WEBVTT 00:01.390 --> 00:03.940 PROFESSOR: So where are we? 00:03.940 --> 00:08.620 Well it's the closing lecture. 00:08.620 --> 00:14.460 When we first started gathering in this room three 00:14.460 --> 00:20.970 and a bit months ago, there was a photo essay in the Yale 00:20.970 --> 00:25.400 Daily News with snow everywhere. 00:25.400 --> 00:29.570 On January 13, when our second meeting began, campus looked 00:29.570 --> 00:36.980 like this, and this, and this, and this, and this. 00:36.980 --> 00:41.050 Whereas exactly three months later, the Yale Daily News ran 00:41.050 --> 00:48.440 a photo essay with this, and this, and this, and this, and 00:48.440 --> 00:51.250 this, and this. 00:51.250 --> 00:53.490 It's spring. 00:53.490 --> 00:55.320 And we're done. 00:55.320 --> 00:57.060 What did we do? 00:57.060 --> 01:04.900 Well we started with Plato's Republic and we ended with 01:04.900 --> 01:07.000 Plato's Republic. 01:07.000 --> 01:09.120 The seasons changed. 01:09.120 --> 01:13.830 We, in some ways, performed an intricate reading of one of 01:13.830 --> 01:17.310 the most foundational works in the western 01:17.310 --> 01:19.760 philosophical tradition. 01:19.760 --> 01:25.290 So what I want to do in today's lecture is to take you 01:25.290 --> 01:32.320 through the course, using four different paths. 01:32.320 --> 01:37.240 The first thing I want to do is to think through how it is 01:37.240 --> 01:40.910 that the course goals were realized. 01:40.910 --> 01:45.690 The goals of helping you think about how material that you 01:45.690 --> 01:49.640 learned in a lecture in Linsley-Chit might relate to 01:49.640 --> 01:54.220 material that you learned to a lecture in WLH and how that 01:54.220 --> 01:58.700 might relate to thoughts that you had in the library or 01:58.700 --> 02:03.820 ideas that came up in the context of conversations in 02:03.820 --> 02:06.660 your dining hall. 02:06.660 --> 02:10.070 The second path I want to take through the course is to go 02:10.070 --> 02:16.110 back to the syllabus's initial description of the three main 02:16.110 --> 02:21.740 course topics and to point out to you the way in which your 02:21.740 --> 02:25.010 understanding of those topics have changed. 02:25.010 --> 02:30.060 So we'll look at the question of happiness and flourishing 02:30.060 --> 02:35.350 as we encountered it in the works of Plato, of Epictetus, 02:35.350 --> 02:37.380 of Csikszentmihalyi. 02:37.380 --> 02:41.380 We'll look at the question of morality as we encountered it 02:41.380 --> 02:46.270 in the works of Kant and Mill and again in the context of 02:46.270 --> 02:47.840 trolley cases. 02:47.840 --> 02:51.950 And we'll think about the questions of social legitimacy 02:51.950 --> 02:55.680 and political structures, both within the context of Rawls 02:55.680 --> 02:59.580 and Nozick, Hobbes, and in the context of 02:59.580 --> 03:01.680 the Prisoner's Dilemma. 03:01.680 --> 03:06.300 In the third part of the lecture, I want to move to 03:06.300 --> 03:11.570 three themes, which I see as having unified of course. 03:11.570 --> 03:15.430 Three central questions, each of which provides us with a 03:15.430 --> 03:19.450 way of tracing a path through our reading. 03:19.450 --> 03:23.100 The first, unsurprisingly, is the theme of 03:23.100 --> 03:25.380 the multi-part soul. 03:25.380 --> 03:30.940 The second, the theme of luck and control. 03:30.940 --> 03:34.990 And the third, the question of the relation between the 03:34.990 --> 03:37.760 individual and society. 03:37.760 --> 03:42.370 And I want to close the lecture with, what for me are 03:42.370 --> 03:48.170 the three central quotations around which I see the course 03:48.170 --> 03:50.790 as having been organized. 03:50.790 --> 03:55.880 One from Epictetus, one from Aristotle and one, which we 03:55.880 --> 03:59.940 haven't discussed yet as a group, from the closing pages 03:59.940 --> 04:02.430 of Plato's Republic. 04:02.430 --> 04:07.410 So let's start out by remembering what it said on 04:07.410 --> 04:12.000 the syllabus that the goals of the course were. 04:12.000 --> 04:16.510 The syllabus told us that the course had three goals, the 04:16.510 --> 04:20.820 first of which was to "introduce you to a number of 04:20.820 --> 04:24.100 traditional philosophical discussions that address 04:24.100 --> 04:27.950 profound questions about the human condition and to help 04:27.950 --> 04:32.090 you think about ways in which the methodology of philosophy 04:32.090 --> 04:37.200 provides insight regarding them." And in the course of so 04:37.200 --> 04:46.460 doing, we encountered work by Plato, by Aristotle, by 04:46.460 --> 05:01.330 Epictetus, by Hobbes, by Kant, by Mill, by Judy Thomson, John 05:01.330 --> 05:05.530 Rawls and Robert Nozick. 05:05.530 --> 05:08.730 And what I tried to provide you with, in each of these 05:08.730 --> 05:14.430 cases, were the tools to make these texts your own for the 05:14.430 --> 05:16.350 rest of your life. 05:16.350 --> 05:20.530 Some of your exercises involved learning how to use 05:20.530 --> 05:24.980 the front material or the indices or the critical 05:24.980 --> 05:27.980 material that is attached to the texts. 05:27.980 --> 05:30.810 So in the case of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's 05:30.810 --> 05:35.650 Nicomachean Ethics we used highly annotated editions of a 05:35.650 --> 05:39.250 kind that let you make your way into an ancient text that 05:39.250 --> 05:42.000 might be otherwise unapproachable. 05:42.000 --> 05:44.590 In some of the cases the problem was having the 05:44.590 --> 05:48.450 terminology necessary to make sense of technical words that 05:48.450 --> 05:50.010 the author was using. 05:50.010 --> 05:53.130 And there we learned to make use of the Blackburn 05:53.130 --> 05:57.220 Dictionary of Philosophy and other resources as a way of 05:57.220 --> 06:01.580 orienting yourself in texts that seemed technical. 