Michael Sandel: On the Good Life

the most interesting way of learning the deepest kind of mutual understanding is to come to a keener appreciation of the debates and disagreements within our respective cultures that's what's really interesting and to attend to them and we may discover that there is a distinctive shape to the debates and disagreements one place to the next but that should be the starting point and I would like to give a concrete illustration of this general point by looking at one big philosophical debate about the good life within the West now if you were to take a very rough-and-ready stereotypic account of the difference between eastern and western approaches to the good life you might say that in the West we think of ethics in political philosophy as a matter of utility and rights and in the East the good life is about virtue the cultivation of virtue but if you look within the Western tradition there's a very interesting and lively and continuing debate over centuries between accounts of the good life that emphasize utility and rights and autonomy and accounts of the good life that emphasize virtue so noticing the disagreements is more interesting but it's also potentially a way of creating bridges better more substantive bridges among cultures than just trying to figure out the fixed views so what is this debate about well what is the good life one answer to that question was offered by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century in English political philosopher who said it's very simple maximizing half that's the good life and what he meant by maximizing happiness was maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain now the appeal of this way of thinking about the good life is it simple everybody likes pleasure in this likes pain and it's non-judgmental it doesn't pass judgment on what gives you pleasure or me pleasure all that matters is that we add it all up and try to maximize now in fact Bentham emphasize this non-judgmental appeal when he said the quantity of pleasure being the same pushpin a children's game pushpin is as good as poetry so some people might like dogfights that going to dogfights might give some people pleasure other people like going to museums who's to say that the preference or the pleasure derived from museums is higher or worthier than that derived from dogfights people have different tastes now there are familiar objections to this way of thinking about the good life one of them uses a counter example of the ancient Roman Colosseum where they threw Christians to the Lions for sport if ethics is all about adding up the balance of pleasure over pain people argue against Bentham does that mean that throwing Christians to the Lions might be the right thing to do if there are an it's true it causes excruciating pain to the Christian being eaten by the lion but if there are enough deliriously happy Romans in the Coliseum delighted by this does that mean this is the good life the right thing to do this is a standard and pretty powerful rejoinder to which there are few sponsors one response from a utilitarian would be to say well because it's embarrassing if you have a theory of the good life that endorses throwing Christians to the Lions in the Coliseum so one way of avoiding the embarrassment would be to say well you have to consider as the economists say externalities there might be other people out there who are pained by this maybe they worry that when they run out of Christians they'll come for me and that will make me anxious and that unhappiness has to be cranked into the balance but that's kind of a feeble and contingent response other people would say is that the only reason it's wrong what about violating the human rights not their fundamental human rights that are being violated when these people are being used for sport that's one answer and that's in the broad tradition of utility and rights but there's another reason to object and that's and that takes us to virtue isn't there something wrong with catering to perverse desires yes those people may be taking pleasure but shouldn't we try to educate them out of taking pleasure in that base spectacle that's the virtue argument not the rights argument against this brutal practice so that takes us to a second way of conceiving ethics and the good life which goes back to Aristotle in the West and Aristotle said that the good life is about seeking happiness but happiness is not something that is maximized something where you just add up pleasures and pain happiness is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue and by that he meant learning how not adding up pleasure the balance of pleasure of a pain but learning to take pleasure in the right sorts of things that's what happiness is and so if people prefer watching dog fights to going to museums the thing that needs to be done is to try to educate them out of that to cultivate virtue well how do you do that Aristotle said by habit people learn the virtues by practicing them which is why we can't learn how to be a one can't learn how to be a good person by reading a book or listening to a lecture on philosophy or or even by being given a bunch of moral precepts you become virtuous by practice you become brave by doing brave acts just by doing just things you've got to get in the habit of it well that seems circular how did the habits get going and how do you know which ones are worth emulating well part of it is you have to figure out whom to look up to whom to emulate and you have to be brought up right and you have to develop good habits from the time you're young and part of what gets that going is living in a certain kind of community with certain kind of laws because part of the point of law on Aristotle's picture is not just to keep people from one another's throats or from committing crimes the real point of law is to make people good to cultivate virtue and that's how you get the good habits going now there are two interesting features of this picture one of them is that this way of thinking about the good life about habit about looking up to exemplary figures about having to live in a certain way of life with certain rites and rituals and laws this looks pretty close to a confucian picture of the good life and how its acquired but and here's the debate within the West it makes a lot of people especially in the modern world uneasy because people look at the this Aristotelian account of virtue cultivating virtues the role of law and forming good habits and say that sounds like it might be coercive that sounds like well what about choosing for myself the best way to live rather than having to live according to habits that are cultivated by a certain way of life so fast forward to another utilitarian who came after Bentham John Stuart Mill who wrote this famous book on liberty and he said no there's a fundamental difference between public and private the purpose of law is to prevent us from harming one another but beyond that the law shouldn't try to make us good and yet Mill disagreed with Bentham who had come a generation before him Mel didn't think it was plausible to say that dog fights and museums are equally worthy Mill thought we can't hold that can't make sense of a theory of the good life that says there isn't any difference between higher and lower pleasures so what then how can you distinguish the two Mills answer was well because remember he was a utilitarian and he wanted to show that there were higher qualitatively higher pleasures fact he said it's better to be a better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied some modes of life just are higher but how to establish that he said without being judgmental that's