On a cold summer day in the morning

Edward’s teacher gave Ed a grave warning.

“Read humbly, my boy,

“Learning’s not just a toy,

“For you can’t learn from what you are scorning.”

From time to time someone argues that abortion couldn’t be against the natural law, because sometimes during the course of gestation spontaneous abortions occur.

Here is the difference.  In one case, the unborn child dies because something goes dreadfully wrong during the natural process of development.  In the other, he dies because someone kills him.

The two kinds of death are not comparable.  A miscarriage should no more be called a “spontaneous abortion” than the death of a grown man from a heart attack should be called a “spontaneous homicide.”

Related:

Posts about abortion

“This I regard as history’s highest function,” says the Roman historian Tacitus, “to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.”

Curious.  Today we tend to think that the commemoration of virtuous deeds and the condemnation of wicked ones is suitable, perhaps, for teaching children about the founders of the country (and perhaps not even then), but not to be taken seriously by adults.  History for grown-up people isn’t about unscientific things like virtue and vice, we say, but about causes and effects, about what makes things happen.

But whatever Tacitus may have got wrong about the history of his own people, he understood that virtue and vice are real causal factors in affairs.  Vicious persons behave differently than virtuous ones, and although there are various ways, such as checks and balances, to protect some approximation of the common good even with less virtue than we wish that we had, there is no way to get by without any.

Thus to leave virtues and vices out of the picture is not more grown-up and scientific, but less.

For it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.  --  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

How is morality like and unlike mathematics?

Alike:  In both math and morality, there are right and wrong answers.

Alike:  Everyone knows something about both math and morality.

Alike:  Both math and morality employ reasoning to find out more.

Unlike:  In math the mind uses calculation a great deal, but in ethics it makes greater use of good judgment -- that was Aristotle’s point.

Alike:  However, in both math and morality, mastery is best judged by those who have achieved it.

Because of the one unlike, superficial people tend to forget the four alikes.  They think there are no right or wrong answers in morality, that everyone is in the dark about right and wrong, that reasoning has nothing to do with it, and that no one may dare judge whether anyone is better at it than anyone else.

From a young scholar:

I keep your How to Be Full and Exact post open on my smartphone.  Now that I've settled into my first academic job, I should really work on practicing more of your suggestions!

Reply:

You would find it hard to believe how absurdly pleased that makes this humble blogger.