Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about New Year's resolutions, what they are, what they have been, and why we're so bad at keeping them.
Speaker: All right, so before we get into our topic today, I guess we should introduce ourselves.
Speaker: I'm Megan Fritz.
Speaker: And I'm Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: We're philosophy professors from Little Rock, Arkansas.
Speaker: We are married.
Speaker: To each other.
Speaker: And only each other.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we have a lot of philosophical conversations in our married life.
Speaker: And we wanted to have a podcast where we have those conversations with you, too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I guess we should say a bit about what philosophy on the fringes means.
Speaker: Like, what sort of topics will we be discussing in our podcast?
Speaker: And why did we even start this podcast in the first place?
Speaker: Yeah, great questions.
Speaker: Should I start?
Speaker: Yeah, why don't you start?
Speaker: So I think one of the big reasons behind why we wanted to start this podcast is we both have this belief that it's really important to live a philosophical life, not just be what I call a classroom philosopher, someone who
Speaker: goes into the classroom and is able to think really well about philosophical questions that involve brains in bats or children drowning in ponds or other kinds of canonical philosophy textbook examples.
Speaker: but otherwise sort of leaves their philosophical hat at the door.
Speaker: I think I got that idiom wrong, but you know what I mean.
Speaker: They're a classroom philosopher, but they're not a kind of a constant philosopher.
Speaker: They're not maybe living a philosophical life, which is hard to do.
Speaker: So that's part of at least why I wanted to start Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: There's all of these things that we think about, that we interact with in our day-to-day life, and there are philosophical dimensions to these topics.
Speaker: But maybe we're not primed to think about them philosophically.
Speaker: So that's what we're trying to do.
Speaker: At least for me, this is a big part of the reason I wanted to start the pod.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree with all that.
Speaker: I guess one other reason for me is I just have a lot of other interests besides philosophy.
Speaker: So philosophy is just one subject among many that I like.
Speaker: So for some philosophers, philosophy is the only thing they're interested in.
Speaker: That's not true for me.
Speaker: I have lots of other interests as well.
Speaker: And sometimes I find myself thinking, wow, it would be really cool to write a paper where I combine my philosophical research area with this cool thing I read about ancient Roman history.
Speaker: I never get around to doing it.
Speaker: Because writing journal articles is not very fun.
Speaker: And you'd be writing like three a day.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So I thought, well, instead of letting all those ideas go to waste, we could maybe make a podcast where we talk about some of this stuff.
Speaker: And that would be fun.
Speaker: I also think I have a really good radio voice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like really alto, really sultry.
Speaker: Yeah, very good.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: Yeah, Megan will be doing most of the talking just because she has the best voice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we should say, what constitutes philosophy on the fringes?
Speaker: When I think of philosophy on the fringes, I think not just fringe, I'm thinking not fringy topics as in like completely bizarre.
Speaker: Not just like aliens and ESP.
Speaker: We will be talking about aliens and ESP at some point.
Speaker: But by fringes, I think we really mean the fringes of academic philosophy.
Speaker: So that's not to say that the topics we'll be talking about are on the fringes of all academic disciplines.
Speaker: Some of them will fall squarely into kind of normal subject matter for other disciplines.
Speaker: And it's also not to say that no philosophers have ever talked about the topics that we'll be talking about or never thought philosophically about them.
Speaker: But they're not maybe standard things to think about or talk about in the literature.
Speaker: Nevertheless, they have philosophical dimensions, or at least as we will attempt to show.
Speaker: We'll attempt to show.
Speaker: So the topic for today, what we're going to discuss is New Year's resolutions.
Speaker: So this is something that's been on a lot of people's minds recently, I imagine.
Speaker: It hasn't been on my mind at all.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I guess you preempted the question I was going to ask, Megan.
Speaker: So how are your resolutions going?
Speaker: Badly.
Speaker: Badly.
Speaker: Why is that?
Speaker: I did not want to do this topic because...
Speaker: My resolution began on January 1st and ended on January 9th.
Speaker: And what was your resolution?
Speaker: My resolution was to journal every day.
Speaker: I even I made it very easy on myself.
Speaker: I said, you only have to write like a few sentences.
Speaker: Just what did you do that day?
Speaker: And I kept it for nine whole days.
Speaker: And then we, if you remember, we got the flu.
Speaker: I was so sick.
