I also have this sense, hard to put into words, that it is written from a perspective of socioeconomic privilege and implicitly assumes a certain freedom, or has as its focus certain concerns that reflect that. It comes across to me now as narrow-minded and lacking in understanding of the broader human condition and diversity of challenges affecting persons. Put another way, it seems to be written as if advising royalty or the wealthy is the implied goal, ignoring the broader experiences of mankind, which seems to me in turn ironically a moral failure.

Maybe related to this, it seems to presume a certain set of things that I see as actually being fundamental societal and philosophical questions, such as free will and personal agency and all that encompasses. Failure to attain well-being in a broad sense is a failure of the individual to practice free will, under The Ethics, and not of society to foster or intervene in a way so as to facilitate individual improvements in well-being. The sort of paradigm being asserted in The Ethics provides no way out to address the question of "how do I improve the lot of my fellow persons?" or to develop virtues in others. If someone rejects the notion of free will, either in itself or as a meta-phenomenon (that is, as something that can be manipulated itself), The Ethics seems misguided at best and pernicious at worst.

Virtue ethics also seem naive to me often, in that there's often little self-awareness of its limitations. For example, what if two virtues conflict? How do you resolve this? How do you interpret a behavior vis-a-vis its outcome in the presence of fundamental uncertainty?

But just because the Ethics alone doesn't fully address the social issues you rightly raise (about helping others be free) doesn't mean it implies that they are irrelevant to individual ethics. They are just out of scope for the book. The Politics is more about what kind of society creates the conditions for people to achieve the good life described in the Ethics. There are, however, parts of the Ethics that do bear directly on this question — the parts on generosity, friendship, and education.

Your last question — how to decide between different virtues if they conflict — is also a good one. The best answer I can come up with is that virtue ethics is based on the idea that open-ended judgment is going to be exercised in any ethically significant situation, and it does not attempt to give a rigid framework for decision-making. I would suggest that any framework that does try to do that is brittle, and trading flexibility for false clarity.

It's about the question of how a man should live, and how should he choose to act - which presumes the availability of reasonable choices, the practical ability to make these choices, and considers the effect these choices have on the community. Yes, slaves or many other less-than-free laborers of classical Greece are not the target audience of this book - as they don't have the option of freely making many of the choices in their life, it's kind of worthless to discuss what should they choose to do if they can't.

It does not argue about how do develop virtues in others, it does presume taking some responsibility for others and being virtuous "on their behalf" (a very paternalistic approach) - it's reasoning about how to best use power and agency assuming you have it, and if you don't, then presuming that obtaining power and agency is the first prerequisite step, you can't make virtuous choices if you're not in position to choose, you can't make virtuous acts if you don't have the ability to act with meaningful influence. Without free will there's neither virtue or vice, just acts that are outside of ethics.

It's not a conceptual mess, it simply argues for a moral position with which (it seems) you strongly disagree, just as it would disagree with yours. Coming back to the issue of socioeconomic privilege, Nichomachean ethics pretty much argues that you have to have socioeconomic privilege in order to be ethical according to these standards. If you're a slave then you are neither ethical or unethical, the whole concept does not apply to you; It makes an argument that the concept of ethics (in the limited, narrow definition of ethics used there, which substantially differs from what we consider ethics in the modern world) starts to make sense once you're above the "food and necessities" level of life and have the liberty to act freely and deliberately make wide-ranging choices with significant influence; then you should study ethics-as-in-the-science-of-making-these-choices.

Don't mix your modalities.

It's possible to reason in terms of free will and decisions between right and wrong; or in terms of causes and effects, from mental illness and broken childhoods through to poverty and criminality; but separately.

The problem with reasoning in just one modality or the other is that you miss what the other modality captures. Reason entirely in the former, and you can miss out on social and political changes which can result in better outcomes in the aggregate. Reason entirely in the latter, and you miss out on the ability for the individual to improve themselves, and deny them agency in choosing their own destiny.

(Personally, I think "believing that the notion free will is specious" - actually wrong - is incredibly disempowering, and will have the effect of causing people to blame externalities even when they have the power to change their situation. It has an effect all of its own. You don't need to have free will at the Physics level in order for belief in free will to have a positive mental effect in a mechanistic cause and effect way.)

The concept of blame as it is usually expressed depends on the belief in free will. The person whose free choices led to an outcome bears the greatest responsibility. Assigning blame to others is therefore accomplished by proving that the self didn't possess this freedom. When no choice exists, responsibility reverts to environmental circumstances.

The condition you're describing can only be coherent if a person believes they lack personal agency but that the framework of free will and the primary responsibility of those who have a choice remains in place. This is a real condition that many people suffer from, and many will disguise it as giving in to inevitable causes and effects, but the problem is not that they lack faith in free will, but that they have assigned freedom elsewhere.

