Category Archives: Flourishing

Against “non-overlapping magisteria”

18 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by in Buddhism, Certainty and Doubt, Flourishing, German Tradition, Health, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Roman Catholicism

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“Religion” and “science” are typically held to be opposing worldviews, especially in the United States where they identify two sides of a cultural divide (such that Jesus fish and Darwin fish are as common on American cars as are bumper stickers). For those of us who are trying to learn from both, it often seems like a relief to hear compromises like the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “non-overlapping magisteria” (abbreviated NOMA). Briefly, in effect, Gould says that there is no need for conflict between science and religion, because science deals with questions of fact and religion with questions of value (or of “moral meaning”). Ken Wilber puts forward a slightly more sophisticated version of the non-overlapping magisteria view:

Simply imagine what would happen if we indeed said that modern physics support mysticism. What happens, for example, if we say that today’s physics is in perfect agreement with Buddha’s enlightenment? What happens when tomorrow’s physics supplants or replaces today’s physics (which it most definitely will)? Does poor Buddha then lose his enlightenment? You see the problem. If you hook your God to today’s physics, then when that physics slips, that God slips with it. (from Grace and Grit, p. 20)

Gould’s claim would be a great way of resolving the conflicts between science and religion – if it were true. The problem is that it isn’t. Continue reading →

The Christian Rawls

08 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Christianity, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Karma, Politics, Stoicism, Virtue

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John RawlsOne of 2009’s more interesting developments in philosophy is the publication of John Rawls’s Princeton undergraduate thesis, entitled A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith. In the past thirty-five years we have known Rawls as an eminently secular political philosopher, trying first (in A Theory of Justice) to work out a political philosophy without any “religious” ideas, and then later (in Political Liberalism) leaving “religious” views at the margins of the theory, where they’re only allowed in insofar as they agree with each other, forming an “overlapping consensus.”

Turns out it wasn’t always so. The title of Rawls’s thesis would have appeared a little drab at the time, but it’s striking to those who have read Rawls’s later philosophy. While the thesis deals heavily with questions of community and interpersonal relations, it says very little about Rawls’s later concern for the organization of the state. And soon after he wrote it, Rawls would go off to fight in World War II, and the horrors he saw would turn him agnostic. But what’s far more striking in the thesis is the continuity between the old (devout, pious) Rawls and the new (secular, political) Rawls. For my part, I have previously thought of Rawls as a philosophical foe – associating him with the utilitarianism that I rejected – and the thesis confirms to me that, in the most important respects, Rawls was thinking in all the wrong directions. Continue reading →

Wealth is not neutral

04 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Buddhism, Economics, External Goods, Flourishing, Happiness, Monasticism, Psychology

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It’s common for those new to Buddhism to ask: “Do Buddhists think wealth and making money are bad?” It’s equally common to answer: “no, wealth itself isn’t bad, it’s just what you do with it.” The Thai scholar-monk Prayudh Payutto (also known as Phra Rajavaramuni and several other names, but this one is the easiest to track him down by) is probably the best-known exponent of this view: in his Buddhist Economics he says “it is not wealth as such that is praised or blamed but the way it is acquired and used.” (61) Others writing on the topic, such as Peter Harvey and Donald Swearer, have said similar things; the topic’s on my mind right now because Justin Whitaker said the same thing in a recent comment here.

There are a number of passages in the suttas that support this interpretation, on which wealth itself is neutral to our well-being (although I suspect that these passages are not always being read in their proper context). But it’s worth pointing out that there’s another view in South Asian Buddhism that takes a significantly more negative view of wealth and its accumulation, one that appears strongly in Śāntideva. Continue reading →

The pleasurable life of a doll

01 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Happiness, Pleasure, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Self, Sex

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The cast of <i>Dollhouse</i>I’ve recently been enjoying Joss Whedon‘s underrated science-fiction TV series Dollhouse. Whedon’s ingenious plot twists and a strong supporting cast have made the show highly enjoyable, at least since the middle of the first season; beyond that, the show’s premise is bait for philosophers, especially those who focus on the ethics of technology or enjoy “thought experiments.” It’s about a secret operation that erases people’s memories and personalities and “imprints” them with completely new ones. Given the rapid pace of advances in contemporary neuroscience, it is not entirely far-fetched to say that such a process could become feasible within my lifetime; and it raises a great deal of questions, familiar to Buddhists, about the nature of personal identity.

Last Friday’s episode, Belonging, implicitly makes a further point about the good life. (Spoiler warning, if you haven’t seen this episode.) Continue reading →

One and a half noble truths?

30 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Buddhism, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Meditation, Psychology

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In almost any contemporary introduction to Buddhism, one of the first things one learns is the Four Noble Truths:

  1. Everything is suffering (dukkha).
  2. Suffering is caused by craving.
  3. There is an end to suffering.
  4. One can reach this end by following the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path.

The Four Truths are central to the teaching of the early Pali suttas, so something like them was probably central to the teaching of the historical Buddha. There’s been a recent trend in Buddhist studies to disparage the Four Truths, on the ground that they were far removed from the practice of most Buddhists in history, whose lives (especially but not only in East Asia) focused much more on devotion and magic. But never mind. I’m far less concerned with learning about the historical structure of past Buddhist societies, and more with the question of whether these truths – undeniably revered and treated as truths by many Buddhists throughout history – are indeed true.