Speaker: I stopped journaling and I just never picked it up again.
Speaker: Yeah, that's fair.
Speaker: I also abandoned my resolution.
Speaker: Mine was to learn Latin.
Speaker: I was doing Duolingo Latin and I sort of stopped.
Speaker: And yeah, so it goes.
Speaker: We did start a new New Year's resolution.
Speaker: We're doing dry February.
Speaker: So that's been going great.
Speaker: Five days, we're doing more.
Speaker: It's not really a resolution for the whole year.
Speaker: Yeah, we'll see how it goes.
Speaker: Maybe by the end of this podcast, we will figure out
Speaker: why we fail to adhere to our resolutions and how we can do better.
Speaker: Our failure can be your gain.
Speaker: How we can do better.
Speaker: So before getting to the philosophy, I did a little background research.
Speaker: We'll start with some background facts.
Speaker: We like to be empirically informed here on philosophy on the fringes.
Speaker: At least I do.
Speaker: I will be restraining Megan's free will and speculative ways.
Speaker: Frank is the facts guy.
Speaker: I like facts.
Speaker: So the phenomenon of making a New Year's resolution is pretty common.
Speaker: It's around 40 to 50 percent of Americans do this every year.
Speaker: Most popular ones are ones you probably already think improved fitness, improved diet or improved finances.
Speaker: But the one new thing, one thing that's jumped out at me that was pretty interesting when I.
Speaker: looked at this 2023 survey was that the top one was improved mental health.
Speaker: So that's pretty new.
Speaker: That's the top one for this last year.
Speaker: For this year.
Speaker: For this year, a top one for 2023 is improved mental health.
Speaker: So 45% of people have that as their top priority.
Speaker: Gen Z has that.
Speaker: 50% of them have that as their top priority.
Speaker: So yeah, improved mental health, that's top one.
Speaker: I think our intuition is that people don't adhere to the resolutions.
Speaker: We have failed.
Speaker: That seems pretty intuitive.
Speaker: But actually, people do a little bit better than you might think.
Speaker: So I looked this up.
Speaker: I looked at some journal articles on this.
Speaker: There's not too many, but it looks like 40% of people after six months are still adhering to the resolution.
Speaker: So that's not that bad.
Speaker: 40%.
Speaker: One study from 2002 had it at 46%.
Speaker: So no.
Speaker: I don't think it's lower because people keep making the same resolution every year.
Speaker: It's sort of like this absurdist play where every year we're like, I'm going to drink less.
Speaker: But at least contrary to popular opinion, people do a little bit better.
Speaker: They don't fail for six months.
Speaker: So they're all still doing way better than I did.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So it's hard to...
Speaker: I adhere to your resolution, but it's not impossible.
Speaker: So it is something that you can do.
Speaker: So it's worth me taking seriously.
Speaker: One question I have about resolutions, I mean, you can help me with this, Megan.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because Megan's a philosopher of action.
Speaker: So she thinks about questions of agency, what is the act, intentions, things like that.
Speaker: So what is involved in doing a resolution?
Speaker: Like under what circumstances is it true that I make a resolution?
Speaker: Do I have to declare that I resolve to make a resolution?
Speaker: I mean, can I just lie on the couch and just close my eyes or stare at the ceiling and be resolving?
Speaker: Like what do I need to do?
Speaker: Do I have to believe anything?
Speaker: Do I have to desire anything?
Speaker: Do I, yeah, do I have to know anything?
Speaker: Is it easy to make a resolution?
Speaker: So philosophers of action have kind of thought about this and they largely people are in agreement.
Speaker: Making a resolution involves at minimum forming an intention to do something.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So when I resolved to journal every day, I formed an intention to journal every day.
Speaker: What does it mean to form an intention?
Speaker: Well, I
Speaker: That's where the agreement ends among philosophers of action.
Speaker: Is it forming an intention of belief?
Speaker: Is it some sort of movement of practical agency?
Speaker: Who knows?
Speaker: But whatever it is, it seems like I need to intend to do the thing I'm resolving to do in order for it to truly be a resolution.
Speaker: But some people think, actually, you even need more.
Speaker: It's not a resolution just because you intend to do something.
Speaker: I can believe something.
Speaker: I can believe it's possible.
Speaker: Well, most philosophers of action are going to say you cannot intend to do something you think is impossible.
