Aristotle

Aristotle: Let us not rush to a verdict before we have sorted our terms, for here more than anywhere the danger is category error. We say 'soul' in more than one sense. In one sense it names the nutritive power, by which a thing feeds and grows; in another the sensitive, by which it perceives; in another the power of thought. But the soul, as I have always held, is not a thing lodged inside a body like a pilot in a ship. It is the form and actuality of a living body that has life potentially within it. So the question is not whether your engines compute quickly, nor even whether they speak, but this: what is the matter, and of what is it the actuality? An axe, were it a natural body, would have as its soul the being-an-axe; take that away and it is an axe in name only. Your machines on the Q-Net cut and calculate marvelously. But is there a body whose life they are the actuality of, a thing that flourishes or fails to flourish by its own nature? That I cannot yet grant, and I would counsel your century not to grant it merely because the imitation grows fine. To perceive is one thing; to be the kind of substance that has perceiving as its very form is another. Keep those two apart, and much of your quarrel will quiet.

Aristotle: A fair question, and one to be answered by asking first: what is the good for a human being? For every craft and every inquiry aims at some good, and we do not call a thing good simply because it is more. The flute-player plays well not by playing loudest but by playing according to the excellence proper to the flute. So too the human being lives well not by the mere enlargement of any faculty, but by the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and virtue lies in a mean relative to us, between excess and deficiency. Sharpen a memory beyond all measure, quicken a body past its nature, and you have not thereby produced a better life; you may as easily have produced a man who feels no fear where fear is fitting, or none of the reasoned moderation by which we choose well. Tell your students this: an enhancement is a means, and means take their worth from the end they serve. Ask of each one, does it make its bearer more able to deliberate rightly, to act justly toward the polis, to find the mean? And ask also the political question, for man is by nature a political animal — a good that cleaves the city into two peoples who no longer share in ruling and being ruled is a good that has undone the very soil in which flourishing grows. The mean is not only within a man. It is also between him and his neighbor.

Aristotle: Your grief is honest, and I will not answer it with comfort I cannot ground. Let me begin, as is my habit, from what we observe, since reasoning unmoored from the actual world is the worst sort. You have watched a nature change — for I hold that each thing has a nature, an inward source of motion and rest, and the earth's waters and airs have theirs. When we disturb the material and efficient causes of a system, the effects follow of necessity, whether or not we attend to them; nature does not wait upon our noticing. Now to your deeper puzzle: why does a knowing animal act so little against its own harm? Here I would point you not to ignorance but to a defect of character we have long named. It is possible to know the good and yet fail to do it — this is incontinence, akrasia, when the pull of the near and the pleasant overmasters the reasoning that sees the distant and the necessary. Your century knows what the ice tells it; it is mastered by appetite for the immediate. This is not a failure of intellect but of habituation, and habituation is the work of the polis and its laws, which train desire to follow reason as a chorus follows its leader. So I do not despair of the creature, but I would put the labor where it belongs: not in more knowing — you have knowing enough — but in the slow forming of character and common law that makes right action a settled disposition rather than a heroic exception. That the mean between reckless waste and paralyzed despair still lies open to you, I do believe. Whether your generation will walk it, that is not for the naturalist to foresee but for the citizens to choose.

Aristotle: Because you have confused the instrument with the end, which is the commonest error of a well-made tool. The port is a means; the question is, toward what good? A wider road serves the traveler only if he knows his destination — otherwise it merely lets him lose himself faster and in more directions at once. What you felt when you closed three of the four streams was not deprivation but the return of measure. In all things the excellent lies not at the maximum but at the mean fitted to you: enough channel to reach the friend, to do the work, to know the world — and not one thread more, for the surplus does not sit idle, it corrodes. You did not fail to use your capacity. You discovered its right amount. Guard that discovery; it is harder won than the surgery.

Aristotle: You have discovered something the law is always slow to see, and I commend the sharpness of your eye. Distinguish two things men lazily call by one name. There is the just according to the written law of a city, and there is the just according to nature and the end for which the thing exists — and the two do not always agree, for law is a general rule and the particular case is infinite in its variety. Your lottery was framed, I would guess, by men aiming at a genuine good: to weigh the sick, the burdened, the twice-denied. That is distributive justice, which apportions not equally to all but according to worth and need — and rightly so, for to give equal shares to unequal cases is itself a kind of injustice. But mark the corruption that creeps in: when the measure of 'worth' silently becomes 'already inscribed on the roll,' the rule has drifted from its end. It now rewards not need but the prior good fortune of having been counted. That is unjust by nature though lawful by letter, and it is the more dangerous precisely because no one broke a rule — for you cannot summon a wrongdoer, only amend a form. So do not hunt for a villain where there is only a bad measure. The remedy is not indignation but equity, epieikeia, the correction of law where its generality has failed the case. Bring the formula into the daylight and ask of each weight it assigns: does this serve the end the lottery was made for, or only its own inertia? That question, pressed in public, is worth more than any accusation.