▶ YouTube Summaries

• YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF0rMmm7lCI
• Original title :: Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics: on goals, institutions, sin of exaggeration

Prot reads the opening chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics (Loeb edition) outdoors in Cyprus and comments as he goes. His themes: goals form a hierarchy, and a stated goal is what lets you judge success; for the Greeks ethics and politics are the same subject; conventions are instituted by people and can be re-instituted; and every vice is a form of one sin, exaggeration. The laptop battery ran out before he reached eudaimonia, which he leaves for the next video.

The good as "that at which things aim"

• "The good" here does not mean benevolence or God. It means the thing a pursuit works towards, as in public good or private good.
• Projects break into subordinate tasks (clear land, foundation, house). Each task has its own end but serves a higher one, so tasks need ranking and sequencing.
• Many pursuits mean many ends. Even a criminal can be good or bad at crime, so the common element is effectiveness relative to a goal, not morality.
• The goal is the criterion by which a deed is measured. If you cannot state what you are working towards, you can never fail, but you can never succeed either.
• In life, ranking goals means knowing what you would give up to keep the thing that matters most (e.g. a vacation for family). Without that you get tunnel vision and lose sight of your highest good.

Ethics is politics

• Aristotle makes politics the master science: it decides which arts exist and what citizens learn. The good of the state is "nobler and more divine" than the good of one person.
• Ethos comes from upbringing and culture, so it can change; character (from "engraving") is mostly innate. Culture is the instituted social whole.
• To institute is to agree on something until it gains the force of objective truth. Money, property and law are examples, and theft only exists because ownership was instituted.
• Personal complicity: condemning imperialism while living beyond your means, which only extraction can finance, is inconsistent. A government is a larger version of its culture's habits.
• Pure individualism contradicts itself. A court ruling on a neighbour's 3 a.m. heavy metal needs a common good, and even a society of anarchists must start from something shared.
• Imprecision is no excuse: justice, love and beauty have no exact definitions but are still real and discussable.

Protagoras, mistranslated

• "Man is the measure of all things" should be read with chremata: things with use value, i.e. conventions. People are the measure of what people institute.
• Conventions are conventions, but the needs that force people to make them, such as living together to survive, are facts of life.
• Treating your own institutions as laws of nature is learned helplessness. What people instituted, people can reform.

The one sin: exaggeration

• No good is unmitigated. Wealth has ruined people and courage has killed them. One apple a day is healthy; a hundred is poison.
• Every vice is excess: laziness is rest overdone, gluttony is eating overdone, greed is acquiring overdone.
• Greek myth and tragedy keep returning to hubris. Hyperbole literally means overshooting, and missing the mark is the root meaning of sin.
• Limits that hold regardless of opinion are a good way to start thinking about the divine. A god that only exists if you believe in it puts the ego on a par with God.
• Modern examples: social media collapses distance and time and wrecks situational awareness; endless gaming affects mood; overthinking freezes you among too many options.
• The ethos of moderation comes from three Delphic maxims that predate Aristotle: "nothing in excess", "know yourself" (know your limits) and "surety brings ruin" (overconfidence stands next to Ate).