In my lectures on Plato’s “Apology” this morning, my Saint Michael’s students and I followed Socrates’ method of cross examination of Meletus and asked ourselves, “who does improve the youth?” Our replies were no different than Meletus’s; but upon further refelection, we too realized that only a few actually do\u00a0improve children. The few who do, and whom my students offered (specific parents, coaches, teachers, and friends), were those who could (and did)\u00a0successfully teach\u00a0 the\u00a0virtues.\u00a0 It soon became apparent that the teaching of virtue is\u00a0a kind of moral development\u00a0 and is a knowledge-based activity. It is an epistemological\u00a0endeavor that rests on the\u00a0ability to know what the “good” might truly be.\u00a0 Before we knew it , we were standing at the precipice of normative ethics.\u00a0 Normative ethics is the division of philosophy that seeks to define the concept of the “good” ; and, alternatively, its opposite, the “bad”. As I understand it, ethical theory tells\u00a0us that there are essentially only a handful of ways of proceeding. We can define the good as the virtues we practice in\u00a0our characters and communities\u00a0(virtue theory), or our adherenece to certain universal and pre-established rules and principles (the deontologocal approach); or, finally, by the maximization of the social benefit (consequentialist models) our actions create. The only other approach seems to be the emotivist approach which claims that the good is what intuitively\u00a0“feels” good.\u00a0 So I leave you with this question, how do you define the good?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my lectures on Plato’s “Apology” this morning, my Saint Michael’s students and I followed Socrates’ method of cross examination of Meletus and asked ourselves, “who does improve the youth?” Our replies were no different than Meletus’s; but upon further refelection, we too realized that only a few actually do\u00a0improve children. The few who do, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":883,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/883"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/pstanden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}