06:01.580 --> 06:04.650 Sometimes the language of the text got in the way. 06:04.650 --> 06:08.310 So for many of you reading the Hobbes in the original 16th 06:08.310 --> 06:11.680 century English made it harder to understand what the 06:11.680 --> 06:12.860 concepts were. 06:12.860 --> 06:16.060 And there we learned the possibility of making use of 06:16.060 --> 06:20.270 modernizations of texts as ways of understanding them. 06:20.270 --> 06:23.320 And throughout, with the reading guides, the reading 06:23.320 --> 06:27.420 questions, the lectures and the discussions, the goal was 06:27.420 --> 06:31.990 to provide you with the tools so that for the rest of your 06:31.990 --> 06:35.570 life when you look on your shelf and you see your copy of 06:35.570 --> 06:39.750 Plato's Republic you can open it up and learn 06:39.750 --> 06:43.400 from it on your own. 06:43.400 --> 06:47.930 The second goal of the course was to "introduce you to 06:47.930 --> 06:51.360 related discussions of these topics from the perspective of 06:51.360 --> 06:54.740 other academic disciplines, particularly contemporary 06:54.740 --> 06:57.980 cognitive science and psychology, and to help you 06:57.980 --> 07:01.200 think about the ways in which the methodologies of those 07:01.200 --> 07:04.700 disciplines provide insights regarding these fundamental 07:04.700 --> 07:09.330 questions." So we started our discussion of The Ring of 07:09.330 --> 07:15.310 Gyges by looking at empirical work by Daniel Batson inspired 07:15.310 --> 07:21.030 by Plato's challenge as posed by Glaucon. 07:21.030 --> 07:24.800 When we looked at Plato and Aristotle and Epictetus on 07:24.800 --> 07:30.460 flourishing, we did so in light Jon Haidt's Happiness 07:30.460 --> 07:34.370 Hypothesis, which brought to bear on these historical 07:34.370 --> 07:38.470 questions study after study from the contemporary 07:38.470 --> 07:42.340 psychological tradition. 07:42.340 --> 07:46.680 When we thought about how the notion of parts of the soul is 07:46.680 --> 07:53.400 manifest in our contemporary idiom, we made use of the work 07:53.400 --> 07:57.500 of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the heuristics and 07:57.500 --> 08:02.060 biases tradition, as a way of trying to use our vernacular 08:02.060 --> 08:06.500 to think about insights that have been part of every wisdom 08:06.500 --> 08:11.040 tradition since human civilization began. 08:11.039 --> 08:14.659 When we thought about what Plato meant by the harmonious 08:14.659 --> 08:18.819 soul and what Aristotle meant by the cultivation of habit to 08:18.820 --> 08:22.920 allow virtue to become easy, we thought about it in light 08:22.920 --> 08:27.900 of Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow and considered the 08:27.900 --> 08:32.010 ways in which that notion might, in a contemporary 08:32.010 --> 08:35.360 idiom, give voice to the concerns that we saw in these 08:35.360 --> 08:37.920 earlier authors. 08:37.920 --> 08:42.030 When we thought about what the costs of a disordered soul 08:42.030 --> 08:45.820 might be, we read Jonathan Shay's extraordinary work, 08:45.820 --> 08:47.450 Achilles in Vietnam. 08:47.450 --> 08:51.430 And we thought about the ways in which the war experience as 08:51.430 --> 08:55.080 described in Homer's Illiad and the war experience as 08:55.080 --> 08:59.460 described by returning veterans give voice to a 08:59.460 --> 09:04.350 common human experience in the face of the loss of a certain 09:04.350 --> 09:07.010 sort of structure. 09:07.010 --> 09:11.760 When we thought about the ways in which social activities of 09:11.760 --> 09:14.120 those around us -- 09:14.120 --> 09:18.520 the inevitable human tendency conform to the demands of 09:18.520 --> 09:19.390 authority -- 09:19.390 --> 09:22.850 when we thought about those questions and how they might 09:22.850 --> 09:25.980 affect people we did so in light of the 09:25.980 --> 09:29.110 work of Stanley Milgram. 09:29.110 --> 09:31.940 When we thought about how it is that we might go about 09:31.940 --> 09:35.180 cultivating virtue in ourselves we considered what 09:35.180 --> 09:38.900 implications that might have for parenting. 09:38.900 --> 09:42.280 When we thought about the question of how it is that we 09:42.280 --> 09:46.360 should explain our responses to trolley cases, we 09:46.360 --> 09:48.610 considered the question of whether the neural 09:48.610 --> 09:53.760 underpinnings with respect to activations in particular part 09:53.760 --> 09:57.920 of the brain might be doing some of the explanatory work 09:57.915 --> 10:02.145 to answer the questions with which we were concerned. 10:02.150 --> 10:05.990 When we thought about how it is that we might make sense of 10:05.990 --> 10:09.780 questions in political philosophy and the legitimacy 10:09.780 --> 10:13.230 of the social contract, we helped ourselves to game 10:13.230 --> 10:16.010 theory's notion of the Prisoners' Dilemma and to the 10:16.010 --> 10:19.220 idea of the Problem of the Commons. 10:19.220 --> 10:23.360 When we considered the ways in which social structures affect 10:23.360 --> 10:27.770 us, we looked at the question of social norms and we thought 10:27.770 --> 10:32.340 about the ways in which, though we had cut a fairly 10:32.340 --> 10:35.900 wide path through one intellectual tradition, that 10:35.900 --> 10:39.910 there was a world full of other intellectual traditions 10:39.910 --> 10:42.440 which we had barely touched. 10:44.990 --> 10:49.220 In all of these cases the goal, as with the 10:49.220 --> 10:53.050 philosophical texts, was to give you the tools and 10:53.050 --> 10:58.510 resources to make use of this sort of literature on your own 10:58.510 --> 10:59.910 in the future. 10:59.910 --> 11:03.500 You performed a directed exercise where you were given 11:03.500 --> 11:07.880 a core text and asked to find articles that cited it and 11:07.880 --> 11:09.720 articles that it cited. 11:09.720 --> 11:12.870 You were asked to take a particular article from an 11:12.870 --> 11:16.990 empirical psychological journal and to figure out what 11:16.990 --> 11:19.510 question it was asking, what alternatives it was 11:19.510 --> 11:22.600 considering, what the logic of the argument was, what the 11:22.600 --> 11:25.910 methods were that were being used, what the results were 11:25.910 --> 11:27.650 and what the implications were. 11:27.650 --> 11:30.260 And then you were asked to come up with your own 11:30.260 --> 11:34.230 experimental design, having thought through, in the case 11:34.230 --> 11:38.450 of someone else's study, what a study might look like. 11:38.450 --> 11:43.230 The goal of this was not only to introduce you to a broad 11:43.230 --> 11:47.420 swath of psychological literature, but also to let 11:47.420 --> 11:51.830 you know that this too is a body of intellectual 11:51.830 --> 11:56.020 resources, which is at your disposal for the 11:56.020 --> 11:58.730 rest of your life. 11:58.730 --> 12:02.400 The third goal of the course was to help you to think about 12:02.400 --> 12:06.530 your own education in a synthetic way by "encouraging 12:06.530 --> 12:10.550 you to be sensitive to how insights from one academic or 12:10.550 --> 12:15.390 other contexts might be echoed or illuminated by insights 12:15.390 --> 12:21.340 from another." This course is a case study, a model, an 12:21.340 --> 12:26.250 exemplar, for how it's possible to look at a problem 12:26.250 --> 12:28.920 from multiple perspectives. 