Aristotle and Heidegger Allowing Personal Accountability Essay

Aristotle and Heidegger Allowing Personal Accountability A disquieting article latterly appeared in The New York clippings. The article chronicles the story of Larry W. Peterman, resident of Provo, Utah, owner of a successful adult video store, and defendant in a case in which he was charged with selling obscene material. During Petermans trial, the following information came to the fore, As it turned out, people in Utah County, a place that a lot boasts of being the most conservative area in the nation, were disproportionately large consumers of the very videos that prosecutors had labeled obscene and illegal. And far more Utah County residents were getting their adult movies from the sky or cable than they were from the stores owned by Larry Peterman.11 Mr. Spencer, a public defender who described himself as a devout Mormon said, The accompaniment is that an awful lot of people here in Provo are paying to look at porn. What that says to me is that were normal.22 Provo s normal residents buy twice as much pornography as the occupants of other comparably sized American cities.33 Ostensibly most, if not all, of Provos predominantly Mormon inhabitants have heard their church leaders constantly, unequivocally decry pornography.44 Yet despite constant warnings, not only are Provoans incontinent, they are statistically twice as incontinent as their other small-town counterparts. What could explain this weakness? Moreover, what is it in us that seems to make us prone, or whereby we make ourselves prone, to incontinence? Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics and Martin Heidegger in Being and Time both offer models of human action that account for human weakness, which Heidegger calls inauthenticity and Aristotle names akrasi... ...iversity Press, 1993)John Haugland, Heidegger on Being a Person, in Nous 16, no. 1 (1982)Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York Harper and Row, 1962)Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Tre mbling Dialectical Lyric, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (New Jersey Princeton University Press, 1983)Daniel N. Robinson, Psychology as a Human Science Rationality, Volition, and the Moral Point of View, in Aristotles Psychology (New York Columbia University Press, 1989)Amelie Okensberg Rorty, The Place of Contemplation in Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics, Mind 87, no. 347 (Jul 1978)M.T. Thornton, Aristotelian Practical Reason, Mind 91, no. 361 (Jan 1982)C. Terry Warner, The Aristotelian Strategy, in The mishap of Self-Deception (Department of Philosophy, Brigham Young University, photocopy)