Reflection: Understanding our own behaviour

Sydney
11 November 2001

Court strips ex-student of $3m award

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Archbishop Pell chosen

Kudos for Catholic Health head

Muslims at Mass

Gleeson Auditorium

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Letters: Abstinence and sainthood

Conversation: ‘Give Muslims a fair go’ – plea to media - Faruk Chowdhury and Amjad Ali Mehboob of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils Reflection: Understanding our own behaviour

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A horse and buggy and stained-glass windows

Sister Gen – mother to the boys of St John’s

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Inspirations: A suitcase of prayer and love of Jesus

Reflection: Understanding our own behaviour

By Andrew Murray SM

In his Letter to the Romans (7: 15–16), Saint Paul complained in the following way. “I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.” One can sense his disappointment. His complaint, however, is not unique. It is one with which the philosophers have also had to deal.

Socrates brought the question to a head by claiming that to know what is good is to do good or, in other words, to know virtue is to be virtuous. Socrates’ claim is extraordinary. Does anybody really think that simply knowing the right thing to do will ensure that we do it? Paul certainly did not, and the experience of most of us probably runs closer to what Paul describes than what Socrates claims.

Scholars find solutions to Socrates’ position, but these are not our interest here. What Socrates did was highlight the problem of a human world that is divided only into virtue and vice or excellence and wickedness or good and evil. It is a very harsh world, a very black and white world. While we might hear this kind of world preached even with the sting of a preacher’s own disappointment, it hardly fits with our experience.

Aristotle (Ethics VII) resolved this dilemma by recognising the complexity of the human make up. Firstly, he recognises the reality of virtue or of character that enables human beings to do the right thing easily and pleasantly in the different circumstances that they meet. Conversely, vicious persons engage in wrong-doing without compunction. Through habituation they readily and easily engage in what we might call evil lives or practices.

Secondly, he acknowledges that this is not the whole story. Experience tells us that sometimes we are torn. We may engage in wrong actions against our best instincts and contrary to our wishes but pulled by desire or slow to act. This might be called weakness. Alternatively, we sometimes find ourselves doing the right thing but at considerable cost. We have to strain against our inclinations. This can be called self-control.

By inserting self-control and weakness as conditions of character between virtue and vice, Aristotle recognises that many of us work out our lives being neither extremely good nor terribly bad yet for the most part wanting to do what is good. We take joy at our successes and strive to remedy our failures.

At a more systematic level, by taking account of this complexity in human character and action, Aristotle avoids some of the epistemological extremes that we find in the world around us. On the one hand, he asserts without compromise that there is objectivity to good and evil. Relativism is not an option. On the other hand, he rejects a dogmatism that views human action and life in terms that are merely black and white.

Fr Murray teaches philosophy at the Catholic Institute of Sydney.