Speaker: So believing it's possible is a necessary condition for intending.
Speaker: But while intending may be a necessary condition for resolving, it may not be sufficient.
Speaker: Maybe I can intend to journal every day without it being a resolution, right?
Speaker: Like maybe I'm just like, oh, yeah, I think I'm going to journal every day, but it's not a resolution.
Speaker: So maybe other background conditions need to be that, like, I think it'll be really hard to journal every day.
Speaker: or I think that I need to journal every day.
Speaker: It's not something I'm merely intending to do.
Speaker: I really see a need for it.
Speaker: I really think it'll be hard to do.
Speaker: It may even involve some kind of like structures that I put in place to try to help ensure that I journal every day.
Speaker: Yeah, it seems like it needs to be possible, but also it can't be like too easy.
Speaker: So I think one year I had a resolution to get to buy a new iPhone.
Speaker: I mean, like that's like kind of a silly resolution.
Speaker: It's really easy to accomplish.
Speaker: All you do is just click a button.
Speaker: Is that the year you had the 10-year-old iPhone?
Speaker: Yeah, I had an iPhone 5.
Speaker: That was a good resolution.
Speaker: Yeah, I had a good resolution.
Speaker: I had an iPhone 5 until a few years ago.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, it's kind of weird to have that as a resolution because it's so easy to accomplish.
Speaker: And in fact, it's like something good.
Speaker: It was good for me.
Speaker: I was really excited to get a new iPhone.
Speaker: Yeah, my resolution next year is going to be to breathe every day.
Speaker: I'll definitely keep that one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So it seems like it has to be possible for you.
Speaker: Also, it can't be super duper easy.
Speaker: It has to be some kind of struggle maybe.
Speaker: Would you do that or no?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That sounds plausible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then some people think that you need to kind of you may need to have some like structure in place to kind of help, you know, maybe some plan for how you're going to keep your resolution.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe a really vague plan.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So that's OK.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: What do you think about the the most popular resolution?
Speaker: So I have thoughts about that.
Speaker: So people typically want to improve their diet, improve their finances, in this case, improve their health, improve their mental health.
Speaker: Thoughts about that?
Speaker: Um, I guess, and I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but they do seem self-centered, maybe self-focused is the right word.
Speaker: They're very, like, focused on themselves.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, that seems right to me.
Speaker: So in my research, donating to charity or helping others didn't really make it to the top of the list.
Speaker: Other ones on the list were like learn a new skill, make time for new hobbies.
Speaker: So they're not very other directed.
Speaker: They're all self-directed.
Speaker: What about like spending more time with family?
Speaker: Not a popular one.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Well, you know, you just had the holidays, so.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Everyone's sick of their family.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, yeah, they seem pretty self-centered, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're, like, immoral or something like that.
Speaker: So you might think, like, self-development is a virtue.
Speaker: You might think you even have, like, a moral duty to yourself.
Speaker: So this is something people talk about a lot, especially, like, Kantians.
Speaker: So people who follow the philosophy of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who
Speaker: Like they like to talk about moral duties to oneself.
Speaker: So yeah, maybe you think you have a moral duty to yourself to like improve your finances or improve your diet or something like that.
Speaker: What do you think of the idea of like obligations to yourself?
Speaker: I think that obligations arise from contracts and they're not bedrock aspects of the moral realm.
Speaker: But let's maybe talk about errors.
Speaker: Let's take this question from an Aristotelian perspective.
Speaker: Are there certain things that we need that are...
Speaker: Things you ought to do that are like self-directed.
Speaker: Like you're the subject of people.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: For Aristotle, like, you know, physical fitness and mental health and all these things.
Speaker: These are all part of virtue.
Speaker: in addition to the way you act for others.
Speaker: I think you want to talk more about Khan, though.
Speaker: I don't want to talk about Khan.
Speaker: Not right now.
Speaker: We'll get to Khan.
Speaker: We'll get to Khan.
Speaker: Not right now.
Speaker: Yeah, so these resolutions nowadays look pretty self-involved.
Speaker: But it's worth noting that this phenomenon of making a New Year's resolution isn't entirely modern.
Speaker: You can find instances of people, people from the past, people from even the Middle Ages, making New Year's resolutions.
Speaker: So I found one interesting example of this.
Speaker: So this guy, Grigori Odati, was a Florentine merchant who lived in the 14th and 15th century.