12:28.920 --> 12:33.880 And your final exercise, which asks you to think about, for a 12:33.880 --> 12:37.810 question that concerns you, how you might bring multiple 12:37.810 --> 12:41.440 perspectives to bear on it, is an attempt to get you to 12:41.440 --> 12:45.240 think, for the rest of your time at Yale and the rest of 12:45.240 --> 12:49.800 your time on this planet, in a synthetic way. 12:49.800 --> 12:55.030 To think about the range of courses and choices that are 12:55.030 --> 13:00.220 available to you as being interrelated in exploring the 13:00.220 --> 13:05.700 fundamental question that defined human experience. 13:05.700 --> 13:09.050 So that's path one through the course. 13:09.050 --> 13:10.760 Three goals. 13:10.760 --> 13:13.240 Three skills. 13:13.240 --> 13:18.320 Path number two looked at three fundamental, 13:18.320 --> 13:20.900 substantive, questions. 13:20.900 --> 13:24.370 The question of what can be said, at least in the context 13:24.370 --> 13:27.830 of the Western tradition and perhaps beyond, about the 13:27.830 --> 13:31.320 conditions under which authentic happiness and true 13:31.320 --> 13:33.730 flourishing are possible. 13:33.730 --> 13:38.970 The second was the question of what sorts of demands morality 13:38.970 --> 13:40.820 makes on us. 13:40.820 --> 13:45.160 And the third was the question of political legitimacy and 13:45.160 --> 13:50.310 social structures and the ways that those affect us. 13:50.310 --> 13:55.640 So if you look back at your syllabus you will see that the 13:55.640 --> 14:01.100 set of questions which we aim to explore there are the set 14:01.100 --> 14:05.040 of questions which we actually explored. 14:05.040 --> 14:07.810 In the context of happiness and flourishing, we ask 14:07.810 --> 14:11.430 ourselves how we might think about Plato's suggestion that 14:11.430 --> 14:15.520 the human soul has various parts in light of contemporary 14:15.520 --> 14:17.800 work in psychology. 14:17.800 --> 14:21.120 And we explored, not only Plato's idea that we are 14:21.120 --> 14:25.970 composed of a reasonable part, a spirited, and an appetitive 14:25.970 --> 14:31.100 part, but looked also at numerous manifestations of 14:31.100 --> 14:35.250 what's now known as the dual processing tradition. 14:35.250 --> 14:37.920 And we'll talk more about that when we talk about the 14:37.920 --> 14:39.820 organizing themes. 14:39.820 --> 14:43.840 We asked ourselves how Plato's and Aristotle's discussion of 14:43.840 --> 14:47.080 the importance of friendship and human attachment are 14:47.080 --> 14:50.120 echoed in recent discussions of human happiness and 14:50.120 --> 14:51.300 flourishing. 14:51.300 --> 14:54.590 And sadly because of the weather that lecture was 14:54.590 --> 14:56.440 somewhat abbreviated. 14:56.440 --> 14:59.710 I promise next year when I do the class to do it in more 14:59.710 --> 15:02.980 detail and you're all invited back, if you're on 15:02.980 --> 15:05.320 campus, to hear that. 15:05.320 --> 15:09.200 We asked ourselves how the basic ideas of the stoic 15:09.200 --> 15:12.640 philosopher Epictetus are reflected in modern 15:12.640 --> 15:14.060 therapeutic practices. 15:14.060 --> 15:17.950 And we recognized that the central insights he has -- 15:17.950 --> 15:22.400 of recognizing what is and isn't in your control and of 15:22.400 --> 15:27.410 realizing that one can set ones desires in such a way 15:27.410 --> 15:30.150 that the world feels more cooperative -- 15:30.150 --> 15:35.230 lies at the center of modern therapeutic practice. 15:35.230 --> 15:40.510 And we read in this context the amazingly moving words of 15:40.510 --> 15:45.220 Admiral Stockdale describing the ways in which the words of 15:45.220 --> 15:51.210 Epictetus enabled him to survive and even flourish the 15:51.210 --> 15:54.280 degrading conditions of a prisoner 15:54.280 --> 15:56.920 of war camp in Vietnam. 15:56.920 --> 15:59.630 We asked ourselves how Aristotle's discussion of 15:59.630 --> 16:02.580 weakness of the will-- what he calls akrasia-- 16:02.580 --> 16:05.530 connects with current discussions of procrastination 16:05.530 --> 16:06.970 and how to avoid it. 16:06.970 --> 16:10.400 And we presented ourselves with various resources for 16:10.400 --> 16:15.850 structuring our external and internal environment in such a 16:15.850 --> 16:18.920 way that our reflective commitments could be what 16:18.920 --> 16:23.580 guided our practice, rather than our untrained habits. 16:23.580 --> 16:27.110 And we asked ourselves how Aristotle's reflections about 16:27.110 --> 16:30.280 the role of habit in cultivating virtue are 16:30.280 --> 16:33.210 reflected in 20th century and 21st 16:33.210 --> 16:36.490 century parenting manuals. 16:36.490 --> 16:39.600 All of those were questions that we considered in the 16:39.600 --> 16:42.700 context of happiness and flourishing. 16:42.700 --> 16:46.500 All of those were words on a syllabus page, whose 16:46.500 --> 16:52.070 significance to you three months ago was, I hope, less 16:52.069 --> 16:54.609 than it is now. 16:54.609 --> 16:59.319 All of these are questions worth asking yourself for the 16:59.319 --> 17:01.299 rest of your life. 17:01.300 --> 17:05.310 In the context of our discussion of morality, we 17:05.310 --> 17:08.390 asked ourselves what are the basic tenets of the 17:08.390 --> 17:12.650 fundamental moral theories, which compose the Western 17:12.650 --> 17:18.540 tradition: Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian deontology and 17:18.540 --> 17:20.940 Millian consequentialism. 17:20.940 --> 17:25.760 We set aside, for the purposes of this course, a fourth very 17:25.760 --> 17:30.210 important strand that grounds morality in religion. 