I noted before that the Second Noble Truth was of great importance in my own spiritual development. I would still count it as the most important thing I’ve learned from Buddhism. Maybe not all suffering comes from craving, but a huge chunk of it does.

But what about the other three? Continue reading →

Zest

16 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Flourishing, Food, Greek and Roman Tradition, Health, Monasticism, Patient Endurance, Pleasure, Self-Discipline, Zest

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One of the most important virtues to consider, to my mind, is what Bertrand Russell called “zest.” Zest, in Russell’s terms, is the healthy enjoyment of worldly pleasures. He explains it as follows:

Suppose one man likes strawberries and another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in more important matters. The man who enjoys watching football is to that extent superior to the man who does not. The man who enjoys reading is still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. (Russell did not live to see ESPN.) The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days. (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, pp. 125-6)

Zest in this sense, I think, is and should be a controversial virtue. There are many lists of virtues in which it does not appear. Continue reading →

Why I’m getting married

08 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Attachment and Craving, Buddhism, Death, Epicureanism, External Goods, Family, Flourishing, Friends, Greek and Roman Tradition, Grief, Happiness, Jainism, Monasticism, Pleasure, Sex, Social Science, Virtue

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I’ll begin with happy news: I’m engaged! This weekend I proposed to my beloved Caitlin, and I’m delighted to say she accepted.

Now, I’ve tried to be explicit that this is a philosophy blog, not a personal blog – while a great deal here is autobiographical, the purpose of even those entries is to point to bigger questions, questions that I hope my life story can help illuminate in some way. So I’m going to talk today a little bit about my reasons for deciding to marry. The particular reasons, of course, are all about my sweetheart herself, a beautiful, smart, funny, playful, charming, sexy, adventurous, responsible, virtuous woman. But there are more general reasons that tie to the blog’s bigger concerns.

Above all, my action this weekend is not one that Śāntideva, or the Buddha of the Pali suttas, would view as a part of the highest, best, most fully virtuous life. They speak at length of the disadvantages of the household life, the life spent among family with a paid job in the everyday world. The life of a monk is a higher and better one to pursue. Eros keeps us mired in the suffering of everyday life, enslaved to the desires and craving that only cause us yet more suffering. The monk, by contrast, devotes himself or herself fully to the development of virtue, much more able to rise above craving and suffering.
Continue reading →

Medicine as ethics

01 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Flourishing, Food, German Tradition, Happiness, Health, Judaism, Politics, Psychology, Roman Catholicism, South Asia

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In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre once said that “it is the lawyers, not the philosophers, who are the clergy of liberalism.” That is, in modern societies – liberal in the broad sense – it is lawyers who do the work, and have the status, once given to the medieval European Christian priesthood.

On this point I think MacIntyre is half right – or perhaps three-quarters right. He is quite right to note the low status that the modern West accords philosophers; but he overemphasizes the role of lawyers, because his concept of the good is (to my mind) overly political. Lawyers do play the role of medieval clergy as the rulers’ intellectual assistants in determining what a good state will be in practice. When it comes to the good life itself, however, the intellectual heavy lifting is done by a very different group: namely doctors, and medical researchers. It is medicine, not law (and certainly not philosophy), that plays the greatest role in telling moderns how they should live.
Continue reading →

Do we know whether we’re happy?

02 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Economics, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Pleasure, Psychology

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Rosalind Hursthouse has an entry on virtue ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where she tries to explain why “happiness” is not an adequate translation of the Greek word eudaimonia (human flourishing, blessedness, good life). The trouble with “happiness,” she says, is that in contemporary English

it connotes something which is subjectively determined. It is for me, not for you, to pronounce on whether I am happy, or on whether my life, as a whole, has been a happy one, for, barring, perhaps, advanced cases of self-deception and the suppression of unconscious misery, if I think I am happy then I am — it is not something I can be wrong about.

I think Hursthouse is severely understating matters here. Continue reading →

Stumbling on happiness

30 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in Family, Flourishing, Happiness, Psychology

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Rare is the philosopher who doesn’t give happiness a significant place in the good life. Even Kant, often caricatured as making no room for happiness, still says both that it is a duty to secure one’s own happiness in this world, and that one needs to hope for happiness in the afterlife. Happiness, then, is a topic of key philosophical importance, whether by “happiness” we mean the pleasant mental state aimed at by Bentham or the broader conception of human flourishing in Aristotle’s eudaimonia; and most accounts of the latter include some element of the former.

We would do well, then, to pay attention to the burgeoning field of psychologists’ empirical research on happiness. The field faces a number of methodological problems, but comes to interesting insights in spite of these. One deservedly popular book in the field is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, a well written and engaging summary of current research. Gilbert does a good job of summarizing many psychologists’ counterintuitive findings about happiness.

The problem is that some of Gilbert’s conclusions contradict not only common sense – which isn’t a problem, because contradicting common sense is the point – but each other. He concludes at the end that we are not as different from other people as we think we are, and that therefore in order to be happy we should ask other people what makes them happy. Yet elsewhere in the book he acknowledges that people don’t themselves know what makes them happy. The most obvious example is children: ask anyone who has children and they will tell you their children are their key source of joy, yet every study on the subject concludes we get less happy when children are born, and happier again when they leave. Which is to say that according to Gilbert’s own data, other people’s self-report is not the best place to find out what will make you happy.