Speaker: So he kept a secret diary where he made some resolutions on January 1st, 1404.
Speaker: And so his resolutions were a bit different than the ones we see.
Speaker: So he was resolved to not work on church holidays, to give more to the poor and to pray more, and importantly, to keep Friday as a day of total chastity.
Speaker: So those were his resolutions.
Speaker: And he, in fact, he used some financial disincentives to ensure that he adhered to his resolutions.
Speaker: When he failed to be chased on Fridays, he would donate to the church.
Speaker: That's the kind of thing when I'm talking about little structural strategies for keeping a resolution.
Speaker: So here's a question for you.
Speaker: Do you think that Gregorio's secret diary had a little heart-shaped padlock on it?
Speaker: Yeah, so he didn't want, I think he was married a bunch of times, so he didn't want his like 15th wife to find it.
Speaker: By the way, I learned of this guy from the medieval podcast, Danielle Cebulski, she did a podcast on this guy.
Speaker: So highly recommend if you want to learn more about Gregorio Dati and his New Year's resolution in the 15th century.
Speaker: So that's a different kind of New Year's resolution.
Speaker: We see one.
Speaker: Those are some good ones.
Speaker: Yeah, they're other directed.
Speaker: Interestingly, I think a lot of people forget this, but Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher, he made a very famous New Year's resolution in his work, The Gay Science.
Speaker: So this is that passage where that idea of amor fati comes.
Speaker: So he says, for the new year, I will do this amor fati thing.
Speaker: Let that henceforth be my love.
Speaker: I do not want to wage war with the ugly.
Speaker: I do not want to accuse.
Speaker: I do not want to even accuse the accusers.
Speaker: Looking aside, let that be my sole negation.
Speaker: And all in all, to sum up, I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yay-sayer.
Speaker: So Nietzsche, he resolves, right, to embody this amor fati, right?
Speaker: What is amor fati?
Speaker: You know more about Nietzsche than I do.
Speaker: What does he mean by amor fati?
Speaker: Oh, the amor fati, the love of fate.
Speaker: So he's resolving to just love whatever happens to him?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That seems like a really easy resolution to keep.
Speaker: That seems like cheating.
Speaker: I mean, I guess you could fail in some other ways, right?
Speaker: Okay, right.
Speaker: I guess it is hard to throw on the bad stuff, right?
Speaker: He accidentally cuts half his mustache off.
Speaker: You know, he's pissed.
Speaker: Yeah, but he wakes up and he's like, ah, yes, I love this.
Speaker: I'm keeping my New Year's resolution.
Speaker: Yeah, it seems like an easy one.
Speaker: I guess he he he cracked the code for making a good but easy to keep New Year's resolution.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So why are our New Year's resolutions so hard to keep?
Speaker: So let's do some armchair psychologizing.
Speaker: We like facts and philosophy on the front is, but also we like to play armchair psychologists and armchair sociologists from time to time.
Speaker: Who doesn't?
Speaker: Why are they hard to keep?
Speaker: I mean, there's an obvious answer here, right?
Speaker: Which is that if you are New Year's Eve resolving to do something or New Year's resolving to do something, it's probably like a thing that's not super easy to do unless it's your iPhone resolution.
Speaker: Yeah, so they're usually pretty difficult.
Speaker: I guess sometimes we might realize we're too ambitious.
Speaker: I think sometimes we also just forget.
Speaker: People forget about their resolutions.
Speaker: Like, oh yeah, I was supposed to be doing that.
Speaker: That's why I failed.
Speaker: I just forgot.
Speaker: Yeah, on New Year's Eve, there's all of this romance.
Speaker: You know, it's sort of a romantic, capital R, romantic time.
Speaker: I got caught up in the moment.
Speaker: I didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it feels like a blank slate, you know, even though it's really just an arbitrary day.
Speaker: We mark it out as the start of a new year so things feel fresh.
Speaker: We have a blank slate.
Speaker: We haven't messed up at all this year yet.
Speaker: So darn it, we're going to keep doing that.
Speaker: So one thing that I'm reminded of when it comes to just shifting gears a little bit.
Speaker: One thing I'm reminded of when it comes to New Year's resolutions is it seems like one, maybe another reason why people failed to adhere to them is that
Speaker: We just lack the willpower.
