Mathematical Ethics Essay -- Math Philosophy Aristotle Papers

Mathematical ethics Philosophers since antiquity have argued the merits of mathematics as a normative support in honest decision-making and of the mathematization of ethics a theoretical discipline. Recently, Anagnostopoulos, Annas, Broadie and Hutchinson have probed such(prenominal) issues said to be of interest to Aristotle. Despite their studies, the sense in which Aristotle each opposed or proposed a numerical ethics in subject-matter and method acting remains unclear. This paper attempts to clarify the matter. It shows Aristotles matrix of exactness and looseness for ethical subject-matter and ethical method in the Nicomachean Ethics. Then it probes a answer puzzle from the matrix, namely, the HL model of the happy life without consideration of mathematical justice (Bk. III) and the HJL model of the happy life with such consideration (Bk. V). Finally, it examines Aristotles twofold rationale for differentiating these two models in his overall moral feedback wave system differences in the intellectual virtue of steady-going deliberation the precedence of friendship over justice for the happy life. This suggests Aristotle saw no dissent either to using mathematics as an aid to ethical decision-making for a happy life, or to mathematizing at least some parts of an ethical theory of eudaimonism. I. The problem of math ethics in new-fangledity and antiquity Mathematizing ethics to become scientific ethics has long been a vision of some philosophers, dating to both the Academy and perhaps the Lyceum. In modern philosophy Jeremy Bentham, (1) G.E. Moore, (2) and Nicholas Rescher (3) have tried to mathematize ethics. Such mathematizations square with Quines view that mathematizing inexact things by way of exact methods jibes a successful reduc... ...participants. It misses the mark methodologically, or, as Broadie likens it, it is playing at ethics or even a perversion. It is, as Aristotle sees in the Nicomachean Ethics, a deception, since the under lying longitudinal assumption is that psyche thinks they can become good by talking about the good without doing good and without being impacted by doing what they have chosen in a moral feedback loop system. (1105b 13-17) Furthermore, such maturation theories overlook the repetitious dimension of moral decision-making with feedback loops and filters in the development of moral character including the come-at-able use of mathematical ethics in the manner of Aristotle, who seems to have steered a middle course between complete reductive mathematization of ethics and an apriori vindication to even a partial mathematization of ethics. Not too much and not too little