S10E2—Temperance: When Losing the Pleasure is Painful

Device & Virtue

The word "temperance" may make us think of prohibition, but this virtue isn't some outdated legislation. Today's technologies are creating all new challenges. Should we be prohibiting them now?

It’s the season of Virtues! We’re exploring the old-school virtue of Temperance—including how a technology in the 1800s changed the course of American politics, spawned hundreds of Christian organizations and even changed the US constitution!

Plus, why ice cream could be an moral issue.

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IN THIS EPISODE

• How virtue ethics can be understood through parenting
• What it could mean to be “temperate” in our social media and smartphone usage
• How temperance could change the way humans use A.I.

THE LITTLE COLD WATER GIRL

THE WILLARD FOUNTAIN.Children Invited to Contribute Their Mite to the Fund for This Gift.The commission for “Willard Fountain.” which is to be a gift to the city of Chicago from children all over the world connected with the Loyal Temperance Legion Department of the World’s W.C.T.U.,…All money raised should be sent to Miss Anna Gordon, Evanston, Ill., and it is earnestly desired that little people everywhere should be impressed with the thought that the mission of love and money which they might perform by giving a cup of cold water to men who might otherwise be drawn into the saloon, can be carried out by this patient little figure, which will never grow “weary in welldoing.” It rests with them to send their pennies if they would be thus represented.

Cold Water Girl Fountain—Chicagology

QUOTES

…the self indulgent man is so called because he is pained more than he ought at not getting pleasant things (even his pain being caused by pleasure), and the temperate man is so called because he is not pained at the absence of what is pleasant and at his abstinence from it.The self-indulgent man, then, craves for all pleasant things or those that are most pleasant, and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else; hence he is pained both when he fails to get them and when he is merely craving for them (for appetite involves pain); but it seems absurd to be pained for the sake of pleasure. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

LINKS

• We’re using the list of virtues from Stanley Hauerwas and his book, The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson. Buy a copy and read along with us!

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