/lit/ - Literature

Only bad people have a good life.

No. Yes.
Aristotle. No, it has not much to do with neuroscience.

I believe that is the domain of psychology.

We surely don't believe in ideals anymore, this being 2014? Surely...

Is/ought gap bro. Empirical evidence isn't going to tell you anything about an "ideal" life (how a life should be), though it might tell you what is a happy or satisfying life for most people. (e.g., you could survey some people about what they think constitutes a "good life". That info wouldn't tell you anything about what a "good life" actually is.)

If you're just talking "satisfying life", well that's obviously relative to a person's particular mental states, etc.

>>4686744
Depends on what you mean about neuroscience and the good life.
Someday, they might discover how to hook an electrode up to your pleasure centers and make you just feel good about everything all the time. Like, wow, man, just, pretty cool, it's, oh, um, yeah, because, like, with the, and, ooh, just, right on the fucking dot, man, like, like you're touching yourself and, ah yeah, just, um, ooh, hahahaha.
Alternately, we could just mass produce a shit ton of heroin and get the same result.

>>4686788
I assume that most people mean "worthwhile life" when they say "good life". If I were hardwired to get max pleasure from just indiscriminately mutilating people, I don't think people would call that a "good life". They probably don't even mean "ethical life" either, since I could just sit on my ass for my whole life and not do anything wrong and still have a not-good life. It's the "worthwhile" thing that's up for debate.

>>4686806
I wasn't talking about getting pleasure through anything. That includes toil and disrupts the placidness of joy. I meant, just pleasure. Regardless of circumstances, just keep zapping that one part of the brain that rewards behavior.
Which is why, if we want to be truly utilitarian, we'd just manufacture enough heroin to send everyone off to lala land for a couple months until we all starved to death. Max pleasure, no pain, no consequences, no downsides.

If you're talking about "worthwhile," then everyone is going to say it is best for everyone to do those things which promote their (individual) interests. That is to say, I'll tell you that the only worthwhile thing to do is obtain easy pleasures and withdraw from society because I like to be left alone and hate busy-bodies, social workers, psychiatrists, cops, politicians and all sorts of other people who want to step into my world and annoy me.
Aristotle will tell you to own slaves, be part of the army, and send your sons to the academy, because that's what benefits him.

>>4686837
>I wasn't talking about getting pleasure through anything.
Whatever, then just take your scenario about being hooked up to the pleasure machine. You could just sit there and have pleasure pumped into your brain for your whole life, again I don't think most people would call this a "good life".

Also, I really should have said "life with worth". I mean something much more general, just a life that is worth living in the sense we are trying to determine. There are people who would say that a worthy life isn't one where you just fulfill your interests. These people would say that there some kind of greater thing, I don't know, that gives your life the worthy status.

>>4686837

Aristotle's method was more descriptive than it was prescriptive. His ethics gives an account of how we as humans, who inherit biological and historical circumstances, do in fact strive toward excellence. He doesn't command you to own slaves, be part of the army, and send your sons to the academy, but he would probably advise it because that's excellent human beings do in his social context.

There are notions in his ethics which are, however,more generalizable. Speech and reason exercised in a social and communal context essentially belong to man and segregates him from the animals. To flourish as man one has to act well in these essentially human activities and establish the preconditions which allow for the flourishing of these human capacities.

Using Aristotle's methods one might say that utilitarian ethics or extreme hedonism is nonsense because it has nothing to do with the way everyday human beings do, as a matter of fact, behave or apprehend moral living. The pursuit of pleasure is unconscious, people consciously strive to be successful as human beings, whatever that may mean to them.

We need to get rid of useless dichotomies like "is/ought" and "prescriptive/descriptive". There is no "good life" other than a subjective, personal account arrived at by an arbitrary choice of values.

It's perspective. To live an ideal life an individual must come up with the definition of what an ideal life is. Then live it. But since this definition is subjective and open to opinions it is something each individual must find himself.

>>4686744

>Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from him who observes these things.

Aurelius had it. Become a stoic and start working to Ataraxia, simple as that.

>>4686922
>"In the Phaedo, Socrates says that no worse thing can happen to a person than becoming a despiser of arguments, a misologue, because such people are deprived of "science and of truth about the beings" The cause of misology, Socrates says, is not ignorance or egoism but artless confidence in the truth of arguments followed by complete and artless disillusiion once the trusted arguments fall to pieces. Expecting too much of logoi, whether ironically or not, is the opening move in the contemporary game that ends either with a wistful and admiring glance at the monastery pr with a carefree wink that we "should simply drop the distinction between rational judgement and cultural bias."

