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Notes -
This "ostensibly" is doing quite a bit of work.
Trying to answer "what is good in life" with any rigour is not possible in the format of a board like this. You may equally try to answer in the same space a question like "by the way, what actually is everything?"
To avoid condescension and make clear what I mean, let's even tease apart your first postulate here:
Why is the goodness or otherwise of life applicable to groups of "humans" rather than individuals? Now it might be or it might not, I'm not taking a position, just pointing out that you're implicitly smuggling in a sort of moral realism here, a sense that "the good" is a discoverable truth that's the same for many people, as opposed to say an "invented" individual preference or something else.
The Good is what people want, really? Is that the relation you're grounding it in? You sure? What about people who want bad things etc. Okay, so we'll only trust the wanting of sensible people. But how do we decide which reasonable group's wanting we should trust to define the Good, when the Good itself is the criterion we'll have to use to define reasonableness? (This is close to something called the Euthyphro problem, FYI)
Do they? What does "maximisation" really mean here, is this like arithmetical summing of good to get the most utils? What's the conversion ratio of big boons to little ones? How many fun nights out does it take to equal me bearing a child?
Is this just a synoym for "the Good"? If not, what is it?
Usw, the point is getting clear now!
It’s definitely possible to discourse on it with sufficient rigor to come away with more clarity than before. The Socratic dialogues are essentially that; the Summa is almost that. We’re not trying to Wittgenstein our postulates together to form a Tractatus. The alternative of never (not once) attempting to circumscribe how humans should live means we will forever be doomed to uncertainty on political or cultural shoulds.
That many different cultures developed to include the promotion of certain emotional states and the negation of other emotional states is evidence that humans are sufficiently similar that we can talk about them as a class. We can also use words that describe the deeper patterns of the human condition, like “desire” and “satisfaction” and “memory” to make progress on the question. Further, we can look at human narratives of people who have positive “life-changing realizations”: what do these have in common? Generally an aversion to addictions and an attraction to “deeper” emotional states involving gratitude and awe. And the science of well-being supports this. We can also ask, “when humans feel that their life is missing something, what do they generally desire more of?” You don’t have a lot of people lament that they have too few addictions or pains, or too many good memories with friends. These clue us into universal patterns of the human condition.
That’s not quite my view. “We can imagine that if this ideally-lived person were at a dinner party, he would not wish to replace his life with anyone else present ever — this is what we mean by ideal. We can also imagine that a reasonable person would be convinced of the superiority of his lived life.” So it’s not about want exactly. When we’re confronted with another person we can judge their way of life. Most reasonable people have had the experience of meeting people who are living better than themselves and living worse. For instance, someone who loves video games might meet someone whose happiness comes off as much greater; even though he personally wants to play video games, he senses a superior way of life. I think this is a universal experience. When people watch David Goggins, they don’t want to do what he does, but they want to want to do what he does. Something something Lacanian desire.
Phrased like this it seems paradoxical, but we can determine reasonableness by the ability to make accurate predictions. This is really the problem of all authority, not just “authority on the good”. I trust that the bridge won’t collapse, but isn’t this a case of “trusting the reasonable group’s [definition of] the reasonable”, namely bridge construction)? But we don’t even need to “trust a group”; an inquiry into the Good can be used by an individual subjectively to determine what is best for himself given the arguments available. Almost every reasonable person upon reading the scientific papers today would say that awe and gratitude are positive emotions to cultivate — this is not just common subjective sense, but evidenced from testimonies and major world religions. The paradox is interesting to dwell on but not actually applicable to how humans make decisions in the real world, no? But I could be misunderstanding the heart of the argument.
Can i just say, absolute banger of a reply (and definitely better than chatGPT, to whose writing I've been comparing literally everything else today)
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