My blog

Deliberative Empathy

There are two distinctive features of Aristotle’s ethics that are useful for us, and it so happens they are also key to understanding Aristotle’s “science of happiness.” First, Aristotle focuses not on character as some fixed and immutable quality, like temperament. Rather, his emphasis is on the development of character through the deliberate cultivation of […]

Continue Reading

Practically speaking

The gospel reading for the First Sunday in Lent, from Mark 1, recounts the familiar scene of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan River. We tend to focus on the dramatic parts of that story: The cleaving of the heavens, the booming voice announcing the Beloved, the Spirit descending like a dove. But right […]

Continue Reading

Balancing Act

Taking a cue from Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean, I talked about humility as a balance between too much confidence, which produces deliberative arrogance, and too little confidence, which produces timidity. We can generally recognize the extremes when we see them (and especially when we encounter them in dialogue), but it’s a lot harder to […]

Continue Reading

Timidity

Deliberative humility can be conceived as a “mean between extremes,” which implies a continuum. At one end, we’ve seen what we might call deliberative arrogance, but what’s at the other end of the continuum? We don’t really have an adequate word for it, so I’m co-opting the word timidity — though diffidence usefully captures another […]

Continue Reading