>>4686929
I don't think it's necessarily true that an ideal can't be universal. It's true that people value different things, but that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an ideal existing that transcends peoples' individual values.

>>4686922
>We need to get rid of useless dichotomies like "is/ought" and "prescriptive/descriptive"

How exactly are they "useless"?. They just describe what kinds of claims people make, they're extremely helpful and do not impede discussion at all. In fact they prevent mistakes when people are sure exactly which side of the gap they're talking about.

The reason we're invoking it in this discussion is because people think there are some objective standards of "good life", which you say are purely subjective. If there are objective standards then the is/ought is very relevant.

>>4686744
Being a blooddrunk Nietzschean is the closet we have anno this year.

>>4686907
What makes those people "excellent" is because they're of use to him. His interests are in line with those of society, so he is a conservative philosopher and his thinking promotes the status quo as inevitable, or at least preferable to alternatives.

>>4686939
Most of us are not Roman, tho

>>4686744
The "Good Life" is an abstract concept, right? It's not something that you can point to and measure in a laboratory. We're still arguing over what that term means, as you can see in this thread. To be empirical you need well defined variables, which we don't have.

You could certainly investigate the question of what people THINK is the "Good Life" empirically. You would almost certainly get huge differences in your answers, and they would be influenced by personal biases, culture of answerer, language used to phrase the question etc. Philosophers who think the Good Life is an ideal won't be moved by arguments that what people THINK is the good life carries over to what the good life actually is.

I personally feel epicurean hedonism is pretty close. Do the right things, and be happy.

I've read enough Sade to know what the good life is.

Have you?

There is no good life.

It is in our nature to always want more. The grass is always greener. There is no ideal for us because we will never be satisfied, unless we succumb to escapism.

>>4687144
So could it be said that the good life consists of always striving for more?

>>4687056
>What makes those people "excellent" is because they're of use to him. His interests are in line with those of society, so he is a conservative philosopher and his thinking promotes the status quo as inevitable, or at least preferable to alternatives.

It's because he was taught or otherwise learned through experience that people of such and such character are valuable. Values don't come from nowhere and they certainly don't derive from logical principles. As for his conservatism, you may be overstating it. He questions many widely held beliefs, bit importantly he does so only when a problem makes the belief present themselves as problematic. It's a move counter to method of modern philosophy which questions that which was never made questionable (for example when Descartes doubts the entire world.)

>>4687118
Except that happiness is not the nature of man. Man was made for cooperation with one another, we're social creatures. The good life is the one where you look towards the needs of your group, your society. In theory you will be treated well yourself by others. But even if everyone in your tribe was a douche, you are still bound to do the 'right thing'.

And the right thing is pretty basic. Don't kill, don't steal, don't rape, don't cheat on your bro with his wife. Very simple, and being selfish undermines your society at some level.

>>4687143
Having precise, down to the centimeter, measurements for all penises within the country.
You can say whatever you want about Sade and the power of names or whatever bullshit, the truth is he was a bookkeeper and the world's first amateur fiction writing autist.

>>4687209
Those rules are all negative and can be fulfilled, as was said earlier in the thread, by sitting at home all day doing nothing. That's not exactly a "good life" and certainly isn't a life looking towards the needs of society.

>>4687164
Values and teaching ethics are different things, though ("Do as I say, not as I do")
When someone, such as Aristotle, espouses that this and this or that is the good life, they're just trying to convince others to behave in a manner that they find pleasing.
Case in point, this guy:
>>4687209
Man cannot cooperate with others or exist in society without man already existing. Man predates his society and his groups, he predates reason and language. All of these things are simply tools developed to serve ends, but if you can convince a bunch of suckers to devote themselves to the means without considering the ends, then your free to reap the harvest without them noticing.

>>4687227
I suppose you're right, those are negative things. But philosophy often seems to focus on the negative. How can we not be bad, so that we can be good.

It really isn't that easy to figure out the positive things. But I suppose suppose that anything you can do cooperatively for the betterment of your society. Things that help people live, whether sustaining life or enhancing it, can be viewed as good.

Having a job, for instance. Whether you enjoy it or not, the more you're willing to sacrifice for the whole can be viewed as 'better'. Though that does come off as pretty grim. Having kids, and raising them well, could be another. And I think we all can agree that selfish parents are deplorable.

I would say it's more of a willingness to sacrifice. A degree of how 'good' a life you want to live. There is always going to be suffering in life, even Bill Gates probably has his down moments and certainly did before he started Microsoft.

>>4687228

Reasoning and language were always there. Even body language is cooperation, and the more cooperation between people the better. Even animals cooperate, and are superior the more they do. Dogs, for instance.

