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PROFESSOR: So today's lecture is
about the claim that we've
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been exploring in the context
of Aristotle's ethics, that
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the way to cultivate virtue is
by cultivating in ourselves
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certain sorts of habits.
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And I want to start by showing
you a picture of a T-shirt
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which was popular at MIT in the
mid-'90s when my husband
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was a graduate student there.
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And what it said on the T-shirt
was, "Gravity: It's
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not just a good idea,
it's the law."
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Now, if you guys were MIT
students, you would be rolling
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As it is, social beings that you
are, you're rolling on the
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floor at the thought that other
beings are rolling on
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the floor at the thought
of this.
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But what's interesting about
this T-shirt is that it brings
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out a distinction between
two kinds of laws.
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Because gravity isn't a law that
tells you how you ought
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to behave. It's a law that
tells you how things do
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And philosophers make a
distinction between
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two kinds of laws.
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There are, on the one hand,
normative laws, oughts, things
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that tell you how you how you
should do things, things that
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express, as the name indicates,
norms. Those are
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things like, "look both ways
before crossing the street."
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That's something you
ought to do.
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It wouldn't be funny have a
T-shirt that said, "Look both
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ways before crossing the street:
It's not just a good
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idea, it's the law." Right?
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It could be the law, and the
T-shirt, for lots of reasons,
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wouldn't be funny.
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It wouldn't be funny to have a
T-shirt that said, "Don't eat
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in the library: It's not just
a good idea, it's the law."
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Because it could be a law in the
library that you not eat.
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And it wouldn't be funny to have
a T-shirt that says, "65
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miles per hour: It's not just
a good idea, it's the law,"
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because in fact, it is
a normative law.
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So normative laws express
summative judgments about the
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way things ought to be.
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They are laws in the sense that
you find over at the Yale
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But in addition, there are laws
of a very different kind,
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spread around the
rest of campus.
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Spread around, in fact,
everything that you ever do.
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And those are descriptive
laws.
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They tell you the way
things actually are.
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So it would be sort of funny to
have a T-shirt, "If a car
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hits you, you will die.
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