HUMANITIES LAB: READING CLASSICS FOR CIVIC LEADERSHIP

Week 1. Introduction What is Virtue? Ancient and Modern Thought Ancient thought was preoccupied with virtue. What is virtue (arete), and why did it matter for ancient thinkers? For the Greeks, arete is the specific excellence of thing. We know what an excellent knife is, an excellent car, and an excellent computer. Something is "excellent" if it performs its task well. The excellence of a thing is therefore tied to its purpose. To know if something excellent, we must know what it is for. What is an excellent human being? Do we know what human beings are for? The session offers a framing introduction to virtue, ancient, Christian, modern, and contemporary, along with a sketch of the differences between ancient and modern thought. Reference texts TBA

Week 2. Human-beings and Citizens In liberal-democracy, we prioritize rights over duties. Today, we commonly conceive of the purpose of politics as protecting rights. For ancient thinkers, by contrast, duties were primary – what we owed our communities rather than what our communities owed us. In the small regimes of classical antiquity, citizenship demanded more of ancient citizens than we demand of modern ones, including a willingness to sacrifices one's life. Consequently, civic education was of vital importance. It was an education in those virtues or habits of behavior that made human beings into good citizens. At the same time, the excellence of a citizen is regime-dependent: a good democrat is not the same as good oligarch, etc. Aristotle thematizes this as the question of the relationship between the good human-beings and good citizens. Reference texts TBA

Week 3. The Virtues of Courage and Moderation Courage has often been called "the footstool" of the virtues. Why? What are its moral as well as intellectual dimensions? Moderation, too, is a master virtue, which has cognitive dimensions but also involves the regulation of our bodily desires. In this session, we will explore Greek accounts of courage and moderation phenomenologically (i.e., within ourselves) with an eye to their excesses and deficiencies, i.e., vices. We will also discuss how these virtues relate to right or just action. Reference texts TBA

Week 4. Justice and Prudence Just as a good citizen is not always a good man (and vice versa), so too is justice for Aristotle regime dependent. The good man and good citizen overlap only in the best regime, which is the only perfectly just order. A perfectly just regime would be based on (perfect) proportional justice. What is that? According to Aristotle, what are the several kinds of justice? As we will see, Aristotle, like Plato, raises hard questions about the overall coherence of justice itself, while prudence for Aristotle relates to how we achieve ends set by virtue, or how we do the "right" thing in specific circumstances. In this session, we will also sketch the Ciceronian account of right or appropriate action. Reference texts TBA

Week 5. Need and Luxury The lecture explores how the ancient equation between need and sufficiency breaks down. For Cicero, decorum is what fits a man’s nature, his station and the part he has been given to play, and excess is therefore a failure of proportion rather than a matter of accounting. Lear’s “O, reason not the need” marks the point at which that equation fails. How does such an approach withstand the changes brought by the development of commercial society? Does commerce reshape it? For Barbon, the wants of the body are few and the wants of the mind infinite, so that fashion and emulation are not corruption but the engine of employment, and parsimony is the vice. How does this different appreciation of luxury come to underpin moral reasoning in the commercial era? Reference texts Cicero, On Duties (44 BC), I.92–99 (decorum), I.103–106, I.138–141, II.52–60 Shakespeare, King Lear (1608), 2.4 (excerpts); 3.4.28–36; 4.1.67–74 Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (1690): “Of the Value and Price of Wares”; “Of the Use and Benefit of Trade”

Week 6. Shaftesbury and the Moral Sense Shaftesbury maintained that the modern world would be moved by imagination and sentiment rather than by command, and that this was no cause for alarm, because the affections are naturally ordered. The Inquiry builds the argument in stages: every creature is part of a system and is good insofar as its affections serve that system; but man alone can make his own affections the object of a further affection, approving or disliking what he finds in himself. This second-order, “reflex” affection is the moral sense. The lecture will also consider, briefly, how Shaftesbury’s ideas left their mark on the so-called Scottish Enlightenment through Francis Hutcheson. Reference texts Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699; rev. 1711), Book I, Parts II–III, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: or, Advice to an Author (1710), Part I, §2 (three or four pages on self-dialogue) Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699; rev. 1711), Book II, Part II (conclusion) Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Treatise II, sections I–II (or A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy [1747], I.i)

