Engaging With Philosophy to Bring About "The Good Life"

I was often reading the new book The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning in public. The bright yellow cover and title would seem to always pull a few people in. But I was surprised at the tone of some of the comments, as they were a little aggressive: “The good life has a method, huh? Yeah, how does that work?” One question got laughs from others: “The author is some kind of extra-good person or something?”

These defensive reactions might explain why we have not had a book like this before. I have always wished someone would write something exactly like this. Maybe they also help explain why we prefer to learn about happiness from others' survey answers, or why we seem to be more comfortable weighing in on how children should be taught rather than (first) answering deep ethical questions about our own choices. Even a title that references “the good life” seems to bring out some competitiveness or insecurity. So that this book is anything but off-putting, that it would have won over those skeptics before they finished Chapter One, is something else.

For a book like this to not be off-putting, it must be encouraging, nonintimidating, nonthreatening, and challenging in a way so many self-help books are not. I’ll end my commentary with more on this, but I am also fairly certain that it also takes having authors about whom you might honestly respond (when quizzed on the yellow book you are reading):

Well, frankly, to me, yes, they do seem like unusually good people. Normal, but really pretty ethical. And I’d say it has to do with the ethical reflection practices they recommend in here. I’d like to try them for myself!

To the earlier question, I’d say,

Imagine your philosophy class from college were focused on the times philosophers had some advice on how we should live, and the tests were on whether the ideas actually applied to your life.

How They Do It

How do the authors do it? It is a complex formula. To begin, modeling being very open, at the start of the book, the authors explain their methodology and aims quite plainly. They stick to what they promise. They also provided the book with a framework rather than treating it like an anthology of theories on ethics. We use anthologies in ethics courses (asking if Kant, Mill, or Aristotle is right about ethics), but I (and I am sure, the authors) sense that students get less of a chance to practice any particular view with that approach. But previous philosophical views on money, work, relationships, God, suffering, and death are certainly not tossed aside for something else. The authors just ingeniously weave these views in.

Not the Surveyed Life

And, at the outset, Sullivan and Blaschko suggest that what they are offering is an alternative to “the surveyed life.” The authors point out, no matter how much we learn through research and surveys, a premise will always be missing. Why should we emulate those being studied or assume that they are living the good life, whether they say they are or not? Instead, they are saying, you need to figure that answer out for yourself, and along with previous thinkers on the issue.

The Good Life

Specifically, the framework that "The Good Life Method" uses from virtue ethics is that we are the kind of creatures who respond to goal-setting and that there are better and worse ways to reach one’s life goal, given some regularities in us humans (p. 14). When it comes to deep life questions the authors say we all give varied answers but “clear patterns emerge” (p. 116). For example, cultivating various virtues is of assistance. The authors also seem to regard virtue ethics as overly focused on first-person concerns, and as a kind of supplement (though, of course, some virtue ethics include these concerns as well) the book has sections that take up consideration of what it takes to commit to a community and what it takes to develop one’s religious faith.

The virtue ethics framework is in some ways unobtrusive. Readers have non–virtue-based views about ethics to consider throughout, for example. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a reader jumping ship because the very framework being used is…well, that which suggests testing ideas for yourself, in your life, is necessary to ethics. I don’t think of this as being hidden (it’s stated outright), and it just seems like if a person finds a personal and narrative-centered approach to ethics inappropriate, they would just put the book down.

But I hardly think this would even occur to someone who had not already been trained in ethical theory. It’s in that training that someone would come to believe that ethics ought to be a deductive matter or in need of codification, that it requires the impartial analysis of cases, or that it is a matter of expert analysis. Or perhaps the background is in a discipline in which ethics is merely studied as preference among other preferences, and that we often delude ourselves with self-talk, especially about value. Then, perhaps, one might think examination of one’s own reasoning is to no point. But this position seems a little strange in light of how tempting and fruitful the questions in the book are. The book itself becomes some support for the general appeal of a general virtue ethics framework.

And this is not so minor, if we are thinking about ethical theory, because descriptions of virtue ethics can put it in a very poor light. (“There are no right answers. Everything depends. It assumes some kind of self-transparency.”) The "Good Life Method" puts virtue ethics in a good light, illustrating Kristján Kristjánsson’s recent description with all the common sense of a person unafraid of working through GLM’s self-examinations: a virtue ethics framework sees ethical decision-making as “critically and experientially grounded” and “improvised and unforeseeably context dependent.”

Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Murdoch, Mill, James, Baldwin, Du Bois

"The Good Life Method" has a two-part way of getting readers to work on their own answers. It is hard to compliment one part over the other as the book's capsule summaries of philosophical views are really nice. From our classes, professors know how learning the views of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Murdoch, Mill, James, Baldwin, or Du Bois has a gentle, indirect way of getting students to wonder at the deep questions. The professor’s views certainly take a backseat, and students get to “try on” views that might never have dreamed up themselves, each set contributing some new challenge to the others, some new questions.

As I read these summaries of philosophy, it seemed to me every part, every emphasis, every line even, had been chosen due to student audiences giving ready feedback to what must be their favorite professors. "The Good Life Method" has distilled these views so that they can present what would impress us and keep our attention. There is no droning on; there is nothing superfluous to the book’s objective.

Authoring Your Own Philosophical Apologies

The other strategy is to associate the consideration of others' stories and ideas about how to live with the practice of engaging in “philosophical apology.” Writing answers to questions about our own lives is a way to become articulate in our answers to big deep questions, so that encourages work on coherence. The writing requests also means one has time to reflect (or “look again”) on both what you’ve experienced and even on previous answers.

The authors insert their own examples of doing these exercises, and I found them incredibly moving. They are far more open and honest than you expect out of an author, and they also make sure to not be describing triumphs. Instead, they share times when they were attempting to be philosophical about what they were facing. In fact, they are not even reports of “interfering with running code”; they are the thoughts of a person wondering if and how they should do that. I found it a supremely gentle approach to encouraging moral reflection. There were no false promises, nothing strident or shaming about it.

The authors of course did not make anything seem easy (this book, again, is not off-putting). But they do have a clearer take on why ethics matters than is common, and, without it, I would not be so sure the methods they recommend work.