Tag Archive for 'philosophy'Page 2 of 17

Why Be Virtuous?

Published
by
michael lee
on 5 September 2007
in groupthink, philosophy and university
. 7 Comments

Posts in the Music and Ethics: Blog Dilemmas series

  1. Why Be Virtuous?
  2. Ayana and the Sacred Song
  3. Music and Ethics: With Strings Attached

As part of the Music and Ethics class, I post something on the course blog each week for the students to read, consider, and then comment on. This is the first of the blog assignments, and I thought it would be interesting to post it here as well, for you folks to interact with:

Blog Assignment #1: Why Be Virtuous?
In class today, I gave you Plato’s view on the interaction between virtue and the human soul, and how a life lived excellently must mean a life lived with virtue. Plato’s is not the only view on the matter, of course. There are other views, by other smart people, on the meaning and purpose of virtue.

Let’s start off the blog assignments by reacting to a few of those perspectives. Here are four statements on reasons to be virtuous. They aren’t quotes, they are my own paraphrases of the views held by different philosophers:

  1. “The best reason to be virtuous is because of the nature of the human soul - we were created to be virtuous, and we do damage to our own nature, our own souls, if we deceive others and act with cruelty.” (Plato)
  2. “The best reason to be virtuous is because of God’s decree - He commands us to do certain things and not to do certain other things, and out of either love or fear, we ought to obey his commands.” (William of Ockham)
  3. “The best reason to be virtuous is the force of social pressure - if you are dishonest and cruel to others, society will shun you, and your capacity to enjoy life will be diminished.” (Ayn Rand)
  4. “The best reason to be virtuous is for the cause of greater social good - society as a whole is better off when people are honest and compassionate toward one another.” (Peter Singer)

There are certainly more options than the ones I’ve presented (include the option to say we shouldn’t be virtuous!), but let’s start with these. Which of the four statements above seems the most true to you? This isn’t a survey, don’t just jot down your answer; give us a little insight into why you think your option is the best choice.

Next in series: Ayana and the Sacred Song

A Virtuous Musician

Published
by
michael lee
on 5 September 2007
in philosophy and university
. 0 Comments

Today was the first meeting of the brand new class, Music and Ethics. The whole class is built around the question, “What does it mean to be a virtuous musician?”

It was pretty electric - the students were excited about the course, and I was nervous (I still get nervous before every single class session I teach). I did something today that I’ve never done before. The students are all seniors, and I want to treat them like adults, so I let them decide their own class policies. They took the high road - two excused absences and their grade drops a letter, late work loses a grade a week, no excuses for missed reading and lack of participation in class discussion.

I had most of these same students as freshmen, in my Intro to Music Tech course. To see how much they’ve grown up in 4 years is encouraging. To watch them handle their business, and the maturity with which they embrace the challenges of the class, makes me want to do this every day for the next 20 years.

I’ll post some of the content from the course here at the Road House for your perusal, and you can follow along as I mold my own personal army of Virtuous Musicians.

Seasonal Affective Reordering

Published
by
michael lee
on 28 August 2007
in art and culture, philosophy and university
. 17 Comments

I love these kids.

These bright eyed recruits, fresh to the craft, newly minted and unpolished, these old and young all-at-once, these boundless excesses of energy, not yet stunted by perspective.

They are as unafraid of questions as any group I’ve ever seen, setting their frame-of-reference up against everything new and ready to see it changed and stretched and grown. They are wolves, and every new thing is their prey. Knowledge, experience, fear, wonder, they hunt it down with precision and abandon.

I sit down to eat with one of them, and hear confession. They are uncertain, and afraid, but they are undaunted. They are ill-at-ease with their received faith, with simplicity and steps and a church reduced to social gatherings, and are looking for some way of meshing old truths with the complexity of the world as they are coming into it. This is the very meaning of courage, to me, to lay aside old comforts in order to take up greater things.

UCO rehearsal campIn these days before the start of classes, there is the luxury of unhurried time, and a kind of egalitarianism. I am not yet their Professor, they are not yet at the mercy of my gradebook, and we can talk freely. We can be friends, for a few days more, and we can talk about ideas and their consequences. I think sometimes that I get to do my best teaching in these last few days of summer, when the campus is full of eager students, and my time is unbounded by lectures and grading.

I love this place, and these kids, and my place here with them.

Thinky Thoughts with Aly: Inequality vs. Inequity

Published
by
aly hawkins
on 25 August 2007
in faith and theology, philosophy and politics
. 6 Comments

It’s not my plan to make all Thinky Thoughts with Aly a Something vs. Something Caged Death Match, but thinky thoughts have a mind of their own (ha) and that’s just how they thunk this week. Actually, now that I think about it (double ha), pitting related concepts against each other to duke it to the death is one of the the ways we sort shit out. Maybe it’s part of the system Michael mentioned: “We take in data, organize it into a structure that makes sense of it, then use that structure to gather more data.” Maybe Conceptual UFC (RESPECT) is a good idea after all.

