Ethics: The Good Life [Winter 2025]

Can we be happy?  At times, looking around in our twenty-first century world, it would seem that “happiness” is a contingent, fleeting and difficult-to-grasp matter more of luck than of choice and action.  Such a view stems from an implicitly nihilistic worldview, one unconsciously imbibed by many today, in which meaning is imposed upon the realities which extrinsically act upon us.  The result of this worldview—this effort to burden the human being with creating the meaning for all the universe—is a deep, gnawing grief at the inevitable failure and ever-more-extreme attempts at improving anesthetics to dull this pain.  To the contrary of this sadly inverted worldview, this seminar will look at the philosophical treatments of those in the tradition of the ancients and medievals who construe happiness as an inward possession whereby the human person acts outwardly for the sake of attaining real goods meaningful in themselves.

Finding a meaningful life, that is, requires effort: it is not something which happens to us, most especially when the world in which we live denies, both implicitly and often explicitly, that the universe is itself meaningful.  Thus, by reading sources ancient, medieval, and modern, we will look at how the good of life has been emptied, how it can be restored, and how it can be oriented.