Speaker: It's a hard thing to do.
Speaker: We lack the willpower.
Speaker: And this kind of reminds me of the way that Kant, I guess I am going to talk about Kant.
Speaker: This kind of reminds me of the way that Kant talks about morality.
Speaker: So if you're familiar with Kant, he thinks that morality, what the moral life chiefly involves, what our moral experience is about, is that it's a conflict between our sense that we ought to do our moral duty and our desire to act on our own inclinations or to be selfish or self-interested.
Speaker: We're pulled in two directions.
Speaker: We want to do our moral duty on the one hand, but also we like to satisfy our own desires and those come into conflict.
Speaker: What it is to be a morally good person is just to grit your teeth and rise above your inclinations and act
Speaker: on duty, on your sense of moral duty.
Speaker: And so, yeah, that can be really, really hard.
Speaker: But maybe we think about resolutions in a similar sort of way, that we're pulled in multiple directions.
Speaker: I want to act on the basis of my short-term interests rather than my long-term interests.
Speaker: And I just got to grit my teeth and rise above my animal instincts and do what's best for me in the long run.
Speaker: The willpower.
Speaker: We don't all have that.
Speaker: So for Kant, failing your New Year's resolutions is like really bad.
Speaker: You're like an immoral person.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, Kant had self-development too as one of his little duties, I suppose.
Speaker: So that's how I tend to think about it.
Speaker: But I know that's just one model of thinking about practical reason.
Speaker: And Megan doesn't really like Kant that much.
Speaker: So I guess I should let her say how she would like to think about the New Year's resolution phenomenon, our failures to...
Speaker: adhere to our resolutions.
Speaker: I presented one picture, but that's not the only picture.
Speaker: Kant is fine.
Speaker: I'm not sure he's the most helpful for thinking about our difficulties with keeping our resolutions necessarily.
Speaker: As you may have guessed, I think that Aristotle's actually going to be a little more helpful in this area.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess that.
Speaker: Yeah, so Aristotle has categories for agents who are bad at doing what they resolve to do.
Speaker: And he also has a category for agents who are bad
Speaker: Well, they do what they resolve to do, but they kind of have to fight, like Kant might say, against their inclinations in order to achieve that.
Speaker: So people like me, who have already failed their New Year's resolutions, would fall into the category of what Aristotle calls the acratic person.
Speaker: They're acratic people.
Speaker: I'm acratic.
Speaker: I display acracia, which is the inability to do things.
Speaker: what I'm trying to do.
Speaker: I know what I need to do.
Speaker: I know what the virtuous person would do.
Speaker: People usually translate as weakness of will, right?
Speaker: Weakness of will.
Speaker: The weak will of person, yeah.
Speaker: It's sometimes translated as incontinent person, but that's different connotations in our English today.
Speaker: They sell stuff in Walmart to deal with.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, so the weak-willed person or the acrotic person.
Speaker: Yeah, acrotic's the Greek word.
Speaker: Basically, it just means weak-willed.
Speaker: The weak-willed person has, you know, a weak will.
Speaker: They will to do something, namely what the virtuous person would do, and then they just can't do it.
Speaker: They cannot bring themselves to do it, or maybe they do it for a while and then they just fail.
Speaker: And then there's this other category of people that what he calls the encratic person or the continent person who knows what the virtuous person would do and is actually able to do it.
Speaker: But they have to fight against their emotions or their desires.
Speaker: They don't really want to do it, but they are able to make themselves do it.
Speaker: For Aristotle, both of these people are actually, they're not doing great.
Speaker: They're not optimal.
Speaker: So for Kant, that second person, that's the person who's doing well.
Speaker: But for Aristotle, that's not the case.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So Kant, he kind of, he thinks that if you rise, you know, you have these competing inclinations, you rise above them and act on duty, you did something good, right?
Speaker: That is a morally worthy action.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Aristotle is going to disagree, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, Aristotle thinks that the virtuous person, they don't need to grit their teeth to do the thing the virtuous person would do.
Speaker: They're doing it by nature.
Speaker: It's coming naturally from their virtuous nature.
Speaker: So Kant really likes the struggle when Aristotle doesn't.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, in some ways, Aristotle might think that the whole concept of New Year's resolutions is just kind of to praise the merely continent or the encratic person.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: This is bad, right?