And while there are always going to be selfish people who take advantage of those willing to sacrifice, that doesn't mean that the sacrifices are losing out. This is about personal fulfillment, and in the end the exploiters will die just as much as the sacrifices.

We can't have a society if we're in a zero sum game, where everyone is worried about being a sucker.

TL:DR You lead the life you want to, but it is better to deny the self more than it is to indulge.

>>4687209
I think you need to look at what epicurean hedonism means. It's not fuck bitches, get money. It's finding pleasure through limiting painful desires, acquiring peace and developing oneself.

>If what's right is obvious, it's not part of the good life
What.

>>4687252
Except that denying pain can still be selfish.

How about a person who refuses to risk his life to get people out of a burning car? Isn't the nobler/better answer to risk serious injury or death?

>>4687227
>sitting home all day isn't a good life
What if you're satisfied with it though?

Plenty of people who are out and about and troubled. Why must the good life involve contribution to the community? And what of people who contribute, but in a damaging way?

Say a philosopher who's flawed reasoning is very influential and results in destruction.

>>4687247
There's some truth to what you're saying, but I think you're taking the social aspect too far. We're humans, we're very social creatures, but we're not bees. There is still a self that must be nourished, sometimes at the cost of society, and sacrificing every need for others is not something I would say most people think of as fulfilling or satisfying.

>>4687265
You're not taking away, but you're not contributing either. And you could argue that eating other peoples food, and somehow having the money (probably provided for you by the state/your parents) means you're automatically indebted to society to do something productive.

Call it the original sin of obligation. You were made for cooperation, so you have to do it.

>>4687254
Living a life of peace through pruning harmful desires and refusing to help someone whose life is in danger are not totally analogous anon.

>>4687268
Well I know for a fact most wouldn't, but I think there can be a happiness found if you subscribe to that stoic mindset. And at the most extreme of the extent you can take the logic, everyone is helping everyone else and thus there is no real unhappiness.

>>4687276
I would say that most people, who aren't sociopaths, have an inborn desire to help one another. Especially people we care about. If your desire is to help them, at the harm to yourself, wouldn't Epicurus say you should get rid of that?

>>4687247
You show me a protozoa using reason and language, and I'll personally track you down and suck your dick.
And don't try to play word games. Language is an ape tool. A dog barking or wagging its tail is instinctively performing an action in immediate accordance with it's surroundings. It isn't language or communication until it possesses the capacity to express things that aren't there. Dogs do exist in community with one another, but this is just a tool to achieve their ends. The pack formed as a result of evolutionary pressure, but it has no inherent value.

Also,
>superior
By your standard. Because it is useful to you. Those unreasoning uncommunicating protozoa have been around just as they are now for billions of years. Alligators, sharks and cockroaches have existed in their perfect, anti-social form for millions of years. Extinction events that took all of your social animals to the ground left them untouched.

>>4687274
>And you could argue that eating other peoples food, and somehow having the money (probably provided for you by the state/your parents) means you're automatically indebted to society to do something productive.
And people can make money by doing something a machine can accomplish, for instance scanning barcodes over a reader. Or do productive things that generate cash and benefit no-one, say making email spam or marketing penis enhancement pills. Is non-beneficial interaction/productivity always closer to the good life than solo neutrality?

>You were made for cooperation, so you have to do it
You don't have to do it. It's possible for people to live solitary lives, although very rare.

>>4687228

Values are the content of ethics and ethical discourse. To say one action is preferable to another is to say that one is more valuable than another.

I agree that he's trying to convince others to behave in a way that he argues to be better and more valuable than alternatives. My point is that ethics need not be grounded by anything beyond the fact that we do value certain traits in other people because of our biological and cultural inheritance. This doesn't mean that we cannot rationally discuss ethical matters, it only means that we should not seek external, absolute justifications.

Before there were homo sapiens there were lower apes who, at a very basic level, form communities similar to ours and communicate with simple language. They're capable of teaching and learning. "Tribes" of apes have their own preferred methods for hunting/scavenging. They as much as we do, inherit cultural forms, which when enlightened by a higher form of reason become identical with ours. Remember that Aristotle was also a biologist. He considered man as an animal and not as an entity wholly separate from their domain. He knew that we had instincts and capacities that were inborn.

I don't think it is valuable to reject everything because some ethical mores may have been put in place to benefit the powerful.

>>4687292
How about this. How we choose to divide ourselves can represent a true break of the 'whole' with the 'other whole'. Nations do it, in which despite both being made up of people we have soldiers killing one another without using putting the soldiers in jail. Killing is a asocial activity when done within the confines of a society.

