5. Ethics on The Duane Berquist Lectures

1. What Is Good? The First Definition and the Socratic Question of Cause vs. Effect

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist starts from the observation that people naturally answer “what is X?” by pointing to examples before reaching a universal definition, and traces this through Plato’s Meno and Euthyphro alongside the opening of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He builds a first definition of the good as “what all desire,” then presses the Euthyphro’s cause-and-effect question—is a thing good because it is wanted, or wanted because it is good—testing it against Augustine on beauty and against cases in moral and positive law. He weighs objections on both sides of the distinction and leaves the question open at the close.

2. Answering by Induction: We Want Things Because They Are Good, and Why the Bad Seems Wanted

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the old question of whether something is good because it is wanted, or wanted because it is good. Following the Posterior Analytics’ distinction between induction and syllogism, he argues the case inductively, running through natural goods—food, water, sleep, health, reproduction, pleasure, knowledge, money, friendship, wisdom—and the desires that answer to each. Drawing on Aquinas’s treatise on love in the Summa, along with examples from Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, he meets objections about misdirected desire by distinguishing the good as such from the merely apparent good, explained through ignorance or deception by resemblance. He closes by placing the inquiry within Plato’s sequence of Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, previewing “the better” as background for Socrates’ quarrel with the Athenians in the Apology.

3. The Good, the Better, and the Three Kinds of Human Goods

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reviews the Socratic argument, built by induction from cases like food, water, and rest, that we desire things because they are good rather than the reverse—and answers objections drawn from Aquinas on love and knowledge as causes of desire. He then turns to “better,” using the logic of if-then statements and the principle that a cause is more truly what it causes something else to be, to show that an end is always better than what is pursued for its sake. Applying this to Aristotle’s division of goods of the soul, of the body, and external goods, he uses it to clarify what is at stake in Plato’s Apology, where Socrates and the Athenians disagree about which goods, and so which end of life, is truly greatest.

4. The End of Man: Own Act, Virtue, and the Act with Reason Done Well

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist asks what man’s proper end is, ranking external, bodily, and spiritual goods as Aristotle does in the Nicomachean Ethics while drawing on Plato’s Republic and Symposium for comparison. He builds the argument inductively, using tools, bodily organs, and occupations to establish Plato’s notion of a thing’s “own act”—what it alone does, or does best—and to show how ability and act point to an end wanted for its own sake rather than as a means to something further. From there he arrives at man’s end as “the act with reason done well,” identified broadly with virtue, setting up the further question of what that virtue is and how it is acquired.

5. The Good, the Better and the End of Man: Own Act, Virtue and Proportion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What is the good, and what does “better” mean? Berquist takes up that question from Nicomachean Ethics Book I, working through his handout “Note on End or Purpose of Man” to build three proofs—by induction, by categorical syllogism, and by a hypothetical syllogism using proportional reasoning—for man’s proper end: “the act with reason, done well, throughout life.” He ties this to virtue as what lets a thing do its own act well, touches his “Note on Practical Philosophy” and Aristotle’s Metaphysics II, and closes on the threefold division of goods of soul, body, and external things, the dispute Socrates dramatizes in the Apology.

6. Goods of the Soul, Body and Exterior: Socrates vs. the Athenians, and the Scope of Practical Philosophy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why must ethics, which is chiefly concerned with the good of the soul, also treat goods of the body and exterior goods? Berquist works through Aristotle’s threefold division, using Socrates’ stance against the Athenians to show dialectically that interior goods outrank exterior ones and goods of the soul outrank those of the body, on the principle that the end is always better than what merely serves it. He exposes a common fallacy—mistaking what is “prior in being,” like breathing, for what is “prior in goodness,” like philosophizing—then notes Aquinas’s use of this same division for Christ’s humanity, and closes by placing ethics within the order of the sciences, comparing its outward reach toward first principles to the movement in Aristotle’s Physics.

7. Good, Better, and the End of Man: Review and the Two Kinds of Human Virtue

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist reviews how Aristotle moves from the definitions of “good” and “better” to man’s ultimate end: reasoned activity performed well. Virtue, on this account, is whatever enables a thing to perform its proper act excellently, and Berquist maps the resulting shape of the Nicomachean Ethics—moral virtue, intellectual virtue, states below and above the properly human, friendship, and finally happiness itself—showing how Aquinas takes up the same framework in the Summa Theologiae. He draws on the handouts on reason, logic, and man’s end to hold the argument together, pausing along the way for reflections on a recent pilgrimage tied to Padre Pio and on spiritual friendship in Scripture and monastic life.

8. The Virtues of Reason and the Moral Virtues in Aristotle and Thomas

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up Thomas’s simple division of intellectual virtue into speculative and practical reason—art and prudence on the practical side, understanding, science, and wisdom on the speculative—and sets it against Aristotle’s own division, based on what is better known to us. He then turns to the moral virtues, noting that Aristotle’s Ethics treats courage, temperance, the minor social virtues, and justice last, while Thomas’s Secunda Secundae reverses the order, beginning with prudence and justice. He traces the difference to philosophy’s ascent from sense experience toward God against theology’s descent from God to creatures, using etymology and everyday examples to show why courage is easier to grasp than wisdom or justice.

9. Defining Moral Virtue: A Habit of Choosing the Mean, and the Virtues Between Their Extremes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist takes up the definition of moral virtue from Books Two and Three of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: a habit of choosing, lying in a mean relative to the individual, and determined by right reason. He then walks through the particular virtues—courage, moderation, liberality, munificence, magnanimity, mildness, and the social virtues of friendliness and truthfulness—showing how each stands between an excess and a deficiency, with the mean often falling closer to one extreme than the other. He closes by extending the doctrine of the mean to truthfulness in speech about God, comparing it to how orthodox Trinitarian teaching avoids the opposite errors of Arius and Sabellius.

10. Aristotle's Proemium to the Ethics: The Highest End, Method and Fit Hearers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Berquist begins the Ethics by distinguishing two ways of dividing an Aristotelian treatise: the familiar editorial split into books and chapters, and the logical structure of proemium and tractatus that Aquinas’s commentary tracks through its lectiones. Reading closely through Book I’s opening chapters, he follows Aristotle’s argument that every art, action, and choice aims at some good, moving from subordinate ends up to the highest good, happiness, as the proper object of political science, and pauses over Aristotle’s remark that ethics admits only the certitude its subject matter allows. He illustrates what a proemium does and demands of its reader with comparisons to Plato’s Timaeus, the opening of Romeo and Juliet, and Vatican II’s Dei Verbum.

11. Nicomachean Ethics I.7: Drawing a Line Around the End of Man—Reason as Man's Proper Function

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading Aristotle’s Ethics I.7 alongside Aquinas’s commentary (lectio 10) and the handout “Drawing a Line Around the End of Man,” Berquist asks what activity is proper to man alone. By eliminating what humans share with plants and animals, he arrives at reason as man’s distinctive function, and so happiness as activity of soul according to virtue, virtue taken in its fullest sense, over a complete life. He then digresses into Book II’s practical counsel for acquiring virtue—lean toward the extreme you’re less prone to, know your own tendencies, distrust pleasure—illustrating it through figures who deferred to more gifted successors: Plato and Aristotle, Albert the Great and Aquinas, Haydn and Mozart, Belloc and Chesterton.