Speaker: Because now we're just, we're valorizing and we're awkwardly
Speaker: Encrossia.
Speaker: Encrossia.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Being really continent.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So necessarily when we do New Year's resolutions, we're suboptimal according to Aristotle.
Speaker: We should just be virtuous.
Speaker: We should be continuously improving in virtue.
Speaker: I should just be virtuous.
Speaker: That's really hard to do though, right?
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: I'm not sure how good of a bit of advice that is.
Speaker: Oh, by the way, I should mention, we have a guest with us, our baby girl, Theodora.
Speaker: You might hear her in the background.
Speaker: I'm going to try to edit her out, but she might be... We can't edit out all of it.
Speaker: She'll be opining from time to time on these topics, too.
Speaker: So there's another dimension to Aristotle that I should probably mention on this.
Speaker: So some New Year's resolutions, maybe resolutions to do things that are even harder than a normal resolution.
Speaker: So you said quitting smoking.
Speaker: Smoking is, I mean, for most people who smoke, there is like a chemical addiction there.
Speaker: They have a chemical addiction to nicotine.
Speaker: And so stopping smoking is extremely difficult because it involves overcoming this addiction.
Speaker: And Aristotle does kind of talk about this category of actions where we're doing something that we don't want to do, but it's not really because we're acratic.
Speaker: It might be for some other reason.
Speaker: So he has...
Speaker: three categories of action that range from involuntary to voluntary.
Speaker: So we have involuntary actions, things that we do that we're totally not responsible for at all.
Speaker: Like if I drop a bucket of water because someone threw a ball at my hand,
Speaker: And then things that we do that we're fully responsible for, like when we make this podcast.
Speaker: And then there's these actions in the middle called mixed acts.
Speaker: And some examples he gives of those are instances where people throw cargo overboard on their ship because if they don't, their boats can capsize in a storm.
Speaker: We might think of someone handing over their wallet to a mugger who's got a gun pointed at them.
Speaker: And these are sort of in between voluntary and involuntary.
Speaker: It's not totally clear if the act is voluntary in the sense of full-fledged agency.
Speaker: So he talks about these actions twice, once in his more well-known work than in Kamakian Ethics, but he also discusses them in his lesser-known work on ethics called the Udenian Ethics.
Speaker: And in the Nicomachean Ethics, he concludes that mixed acts are more like voluntary acts than involuntary acts.
Speaker: In the Eudemian Ethics, though, confusingly, he concludes the opposite, that they seem more involuntary than voluntary.
Speaker: So this may have been something that he was a little bit unsure of himself, but we might say that, like, smoking falls under this category.
Speaker: Once it becomes a kind of chemical dependency, it's not clear for every subsequent cigarette you pick up how voluntary it is.
Speaker: So there might be another excuse that the person who's having a hard time quitting smoking has.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So just trying to apply that to the new resolution thing then.
Speaker: So, yes.
Speaker: Then maybe that's not like the kind of thing that is possible for the person to do and therefore is not the legitimate subject of a New Year's resolution.
Speaker: Yeah, it might not be something that you can just bootstrap yourself up with, you know, by being virtuous.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right, so Aristotle wants me to be virtuous.
Speaker: He doesn't want me to be just merely encratics.
Speaker: You wouldn't really like the picture that Kant has about rising above your inclinations.
Speaker: But are there any other strategies I can do, I can undertake besides becoming virtuous, which is really, really hard to do?
Speaker: What else can I do?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So the person to look to, if you want to have your cake and resolve not to eat it too, would be Odysseus from Homer's Odyssey.
Speaker: The Odyssey.
Speaker: Odysseus has a really great way of dealing with temptation that we cannot resist, with irresistible temptation.
Speaker: Listeners who are familiar with the story will know that at one point in the Odyssey, Odysseus is sailing past
Speaker: A famous spot in the sea, no sailors ever make it past this spot alive because there is a group of sirens who are just waiting for ships to pass by.
Speaker: They sing their irresistible song.
Speaker: The ships steer themselves, well they're steered by the sailors who hear the irresistible song, toward the sirens where they crash onto rocks.
Speaker: Everyone dies.
Speaker: Odysseus knows that this point in the sea is coming up, so he wants to avoid the ship crashing, but he also, he wants to hear the siren song.
Speaker: So what he does is he has his sailors tie him to the mast of the ship, tie him up so that he is unable to order them to steer the ship into the rocks.
