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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2748 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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“But it makes me happy” —> drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?

This is precisely why philosophers go with "human flourishing" instead of happiness.

Once you accept that happiness is not unitary or reducible to just hedonism this hardly seems a question.

I think this just moves the question down the line. Of what purpose is human flourishing? If flourishing is important because it makes humans happy, then happiness is the point. What is this thing that makes humans unhappy that they must do out of obligation, and what underpins it in the face of the inevitability of extinction of all humans across an infinite time span?

Of what purpose is human flourishing? If flourishing is important because it makes humans happy, then happiness is the point.

"Flourishing" is eudaimonia/"happiness", it's just that translating it that way for moderns seems to bring to mind hedonism or fleeting emotions. Which is how you get the drug question. Or humorous misunderstandings like this.

If you don't take happiness to be the mere sensation of pleasure at any given moment (which always abates and you will always want more of) "why do drugs?" has an obvious answer

Well, because part of my flourishing is cultivating a variety of virtues and capacities - health, discipline, familial relations, friendships - that are all correlated with my well-being and, ugh, "happiness" in a deeper sense. Taking drugs provides me with short-term hedons but harms my ability to do that and may make me - and those around me - much unhappier in the long run.

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