It was in the lift of the Faculty Building, descending from the heights of the fourth floor, that George Constantinides let me know that he too had been reading Aristotle. ‘At Christmas, The Nichomachean Ethics’, he said. George is director of Imperial’s Early Career Research Institute, and is certainly a man of many mansions. This is obvious if you visit his blog, https://constantinides.net, with its amazing plurality of commentary.
Outside my teaching, this conversation was only the second time in 25 years at Imperial that Aristotle has raised his head. I’m happy to remember the first occasion. Armand LeRoi, professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Biology, published in 2014 his very elegant and informative book, The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. We had quite a few conversations at the time about Aristotle, which I also found useful as I was at the time writing a short biography of Darwin. Just as Darwin is so central a character in biology, so Aristotle has a favoured place as well. For sure, many of Aristotle’s ideas about life on earth seem strange to us now, and erroneous. But his interest in classification, in detailing the anatomy of the animals and plants he worked on, and in careful observation, mirror quite precisely the way we go about our sciences today.
Still, science has a short memory, and a prodigious capacity for the generation of newness. If scientific papers rarely cite any work older than a decade, we can hardly expect Aristotle to remain vivid to contemporary science, however sympathetic we may be. Our Greek hero has become part of the history of science. And as Imperial is not much interested in history, Aristotle will remain a shadowy character for us.
However, if we turn to another part of Aristotle’s work, his ethics, and the book that George Constantinides and I were talking about, then a very relevant and important set of ideas springs into focus. It was Mary Ryan, Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) who prompted in me the realisation that Aristotle deserves his place on the Imperial campus. For Mary told me that the Good Science Project (GSP) is, in her mind, ‘… an ethics project’. Naturally I set to thinking: what kind of ethics? The answer I came up with? Aristotle’s ethics.
We tend to think of ethics – the study of what is right and what is wrong – as devolving to two main sets of ideas. First there is utilitarianism, which we associate especially with the Victorian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The idea here is that you judge the ‘rightness’ of an action by its consequences. The happier the outcome, the better the original act. It’s quite clear that science, and Imperial, depends very much on this theory of ethics. For in science we see how beneficial our interventions are: vaccines and clean energy, for example. What we do at Imperial is good, therefore, because the outcomes, perhaps to be fully realised in only 10 or 20 years, will make the world a happier place.
The second common form of ethics, rule-based ethics, suggests it is rules that make the world an ethical place. Again the relevance to science, and to Imperial is strong. We have clear rules on a host of matters: animal testing; health and safety; energy use; campus behavior, and so on. No one could deny that the rules we follow work to promote the better life.
How does this simple account of ethical theory relate to the work of the Good Science Project? In short, not very well. Important though utility and rules may be, they don’t quite capture everything that is important in our daily life scientific. It is a fact that from the first days our Friday Forums and our conferences looked at ordinary daily scientific practice. More particularly we examined the way that scientists derive their pleasure, their sense of professional contentment, very largely from the actual process of doing science: the craft, the learning of new skills, the collegiality, the growing understanding. Of course the sense of making a difference to society, of your work being useful, is vital to scientists. But I think you can argue that it is the pleasure of scientific craft that gets people into science in the first place and keeps them there. In all Good Science Project discussions, it is the oft-overlooked small aspects of science that seem to garner attention.
This is where Aristotle enters the frame, as the philosopher we associate most with the third great scheme of ethical thought, ‘virtue ethics’. Aristotle was concerned with character, and with habit. He asked: how can we make ourselves people of good character? What habits do we need to foster, in order to become a good person? He didn’t really focus on outcomes or rules. Rather, the emphasis was on how we become ‘a good citizen’. Of course he was thinking about classical Athens. Fiercely proud of the great city-state, Aristotle wondered how to ensure its citizens had the character and the skills to keep Athens running well, a place of truth and beauty, as well as of military prowess. In modern vernacular we would say he emphasised practice, tradition and the importance of security.
With its lively depiction of the well-lived life, the Nichomachean Ethics is well-worth reading. But it is another book, from our times, that allows us to see the link between Aristotle’s ethics, and Imperial College. The book is After Virtue, by the great philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died earlier this year. MacIntyre was convinced that if the contemporary world seems chaotic and ill-at-ease, part of the reason lies in the way we juggle different ethical codes, codes which don’t quite match. Specifically, sometimes we refer to utility when we look for ethical correctness, and sometimes to rules. MacIntyre suggests that often this mix just leads to interminable debate. Take assisted suicide. Assuming we will look to ethics for guidance, it is clear that ideas about rules, and ideas about eventual well-being, can clash absolutely.
MacIntyre urged us to look much harder at ordinary daily life, as the source of well-being. Crucially, he saw that Aristotle’s interest in ‘being a good citizen’ has enormous contemporary relevance – relevance that applies to Imperial too. For it is through being in a community, where we help each other gain skills, take seriously the craft of our work and expect to spend years in reaching mastery, that ‘the good’ can be found. If we work well together, and benefit from a College leadership that helps us work together, then we will produce the kind of science that lasts well into the future, and which benefits everyone.