17:30.210 --> 17:33.170 But we have, as a result of having thought through the 17:33.170 --> 17:36.960 questions, what assumptions do these theories make about 17:36.960 --> 17:42.360 human nature and about the role of morality, the tools to 17:42.360 --> 17:44.860 think about even moral theories 17:44.860 --> 17:47.200 that we didn't consider. 17:47.200 --> 17:50.020 We looked for differences in the moral theories, the ways 17:50.020 --> 17:51.710 in which they emphasize 17:51.710 --> 17:55.370 consequence or actor or character. 17:55.370 --> 17:58.090 We looked at similarities among the moral theories, the 17:58.090 --> 18:01.830 ways in which they stressed the importance of overcoming a 18:01.830 --> 18:05.390 certain kind of first-person exceptionalism. 18:05.390 --> 18:08.960 We looked at the ways in which these moral theories deal with 18:08.960 --> 18:12.770 the gap between intention and outcome. 18:12.770 --> 18:16.480 And we looked at the ways in which these moral theories do 18:16.480 --> 18:19.510 and don't provide different answers to particular 18:19.510 --> 18:21.990 normative questions. 18:21.990 --> 18:25.170 We went on to ask ourselves, in the context of our 18:25.170 --> 18:29.210 discussion of morality, how recent experimental work on 18:29.210 --> 18:33.270 moral intuition, particularly discussions of the Trolley 18:33.270 --> 18:37.640 Problem but also discussions of related cases, relates to 18:37.640 --> 18:41.130 traditional philosophical discussions of morality. 18:41.130 --> 18:44.370 And how this work connects with contemporary work in 18:44.370 --> 18:47.420 neuroscience and related work in cognitive and social 18:47.420 --> 18:48.750 psychology. 18:48.750 --> 18:53.270 And through the discovery that it was extraordinarily 18:53.270 --> 18:57.800 difficult to come up with systematic explanations for 18:57.800 --> 19:01.290 why it is that our intuitions were pulling us one way in one 19:01.290 --> 19:07.040 case and another way in other cases, we came to realize how 19:07.040 --> 19:13.120 challenging it is to come up with a systematic theory and 19:13.120 --> 19:18.430 thereby gained further insight on our original question about 19:18.430 --> 19:22.290 the structure and complexity of the human soul. 19:22.290 --> 19:26.300 And we thought about, in the context of our discussion of 19:26.300 --> 19:32.150 morality, the relation between moral responsibility and luck. 19:32.150 --> 19:35.640 Recognizing, perhaps in the most profound way, that some 19:35.640 --> 19:39.570 things are up to us and some things are not. 19:39.570 --> 19:43.390 And that the relation between good intentions and good 19:43.390 --> 19:50.180 outcomes, bad intentions and bad outcomes, are not as tight 19:50.180 --> 19:53.620 as we might wish they would be. 19:53.620 --> 19:57.290 And we asked ourselves, finally in this context, when 19:57.290 --> 20:02.270 punishment might be justified and what moral political and 20:02.270 --> 20:07.560 psychological role it plays as a way of thinking about the 20:07.560 --> 20:10.960 counterpart of the moral question. 20:10.960 --> 20:14.180 And we learned thereby that one of the ways of thinking 20:14.180 --> 20:18.830 about how things should go when they go right is to think 20:18.830 --> 20:22.850 about how things should go when they go wrong. 20:22.850 --> 20:28.680 And thereby we gained another tool for thinking about a set 20:28.680 --> 20:31.580 of fundamental questions. 20:31.580 --> 20:35.410 Like the questions about happiness and flourishing, 20:35.410 --> 20:40.860 these are questions to ask for the rest of your life. 20:40.860 --> 20:45.380 In the third part of the course we asked a question 20:45.380 --> 20:51.270 about the role of social structures in allowing human 20:51.270 --> 20:54.160 flourishing and moral behavior. 20:54.160 --> 20:59.880 And we actually previewed this part of the course back in the 20:59.880 --> 21:01.830 beginning section. 21:01.830 --> 21:05.280 We asked ourselves what the experience of Greek soldiers 21:05.280 --> 21:08.170 in the Trojan War and the experience of American 21:08.170 --> 21:13.020 soldiers in the Vietnam War tells us about the role of 21:13.020 --> 21:16.960 social order, themis, in allowing human beings to 21:16.960 --> 21:18.760 function effectively. 21:18.760 --> 21:22.470 And we, through that and through the discussion of 21:22.470 --> 21:27.340 Stanley Milgram's work, got our first hint of the ways in 21:27.340 --> 21:34.990 which much of what we are and much of how we act is 21:34.990 --> 21:40.130 determined, not merely by things inside ourselves but 21:40.130 --> 21:44.530 also by the communal structures with which we are 21:44.530 --> 21:46.070 surrounded. 21:46.070 --> 21:51.670 And that makes all the more pressing, the set of questions 21:51.670 --> 21:55.180 that we asked in the final unit of the course. 21:55.180 --> 22:00.560 Inspired by Plato's opening analogy, that to understand 22:00.560 --> 22:04.130 the structure of the human soul we must understand the 22:04.130 --> 22:05.820 structure of society. 22:05.820 --> 22:08.940 And to understand the structure of society we must 22:08.940 --> 22:11.630 understand the structure of the human soul. 22:11.630 --> 22:17.440 And we asked ourselves how it is that the fact that we are 22:17.440 --> 22:23.250 simultaneously desirous of possessing objects that others 22:23.250 --> 22:29.330 possess and desirous of being able to be in a position of 22:29.330 --> 22:34.400 security with respect to that to which we have become 22:34.400 --> 22:39.550 attached, we discovered that there was a mathematical 22:39.550 --> 22:43.200 representation, game theory's notion of the Prisoner's 22:43.200 --> 22:49.180 Dilemma, that could illuminate Plato's discussion in the 22:49.180 --> 22:52.450 opening pages of book two of the Republic and Hobbes's 22:52.450 --> 22:58.040 discussion in chapter thirteen of Leviathan of the ways in 22:58.040 --> 23:05.850 which social structures come into being legitimately. 23:05.850 --> 23:09.860 We then went on to ask ourselves, looking at two 23:09.860 --> 23:13.640 central texts in the 20th century Western political 23:13.640 --> 23:18.060 philosophical tradition, how the work of John Rawls and 23:18.060 --> 23:23.070 Robert Nozick bring out the importance of what, in many 23:23.070 --> 23:28.110 cases, seem to be two competing considerations. 