the thing he said well if someone has experienced both whatever that person decides gives the most pleasure that's the higher that's the higher good well that's kind of unsatisfying too in fact to test this I show my students a clip from Hamlet and then a clip from The Simpsons and I asked them which one they enjoyed watching more and the majority say the Simpsons and then I asked which one they think is higher and they all say almost all Shakespeare Hamlet so there can be a difference between even where we've experienced both what we like and what we really think is higher so this I don't think is a satisfactory solution to the question of virtue but it shows it shows that there is a powerful temptation to find a way not to be judgmental not to embrace the full conception of the good life that affirms virtue so I don't think Mill's experiments succeeded I think it's an illustration though of the attempt to wrestle with this tension this debate internal to the Western tradition of the good life and a philosophy and what strikes me is that it isn't so easy to do away altogether with the idea of virtue in giving an account of the good life though we try we in the West at least try time and time again and I experienced I experienced this now remember this is a personal experience back when I was a graduate student in the 1970s at Oxford and I I would go to professor sins lectures as he was then giving them on welfare economics and I learned a lot from those lectures and I also remember there was a there was an extracurricular dispute going on in those days in Oxford they still had some all women's colleges they weren't yet mixed and the all women's colleges had rules against overnight male visitors and but times were changing this is the mid 70s and pressure grew to relax these rules at st. Anne's College which was one of the all women's colleges now not everyone was in favor of liberalizing the rules the the traditionalists were against it but they were embarrassed to give the real reason for their objection and so they translated their argument into utilitarian terms we can't allow overnight male guests they said well why exactly they said it'll increase the costs to the college well how how would it increase the costs they were asked well they said the men will want to take baths and that will use up hot water furthermore they said we'll have to change the mattresses more often so the Reformers met these arguments by adopting the following compromise they said each woman could have a maximum of three male guests each week overnight guests provided each guest paid 50 pence to defray the costs to the the next day The Guardian newspaper had a headline saying st. Anne's girls fifty pence a night which which demonstrates that the language of virtue can't really be translated into the language of utility it's a persisting feature maybe of the good life and a possible bridge between the understanding of the good life in the West and in the east thanks very much so we have a time for two questions let me first say that it was tremendously enjoyable as always to listen to the one thing is your the critique of the pigs I'm not sure I would agree with that because there's a you know Socrates versus being a pig but there's a famous experiment that deprived pigs of social interaction with other pigs and food and it turns out that the pig referred to be with other pigs rather than at food so it's not you know be too harsh against against pig okay let's let's let's have time for two questions might say a word about perfectible perfectibility that is that virtues aren't stagnant they're not something you just discover but the body of thought that talks about the ways in which we may really love dog fights but something in our souls may long for other things too yeah well that's exactly the idea that we may have a lot of de facto desires the satisfaction of which gives us pleasure but that doesn't mean that the good life consists in satisfying those desires in those preferences and in one way or another we all of us I think as human beings bump up against that feature of desire and of judgment and of aspiration and this is why I think that the mean the case against the the dog fights you know the purity the Puritans tried to get rid of bear baiting bear baiting was a sport in the early American colonies and looking back we think that that was a cruel sport and that it was objectionable because of the pain that it inflicted on the animals but the Puritans objected to bear baiting not because of the pain it inflicted on the bear but because of the pleasure it gave the bear bader that's an instance of the virtue argument for the aspirational argument of trying to change what gives people pleasure in a way that elevates us and enables us to realize our highest human faculties or or our nature or our souls depending on how you would want to characterize well here is one of the debates that occurs internal to these various traditions my own view is yes but I can't say that that's I can't associate that view thora tative lee with one or another tradition that your very question is one of the central debates within the political philosophy and debate about ethics certainly in the West and arguably in other traditions as well one last question what if you live in a society where you are surrounded by people whose virtues are really really odd and weird and weird you know so that's one way of asking this and also sometimes you know when I teach virtue ethics and on students I'm especially female students argue that act you know great acts of liberation were associated with getting away from virtues so like women could be liberated because liberal societies started to be you know to get great get rid of old-fashioned virtues thank you if virtues are fixed and given once and for all then they are suffocating in a source of conformity in fact that's what makes people wary about any conception of the good life that says habit matters in fact there there is one branch of philosophy that says really to act morally is to rise above habit and ritual to think for ourselves to will for ourselves autonomously the moral law and so on that picture habit and tradition and rituals are prisons in a way obstacles to living freely and living authentically and if traditions and virtues were just fixed once and for all then they would be that kind of prison but just as we've been discussing here tonight just as cultures are full of contestation and debate within themselves so the right way to interpret a tradition or a habit is contestable and so what keeps or what can keep habit from becoming mere habit a kind of rote mindless behavior is teaching people and creating a way of life that encourages people to interpret and to reinterpret and to argue about what the tradition actually requires to argue about what makes this habit or this ritual or this element of tradition important and that's how culture is change through the roiling contestation and argument about how really to interpret the tradition whether it's a constitutional tradition or whether it's how to read the Bible or whether it's how to read men chess there are competing interpretations so that creates a critical space for reflection that prevents have it from becoming a prison but that doesn't require trying as if to shed our skin to step out of ourselves out of our identities out of tradition as such and to imagine that we can achieve the good life purely on our own devices you

Channel: Berggruen Institute

Views: 36,304

Keywords: Philosophy, East West, Berggruen, The Good Life, Sandel, Political Philosophy

Id: JUxGnHu1R7E

Length: 23min 57sec (1437 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2016