Behavior :: essays research papers

EDUCATING ETHICAL BEHAVIORARISTOTLES VIEWS ON AKRASIACan the teaching of morality really help cleanse the business world of shady dealings? Asked by Newsweek magazine during the height of the recent Wall-Street scandals,1 this query resonates with perennial concerns most whether or not virtue can be taught and how such focus might best be effected. The problem, Newsweek declares, is not that students lack ethical standards or are incapable of distinguishing wrong from expert. The challenge for educators rather lies in constituent students act on the virtues they espouse. Even in todays thickening world, knowing whats right is comparatively easy, Newsweek concludes. Its doing whats right thats hard. Why do people act wrongly, when they know beneficial well what right conduct demands? This phenomenon, known to philosophers as incontinence or akrasia, receives extensive treatment in Book Seven of Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics.2 want Newsweek, Aristotle holds that akrasia prese nts a special challenge for moral education. How does Aristotle conceive this challenge, and what might coetaneous educators learn from Aristotles analysis? To appreciate Aristotles insights into akrasia and moral instruction, it is accommodating to begin by looking at popular views of the akratics dilemma. touristed beliefs about incontinence are varied and often contradictory, Aristotle contends.3 Two, however, bear scrutiny. Aristotle summarizes them as follows (1) The continent person seems to be the same as one who abides by his rational calculation and the incontinent person seems to be the same as one who abandons it. (2) The incontinent person knows that his actions are base, but does them because of his feelings, while the continent person knows that his appetites are base, but because of reason does not follow them.4 In short, popular opinion concludes that with respect to akrasia, feeling overpowers reason the individual, as a consequence, is seduced into acting irrat ionally. This conclusion, in turn, is marked by two deeper suppositions a) feeling (or appetite) is clean-cut from reason b) reason can be disciplined, but feelings cannot. Although voiced in ancient Greece, these common beliefs about akrasia are held no less wide today. Like Aristotles compatriots, we tend to divorce reason from desires and appetites. The latter we admiration as urges we cannot help but feel reason, by contrast, bespeaks a talent for considered control. When we act against our better judgment, it is because we cannot hold our feelings at bay. We lose control and put up irrationally.