Affairs of the Heart: The Ethical Significance of Anger | Prof. Jennifer Herdt

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Jennifer Herdt examines the cognitive dimensions and ethical significance of anger, distinguishing human anger, linked to justice and reason, from animal anger, within an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework.

This lecture was given on September 7th, 2024, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Jennifer A. Herdt is Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale University’s Divinity School. She is the author, most recently, of Assuming Responsibility: Ecstatic Eudaimonism and the Call to Live Well (link is external). Her 2019 book, Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition, was supported by a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is also the author of Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices, and of Religion and Faction in Hume’s Moral Philosophy (link is external), and has published widely on virtue ethics, early modern and modern moral thought, and political theology. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Christian Ethics, Studies in Christian Ethics, and the Journal of Religion, and served as the 2020 President of the Society of Christian Ethics. Her current research project on more-than-human creaturely agency flows from a $3.9M, 3-year collaborative grant from the Templeton Foundation (link is external) supporting projects in science-informed theological anthropology. From 2013-2021, she served as the academic dean of Yale Divinity School, and is now Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs.

Keywords: AI, Anger, Aristotelianism, Ethics, Justice, Passions, Peter Strawson, Reactive Emotions, Responsibility, Thomistic Thought

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.0	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:21.7	visit us at Thomisticinstitute.org. So for many reasons, I find this an apt moment for a conference
0:28.5	that's considering the passions. Let me just focus on one for a moment, rapid advances in
0:34.6	artificial intelligence. Claims by Blake LeMoyne in summer 2022 that Google's
0:41.3	large language model Lambda was conscious were followed by the release of chat GPT late in
0:47.7	2022, catapulting artificial intelligence to the forefront of attention overnight.
0:55.0	There were concerns, of course, about students using chat GPT to cheat, and concerns about
1:01.0	everyone from screenwriters to legal aids being put out of their jobs.
1:07.0	And there were yet more fundamental concerns and anxieties.
1:11.8	Lambda is not actually conscious.
1:15.2	Pretty much everyone agrees on that, but might AI become conscious someday?
1:20.5	Might artificial general intelligence capable of human-like intelligence across multiple domains be within reach,
1:28.0	but of artificial superintelligence exceeding human intellectual capacities.
1:34.3	Rapid advances in machine intelligence are posing anew question concerning human distinctiveness
1:39.9	and feeding anxieties or among some transhumanist enthusiasm, not just about the disappearance of certain job sectors, but about human replacement more generally.
1:52.3	For a long time, we humans have prided ourselves on our cognitive capacities, but now these are being exceeded in one domain after another. And the fact that it is our own
2:03.7	creations that are leaving us in the dust is cold comfort, particularly given the possibility
2:09.6	that they might someday become autonomous, no longer subject to our control or catering to our
2:16.4	desires. Small wonder then that this AI moment has
	...

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