23:28.110 --> 23:32.340 Considerations of equality, on the one hand in the work of 23:32.340 --> 23:36.810 Rawls, and of liberty on the other, in the work of Nozick, 23:36.810 --> 23:41.430 in structuring a just and legitimate society. 23:41.430 --> 23:46.560 And we asked ourselves how work in social psychology and 23:46.560 --> 23:51.540 behavioral economics might shed additional light on these 23:51.540 --> 23:53.870 fundamental questions. 23:53.870 --> 23:57.890 And we asked ourselves finally, in our discussion of 23:57.890 --> 24:03.260 norms and basic social structures and censorship, 24:03.260 --> 24:07.140 what the proper role for non-rational means of 24:07.140 --> 24:11.340 persuasion, including mass cultural influences such as 24:11.340 --> 24:17.610 cinema, television and music, is in a democratic society. 24:17.610 --> 24:25.010 And we noticed, in an uncanny way, that Dan Quayle's remarks 24:25.010 --> 24:31.590 about Murphy Brown and the Madden video games' views 24:31.590 --> 24:38.050 about displaying concussions in online gaming were echoing 24:38.050 --> 24:44.300 almost verbatim the words of Plato from book ten of the 24:44.300 --> 24:49.350 Republic when he discussed poetry and censorship. 24:49.350 --> 24:52.960 So that's our second path through the course. 24:52.960 --> 24:56.950 The three fundamental themes that we identified, the 24:56.950 --> 25:00.920 sub-questions that we asked with respect to each of them, 25:00.920 --> 25:05.370 and the encouragement to all of you to keep asking 25:05.370 --> 25:09.260 yourselves those questions. 25:09.260 --> 25:15.240 Path number three: three organizing themes. 25:15.240 --> 25:18.970 And I will, because I don't want them to go to waste twice 25:18.970 --> 25:23.020 during this section, ask you to use for the very last time 25:23.020 --> 25:25.180 in this course, your clickers. 25:25.180 --> 25:29.910 So if you'll take them out for a slide about four slides from 25:29.910 --> 25:34.460 now and then a couple of slides after that. 25:34.460 --> 25:38.800 You will recall that we began our discussion of parts of the 25:38.800 --> 25:44.640 soul with Plato's famous story of Leontius. 25:44.640 --> 25:49.130 He writes in the Republic of "Leontious, the son of 25:49.130 --> 25:53.930 Aglaion, who was going up from the Piraeus along the outside 25:53.930 --> 25:58.910 of the north wall of the city when he saw some corpses lying 25:58.906 --> 26:02.026 at the executioner's feet. 26:02.030 --> 26:06.830 He had an appetite to look at them but at the same time was 26:06.830 --> 26:09.370 disgusted and turned away. 26:09.370 --> 26:12.770 For a time," writes Plato, "he struggled with himself and 26:12.770 --> 26:14.160 covered his face. 26:14.160 --> 26:19.580 But finally, overpowered by appetite he pushed his eyes 26:19.580 --> 26:25.100 wide open and rushed towards the corpses saying, look for 26:25.100 --> 26:27.240 yourselves you evil wretches. 26:27.240 --> 26:32.310 Take your fill of the beautiful sight." 26:32.308 --> 26:36.658 Tempted by corpses, perhaps we are not. 26:36.660 --> 26:39.620 Tempted by contemporary analogs 26:39.620 --> 26:42.780 thereof, perhaps we are. 26:42.780 --> 26:46.330 And we introduced ourselves, as a tool for thinking about 26:46.330 --> 26:52.040 this, to George Ainsle's idea of hyperbolic discounting, 26:52.040 --> 26:58.000 whereby a smaller, sooner reward, one that from a 26:58.000 --> 27:02.240 distance doesn't seem as valuable as our ultimate 27:02.240 --> 27:07.840 reward, comes as the result of the way in which we relate to 27:07.840 --> 27:14.970 value over time to seem more valuable to us at a moment of 27:14.970 --> 27:16.760 decision making. 27:16.760 --> 27:21.560 So even if your goal is to spend the weekend preparing 27:21.560 --> 27:27.380 for exams, and even if now, from the perspective of 27:27.380 --> 27:32.650 Thursday, the larger, later reward looms greater in your 27:32.650 --> 27:35.100 mind, there is-- 27:35.100 --> 27:39.890 let me remind you-- the risk that as you move closer the 27:39.890 --> 27:45.530 curves will cross and you will find yourself consuming the 27:45.530 --> 27:51.730 smaller, sooner reward and losing the larger, later one. 27:51.730 --> 27:58.510 We talked about this in the context of this class, where 27:58.510 --> 28:06.300 more than 50% of you committed to turning off the Internet, 28:06.300 --> 28:10.050 either completely or restricting your Internet 28:10.050 --> 28:14.610 usage in some way in the context of class. 28:14.610 --> 28:19.790 And I asked you on January 25, back when the snow still 28:19.790 --> 28:23.340 covered the ground, how successful you had been. 28:23.336 --> 28:27.536 And at that time, of those of you who had committed yourself 28:27.540 --> 28:32.230 to some sort of restriction, 56% of you had strayed not 28:32.230 --> 28:34.680 even an itty bitty bit. 28:34.680 --> 28:38.630 25% had strayed just once or twice. 28:38.630 --> 28:44.010 8% said, well a few times but I'm trying. 28:44.010 --> 28:49.620 And 11% of you had fallen off the wagon. 28:49.620 --> 28:53.270 So the first clicker question, I'll ask only for those of you 28:53.270 --> 28:58.060 who made some sort of commitment to yourself, is how 28:58.060 --> 29:01.150 did it work out? 29:01.150 --> 29:06.350 If you had the Internet pledge, did you stray, one, 29:06.350 --> 29:12.930 not even once; two, a few times but not very often; 29:12.930 --> 29:18.330 three, pretty regularly but not all the time; or four, if 29:18.330 --> 29:22.240 for example you're closing Facebook now and looking for 29:22.240 --> 29:26.180 your clicker, you might want to push yep. 29:26.180 --> 29:32.270 So let's see in the next 10 seconds how our numbers came 29:32.270 --> 29:35.620 out in comparison to where we were at the 29:35.620 --> 29:38.760 beginning of the semester. 29:38.760 --> 29:43.860 So of those of you who took the Internet pledge, 30% of 29:43.860 --> 29:46.690 you kept it tightly. 29:46.690 --> 29:53.060 From all 30% of you, the rest of us want advice. 29:53.060 --> 29:54.830 Why did it work? 29:54.830 --> 29:56.650 What did you do? 29:56.650 --> 30:01.450 What enabled you to carry through with your commitments? 30:01.450 --> 30:08.120 Another third of you strayed a few times but not very often. 