Presentation by Zachary Armstrong at the 16th annual MOYA seminar 2024
Posted By Macedon on November 7, 2024
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Orthodox Ethics and Stillness
There are two fundamental questions that weigh on the mind of anyone in any period of time.
- What is the good life?
- How do I live it?
Thousands of years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato observed that every person in some way is trying to attain the good, the difference is in how clear their perception of the good is. We can easily see corruption of this for example in people who make wealth and material satisfaction the ultimate good that they are trying to attain. Such people can easily end up committing all sorts of evils in the name of that good, for example indentured slavery could be a way to further the amount of wealth that you have.
I can see that many of you instantly recognised how this fits in with our theme of “is Orthodoxy Still Relevant Today?” I want to show you how Orthodoxy answers those two questions, “what is the good life, and how do I live it?”, and I want to show you that nothing else can.
Virtue Ethics
I’m going to talk from the perspective of something called “ethics.” In Orthodoxy, broadly, we would subscribe (although perhaps not exclusively) to something called “virtue ethics.” The whole idea behind this is to answer the two questions about the good life. In a vacuum, we are unaware of what good is and we are unable to measure the success of our lives against anything. Fundamentally, humans cannot live in a vacuum.
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