Zhou Lian on Happiness, Justice, and Philosophy

Transcript *This transcript was edited by Vistopia and does not contain the complete talk. I. What Is Philosophy? We can give philosophy a very simple definition: the love of wisdom. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato famously said that philosophy begins in wonder. His student Aristotle later repeated the idea: now as at the beginning, it was through wonder that people first began to philosophize. Philosophical thought begins in wonder at things around us that we do not understand, then advances gradually toward larger questions. Philosophy wonders first whether the external world truly exists. It also wonders about other minds, the meaning of words, whether free will exists, standards of right and wrong, justice, death, the meaning of life, and much more. As the German philosopher Nietzsche said, the person who never ceases to experience, see, hear, doubt, hope, and dream about what is extraordinary is a philosopher. Philosophical questions have no standard answers. Precisely for that reason, they can broaden our vision, open established patterns of thought and new possibilities for reflection, and free us from dreary, rigid, dogmatic ideologies. They let us look at and question the world again with doubt, scrutiny, and curiosity. II. What Is Happiness? In Aristotle's view, goods form a hierarchy. The lowest are “chosen for the sake of something else.” Intermediate goods are “chosen for themselves and also for the sake of happiness,” such as honor, pleasure, and the virtues. Moving upward and asking why at every step, we eventually reach the highest good. Aristotle says that people agree on its name: eudaimonia, conventionally translated as “happiness.” Its defining feature is self-sufficiency: it is “always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.” Happiness is the ultimate end pursued in human life. It is the highest good you can conceive. Ordinary people, for example, identify happiness with visible things such as pleasure and wealth; they take a life of enjoyment to be a happy life. Some identify political life with happiness and pursue honor as happiness. Philosophers, by contrast, believe that the contemplative life is happiest. How to translate eudaimonia has long been disputed. Proposed renderings include happiness, pleasure, flourishing, well-being, and success. Happiness is the most common, but in the past thirty years many scholars have questioned it. John Cooper, for example, argues that happiness in English usually describes a subjective psychological state, which conflicts with Aristotle's ethical position. Cooper believes the better translation is human flourishing. Aristotle was no philosopher detached from ordinary life. Although he regarded the “contemplative life” as happiest, he acknowledged that only philosophers could live it. For ordinary people, a happy life requires both “external goods” and “internal goods.” Internal goods include tranquility of mind and health of body; external goods include a stable and secure environment. Aristotle writes: “Happiness evidently also needs external goods. For it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper means. Many noble activities require friends, wealth, or political power as instruments. And there are things whose absence clouds our flourishing, such as good birth, good children, and beauty. A person who is extremely ugly, low-born, childless, and alone is not what we call happy. …… As we have said, then, happiness needs good fortune in addition. This is why people identify it with good luck.” This passage tells us that ordinary people need the security of external goods and, especially, good fortune if they are to attain happiness. The question is this: when misfortune strikes, should we attribute it to bad luck or to social injustice? Martha Nussbaum writes: “Once we recognize that the world we live in simply is this way and cannot be changed, we can rest and surrender ourselves to it. But if we believe that evil, ignorance, and indifference may lie behind the suffering we witness, then in one sense that news is good news, because it means there is hope for change.” Someone may ask: where exactly does this “hope for change” lie? At this point we can introduce the concept of justice. In one sense, the central purpose of pursuing social justice is to minimize the arbitrary effects of luck on human lives. III. A Just Society: One Whose Institutions Respect Everyone Hope for change lies not only in individual effort but also in reforming social institutions. The renowned American political philosopher John Rawls begins A Theory of Justice with the claim: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.” Justice directs its sword at social institutions because those institutions exert a “profound, pervasive, and present from the start” influence on an entire life. The point is easy to grasp. Turn the clock back three hundred years and nearly half the people in thi…