I pointed out in a couple of my forum posts that most people in our world today see the good life as happiness, which allows them to be controlled by perceived social pressures into having “standard wants”, which in turn leads to unhappiness since they don’t have the resources to meet all of their wants. I proposed another possible view of what the good life is in another one of my forum posts. And that is by making it so obvious of how hard it is to argue for a view of the good life, since the standards we would normally use to judge something such as this are tied up with our conception of the good life. Its hard to understand but it makes sense if read it slowly.
Instead of pursuing further what the good life IS, because I feel like we have …show more content…
No matter what the good life is it has to be something that is strived for if it is to be valuable. It is hard to think of a serious version of the good life that doesn’t require effort, even if the good life is happy life it is generally assumed that it takes some effort to become happy, or to maintain a state of happiness. I can, and I’m sure others could, think of ridiculous examples. Considering that a view of the good life that says that the good life is thinking of the color blue on a daily basis. Certainly this is a choice not tied to ethics, so it meets our other requirements, but I think no one would seriously consider this as a possibility for the good life, because the good life, doesn’t seem to be in any way better than a life lived normally, minus thinking daily about the color blue. And I think this is because no effort has been used to set the life above the non-good life. Now this is not to say that great effort guarantees that one is living the good life, work can be used without purpose, for example rolling a boulder uphill all day, only to have it roll back, and, if I am correct, you would still be happy at the end of the day. Nor do I think that work is related with the “goodness” of the life, simply working harder doesn’t make your life better, and I always have said work smarter not harder. But I think the fact that some work must be applied is a good indicator that we …show more content…
It seems apparent to me that they all follow, from the view of the good life, something that represents the best possible life, something that is not given must be earned, and something that, as in ideal, can be a guide for us. But here we have to be careful we don’t go in circles if we allow what the best life is to be tied to our idea of the good life. But perhaps we can ground it in ethics, by defining the best life as the one that results in the best society. Worrying about what is equal to the best society is something we have already tackled within ethics, when dealing with consequences, and hopefully something that we already have an answer for. If you think that the best society is when everyone as happy as they possibly can be then it would seem that that the good life should be a happy life, which is the common concept of the good life. But if you think that the best society is the one that survives for the longest under all conditions, as I do, then I think that you can make a case for thinking that the good life is one that meets its goals (since such people will contribute the most to that
Instead of pursuing further what the good life IS, because I feel like we have …show more content…
No matter what the good life is it has to be something that is strived for if it is to be valuable. It is hard to think of a serious version of the good life that doesn’t require effort, even if the good life is happy life it is generally assumed that it takes some effort to become happy, or to maintain a state of happiness. I can, and I’m sure others could, think of ridiculous examples. Considering that a view of the good life that says that the good life is thinking of the color blue on a daily basis. Certainly this is a choice not tied to ethics, so it meets our other requirements, but I think no one would seriously consider this as a possibility for the good life, because the good life, doesn’t seem to be in any way better than a life lived normally, minus thinking daily about the color blue. And I think this is because no effort has been used to set the life above the non-good life. Now this is not to say that great effort guarantees that one is living the good life, work can be used without purpose, for example rolling a boulder uphill all day, only to have it roll back, and, if I am correct, you would still be happy at the end of the day. Nor do I think that work is related with the “goodness” of the life, simply working harder doesn’t make your life better, and I always have said work smarter not harder. But I think the fact that some work must be applied is a good indicator that we …show more content…
It seems apparent to me that they all follow, from the view of the good life, something that represents the best possible life, something that is not given must be earned, and something that, as in ideal, can be a guide for us. But here we have to be careful we don’t go in circles if we allow what the best life is to be tied to our idea of the good life. But perhaps we can ground it in ethics, by defining the best life as the one that results in the best society. Worrying about what is equal to the best society is something we have already tackled within ethics, when dealing with consequences, and hopefully something that we already have an answer for. If you think that the best society is when everyone as happy as they possibly can be then it would seem that that the good life should be a happy life, which is the common concept of the good life. But if you think that the best society is the one that survives for the longest under all conditions, as I do, then I think that you can make a case for thinking that the good life is one that meets its goals (since such people will contribute the most to that