Can philosophy help us live 'better' lives?

Comments

I hope so. And I think so. Especially if we understand philosophy in a general way to involve careful reflection on what we should be doing with our lives and how we should structure our relationships and societies, I think it can help us live better lives. While reflection isn't always good (e.g., in the middle of making a tennis shot or a guitar solo), surely it is often necessary in order to see how our ideas of what it means to lead a good life and create a good community are consistent with each other and with what other people in our community think. And when we see that they are inconsistent, we can consider how best to reconcile them to find what might be called reflective equilibrium. Another way of putting these points is to say that, whether we know it or not, we all have a philosophy (a set of ideas of which we are more or less aware) that guides our decision-making and personal interactions. It seems that trying to figure out what our philosophy is will make it more likely that we will live better lives at least in the sense of living lives that better reflect our own philosophy. (Of course, some people are very aware of their philosophy but have very bad ideas about how to live, so self-reflection alone is not sufficient for leading a good life.)

OK, but maybe you are asking whether philosophy, as it is practiced by professional philosophers, can help us live better lives (I'm not sure why you put 'better' in quotation marks--perhaps because you worry that better and worse are subjective, in which case, I hope philosophy can make us lead (for real!) better lives in part by helping us see that some lives really are better than others--e.g., Elie Wiesel has really led a better life than Bernie Madoff). The answer to this question is harder, but I still hope and think that the answer is 'yes.' I hope that professional philosophers can help students do the sort of reflection suggested above and do it better than they might have otherwise. I hope we can help scientists think more clearly about some of the problems they consider (e.g., in my own case, the issue of free will and responsible agency). And I hope we can help politicians, lawyers, doctors, secret agents, etc.--the people who most directly influence the way we structure our societal relations--think more clearly about the reasons they are doing what they are doing. By helping systematize our thinking about certain subjects--e.g., what a theory is, what a political philosophy is, what counts as knowledge--I think we can, at a large scale, better achieve what I suggested above we need to do at the individual level: reflect on what we should be doing with our lives and how we should structure our social relationships in order to make them internally consistent and maximally effective.

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