the reflective life living wisely with our limits may 2008

[...]... depends on the content of the good life, or the nature of human flourishing If the best life for you is the life of perfecting your talents, then try for greatness If the best life is a life of pleasure, you should find reliable sources of pleasure and forgo perfection To know how to live, we need to know what we’re aiming at, and this is what a good theory will define: the target The problem with this... which it makes sense to aim, and there must be reasons for cultivating it that people can grasp The reasons we have to cultivate the virtues essential to the reflective life derive from our interest in living well It makes sense to cultivate these virtues because we will live better from our own point of view with them than without them Unlike the Aristotelian account, the account of virtue I favor is... live your life well by doing what you want or by letting your feelings be your guide; a good life for you is one in which you feel good, get what you desire, or enjoy your experiences There is a long philosophical tradition that follows the first path, putting reason in the driver’s seat and identifying the person (and hence the person’s point of view) with the rational or reflective part Plato used the. .. according to which the good for me is what the ideal me would recommend for the actual me (e.g., Railton 1986) Again, while such theories may provide a compelling analysis of the good, the move to an advice model doesn’t help when our questions are about how to live, given our distance from the ideal ⁶ In my preferred terms, both reflective wisdom (which has to do with living your own life well) and moral... pursuing Second, the focus on the process motivates an exploration of the nature of wisdom, which is interesting in its own right Third, an investigation of the process may shed light on the nature of the target To explain these advantages further, it will help to say more about the approach I am taking As I have explained, the primary focus of this book is the process of how to live, rather than the target... goal-based theory of the good life To put it another way, we begin with the question ‘‘How should I live?’’ instead of questions like ‘‘What is a happy life? ’’ or ‘‘What is a good life for a human being?’’ My account of how to live well 4 The Reflective Life and Reflective Values is addressed to the first-person point of view; it invokes the perspective of the deliberator It is an account that aims to answer the. .. focused their attention on metaethical analysis of the questions being asked and the status of the possible answers to them.²³ If I am right, then there is another role for Humean ethicists: by drawing out the implications of our commitments in light of our ideals and aspirations about how to live, we can derive normative conclusions about the reasons we have to choose to live one way rather than another... have these concerns, who do not care about what reasons they have to live one way rather than another, I have no argument to compel them to care I do hope that the description of the reflective life I provide is attractive in its own right, and that it will therefore be natural to identify with the concerns that motivate this characterization The concerns I identify as the concerns we have about our. .. person’s attitudes toward it Among these theories there are two front-runners: the Informed Desire Account and the Authentic Happiness Account The former tells us that the good for you is the fulfillment of the desires you would have if you were fully informed.⁸ The latter, according to its main proponent L W Sumner (1996), tells us that the good for a person is her authentic happiness, which in turn... by defining the target or aim of life. ¹⁰ If so, what reason do we have to start here rather than there? There is a rich literature on well-being and the prudential good that focuses on defining the target Why not advance that literature rather than change the topic? Very briefly, my first answer is that the guidance we get from a theory like mine is better than the guidance we can infer from a theory of . depends on the content of the good life, or the nature of human flourishing. If the best life for you is the life of perfecting your talents, then try for greatness. If the best life is a life of.