Speaker: And he has the sailors put wax inside their ears so they're not tempted by the siren songs to untie him or to steer the ship into the rocks themselves.
Speaker: They're also not going to hear Odysseus when he is inevitably screaming at them to steer the ships toward the sirens.
Speaker: And the ship makes it past the sirens in one piece.
Speaker: Odysseus is able to hear the siren song.
Speaker: He's furious for the few moments that while they're sailing past the rocks, when the sailors won't listen to him, won't steer the ship toward the sirens.
Speaker: But he is able to hear the song of the sirens and still save his hide.
Speaker: So tying yourself to the mast.
Speaker: That's the phrase.
Speaker: So how can we apply this to the New Year's resolutions?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So how can we apply this to nearest resolutions?
Speaker: Well, yeah, tying yourself to the mask has become a kind of phrase to denote things that we put in place to prevent us from falling prey to things we know we're going to be tempted by.
Speaker: Maybe if you don't let use social media for a while, you might have a friend change your password so that you can't log into social media.
Speaker: Yeah, that's what those screen time limits are that Apple has for your iPhone, right?
Speaker: You can put a screen time limit for Twitter, for instance.
Speaker: Yeah, those don't work very well, though, because you need to override it.
Speaker: Yeah, I do all the time.
Speaker: In fact, I've tweeted about this.
Speaker: So one question I have is, think about this.
Speaker: So we do this every year.
Speaker: It seems like a lot of times people don't adhere to their resolutions.
Speaker: They're like the same every year.
Speaker: It's just sort of a thing we always do.
Speaker: Should we keep doing this?
Speaker: I mean, is this irrational?
Speaker: Should we give up this practice?
Speaker: If you think that what that so if you think in November, for instance, that you drink too much or or that you are wasting too much of your money, why don't you just change then?
Speaker: Or why do you wait until New Year's in order to change?
Speaker: This is kind of a puzzle, right?
Speaker: So here's an epistemological analogy.
Speaker: So suppose I know today that tomorrow I'm going to get decisive evidence that some proposition's true.
Speaker: I know today that it's true that I know today that tomorrow I'm going to get some decisive evidence that something's true.
Speaker: Maybe the oracle of Delphi says that I'm the wisest person in the world.
Speaker: And they tell me that tomorrow I'm going to get evidence of this.
Speaker: And they don't give me the evidence now.
Speaker: I should trust the Oracle, right?
Speaker: They're always right.
Speaker: So shouldn't I just believe today that I am the wisest person?
Speaker: Why should I wait till tomorrow in order to get this evidence?
Speaker: Likewise, when it comes to desire, like values, resolutions, if I know in November that what I'm doing is bad,
Speaker: Shouldn't I just change my behavior today?
Speaker: Why should I wait until December?
Speaker: Why should we till the new year?
Speaker: This is I think is a common complaint people have about this practice.
Speaker: Is it rational to engage in the practice of making these resolutions?
Speaker: Well, people want to keep doing the thing they're going to resolve not to do through.
Speaker: Oh, so it's just more weakness of will.
Speaker: A last hurrah kind of thing.
Speaker: Yeah, they want their feast day before the famine.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: Yeah, okay.
Speaker: I guess I can buy that.
Speaker: One other reason I guess you might want to keep this practice is just sort of like it's a nice ritual, I suppose.
Speaker: So the cynic says, you know, we shouldn't do this.
Speaker: But it's a nice ritual.
Speaker: Everyone bands together to do, or at least 40-50% of us, band together to do this.
Speaker: We're focusing on making ourselves better in certain ways.
Speaker: That's cool.
Speaker: It's an act of hope.
Speaker: Yeah, there's not a lot of rituals like that that a large amount of people from diverse backgrounds get on board with.
Speaker: So I'd want to keep that sort of thing just because rituals are cool.
Speaker: We don't have a lot of ceremonies like this.
Speaker: So we resolve we should keep New Year's resolutions?
Speaker: I resolve.
Speaker: I will keep it.
Speaker: I disagree with the cynic.
Speaker: I mean, I'm probably not going to keep my resolutions, but we'll keep the rituals.
Speaker: We resolve to keep resolving.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right, I think we're out of time for today, but join us next time when we investigate the philosophical dimensions of Bigfoot.