Week 7. Mandeville and the Origin of Moral Virtue Mandeville’s The Grumbling Hive is a poem of paradoxes: the beehive is prosperous, indeed a paradise, whatever the morality of each single bee. Behind the paradox lies a serious argument, developed in the Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue: morality is a political invention that builds on pride, and the moral sense is not a sense at all but the internalized applause of an audience we have been trained to want. The lecture will examine how, according to Mandeville, the passions do their work unseen, so that what we call self-knowledge is largely self-flattery; and how morals, arts and language are understood by him to grow by imperceptible degrees over generations, anticipating what we are now accustomed to call the theory of evolution. Reference texts Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive (1705); An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue (1714); Remark (C) of The Fable of the Bees (1714) Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Part II (1729), Sixth Dialogue (the passages on the slow growth of arts, laws and language)

Week 8. Hume: Sentiment and Sympathy, not Reason For Hume, reason discovers relations and consequences but never moves anyone; it is sentiment that pronounces. And the sentiment in question is not idiosyncratic taste but a common point of view we are able to occupy because we sympathize. The lecture will track the respective roles of reason and passion in Hume’s thinking, beginning with the pages of the Treatise in which reason is shown to be inert and the passage from “is” to “ought” is called into question, and will then highlight the place of sympathy in his theory of morality. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, read alongside Bennett’s essay, will provide a test case. Reference texts Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), III.i.1 Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Sections I–II and Appendix I Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Section V (“Why Utility Pleases”) Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), ch. 31 (“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”) Jonathan Bennett, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” Philosophy 49 (1974)

Week 9. Hume: Justice as an Artificial Virtue Justice is the anomaly in a sentiment-based ethics. The lecture will explore justice as an artificial virtue, one that arises from convention rather than from an immediate sentiment, and the way in which its notion separates from the notion of what is appropriate: justice is a matter of rules, exact and inflexible, which is exactly what a sentiment of propriety is not. Hume’s sensible knave then raises the question whether, so understood, justice can bind the man who is able to evade it safely. Reference texts Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Section III and Appendix III Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), III.ii.1–2 Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Section IX, Part ii

Week 10. Smith: Sympathy and Propriety The lecture explores Smith’s notion of sympathy, understood not as compassion but as a general capacity for imaginative substitution (we can reach other people's feelings only by putting ourselves in their shoes). From that capacity, Smith derives the notion of propriety. How may sympathy work as a foundation of social order? What are the benefits, and the problems, of founding morality on imitation and imagination? Students will be invited to discuss Smith’s moral theory by using references to Jane Austen’s characters, in this lecture and in the next; they are asked to watch the 1995 BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice before the two lectures on Smith. In Sense and Sensibility, by contrast, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood epitomize the amiable and the respectable virtues. Reference texts Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; rev. 1790), I.i.1–5, I.iii.1 and I.iii.3 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), chs. 29–30 (Marianne after Willoughby’s letter)

Week 11. Smith: Merit, Justice and the Impartial Spectator The lecture focuses on the relation between propriety and justice in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Merit concerns not the fitness of a sentiment to its cause but its effects upon others, and justice enters as the boundary case: the one virtue whose observance may be extorted by force, and whose violation excites a resentment that every impartial bystander approves. We judge ourselves as we judge others, by dividing ourselves in two and examining our conduct as the spectator would; and because actual spectators are partial, ill-informed and often absent, the tribunal becomes an imagined one — the impartial spectator, “the man within the breast.” Is this standard of appropriateness both social in origin and yet capable of standing against society? Elizabeth Bennet re-reading Darcy’s letter will be examined as an application of Adam Smith’s thought. Reference texts Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; rev. 1790), II.i–II.ii, III.1–2 and III.3–4 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), chs. 35–36 (Mr Darcy’s letter and Elizabeth’s re-reading of it) Vernon L. Smith, “Adam Smith’s Emergent Rules of Justice,” Liberty Matters (Liberty Fund, June–July 2023)

Week 12. After Darwin: Evolutionary Genealogies of Morals The closing lecture asks what became of the eighteenth-century argument once it was given a mechanism it had lacked. Darwin had read the Scots, knew their ideas and wrote on the moral sense himself: on his account the moral sense is not a lawgiver’s invention, nor a pre-established harmony, but the outcome of a history that includes the group and the pressures upon it. Hayek’s essay helps connect that approach to more recent lines of thought in the social sciences. The lecture then contrasts it with a contemporary alternative. Jonathan Haidt’s intuitionism restates Hume’s priority of sentiment with the experimental apparatus Hume did not have. Is that a vindication of the position it claims to inherit, or a flattening of it? Reference texts Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), ch. III Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (2012), ch. 2 F. A. Hayek, “The Three Sources of Human Values,” Epilogue to Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. III (1979)