30:08.120 --> 30:14.710 But nearly 50% of you, despite having resolved to do 30:14.710 --> 30:19.800 something, were unable to carry through on your 30:19.800 --> 30:21.660 commitments. 30:21.660 --> 30:27.640 One of the goals of this course is to remind you that 30:27.640 --> 30:32.250 both in the Ancient tradition and in the modern dual 30:32.250 --> 30:37.470 processing tradition, there are theoretical frameworks for 30:37.470 --> 30:42.870 understanding why it is that we often find ourselves not 30:42.870 --> 30:47.680 carrying through on what we were committing to and how it 30:47.680 --> 30:51.510 is that we might structure our experience and our 30:51.510 --> 30:56.660 surroundings in such a way that that becomes easier. 30:56.660 --> 31:00.080 So that's one of the ways in which we thought about the 31:00.080 --> 31:05.520 question of the soul having parts in this course. 31:05.520 --> 31:09.190 We also thought about the question of the soul having 31:09.190 --> 31:14.710 parts in this course as a rather profound challenge to 31:14.710 --> 31:19.380 methodology in any discipline. 31:19.380 --> 31:24.120 We observed, in the context of the heuristics and biases 31:24.120 --> 31:28.730 tradition, that there are cases where we are faced with 31:28.730 --> 31:33.350 choices where we know what the right choice is and we are 31:33.350 --> 31:36.110 pulled one way by one sort of instinct and 31:36.110 --> 31:38.670 another way by another. 31:38.670 --> 31:43.560 So for example, in what are called frequency/probability 31:43.560 --> 31:49.150 cases, where, for instance, your goal is to choose from 31:49.150 --> 31:52.640 the box where you have the greatest likelihood of drawing 31:52.640 --> 31:54.060 a red ball. 31:54.060 --> 31:58.930 And one of the boxes has one red ball and nine white ones-- 31:58.930 --> 32:00.500 a 10% chance-- 32:00.500 --> 32:05.790 whereas the other box has 8 red balls and 92 white ones-- 32:05.790 --> 32:07.920 an 8% chance. 32:07.920 --> 32:14.460 We know that there is a tendency, when under cognitive 32:14.460 --> 32:19.940 load or when exhausted, to be pulled towards frequency-- 32:19.940 --> 32:23.170 the presence of eight red balls over here-- 32:23.170 --> 32:25.190 as opposed to probability-- 32:25.190 --> 32:28.090 the 10% case over here. 32:28.090 --> 32:31.990 But we also know that when we're pulled towards frequency 32:31.990 --> 32:34.840 rather than probability in that case, 32:34.840 --> 32:38.060 we're making a mistake. 32:38.060 --> 32:43.680 In other of the cases that we considered, it's not so easy 32:43.680 --> 32:47.130 to know which answer is the one that we 32:47.130 --> 32:49.470 reflectively endorse. 32:49.470 --> 32:55.060 We were presented twice in the course with Kahneman and 32:55.060 --> 32:58.040 Tversky's famous disease problem. 32:58.040 --> 33:02.010 A terrible disease has struck 600 people in your town, 33:02.010 --> 33:04.540 you're the mayor and two courses of treatment are 33:04.540 --> 33:09.120 available: plan A and plan B. It turns out that the plans 33:09.120 --> 33:10.590 are identical. 33:10.590 --> 33:15.520 But plan A is described as a plan where 200 people of the 33:15.520 --> 33:17.500 600 will live. 33:17.500 --> 33:25.470 Whereas plan B, in the second case is described as one where 33:25.470 --> 33:29.530 400 of the 600 people will die. 33:29.530 --> 33:33.000 And so too with the probabilistic 33:33.000 --> 33:35.640 determinations of them. 33:35.640 --> 33:41.520 But here are the data that you as a class provided. 33:41.520 --> 33:44.850 Those of you who faced the green description of the 33:44.850 --> 33:51.800 choice between A and B were 2/3 of the time preferring 33:51.800 --> 33:56.780 plan A. Those of you who faced the blue description of the 33:56.780 --> 34:01.170 choice between plan A and plan B, the one that phrased it in 34:01.170 --> 34:07.140 terms of 400 deaths rather than 200 lives saved, showed 34:07.139 --> 34:12.279 exactly an inverse proportion of responses. 34:12.280 --> 34:15.900 But in contrast to the frequency/probability case 34:15.900 --> 34:20.780 it's not clear what the right way to frame a question of 34:20.780 --> 34:22.550 decision-making under certainty 34:22.550 --> 34:25.090 versus uncertainty is. 34:25.090 --> 34:28.020 Should we think about how many will live? 34:28.020 --> 34:31.540 Should we think about how many will die? 34:31.540 --> 34:36.610 Which framing is the right one isn't so obvious. 34:36.610 --> 34:42.070 And this problem persisted as we over and over again, in the 34:42.070 --> 34:46.470 context of our trolley discussions, found ourselves 34:46.470 --> 34:51.230 giving different sorts of responses to cases that were 34:51.230 --> 34:55.570 theoretically challenging to distinguish. 34:55.570 --> 35:00.220 So only 15% of you thought it was prohibited to turn the 35:00.220 --> 35:03.870 trolley in the case of the bystander. 35:03.870 --> 35:08.960 Whereas 78% of you thought it was prohibited to have the 35:08.960 --> 35:14.890 trolley hit the fat man in that version of the scenario. 35:14.890 --> 35:19.130 We faced it again in the context of our ducking and 35:19.130 --> 35:21.020 shielding cases. 35:21.020 --> 35:24.870 Almost all of you thought it was fine, if a bear was 35:24.870 --> 35:29.800 approaching you, to move out of the way even if the 35:29.800 --> 35:33.730 inevitable consequence was that the bear harmed the 35:33.730 --> 35:36.070 person behind you. 35:36.070 --> 35:40.100 But almost none of you thought it was acceptable, if a bear 35:40.102 --> 35:44.322 is running towards you, to take the person from behind 35:44.320 --> 35:49.540 you and put them in front of you as a shield. 35:49.540 --> 35:53.730 Does that difference track something real? 35:53.730 --> 35:57.060 Or are those just the different responses that the 35:57.060 --> 36:00.150 different parts of the soul gives? 36:00.150 --> 36:04.300 Again and again we confronted this when we thought about 36:04.300 --> 36:08.470 ways in which we should use not reason, but habit as a 36:08.470 --> 36:10.890 method for regulating behavior. 36:10.890 --> 36:14.920 When we thought about flow as a state of the harmonious 36:14.920 --> 36:18.140 soul, where the parts of the soul that can be pulling us in 36:18.140 --> 36:21.310 different directions might come together. 