"Is freedom always better than a lack of freedom?" Well, doesn’t the answer to this question depend on what sort of freedom is at stake and what one might receive in compensation for losing that particular sort of freedom? No human being is free to do anything she might happen to want to do, nor should we be moved to tears by this fact. I am not free to fly like a bird, nor to travel to the Sun. In the US, I am not free to kill openly whomever I want and stay out of jail. Yet even in jail, I retain certain freedoms: to pace my cell, to think about my mother, to count to a million, to rearrange my clothing in my drawers as many times as I like, to talk or not to talk to my cell-mate. Of course, we never hold up a person in jail as a paradigm of freedom, but this is not because we believe that a person in jail has no freedoms, but because we believe that he lacks important freedoms that the rest of us on the outside thankfully possess. So what makes a particular freedom an important freedom?...

And here’s another way in which focusing on the negative traits of others serves a self-defensive function. If I notice how virtuous, intelligent, witty, and beautiful X is, then I might be forced to notice how my own traits pale in comparison. In contrast, if I notice the peccadillos of X, then I can take great satisfaction in the fact that I’m superior in at least these trivial respects.

On Aristotle’s view, in order to determine whether Bob is living a goodlife, we first need to determine what kind of creature Bob is– e.g., ishe a human being, a dog, or an oak tree. We then would judge thequality of his life against a species standard of flourishing. Forexample, our view of what it would mean for a dog to live a good lifeis informed by our views about the nature of dogs. We tend to think ofa dog who lives its life in a cage as not living a good life for a dog,even if we imagine that it is given sufficient drugs to feel nodiscontent or frustration. A good life for a dog, we think, would beone thatinvolved companionship, running around, barking at threatening noisesand strangers, and so forth. Because a dog in a cage on drugs is notgiven the opportunity to engage in doggy activities, it is notfunctioning as a dog at a high level, and so, is not living a good lifefor a dog. If Bob is a dog, Aristotle would say, then we would judgehis quality of life as good just in case he had a lot of...

One way of thinking of a perfect world is as a world that cannot be improved upon in any way. There are no problems to be solved, because everything is as it should be. But paradoxically, perhaps, such a perfect world would not be perfect for us. We’ve evolved to be the ultimate problem solvers, and we take a great deal of satisfaction in our successful problem solving. If there were no longer any problems to be solved, there would no longer be anything left for us to do. And how perfect can life be if there’s no point to doing anything? Having said that, I think that I would opt for a world in which there was always enough food, no war, and eminently trustworthy people. Such improvements seem only to eliminate a lot of pointless suffering, and there would still be plenty of interesting problems remaining to be solved. Whether the elimination of death would be a genuine improvement is unclear to me. Bernard Williams has argued (“The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality...

Aristotle argued that it is irrational to want prestige or honor for its own sake. Why? In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Aristotle asks you to imagine yourself honored by people forwhom you have no respect and who honor you for attributes that you donot believe are particularly worthwhile (perhaps your fingerprintpattern (my example, not Aristotle's)). Would you value their honor? No, he predicts, you would disdain it. It would beworthless, unless perhaps your prestige in their minds gave you powerto do something that you thought was worthwhile. What, then, about poweritself? Is that valuable for its own sake? Well, let’s imagine havingimmense power. In particular, let’s imagine that you can make anybodydo anything you want her to do. But let’s imagine also that you can’tthink of anything worthwhile that you want her to do. Is your power ofany value to you in these circumstances? Again, the answer seems to be,no. Power is valuable only to the extent that it can be used to gainsomething else of...

Alex is suggesting that unless something is “important, period,” nothing can be important at all in a way that gives meaning to human lives. We might understand Alex’s argument for this conclusion as a kind of reductio of my suggestion that I could be reasonably satisfied with the meaning of my life if I were important to things that I cared about, things that I believed were themselves of value and importance. If, as Alex adds, the value of those to whom I am important depends on their importance to something else of value, then unless something ’s value is a matter of its “importance, period,” my life’s meaning never gets grounded: the value of my life depends on my importance to Xs who are valuable because they are important to Ys who are valuable because they are important to Zs, and so on ad infinitum . However, this regress goes on ad infinitum only if it can never turn back on itself. Certainly, I wouldn’t think that my life had much meaning if I were important only to...

I think that it’s very difficult to make sense of the idea that I amimportant, period. It used to bother me that I couldn’t make sense ofthis idea, but now I’m perfectly content with the idea that I’mimportant to those I care about, or that I make an importantcontribution to projects that I care about. I’d like to think thatthese people and projects are themselves important, and I think thatthey are, but only because they are important to themselves or toothers– that is, genuinely important to themselves or to others, not just thought by me (or others) to be important in these ways.