Post #1

Living life in such a manner as to avoid pain and to seek pleasure seems far too simple to be a normative theory for either how humans live or how humans ought to live. So using this language in an ethical theory seems inappropriate. What might make more sense than that would be speaking of happiness. Happiness could readily be listed among those things that are inherently worth pursuing, that is all things good. It also seems that happiness might be secondary to or an effect of pursuing some other inherent and objective good. One might choose a life of service to others, because it is a good thing to be in the service of the good of others. In serving the communal good one also increases one’s own good. Committed service to that which is good brings happiness. That is kind of weak. I am going to have to work on this because Objective List Theory seems to be (on my own intuition) source of moral life for humans. That is that any reasonable person should be able to, if given all the necessary information to discern the good from the bad and pursue that which is good. The fact that we can discern these things seems reason enough that we have to in order to live our everyday lives. It is not as if we’re as animals without capacity for thought and that fact makes us able to wait and not necessarily only able to thoughtlessly (without consciousness or discernment) respond to pleasure and pain. I’m not sure what I’m saying here.

Reverse Engineering the Good Life

As far as I can tell, Shelly Kagan and Derek Parfit are pretty typical in their explication of theories of well-being. We start with a theory (hedonism, for example) and find some cases that cut against it. These cases suggest to us a different theory (desire-satisfaction). In turn, the problem cases for the new theory suggest that yet another theory (objective list) may best ground our views of what a good life is. There is another way to go about figuring out what well-being consists of, it seems.
In a manner reminiscent of Descartes, we might start with what we know. What do we know about the good life? Like Socrates, I only know that I do not know. Perhaps we should start with people who appear to have a high level of well-being. Talking to them or reading what they write would hopefully give us insight into what the good life is, and if they truly have found it. Those who possess peace and satisfaction (but not complacency) probably have found a means to high well-being. It would be of use to find those who possess very low well-being as well, although I imagine that getting useful information out of them would be harder. Vicious people are hardly affable or pleasant to deal with. Once we had this data, we would have a solid foundation to build a theory on. The only problem I see with this is that it is harder to have certainty in such an area. As compensation, we have more data: more lives that we can be pretty sure were well-lived lives and lives that were poorly lived.

A life's work down the drain?

I want to discuss how a life’s worth can be diminished after the life has ended, and to what extent this can happen. Take for example the Venice preserver we discussed in class. There is a man whose life goal is to preserve Venice. He works for his entire adult life to achieve this goal. He dies and Venice is destroyed years later. Even though Venice is destroyed in the end, after his death, he still worked to preserve it. He still had the satisfaction of knowing that he tried. Also, Venice’s demise does not negate the fact that he did actually this work. People may say he failed, that his work lead to nothing and that a main aspect of his life is now found to have been meaningless, but still he worked for it. He did what it was he wanted to do and cared about: He attempted to save Venice. This may diminish his life's value, as his work ultimately did not lead to his goal of the preservation of Venice, and if he were alive he would probably feel rather downtrodden (to put it lightly), but it does only mar his life slightly. He still tried his hardest to do something he believed in and cared about; therefore his life still has great meaning and value. He would still have been happy that he had tried to save Venice, even if it did not work out in the end. It is not only the end result that matters; it is the effort and the journey taken to achieve the goal that matters.

Welcome to the Ursinus Normative Ethics Blog!

Welcome to the Ursinus Normative Ethics Blog!

See the syllabus for instructions about when and how to post. Feel free to comment on any of these posts -- offering opposing or supporting arguments is a great way to extend your experience with the issues we discuss.