If a person accepts the idea that free will is unattainable, the conventional concept of blame becomes incomprehensible. Every dependent choice is related to every other choice. There is no hierarchy of blame that defaults to the environment. A person can either accept no responsibility or all responsibility. Accepting all responsibility will appear impossible to a person holding on to the idea of free will, but to someone who fully abandons it and considers that they are part of a larger whole, personal responsibility for every outcome becomes a natural consequence.

I don't see how this works. The biggest reason is that if everyone is personally responsible then noone is responsible; this is pretty well established in psychology, with diffusion of responsibility.

Then you are contradicting yourself, because on the one hand you claim the right to treat certain people (the ones you call "criminals") as not having free will, and "cure" them with "neurobehavioral intervention", but on the other hand you claim this right based on "moral obligation", which assumes that you, the person claiming this right, do have free will, because you are claiming the ability to choose who needs to be "cured".

There have been societies in human history that were organized according to such principles as these. They did not turn out well.

Aristotle says that the peak of virtuousness isn't living a life devoted to the theory, but one that puts it into practical use through politics and legislation.

This seems like a direct call to action to help improve society and bring the theory to more people such that they may improve themselves.

I'm not sure what you are asking in your last question btw.

However, in many studies there's a consistent trend toward masks doing something, in the sense that measures of dispersion are attenuated with masks vs not.

This paper is pretty poor in that it commits the classic statistical blunder of equating multiple nonsignificant results with overall effect size. It's very hastily put together.

One of the meta-analyses cited is an example of some of these issues (Offeddu, V. et al. 2017). You can see there's few studies and the ones included result in a nonsignificant effect, but it's almost significant and in the intuitively expected direction (PPE having an effect). But then there's issue of publication biases etc.

My general impression is that the truth is somewhere in between, maybe closer to what this essay is arguing in the sense that masks are much less effective than people think, but probably not actually technically correct in that masks probably have some effect.

I really have to wonder if the people pushing this have some kind of agenda.

I can't find it now though because all the search terms I can think of just return a bunch of other stuff related to universities and students.

In the real world, true randomness is kind of unusual. There's usually some kind of spatial or temporal autocorrelation.

So something might change in a quasi-random way, but it often doesn't just return to "normal" immediately. There's often something continuing (like an antagonist, or some environmental variable that decays over time, but slowly).

So these random "blips" do happen in reality, but they're not normal. What's more normal is for there to be changes, and for those changes to be somewhat, but not completely, stable with some decay. They might not decay at all.

What this should be laying bare is the failure of federal regulation, how this got in the way at a critical moment, and when it was too late, things only got better when they got out of the way. Or what about a healthcare system oriented toward protecting the hospitals, those at the top of a hierarchy, the rent seeking, and so forth, rather than oriented toward public health? What about an artificial reduction in the number of providers to increase their salaries, a lack of competition in provider models and delivery of services?

There was a Slate article about how one side-effect of the pandemic is how much it has exposed bullshit everywhere, how easily so many rules are set aside when the cards are on the table. Some of this is happening now with healthcare, but few are asking what else could have been different, other than single payer care.

To me this all feels like some kind of abuser-victim relationship, where people are subject to some broken system, and then when things go wrong and are failed, they're made to be dependent on their broken system and start cheering it on.

I realize this all sounds bleak but to me there are so many things that could have been avoided, from the highest levels of the government all the way down, and there seems to be little introspection about this. Instead we just blame the virus, rather than what caused our systems to be so vulnerable in the first place.

Note: I am NOT saying you are ignoring what I've said above. I have just seen many people make poor generalizations about government because of their experience with the American government's inability to prioritize citizens over the networth of the elite.

I've been tracking DPH reports in our state since they started, and one thing I've noticed is that although the case counts have gone up, the probability of testing positive has remained roughly constant. It's increased slightly here in the last week or so but not a lot.

One thing this suggests to me is that at least here, the virus was present in significant numbers before they started testing, or at least in similar numbers.

If you combine that with consistent reports of substantial fractions of asymptomatic carriers, it seems very plausible to me that the virus was circulating before authorities in the US started tracking it.

... without randomization or controls to randomize to.

This is promising but it's not randomized or controlled so hard to make anything of at some level (you can see how this kind of protocol would induce massive placebo effects).

If there is an effect, it may be that some kind of mild version of it, say, for a day or half-day or something might be useful in more mild forms of depression. But it's an intensive expensive treatment in its own way so might be hard to implement as an initial intervention.

But I agree that if it works this well it might be worth it to take a week off or a couple of days or something.