耶鲁大学公开课：人性的哲学与科学 第912集英中字幕.doc

目 录第9集 美德和习惯 I2第10集 美德和习惯 II17第11集 意志薄弱性和拖延36第12集 效用主义及批判55第9集 美德和习惯 I E09 PROFESSOR: So today's lecture is about theclaim that we've been exploring in the context of Aristotle's ethics, thatthe way to cultivate virtue is by cultivating in ourselves certain sorts of habits.And I want to start by showing you a picture of a T-shirtwhich was popular at MIT in the mid-'90s when my husband was a graduate student there.What it said on the T-shirt was, "Gravity: It's not just a good idea, it's the law."Now, if you guys were MIT students, you would be rolling on the floor.As it is, social beings that you are, you're rolling on thefloor at the thought that other beings are rolling on the floor at the thought of this.But what's interesting about this T-shirt is that it bringsout a distinction between two kinds of laws.Because gravity isn't a law that tells you how you ought to behave.It's a law that tells you how things do behave.And philosophers make a distinction between two kinds of laws.There are, on the one hand, normative laws, oughts, thingsthat tell you how you how you should do things,things that express, as the name indicates, norms.Those are things like, "look both ways before crossing the street."That's something you ought to do.It wouldn't be funny have a T-shirt that said, "Look bothways before crossing the street: It's not just a good idea, it's the law." Right?It could be the law, and the T-shirt, for lots of reasons, wouldn't be funny.It wouldn't be funny to have a T-shirt that said, "Don't eat in the library:It's not just a good idea, it's the law."Because it could be a law in the library that you not eat.And it wouldn't be funny to have a T-shirt that says, "65 miles per hour:It's not just a good idea, it's the law," because in fact, it is a normative law.So normative laws express summative judgments about the way things ought to be.They are laws in the sense that you find over at the Yale Law School.But in addition, there are laws of a very different kind,spread around the rest of campus.Spread around, in fact, everything that you ever do.And those are descriptive laws.They tell you the way things actually are.So it would be sort of funny to have a T-shirt,"If a car hits you, you will die. It's not just a bad thing, it's the law."Because "If a car hits you, you will die" is a description of the way the world is.It's a fact about the world that is a law in the sensethat it is in a position to allow you to make predictionsabout the future on the basis of the past. It tells youabout law-like relations between things in the past and things in the future.Likewise, it's a law of biology plus chemistry plus physics,roughly, that crumbs cause book decay.That's a description of a fact about the worldto which the normative law, don't eat in the library, might correspond.But they are nonetheless very different claims.And finally, whereas it's a speed limit on your car that you drive 65 miles an hour,it's a speed limit on everything than it not go faster than 186,000 miles per second.The speed of light expresses a descriptive law about how fast you can go,whereas the speed limit "65 miles an hour"expresses a normative law about how fast you may go.Now, why did I start out this lecture on Aristotle and habitwith a bunch of remarks about the difference between normative and descriptive laws?The reason is this.Habits are tools for turning oughts into ises.Habits are ways of taking normative commitments that wehave about the way we want things to be,and making use of the fact that we are psychological, biological,chemical, physical beings in whom patterns of descriptivelaw-like relations can be created by repeating the same activities over and over.So when Aristotle says, "We learn a craft by producing thesame product that we must produce when we've learned it.We become builders by building, harpists by playing the harp, inthe same way we become just by doing just actions,temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions,"he is explaining to us the utility of recognizing the connectionbetween normative laws on the one hand-ways we think we want to be-and descriptive laws on the other-ways that we find ourselves naturally becoming.Remember, when he describes for us how it is that we cultivate virtues,he contrasts that to two cases where merely descriptive laws apply.He said, it's not like trying to train a rock to stay in the air,because that's a case where a descriptive law applies.Nor is it like a case of watching a plant unfold when given water and light,because that, again, is a case where merely descriptive laws apply.What's interesting about the middle realm on which almostthe entirety of the Nicomachean Ethics focuses isthat it's the domain where the principle that I've just articulated holds.It's the domain where it's possible for us to think about the ways we want things to be,to act as if things were already that way,and in a self-fulfilling manner, to have things become that way.So Aristotle's basic insight is that if you want to become something,act as if that is what you already were.If you want to become instinctively brave, act as the brave one does.And then it will become natural to you.If you want to become a piano player,train your fingers to act as the piano player's fingers do.You learn the craft of piano playing by producing theproduct that you must produce when you have learned to piano play.That is, you learn to become a piano player by practicing the piano.So patterns of behavior that are initially under conscious controlcan, through a process of repeated practice, become automatized.So initially, when you learned how to drive a car, you had tothink very carefully about what to do with each of your feet and each of your hands.Any of you who went to dancing school in junior highknow that when you learn how to dance, you start off by counting: "One and Two and."I won't dance on stage, because this is going forever on the Internet.But those of you who learned how to dance in middle schoolknow that behavior that was initially under conscious control became automatized,such that those of you who were trained to do waltz and tango will now, upon hearingthe music of waltz and tango, have a kind of motor routine activated in your feet.The fact that this happens inevitably to biological beings like ourselvesgives us a tool for turning normative commitments into descriptive laws.So it has because the case for me that though it begin as anorm, "look both ways before crossing the street," it's nowa description of me: that I look both ways before crossing the street.And any of you who has ever been to England or Australia-countries in which people drive on the left, rather than the right-know how incredibly difficult it is to overcome that ingrained habit.In fact, when I'm in England, I look both directions about thirty times,because I'm so disoriented by the fact thatmy routine doesn't fit the situation in which I find myself.If you grew up driving a standard shift car or an automatic car and switch to the other,it's incredibly difficult to make the changes.When we become habituated to a certain pattern of behavior,something that was initially a normative rule for us becomes a descriptive