More on Aristotle

Virtue ethics begins with the sensibility that we ought to do as human beings is, first of all, to become excellent human beings. Becoming excellent human being, more precisely, means to develop and fulfill our most important capacities as human beings.

If our goal as human beings is to achieve happiness, then it is equally important that we develop what Aristotle (and, subsequently, Kant) identified as practical reason. 

Such practical reason involves first of all our ability – given our best knowledge of reality and thus of our possible choices and actions – to make the sorts of analyses and ethical judgments required for us to do “The right thing” both for ourselves as individuals (the ethical Aristotle) and for our larger communities (for Aristotle, the political)

As we have seen, these sorts of ethical decision-making further require what Socrates and Aristotle term Phronesis, a practical judgment that is able to discern that right choice (or, some-times, choices) among the possibilities before us.

And learning from mistakes means, as Aristotle emphasized, that our developing these capacities of ethical judgment and analyse, and of reason more broadly, is an on-going task: just as the ethlet or physician must constantly practice if s/he is to maintain, much less improve, his or her abilities, so we as human beings must likewise cultivate in a conscious and on-going way our rational abilities, including our use of Phronesis.

Week 14 Semester 2

This video is part of a series that I am posting as a blog about my weekly experience of doing a masters in Interactive Media and Design at the University of Limerick.

What is Aristotle's perspective

To analyse the video that shows how the benefits of computering monitoring can help defeat crime these are the points that Aristotle would look at,

Aristotle virtue ethics is interested in the question of how you become a good person.What would a good person be doing?Good actions.What’s a good action?Good actions are defined in terms of what a good person would do.Knowing what makes a person good and then seeing what kinds of actions the good or virtuous people perform.What are virtues? Virtues are character traits, like honesty, generosity, chastely, bravery, courage etc.A person is good when they have virtues.

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Nico ma che an Ethics asked about the ‘Good’ which was the aim of every action and about what could constitute a ‘final good’ Aristotelian view is that the highest good for man was eu daimonia, which latterly means having a good spirit, but could be translated as happiness.He saw it as a state in which a person was fulfilling his or her potential and natural function. It expressed a form of human excellence of virtue.This tied in with his general view that everything had a ‘final cause’: a goal and a purpose to which it moves. If you understand the final cause of something, you understand its fundamental essence, which finds expression in that goal.If a knife had a soul, Aristotle argued, that is what it is there to do. What then is the essence of human kind? What is it there to do? What is it’s goal?

Final bits of filming

Today we finished the last two movies. One shows how the support of GPS tracking, and how it can help rescue a person if in a kidnapped position, and finally the last movie shows a possible outcome for the future of computer monitoring. As soon as the movies are edited they will be up-loaded to you tube and I will post a link to them.

Further developments for ethics presentation

In this presentation for Monday as I mentioned yesterday, we are using four philosophers to analyse the four movies that we are shooting. The first movie is based on CCTV and the beneficial factors that it's presence has when present in an environment. The movie we shot was done in a local corner street shop.We got permission to shoot a 10min movie where a person enter the store and shops lifts a few items and makes a run for it. The second movie was about a person who is arrested before he boards a flight because of his internet activity. In both of these videos we explore the civil liberties concerned with computer monitoring in both of these cases. 

Today's filming fun

What a day I had, me, Pauline, Stephen and Daisy are in a group for Joe's Ethics class and we are doing a presentation next week on Civil Liberties and Computer Monitoring. So we are creating four videos were we all act in them and then for the presentation, we analyse them using the different theories we have been learning in class. I'm looking forward to putting the videos up on the blog. We had great fun shooting the scenes today, and a great deal of improvising through out them all, and we had a fantastic time. Making movies is a great way to portray a point and to use in a presentation, and tomorrow we have to shoot another two short movies for the final part. I pray that it will be like today lots of success and lots of fun. 

Building the prototype for Hunt Museum

Building the prototype from scratch. Starting with a sheet of wood and then with patients, slowly watch the beauty unfold as your prototype comes together.