36:21.310 --> 36:24.740 In the context of the role in justification of punishment, 36:24.740 --> 36:28.900 where we asked ourselves whether there is any rational 36:28.900 --> 36:33.890 justification for retribution, or whether that only concerns 36:33.890 --> 36:37.860 something which, on reflection, we don't endorse. 36:37.860 --> 36:41.140 We asked ourselves about the relation among parts of the 36:41.140 --> 36:44.550 soul in the context of our discussions last week of the 36:44.550 --> 36:48.310 influences of fiction, of norms, and other forms of 36:48.310 --> 36:51.180 non-rational persuasion in shaping our lives. 36:51.180 --> 36:56.700 And we asked ourselves about it tacitly every single day of 36:56.700 --> 36:59.810 this course when we thought about the difficulty, or 36:59.810 --> 37:05.810 perhaps impossibility given our complexity, of reconciling 37:05.810 --> 37:10.150 our intuitive and reflective responses and reaching what 37:10.150 --> 37:14.160 Rawls calls reflective equilibrium. 37:14.160 --> 37:19.380 That it is difficult to bring principles and practice 37:19.380 --> 37:23.850 together, that it is difficult to bring systematic 37:23.850 --> 37:28.090 understanding to particular cases, does not mean that it 37:28.090 --> 37:30.450 is not worth trying. 37:30.450 --> 37:35.190 But that we discover ourselves repeatedly frustrated by it 37:35.190 --> 37:40.840 may in itself bring philosophical lessons. 37:40.840 --> 37:45.110 That's theme of the course one: parts of the soul. 37:45.110 --> 37:51.650 Theme of the course two: luck, control and circumstances. 37:51.650 --> 37:56.730 We presented ourselves as a paradigm case to hold on to 37:56.730 --> 38:01.590 with the contrast between two kinds of characters. 38:01.590 --> 38:05.760 On the one hand, Lucky Alert and Lucky Cell Phone. 38:05.760 --> 38:10.060 One, a person who did nothing wrong drove home 38:10.060 --> 38:11.520 and harmed no one. 38:11.520 --> 38:15.360 The second, a person who perhaps did something risky, 38:15.360 --> 38:18.100 drove home and harmed no one. 38:18.100 --> 38:20.960 And we contrasted those cases with their unlucky 38:20.960 --> 38:25.900 counterparts, who on their way home, following exactly the 38:25.900 --> 38:30.640 same course ended up, though no efforts of their own, 38:30.640 --> 38:34.040 harming a child. 38:34.040 --> 38:40.040 And when I surveyed you about this in March, almost all of 38:40.040 --> 38:45.100 you thought that lucky alert had done nothing morally 38:45.100 --> 38:46.220 problematic. 38:46.220 --> 38:51.610 97% of you answered that he did not do something morally 38:51.610 --> 38:53.140 blameworthy. 38:53.140 --> 38:59.170 In the case of Unlucky Alert, even though he brought about a 38:59.170 --> 39:05.180 harm, still 81% of you were willing to grant him full 39:05.180 --> 39:07.860 moral exculpation. 39:07.860 --> 39:08.660 But-- 39:08.660 --> 39:12.660 and I'm going to retest you on this in a moment-- 39:12.660 --> 39:16.400 when I asked you on March 3 whether Lucky Cell Phone, 39:16.400 --> 39:20.800 somebody who did a slightly risky thing with no harmful 39:20.800 --> 39:26.490 consequences had done something morally culpable, 39:26.490 --> 39:30.370 78% of you said that he did. 39:30.370 --> 39:35.620 An answer roughly, though not as extremely, in line with 39:35.620 --> 39:39.610 your answer to the question about whether Unlucky Cell 39:39.610 --> 39:43.480 Phone did something morally culpable, which 92% of you 39:43.480 --> 39:45.800 answered yes to. 39:45.800 --> 39:50.300 So I'm curious, because these results perplexed me so, 39:50.300 --> 39:53.990 whether another six weeks of thinking about moral luck has 39:53.990 --> 39:56.090 changed your views. 39:56.090 --> 40:01.680 So question, our old friend Unlucky Alert-- 40:01.680 --> 40:05.680 the one talking on his cell phone who drives home and 40:05.680 --> 40:07.540 harms no one-- 40:07.540 --> 40:13.500 Unlucky Alert you, who take risks in your life every day, 40:13.500 --> 40:17.360 risks which could cause consequences that if they 40:17.360 --> 40:20.380 occurred, you might regret that you hadn't taken 40:20.380 --> 40:21.680 precaution. 40:21.680 --> 40:27.790 In so doing, oh holders of clickers, do you do something 40:27.790 --> 40:29.040 morally blameworthy? 40:32.440 --> 40:36.940 And let's see how these numbers come out. 40:36.940 --> 40:42.680 So in contrast to your previous assessment, where in 40:42.680 --> 40:48.790 the case of Unlucky Alert, 81% of you thought he did 40:48.790 --> 40:55.800 something morally blameworthy, now only 36% of you do. 40:55.800 --> 40:57.010 Why? 40:57.010 --> 40:58.260 I don't know. 40:58.260 --> 41:02.070 But it's worth thinking about why that happened. 41:02.070 --> 41:07.990 Let's contrast this with the case of Lucky Cell Phone. 41:07.990 --> 41:12.610 Sorry, I just asked you the question about Lucky Alert and 41:12.610 --> 41:15.780 put up the question and articulated the question of 41:15.780 --> 41:17.070 Lucky Cell Phone. 41:17.070 --> 41:19.810 My data are distorted and I'm going to have 41:19.810 --> 41:21.040 to skip this question. 41:21.040 --> 41:25.790 So I ask you to ask yourselves at home what you think about 41:25.790 --> 41:26.470 these cases. 41:26.470 --> 41:30.210 But because I misphrased things I need to go on to the 41:30.210 --> 41:31.740 next point. 41:31.740 --> 41:34.670 Although those are some nice numbers. 41:34.670 --> 41:38.260 What question they're in answer to will remain a topic 41:38.260 --> 41:39.510 for future research. 41:42.620 --> 41:44.120 There has been-- 41:44.120 --> 41:46.800 I have only six minutes remaining so I 41:46.800 --> 41:48.020 want to talk quickly-- 41:48.020 --> 41:50.230 a fundamental and recurring puzzle that we 41:50.230 --> 41:51.730 faced in this class. 41:51.730 --> 41:54.640 Determining what is and isn't in our control regarding our 41:54.640 --> 41:56.850 attribution of praise and blame in cases 41:56.850 --> 41:59.270 of unintended outcome. 41:59.270 --> 42:03.200 Resolving the role all what is and isn't in our control in 42:03.200 --> 42:05.630 our own internal reactions to events. 42:05.630 --> 42:08.430 In our recognition of the degree to which we're shaped 42:08.430 --> 42:12.150 by our societal circumstances, as explored by Aristotle and 42:12.150 --> 42:15.810 Doris and Shay and Milgram and the WEIRD studies and Sunstein 42:15.810 --> 42:18.830 and Plato and exploring the ways in which this should be 42:18.830 --> 42:23.270 normatively factored in, both politically and morally. 