Is Moral Philosophy worthwhile? Aristotle thinks not.
Sorry for the lack of posting, but I'm a little busy as the term starts. I've finally gotten around to reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and found this gem:
"the present enquiry does not aim at theoretical knowledge like the others (for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use)..."
(1103b)
I suspect few moral philosophers these days would think of their studies as including psychological facts about how best to make people good. It seems that Aristotle thought of inquiry that excluded such facts as without use.
I'm not sure he thought it
I'm not sure he thought it was without use, simply speaking; rather, he thought it is not the point, i.e., it's a means, and so gets its use from its practical purpose. An analogy he uses occasionally is medicine: just as no one is made healthier by lectures on medicine, so no one is made better by lectures on moral philosophy; and just as it is absurd to think that medicine's dominant purpose is to give precise descriptions of diseases rather than to heal, so it is absurd to think that moral philosophy's dominant purpose is to analyze problems. Inquiry that doesn't include psychological facts about how best to make people good could still be useful -- to an inquiry that does.