one.And in fact, one of the main goals of parenting is toinstill in one's children instinctive responses thataccord with one's reflective commitments.I want it to be the case that when handed an item, withoutreflection, automatically, my children say, "Thank you."Now, the same capacity that allows us to turn normativecommitments that we reflectively endorse into habitual practicescan, of course, be deployed in the reinforcement of habits which we wish to get rid of.So for many of us, it is the case that upon opening one's computer,there is an immediate compulsion to open one's Internet browser,and an immediate compulsion to check one's Facebook page.Now, we talked already in the very first class about one of the ways of dealing with this,which is to eliminate the connection that takes you from the computer to the Facebook page.If you turn off your Internet browser, then no matter howinstinctive the reaction is, you won't be able to respond to the compulsion.If you have an instinctive tendency to go down to your refrigerator at midnightand drink the full fat chocolate milk that's there in the fridge,if you take the milk away, then you don't have to change the habit.So one of the strategies for self-regulation involveslimiting access to the response that you wish to get rid of.But sometimes either the response that we want to getrid of isn't something that we want to eliminate entirely. Right?I don't want to get rid of all the food in my kitchen.Some of you don't want to get rid of Internet access simpliciter on your computer.So the question that we're going to consider in lecture today,is what additional strategies are available for breaking the link between unwanted habits,or the link between cues and the unwanted habits to which they give rise.So let me ask you to take out your clickers.These are the only times we're going to use the clickers today, butI promise in later lectures we'll use them in less contrived ways.So I want to ask you. Which is true of you?That you have no habitual behaviors that you would like to change?Everything about you is perfect?You're like the figure in Alan Kazdin's opening chapter whowants to change everybody in the world, but who needs to change nothing in him- or herself?Or are you somebody who has at least one habitual behavior that you would like to change?And we'll keep polling open for another six, five, four,three, two, we've got 110 responses, and let's see how it comes out.OK. So 8% of you are perfect.I'm thrilled. I've always wanted to have a class full of perfect people.At least I have, I guess it's that back left-hand corner.But 92% of you have at least one habit that you would like to change.For the 92% of you who have that habit that you'd like to change, a second question.So for any of you who has ever gotten rid of a habit andthought to do so, which is true of you?Were you able to change that habitual behavior just by saying to yourself, "You know what?I'm not going to check Internet in class anymore." "You know what?I'm actually going to practice my violin every morning at ten.""You know what? I'm not going to leave my bed unmade in the morning." So howmany were able to change your habitual behavior just by talking yourself out of it,and how many of you were notable to change that habitual behavior by talking yourself out of it?And again, we'll cover this for another ten.OK. And let's see how the numbers come out.Four, three, two, one. OK.Oh my goodness!35% of you can talk yourself out of habitual behaviors.But the other 65% of you are embodied human beings of thesort whom I took myself to be lecturing in this class.OK. It is very often the case, though obviously not always the case,that simply trying to talk yourself out of an unwanted behavior is extraordinarily difficult.And the chapter that we read from Jonathan Haidt, and infact, the readings that we've been doing all semester long, explain why this is so.Part of the reason that at least 65% of you fall into thecategory of people who are unable to talk yourself out ofan unwanted behavior is that we aren't just composed of reason.Plato gave us the metaphor of reason, spirit, and appetite.Haidt gives us the metaphor of the rider and the elephant.Every single one of the authors that we've read so far has talked about the ways in whichwe are fundamentally processing information at a rational levelthat may or may not reach down to the other aspects of what Plato calls our soul.So Aristotle, in those incredible closing five pagesof the Nicomachean Ethics that I had you read for today, thevery last bits of the last book, writes as follows.He says, "If arguments were sufficient in themselves to make people decent,the rewards they would command would justifiably have been many and large.But," he points out, "in a large majority of circumstances,"simply saying to people, "Hey, you know what?You probably ought to pay your taxes by sometime mid-spring,"doesn't cause them to act in keeping with what it is that they want, or you want, them to do.Arguments alone, appeals to rationality alone, work in exceptional cases.But they don't work all the time.Now, because I've been glossing over it in most ofthe material that we've been reading from the ancientauthors, I want to point out that the intervening texts,the texts that I'm skipping over in the rest of 1179, isactually an expression of something that runs throughevery single one of the ancient Greek texts that we've been reading,which is an expression of a certain kind of cultural elitismabout the difference between the well-born and the many.But I want to, right now, set asidewhat is, I think a legitimate ground for challenging some of what Aristotle's saying,and focus instead on what I think is true about what he goes on to remark,which is, that it is impossible to alter by argumentwhat has long been absorbed as a result of one's habits.And Aristotle goes on then to discuss something that we'll talk about in about five weeks.Namely, given this fact about human beings,that early experience shapes subsequent behavior,and that putting regulations in place can shape behavior in ways that is pro-social,it appears that there are implications for how societies ought to be structured.And when we get to the unit on political philosophy, we'lllook yet again at these closing pages of the Nicomachean Ethics.What I want to point out to you now is that there it is anextraordinary connection between what Aristotle is saying in this ancient text-here's a beautiful fifteenth century edition of the Ethics in Latin,here's the translation that we're using-and it seems to me-and this is the point that I want to make in the remainder of today's lecture,that the fundamental insight of Aristotle's ethicsis what lies behind the literature in a certain kind of therapeutic practice-in particular, cognitive behavioral therapy-and I want to show you how this plays out in a particular kind of self-help book.In particular, a parenting guide.The claim I want to make is roughly that Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethicsis the greatest parenting guide ever written.So those of you looking for a baby present for your newborn niece or nephew, look no further!So what I want to do is to contextualize cognitiv