Reflections on Virtue

The nature of virtue is the subject of a rather large fraction of the dialogues of Plato -- probably some of the best parts, if you ask me. The interesting thing is that for all of this wonderful discussion and argument, as far as I can tell, Plato never seems to have been able to say precisely what virtue is. Admittedly, I haven't finished all of the dialogues yet, but from what I can tell he seems to have been running around in circles, like a dog snuffling about the base of a tree where some varmint is holed up. He's figured out the general region, but hasn't quite made the final leap.

I must confess that I don't know what virtue is either, though I think that I thought I did before I started reading. But I don't think I could have defended those opinions against the wily Socrates.

Reading Plato has inspired a few useful ideas on the matter, however, which I thought worthwhile. Unfortunately, I can't put them through the Socratic wringer, he being long dead, so I thought I'd share them here.

(Un)intellectual Property

Yet another assault on the free-market has been averted, this time, against the internet by a motley collection of entrenched business interests that have failed to adjust their business models to the realities of the modern age.  Or is that a general description of the usual perpetrators of these kinds of things?  In any case, one would think with a good decade or so of fair warning, they would have made the transition by now. But no, they'd much rather ask Congress to pass an abominable package of laws that would have stripped users of the information highway of many of their freedoms with an appalling lack of due process, erecting barriers which these businesses can milk for easy revenues.  In the business, we call that rent-seeking.  So much for the dynamism and competitive spirit of entrepreneurship.  Well, at least of these particular entrepreneurs.

As is typical, their arguments were couched in terms which attempt to appeal to free-market sentiments.  Intellectual property, they claim, must be protected from acts of 'theft' and 'piracy,' else the whole edifice of of modern civilization will collapse.  Or something like that, as if it hadn't already, and mostly through the efforts of these very kinds of chumps to confuse the situation and confound our traditions so that they might be taken advantage of.  A violation of property?  What man of any decency could tolerate such a horror?  As it turns out, quite a few.  Over seven million people have petitioned Congress to tell these businesses to stuff it.  Apparently, there was a difference of opinion as to what constitutes decency in this particular situation.

Dogma, Ideology, Criticism, and Philosophy, Part 2

...continued more or less directly from last time...

Ideology as Dogma

Gene Callahan has been producing some excellent and insightful pieces on the nature of ideology.  These focus on two questions -- first, where do they come from, and second, what are they really?

In response to one commenter, he describes the production of an ideology as a stripping down of a philosophical ideal and body of truth to produce a set of rote rules to be dogmatically followed, irrespective of the actual results they produce.  It is easy to see this kind of thing in action, and while he uses libertarianism as his ideological example, I'll stick with something a little more obvious:  communism.

Dogma, Ideology, Criticism, and Philosophy, Part 1

Awhile back, I did a little speculation about a sort of progression of political consciousness. Basically, I put forward a model of alternating political philosophies as one progressed through life and grasped certain truths, from a sort of authoritarian youth, to a relativistic liberal adolescence, to a conservative adulthood, which might then progress to a few other phases -- a libertarian phase, and ultimately a phase which I could not really describe, but suspected to exist.  A person could become 'stuck' at any of these phases through much of his life, even the rest of it after having entered, and of course there is some variation not described here, but in general, most people who make it to 'adulthood' at least do seem to roughly funnel through these phases in this order.

Well, I think I have a little more light to shed on this idea, especially that last 'phase.'

Subjects, Objects, and Christmas Carols

[Note:  This is an extension of the last post I did on human nature.  I am drawing -- and quartering, in some cases, maybe -- these ideas from R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History.  As I am even less familiar with philosophy than with economics, and not to be trusted on the finer points of anything, the interested or skeptical reader is heartily encouraged to investigate for himself.]

Every year about this time, I am flabergasted by the bizarre and irritating renderings of Christmas carols.  For the past several, I have bought or received as gifts Christmas music CD's, almost all of which I find myself disappointed with.

The major problem for me is 1) I much prefer the older songs, and 2) almost nobody seems to understand them, so they can't seem to perform them in an appropriate manner.  Take, for example, Oh Come Emmanuel.  This is perhaps one of the very best ever written, and yet it never ceases to amaze me how badly it gets butchered, even more badly than most others.  After some thought, I think I have come up with the reason why.