We’ll see. Onward…

This week I began editing Tony Campolo’s new book, Red Letter Christians: A Citizen’s Guide to Faith & Politics. (I’m excited and alternately petrified. This is My First Big Book.) I’m not very far into it yet, but it’s already got me thinking. [Side note: In days of yore, I used to think and write about politics a lot. This was until I came to the painful realization that obsessing about civics was a substitute for working out my issues, and I had to put on the kibosh to avoid the looneybin. Now that I'm fractionally less crazy, I'm allowing myself to put politics back on the cooktop, albeit on the back burner. Hey, they're important, but they're not Life.]

So I’ve been musing on the difference between inequality and inequity. In the U.S., “inequality” gets a lot of airtime, I suspect because we’ve got the holding of these truths to be self-evident thing going on as the bedrock of our democracy. (That would be “all men are created equal,” for any of you just tuning in.) But I’m not sure what ol’ Benji Franklin was thinking…it’s pretty clear to me that all people are not created equal. You’ve got tall people and short people, female people and male people (and sometimes in-between people), athletic people and clumsy people, smart people and dumb-as-a-stick people, musical people and hey-I-can’t-lift-this-tune-bucket people. If God created all men equal, She must be using a different dictionary.

To be fair, I’m pretty sure ol’ Benji wasn’t thinking that all people are actually created equal — he was just trying to find a poetic way of saying “Georgie, you’ve got about as much divine right to rule me as I have to fart on your face.” But we seem to forget the circumstances under which The Equality Clause came into being, and have a very bad habit of taking the words at face value, sometimes almost believing that we’re all the same with the lights off. But we’re not. And we’d do well to remember it.

Because aiming social reform at erasing our God-given inequality is about as smart (and effective) as using a paintball gun to screw in a lightbulb. It don’t make no sense.

I hate that “inequality” is so much more of an emotionally loaded word. I think that must be why we keep using it in place of “inequity,” which feels dry and math-ish in comparison. Dry or not, however, inequity is the real Nasty, the bugger we ought to strap on big boots to stomp out.

But it’s hard, and hard is difficult. Inequity is much less abstract than inequality, and that makes it uncomfortable. The numbers don’t lie. (CEOs getting paid 400% of the average worker’s annual salary, anyone?) It’s so much nicer to toss around Big Ideas like “All men are created equal” and golf clap until our hands bleed than it is to sit down with our slide rule and abacus and do the work.

Thinky Thoughts with Aly: What vs. Why

Published
by
aly hawkins
on 19 August 2007
in faith and theology and philosophy
. 11 Comments

I haven’t been in a writing frame of mind lately, which is a bit unfortunate for one who aspires to make a living doing so at some point in the near future. Editing and writing, I have discovered, use different parts of the brain — or, at least, they use different parts of my brain — and I’ve found that switching between the two is like changing political parties: There’s a lot of paperwork and justification involved. I spend at least eight hours of my day in Editing Brain, and it’s hard to steel myself to fill out the triplicate forms and get my story straight (literally) to put on Writing Brain when I get home.

And also, hanging with my husband while knocking back a bottle of vino is a big distraction. Have I mentioned that he’s my favorite human and that kicking it with him tops just about everything? No? Well, consider that oversight remedied here.

Anyway, it’s been brought to my attention (mostly by said huz) that thinking thinky thoughts and writing about them is part of what keeps me sane, and hey! since we’re all for that, I’m going to try cutting through the mental red tape to put on Writing Brain once a week or so for — tada!: Thinky Thoughts with Aly.

[This is where I insert a disclaimer about my qualifications for thinking and writing about thinky thoughts compared to other authors' credentials, and ask for your patience with my rather elementary approach and tone. Disclaimer ends here.]

For today’s installment, dear reader, I’d like to write about What versus Why. I was actually inspired to think thinky thoughts about What and Why by a book proposal I reviewed this week as part of my editorial duties. (All the editors get together once a week to rip on the ideas of others, which we weren’t man or woman enough to come up with on our own. I love my job!) In the proposal, which was so excellent that I hope we don’t publish it, the author suggests that in this dear old Information Age — borne out of the Age of Reason and accelerated by yummy technology — we try to substitute information (What) for meaning (Why).

Why would we do such a nitwit thing? you ask. (I did, too…and this is where the thinky thoughts come in.) I think we do it because What is easy and Why is hard; because we secretly hope that if we can wrap our brains around all the What in the universe about a Thing, the Why of the Thing will become suddenly obvious and we can dispense with a little thingamajigger called faith (which is the only thing that makes sense of Why).

Here’s a poorly kept secret: I’m a trivia whore. I love to know shit from shinola, and I love even more to tell you the difference. Why? Because information is power. (And who doesn’t love that, can I get an Amen? ) Why does information equal power? Because we’ve predicated our entire society on the faulty premise that the What can save us. Think about the War on Terror. Or consider that the NY Times bestselling “religious” book of the year is based on the idea that we think reality into existence — that the What is the Why. Our sneaky negative thoughts (What) are the reason (Why) we’re in such a fix! (Damn. I wish we’d known this before, say…the effing Holocaust.)

I think you see where I’m headed. Our addiction to What is killing us.

I’m definitely not saying that What isn’t important — I think I may have mentioned that I like information as much as the next gal (and perhaps slightly more). My point is that only Why can make sense of What…not the other way around. To be didactic about it: We can use our What well only when we have a good Why.

Thus concludes the first installment of Thinky Thoughts with Aly.