Germany Finally Pardons Pacifist Soldier Who Deserted Nazi Army

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Germany has finally decided to pardon soldiers convicted of treason against the Nazis, including Ludwig Baumann, who became a pacifist in 1942, deserted the Wehrmacht, was “sentenced to death for desertion.… tortured, taken to concentration camps, and was lucky to avoid being executed.” In a sane world, they would have recognized his prescience and uncommon valor and promoted him to some position of authority. Instead, the government debated for sixty plus years about whether officially absolving him of his “crimes” might send the wrong message to soldiers of the latest Reich, before finally giving in and begrudgingly pardoning the few remaining survivors.
• There are a bunch of new expansions to the various higher education-related tax credits and deductions in the United States. Some of these may be helpful to folks who try to reduce or eliminate their federal income tax liability. The IRS website has a good run-down of the details.
• The Taxpayer’s Alliance group in Britain looks like just another of those middle-right fiscally conservative groups, but unlike those on our side of the pond, they sometimes use and support tax resistance as a tactic.

In section ten of the first book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle acknowledges the seeming contradiction between eudaimonia as something that takes place within a person as an “activity of the soul” and as something that is best thought of as an objective, external evaluation of a life as a whole — a sort of posthumous (or even post-posthumous) summing up of how successful a life it was.

What if you’ve lived a good life and it seems like your eudaimonia has been well-secured, but then, after you’re dead, your reputation is slandered and your family comes to ruin? Can you even suffer harm to your eudaimonia after you’re six feet under?

Aristotle says there has to be a middle ground between seeing eudaimonia as utterly transient and dependent on fortune on the one hand, and seeing it as unattainable in life but only assignable in retrospect on the other.

Nobility, greatness of soul, virtue — these things are durable. They lead to an enduring eudaimonia less susceptible to the whims of fate, and also allow their bearers to better adjust to whatever fortune throws their way. If your character is such that you’ll try to make the best of whatever life presents you with, at least you’ll never be miserable, though perhaps you’ll never be blessed.

That seems like sensible enough advice, though not particularly enlightening. One way I can interpret it is to think of nobility and greatness of soul and virtue as being a sort of riches that are less vulnerable to being lost by misfortune.

But even Job, though he “was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil,” when the devil threw misfortune after misfortune at him, came to curse the day he was born and concluded “I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.” Someone asked him what happened to the optimistic good advice he ladled out back in his days of wine and roses: “Should not your piety be your confidence and your blameless ways your hope?” No, he replies: I’m miserable and I see the wicked flourishing all around me and my piety and virtue are no comfort to me. So his companions are reduced to asserting that if Job redoubles his efforts to be pure and upright, God will of course restore him to health and prosperity, and eventually get around to smiting the wicked: virtue apparently is not its own reward after all. (God’s eventual answer to Job is pretty pathetic, and reminds me mostly of the bluster of “The Great and Powerful Oz” before Dorothy and her crew.)

But certainly if you love virtue and behave virtuously, voila! at least to that extent you’re richer and more eudaimon as a result of your action. But that’s not much to go on. If you love music, and sing aloud, to some extent you’re richer for doing so. Virtue is nothing special in this regard (or if it is, Aristotle hasn’t told us why yet). Indeed, if you love vice and behave viciously, you seem to reap an equivalent reward, by this logic.

In section eleven Aristotle spends a little more time talking about how posthumous events can effect the eudaimonia of the dead. I didn’t get much more out of that, except more confirmation that “happiness” is an absolutely inadequate translation for what Aristotle meant by eudaimonia.