Virtue & the Good Life

Six steps into the oldest answer: that to be good is not to pay a tax on happiness but to possess it — the life of flourishing, and how a soul is trained for it.

A course on the thought of Ethics.

Course outline

1. The Final End — Glaucon asked why be good if vice pays. The answer begins by asking what we are ALL really after — the end behind every end — and finding that it is eudaimonia, flourishing; and then asking what a…
2. The Golden Mean — What a virtue IS — not a feeling and not a mere capacity but a trained state of character, a disposition to hit the mean between too much and too little — and how such states are built the only way…
3. The Weakness of the Will — The puzzle of akrasia: how can a person know the better and do the worse? Socrates said it's impossible — no one errs knowingly. Aristotle disagrees, and explains how knowledge can be present yet…
4. The Stoic Fortress — The Stoics take the lectern to push virtue's answer to its limit: if the good life is virtue, and virtue is entirely up to you, then happiness is invulnerable — no tyrant, no illness, no loss can…
5. Does Goodness Need Luck? — The wound in virtue's answer, faced honestly: if the good life needs external goods, then flourishing is partly a gift of fortune — Priam was good and ended wretched. And worse: whether you even…

Part of the Symposium course library.