16 February 2022
This fifth blog (the first is unnumbered) in the series that began with Before We Change (19 January 2022), is concerned with the link between metaphysics and ethics. In simpler language, the focus is on how humans have evolved to work well with the fundamental nature of reality. The working well is ethics, as this word arose from ethos, the culture or customs of societies (Sparshott, 1996).
While most readers may find it unnecessary to review Aristotle’s logical tenet that A=A, they may not have survived a late-middle age foray into the wilds of academia. A=A is most easily understood by the early computer programming acronym, WYSIWYG, often pronounced wiss-ee-wig. It means that What You See Is What You Get. There are entire schools of psychological thought that make a point of rejecting this tenet and schools of philosophy that, with even greater conviction, say that a realist position (A=A) is unreal and that nothing is certain.
I will not dismiss these schools of thought out of hand as they can each make convincing arguments in their favour but, I maintain, those arguments miss the main show. What has always convinced me, is that we can drive two-thousand-pound machines on rubber wheels at 120 km/h while weaving in and out of three and more lanes of anxious traffic and remain safe, most of the time. Similarly, we can calculate weather, different gravitational forces, human requirements, and the laws of motion with such precision that we can—repeatedly—get people to the moon and back. I could go on, for days, but it’s dull stuff to most people so I just want to be clear that I write from a realist position and believe that what a therapist and client discuss are real things that can be identified, defined, analyzed, and, often, changed for the better.
The first word examined, above, was ethics. Aristotle maintained that only those people who had been well habituated in youth were fit for moral education. He believed this because being ethical involves making hard choices that often do not appear to be in your best interest. For example, speaking up when you see someone wronged, or an important principle betrayed, takes courage and strength, not to mention mental toughness. Aristotle believed, correctly or not, that only well-raised children could undertake such rigours.
While Aristotle is my greatest grandfather (not genetically but intellectually), my favourite uncles are Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Stoics both. And what a pair. While Aristotle was the son of the court doctor to Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s father) and a wealthy man from the ruling class, Epictetus was born a slave while Marcus was the ruler of the Roman Empire. Both Marcus and Epictetus implicitly maintained that habituation was necessary, but that no point in life was too late to refashion one’s own habits for the better. After that, in terms of therapeutic premises, the differences between the Stoics and Aristotelians seem to me insignificant.
Both schools of thought embrace virtue ethics, the understanding that each capable human being is an agent with the ability to live (or not) according to values enshrined as virtues. “Some take the principal claim of virtue ethics to be about the moral subject—that, in living her life, she should focus her attention on the cultivation of her (or others’) virtues” (Audi, 1998, p. 840). The beauty of virtue ethics is that their use is entirely agential—each thinking person interprets courage, justice, or greatness of soul in his own way. The rigour of the practice is to ensure its consistent and honest use.
So...what does this have to do with therapy? A fair bit. If some part of therapy is about how we see the world and how we think about that world, we are always choosing our points of view and questioning how to best characterize a choice, an action, or the actions of another. And here we switch gears from philosophy, as the love of wisdom, to applied philosophy, as the product of disciplined practical exercises like the ABCs of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT).
I’m going to review the ideas brought together, above. What we sense, as humans on earth, is real as are our fellow creatures. As such, our concepts or ideas are based on our understanding of the real things we experience. As concepts are shorthand symbols and ideas for our categorization of all that we comprehend, so our values are also real, even if in flux over one’s lifespan. As such, the virtues we adopt and practice shape who we are and who we are becoming. However, there is enough perceptual and conceptual slippage in the works that, for many varied reasons, we can get things wrong, that is, we can misperceive, mis-conceptualize, or misinterpret the phenomena we each aggregate individually.
Those poorly aggregated phenomena provoke behaviours, feelings, thoughts, relationships, and actions. This is why I so like Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT), the brainchild of the Stoics as read by Albert Ellis. What Ellis introduced is a really simple way to get between the phenomenon and the feeling or behaviour by carefully examining the thought.
In Ellis’ ABCs, there is an activating event, A, and a consequent, C, behaviour, feeling, or action. Between the activating event, A, and the consequence, C, is a belief, B. For example, when I’m driving east, across Toronto, toward the beloved County, happily engrossed in CCR’s Down on the Corner, and some rude jerk cuts me off at 120 km/hr, my retributive emotions rise fast. That’s an A and a C: being cut off followed (way too fast), by retributive emotions. What’s the B? Rude jerk. What if that guy is having a heart attack and is trying to find the nearest exit before crashing his car? What if he just learned that one of his children was hospitalized? What if he just took a throat full of crack cocaine? And where is the evidence supporting our belief that we are entitled to a hazard-free highway? We have no idea what is happening with our fellow human beings most of the time and at no time do we see the full picture, and nor do they. And that is why we ought look for real (A=A) evidence to support or sink our beliefs. To do otherwise is to remain victim to unchallenged illusions.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
References
Sparshott, F. E. (1996). Taking Life Seriously: A Study of the Argument of the Nicomachean Ethics. University of Toronto Press.
Audi, R. (Ed.). (1998). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
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