So those protozoa, which is the most extreme example one can come up with for 'alone', are societies of one. I personally think there's a bit of hubris to assume humans are somehow magically better than anything else. But I'm a bit of a nihilist so I don't think anything has an inherent value anyway.

I meant superior in terms of what we can examine as a better quality of life. While everything dies, the desire to surrender your own life or momentary happiness is a very laudable thing in my opinion. The dogs who cooperate are better than the lone wolf. It's a combination of effort, and through humanity we've done what nothing else could through even greater cooperation.

So cooperation is useful to everyone, and the more you can get from a person the better the whole is. The people who would exploit the willingness to sacrifice are the most detestable, and you almost always see that in history.

>>4687281
>If your desire is to help them, at the harm to yourself, wouldn't Epicurus say you should get rid of that?
Not necessarily. He felt that living a pleasurable life requires living a just life. If helping someone was just, it ultimately contributes to your contentment and peace.

>>4687314
But the justice is being based on sacrifice. So those two ideals appear to be contradictory. If what is 'best' is to concern yourself with your own happiness how can sacrificing your physical well-being or even life also be good?

Another situation. You choose between feeding yourself and feeding another person. Do you have a duty to yourself first, or the other person first?

>>4687144
Perhaps... But I don't believe this would lead to the 'good' life as one would typically imagine it. Not a place of peace or satisfaction.
Activity is preferable to complacency on the scale of good and bad I'd say.

>>4687297
If you were born, and then dumped on the ground by your mother you would die. It isn't possible for a person to exist without taking anything from anyone else.

And it is a bit subjective to label penis enhancement pills as being non-productive. If you can come up with a pill that makes your penis bigger I think you'd find a lot of people much happier. That they're scams are what makes them wrong. So marketing for a scam also becomes wrong.

>>4687324
>That they're scams are what makes them wrong.
Right. But being a scammer is taking part in society in some way. Simple cooperation from people with misguided ethics doesn't seem a strong candidate for the good life. So you're saying you must cooperate and do it ethically in order to live the good life?

What of the person who contributes, has good intentions, good reasoning for his intentions but disastrous outcome of his actions, affecting either himself or society. Why is this more of a good life than the solitary one?

>>4687350
If something happened by sheer chance through no fault of the person who did it then I can't see anyone blaming that person. Complete accidents, though. But those seem more like random acts of god, like a tree falling on your friend when you go hiking in the woods. You shouldn't blame yourself for something you couldn't control in the first place.

But something like going for a drive and your car crashing due to a maintenance and killing your friend could be construed, and rightly, as your fault. Since a part of your job of owning a car is to keep it working. If you kill someone because of your inattention you do have some responsibility for that act occuring.

>>4687319
There isn't a black and white contradiction
there, though there is tension.

You're not obliged to save anothers life if such an action stands a reasonable chance of depriving you of your own. An epicurean might do it, because acting nobly gives them pleasure.

>Feed yourself or another
As in, until you die? I think you'd be perfectly justified in feeding yourself as an Epicurean. Epicurean philosophy would also allow you to feed the other person, if you felt that more just, wise and pleasing though.

>>4687306
The OP wasn't about ethics, though. It was about the "good life." The two things are necessarily separate, ethics is what you argue other people should be doing, the good life is satiating yourself. Failure (or refusal) to understand this division is what makes these arguments fall to pieces.
It goes back to the earlier post about attaching an electrode to someone's brain. They now have pleasure without penalty, and they're certainly not doing anything to harm anyone. They're also not contributing to society in anyway, just vanishing into a lifetime of masturbation.

>>4687309
We don't send our soldiers to jail (that often), but nations are more than willing to hang the soldiers of their enemies. The surrender of others is praised because it benefits the person who is surrendered to, just like the betrayal of a rival nation will be praised by the nation who benefits from the betrayal.
As for whether that surrender of life is beneficial? Well, you'd have to ask one of those poor bastards buried in mass graves throughout the world whether he thinks he's better off now that he's died for his country.

>>4687274
A contract signed by someone under the age of majority or under duress is not binding. A debt of infinite dollars is a contradiction. A contract without specific limits (of duration or payment) may or may nor be upheld, but it is a very slimy thing to try and get someone to sign.

>>4687228


if they didint find it 'pleasing' in some sense, they would not do it. youre mind-fucked by enlightenment modes of thinking vis ethics (ie, the only way to be 'truly' good/ethical is to do a thing in spite of ones sentiment [no this does not necessarily imply vulgar egoism]).

people have a will-to-right, they can indeed do a thing in spite of devalidation, negative sentiment, or capital deprivation, *if they are convinced as to its veracity/righteousness/superiority*, thus routing it through the existential impulse to be *right* above all (example par excellence, anti-natalists).