42:23.270 --> 42:25.800 That's theme number two. 42:25.800 --> 42:31.360 Theme number three: individual and society. 42:31.360 --> 42:36.680 Sometimes things which are OK to do if you are the only one 42:36.680 --> 42:42.860 doing them become problematic if many others are. 42:42.860 --> 42:47.450 There's no problem polluting if most of the environment 42:47.450 --> 42:49.270 remains clean. 42:49.270 --> 42:53.590 There's a major problem polluting if the result is no 42:53.590 --> 42:55.930 air for anyone. 42:55.930 --> 43:00.570 There's no disruption of patterning if one of us 43:00.570 --> 43:05.730 chooses to give money to somebody whose work we admire. 43:05.730 --> 43:09.820 But, as Nozick points out, there is a disruption of 43:09.820 --> 43:15.770 patterning if many of us have the same response. 43:15.770 --> 43:20.590 The costs of those kinds of patterns may be minimal in 43:20.590 --> 43:25.470 certain contexts, but in others the fact that 43:25.470 --> 43:31.170 differences arise between us may cause a loss of our 43:31.170 --> 43:34.730 fundamental democratic institution. 43:34.730 --> 43:37.980 So in the context of our discussion of the relation 43:37.980 --> 43:42.880 between individual and society, we were taught, both 43:42.880 --> 43:47.020 in the context of the moral philosophy section and in the 43:47.020 --> 43:50.740 context of the political philosophy section, that if we 43:50.740 --> 43:55.780 want to make real our commitments to living as 43:55.780 --> 44:01.100 members of a community, we need to have a vivid way of 44:01.100 --> 44:05.060 representing before ourselves that we are 44:05.060 --> 44:08.360 only one among many. 44:08.360 --> 44:13.280 And we have two beautiful articulations of that. 44:13.280 --> 44:16.870 One in Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative, 44:16.870 --> 44:21.410 that my own desires may serve as the basis for willed action 44:21.410 --> 44:25.340 only if I can at the same time coherently will that others in 44:25.340 --> 44:28.480 similar circumstances would act in the way that I am 44:28.480 --> 44:30.020 choosing to act. 44:30.020 --> 44:35.550 And in Rawls's articulation of the veil of ignorance as a way 44:35.550 --> 44:39.490 of thinking about what justice demands. 44:39.490 --> 44:43.220 What's beautiful about these articulations is that they are 44:43.215 --> 44:46.705 an attempt to bring a consideration that reason had 44:46.710 --> 44:51.510 brought us to into a formulation that we can make 44:51.510 --> 44:54.140 use of intuitively. 44:54.140 --> 44:58.670 Their attempts to give us vivid ways of remaining 44:58.670 --> 45:03.880 committed to what all of you, or almost all of you in this 45:03.880 --> 45:06.550 class, suggested you are committed to. 45:06.550 --> 45:13.890 Which is in education, in housing, in healthcare, and in 45:13.890 --> 45:20.300 the distribution of resources, to a somewhat more egalitarian 45:20.300 --> 45:25.330 distribution of goods than might arise if we didn't think 45:25.330 --> 45:28.270 about our experience from the perspective of the community 45:28.270 --> 45:29.350 as a whole. 45:29.350 --> 45:33.290 And I'll skip-- though put up on the Internet for you-- 45:33.290 --> 45:37.180 three slides from a recent study showing that your 45:37.180 --> 45:41.280 responses in these cases were not exceptional. 45:41.280 --> 45:46.000 Let me close by pointing you to three quotations, which for 45:46.000 --> 45:48.690 me epitomized the course. 45:48.690 --> 45:52.370 The first is the quote from Epictetus that tells us when 45:52.370 --> 45:56.150 we are about to encounter an experience that we worry we 45:56.150 --> 45:59.600 might find distasteful that we need to think about what it 45:59.600 --> 46:02.690 would be like and to prepare ourselves for it. 46:02.690 --> 46:06.900 What upsets people, says Epictetus, are not things but 46:06.900 --> 46:09.570 are judgments about them. 46:09.570 --> 46:13.400 The second is the quote from Aristotle, which I put up 46:13.400 --> 46:16.590 almost every lecture in the beginning of the term. 46:16.590 --> 46:19.800 That we learn a craft by practicing it and that we 46:19.800 --> 46:24.760 cultivate virtues by acting as if we were already virtuous. 46:24.760 --> 46:29.750 If there is something that you wish to become, act as if that 46:29.750 --> 46:32.040 were what you already are. 46:32.040 --> 46:36.840 And I close with, perhaps the most beautiful part of Plato's 46:36.840 --> 46:42.640 Republic, the myth of Er, in which Plato describes the 46:42.640 --> 46:48.590 story of a bunch of disembodied souls, which 46:48.590 --> 46:50.510 people who were about to be born are 46:50.510 --> 46:53.190 permitted to choose among. 46:53.190 --> 46:55.800 They're giving models of lives and asked to 46:55.800 --> 46:57.920 select among them. 46:57.920 --> 47:03.480 And it is in the context of choosing what sort of life 47:03.480 --> 47:07.780 that one wants to live that the questions of this course 47:07.780 --> 47:09.960 become most pressing. 47:09.960 --> 47:14.460 Think over how the sorts of things we have mentioned from 47:14.460 --> 47:18.970 January until now jointly and severally determine what the 47:18.970 --> 47:21.300 virtuous life is like. 47:21.300 --> 47:25.470 "From all this, by considering the nature of the soul, reason 47:25.465 --> 47:28.815 out which life is better and which is worse. 47:28.820 --> 47:32.390 Choose accordingly, calling a life worse if it leads the 47:32.390 --> 47:36.750 soul to become more unjust, better if it leads the soul to 47:36.750 --> 47:41.360 be more just." And remember that on the closing page of 47:41.360 --> 47:47.260 Plato's Republic, Odysseus, the great hero, celebrated for 47:47.260 --> 47:51.990 his exploits in the Trojan War, comes to the recognition 47:51.992 --> 47:57.182 that the life which will allow him to flourish most is the 47:57.180 --> 48:01.730 quiet life of a private individual who does his own 48:01.726 --> 48:07.326 work, who focuses on the things around him in such a 48:07.330 --> 48:11.920 way that he brings joy to those near him 48:11.920 --> 48:14.590 and thereby to himself. 48:14.590 --> 48:18.610 And with those opening and closing words of Plato's 48:18.610 --> 48:22.070 Republic, I thank you for a wonderful semester. 48:22.065 --> 48:23.665 [APPLAUSE]