(urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing and happiness
maru
marudubshinki at gmail.com
Sun Feb 20 21:05:17 PST 2005
That is interesting; I remember you bringing up virtue ethics earlier,
in a more alien context. It seems to fit; )
I can't say I really like that philosphy: it seems to boil down to
selfishness, and I've always been more of a greater
good -guy.
I know a few people who can't be really happy while anyone around them
is unhappy. Could that be a less-extreme
example of what your dissident is doing? More religiously, that seems
very much like the bodhisattva idea, but if that's
a bad connection, a misreading of intent, please tell me.
~Maru
Your fortune is: I don't know half of you half as well as I should like;
and I like less
than half of you half as well as you deserve.
-- J. R. R. Tolkien
Iorwerth Thomas wrote:
> Aristotle appears to have started his ethics along similar lines, but
> his definition of happiness winds up pretty different from the
> common-or-garden definition. And he'd agree with you on the value of
> knowledge :)
>
> (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/ if you really care
> about how this approach has been recently developed; it's one of the
> less dry entries. The bit on whether virtue is suffiecient or
> necessary for eudaemonia [flourishing] has some relevance to what I'm
> about to say.)
>
> 'Happiness' in the common sense might have problems being defined as
> the aim of a prisoner of conscience in a Third-World country who
> refuses to back down on his or her beliefs in full knowledge of the
> consequences; while such a person might be described as 'morally
> fulfilled' - and may even feel so, on occasion - describing someone
> who is being frequently beaten, in solitary confinement, and/or
> tortured as 'happy' does feel like an abuse of the term, I'm afraid.
> Though I may be misunderstanding your intent. (Which is something I'm
> good at doing, so please forgive me if I have!)
>
> Iorwerth
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