Aristotelian Journalism
Nov 14th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | Start the Discussion |
The news media is taking a pleasant interest in Aristotelian Virtues (whether they know it or not). Three stories:
Or, rather, of extreme optimism. As Aristotle said, virtuous action always observes a mean between the extremes of deficiency a excess. This story focuses on the damages of excess optimism.
But, like Aristotle also said, in most cases it’s one vice and not the other that is most common. And it would seem to me that pessimism (being deficient in optimism) is more common that extreme optimism (hence the fact that there is no name for extreme optimism. It just never comes up.)
This story employs the mixture of the ideas “equality” and “fairness” that Aristotle points out in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics (and which I discussed earlier). It portrays monkeys as being able to apply strict equality (the kind appropriate to criminal justice) to issues of distribution (which actually requires proportionate equality).
And finally:
In this article, Walter Rodgers identifies “vilification” and “deification” as the vices, which means there must be some virtue between them. If we put them on a continuum, with vilification being the excess of criticalness, and deification being the deficiency, then the virtue would be “being critical to the right extent, in the right way, at the right time, regarding the right people,” etc.
Nothing like a little Aristotle in the morning.
