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The Good Life Reading List
Jean Kazez jkazez@smu.edu home
Philosophers have been thinking about the nature of the good life since ancient times. There is lots and lots to read. The topics and readings below are explored in my book The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life (Blackwell 2007).
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HAPPINESS Is happiness the only thing that counts? A spate of recent books by psychologists assume the answer is yes. See, for example, Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness and Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis. As these authors define it, happiness is a positive feeling. It's feeling good, enjoying yourself, experiencing pleasure, having a positive state of consciousness. I discuss these two books in a forthcoming discussion/review. Some philosophers agree that happiness, defined as a pleasant sensation, really is the only thing that matters. For example, that was the view of the hedonistic Utilitarians of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham as well as the ancient philosopher Epicurus. "The experience machine" argument suggests otherwise (convincingly, in my view). It's made by Robert Nozick in his book The Examined Life. Useful excerpts from Mill, Bentham, Epicurus, and Nozick are in the excellent anthology Ethics, edited by Peter Singer.
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY The good life was a central topic during the ancient period of philosophy (starting about 500 bc and stretching into the second century ad). Plato's dialogue The Phaedo is a great place to begin. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the most comprehensive ancient work about the good life. Though rich and rewarding, it's pretty dense reading. After Plato and Aristotle, philosophical schools became increasingly focused on the business of everyday life. The Handbook by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus reads like a first century self-help book. It's full of great advice for dealing with problems of living, large and small. The ancients are generally united in thinking of a good life as a virtuous life. So the person living a good life will be brave, truthful, just, generous, wise, and so on. Today we think about morality somewhat differently than the ancients did. We think it's morally very admirable of Bill Gates to be giving away billions of dollars to save lives in distant countries. The Greek philosophers would have seen it as simply strange. Strange? In fact,it seems far more strange that we don't do more for people in distant countries, focusing instead on the luxuries we are lucky enough to be able to afford. But just how much should we do?
MORALITY How good do we have to be? How much should we give up in order to save distant lives? Way back in 1970, this question was forcefully brought to the attention of academic philosophers by Peter Singer in the article Famine Affluence and Morality. More recently he's written two articles in the New York Times Magazine on the same subject--What Should a Billionaire Give - and What Should You? (2006) and The Singer Solution To World Poverty (1999). I highly recommend Singer's very accessible book How Are We To Live? How much can we really do? Paul Farmer, a Harvard-affiliated doctor who runs a clinic for the poor in Haiti, is living proof that we can do a lot. I love Tracy Kidder's biography of Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains. But can I live my life like that? In Singer's Ethics anthology, a negative answer is given by Friedrich Nietzsche (with bravura) and by Susan Wolf (with subtlety). I discuss my own struggles with the question in a short article in the magazine Philosophy Now: How Good Do We Have to Be? If we should help, where are the problems most serious? What can be done? I learned a lot about the facts and the controversies from The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey Sachs and The White Man's Burden by William Easterly. An entertaining novel that explores how good we have to be is Nick Hornby's How To Be Good.
EVERYTHING ELSE Are happiness and morality together all that matter? What about autonomy, self-expression, growing or making progress, knowledge, fun, family, work, religion, cooking, sports? Are they essential to a good life? Just icing on the cake? My book explores these questions and many more.
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