 Hello. This is another one of my doctors have the chalk and talk video responses. And in this one I am responding yet again to a question that was asked to me in BU, a very interesting question. One that's a bit personal, but actually for me as a philosopher, necessarily leads into talking about some orderings of goods, some understandings of goods, some orderings of one's life. So the question is, what is your favorite thing about life so far? And that's an interesting question. I am 40 years old, so I am at what you could say is the peak in some ways, right? They say it's all downhill from here. As far as mental acuities go, for philosophers, historians, people who are working in humanities actually, they're still on the rise until they say 50, 60, sometimes even 70s. Physically, though, you are in decline. And it's also a good age in the heart because by the time that you're 40, you've experienced, most likely, quite a few ups and downs. You've experienced some successes, some setbacks. You have embraced and endorsed goods which turned out to be somewhat like fool's gold, not quite as valuable as you assume they were. You may have sacrificed some goods that appear to be more worthwhile for other goods. You have learned some valuable life lessons. You've also, hopefully, by the time you're 40, you've seen a lot of other people go through these as well and you've reflected on their experience. So that opens up the possibility, in my view, of developing a better appreciation of what we call ethics in the very broad sense. How should you structure your life? How should you arrange the goods and the bad things within your life? How should you order them? How should you rank them? How should you prioritize them? Being 40 years old opens up the possibility of seeing things in a somewhat clearer light than when I was 20, than when I was 30. So what is your favorite thing about life so far? The answer to that for me, at one point, was studying philosophy and uncovering the thoughts and the dialogues and the interplay of many brilliant minds. Now, actually, if I had to give an answer, and it might be different 10 years from now as well, what is my favorite thing about life so far? I would say the persons in my mind. I've learned that people are more important than ideas, that there is a greater value that resides in each person, that there is any abstraction, and that ultimately what makes life most valuable is developing relationships. Now, I also sort of let the cat out of the bag. I am a Christian philosopher, so God is somewhere in there. I'll also admit that God is certainly at this point in my life much less central than within that ordering of persons, than God ought to be. Certainly, if I compare myself to the philosophers who I work on, like St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas and earlier Christian philosophers like Hilary Aquinas and people like that, I mean that is just me. Let's talk some philosophy. So, we have a whole lot of varieties of goods. There are many different ways in which we understand the multiplicity of goods. The listing that I'm choosing here is actually taken apart from the way in which people like Dietrich von Hildenbrand have thought about using some of their vocabulary, but also some of that Aristotle uses. I'm also taking something from Aleister McIntyre, or he's not the originator of this idea. Classically, you could distinguish goods into categories. So, what are some of the big categories? Needfulness, things that are necessary for us, things that if you lack, you suffer some sort of evil. Some of these are so basic that if you lack, then you die. Food, water, adequate shelter. Some of them may take you a while to die. If you lack of health, ultimately reduces your time of life and it also reduces the quality of your life. There are certain goods that you need in order to have a place, in order to enjoy other goods, but they're not particularly great in and of themselves. I mean, you could live off of a very dull diet, but that would be something very different than pleasant things, wouldn't it? It would be needful things, but not pleasant things. Now think of all the different pleasant things that you have experienced. Were I to do that and I actually run them through my mind, we would need a lot of hours of dead air, me just sitting here thinking, remembering, imagining. There are many different pleasant things, and I'm ignoring the fact right now that we find different things pleasant that perhaps you don't enjoy cigars the way that I do or the taste of a bitter stout, the way that I do, and I may not enjoy the taste of some things the way you do. And certainly I would find very few people who share exactly my taste of music or literature or art. Not that big of a problem. Point is, there are many different pleasant things. That's another thing to consider in the range of us. There are other things that we can look back on over time and say, I thought that was a bad thing at the time, but it was necessary for my growth. Necessary in a different way than needful things. Needful things, if you don't have them, you're not going to live, you're not going to live in certain ways that allow you to experience our goods. There are other things that provide you with what feel like setbacks or frustrations, but they're needed in order to allow you to develop further. For example, one of the things that I do agree with Lawrence Colberg on is that if we want to think about moral development, one of the ways in which we do develop morally is through conflict. When we disagree with each other and we have to defend our views on situations and we say, that person is a bad person because they did this, this, and this and that's bad because of this, this, and this. And then somebody else says, no, no, you're wrong about that. And then we think about it. And sometimes we are wrong. I've had the experience of actually being kicked out of my mentor's office one time when I was a deconstructionist and I was pulling some Derridaean things on him. He just told me, get out of here. And I was shocked and hurt and surprised, but I did have an important moment in my development. So there are many things that made us wrong. Not all of them are painful. There are what we can call intrinsically good things. And again, I'm not worrying about the fact that we find different things intrinsically good that we appreciate things differently, that there may be some aspects of some objects that you grasp that I don't get and vice versa. There are some things that are intrinsically good, that we find the goodness of them, the goodness that is there in them and not just because they're pleasant, not just because they're necessary, not just because they're useful for something. There is something compelling about them. There is something that reaches out to us, something that impresses that upon us. And there can also be some things that are intrinsically evil or there could be intrinsically good things that are very vulnerable and we can catch sense of that vulnerability we want to protect it. But the idea is that there are some things whose goodness resides in them. Now some philosophers like Kant have said, oh, there's only one thing that's intrinsically good or good will. I don't accept that. I don't buy that. And phenomenologists of value like Mark Shaler and Dietrich von Hildenbrand don't accept that either. Neither did Aristotle. Aristotle doesn't think that everything is merely because of one other thing. Then there are also goods that have to be shared. There are some goods that you cannot experience on your own or you cannot produce on your own or you cannot fully enjoy on your own or you cannot explore in their depths on their own. For instance, you can play a game of chess with yourself and you can study the openings of great masters. But there's no substitute for having another person across the board so they tell you, I'm not a good chess player and I don't actually appreciate that. Team sports are like that. You need other people in order to play soccer and enjoy that. That one I can't understand. Even to really have a good fight with somebody, you need a partner who you can fight with in a certain way, don't you? Although that may not be quite so good. But there are certain goods that can only be experienced with others and maybe even others of the right sort, others who have the right temperament, others who are in the right sense of relationships. I think that we can think in very, very broad terms about who we're answering this, what's the best thing about life so far? What's intrinsically good? What have you experienced that really is intrinsically good? We can look through a whole range of goods. There are some that are merely useful. They get us some other things. Think about, for example, wealth. Wealth is not good in and of itself. Here's a dollar bill. It's pretty, but it's prettiness, what it has, not compared to other money. It's prettiness is not really a function of its usefulness, is it? Prumble up one is just as good as one like this. Not good for very much, by the way. Then there are things that are pleasant, right? And there's perhaps a gradation between these. Maybe some things are pleasant or become pleasant because first they're useful and then many of them experience them. And then there are intrinsically good things. And it's not as if intrinsically good things are not pleasant, but you don't like them just because they're pleasant. And we can think about this with several things. Aristotle, for example, talks about three kinds of friendship. He talks about it in terms of friendship and the useful and pleasant, and then he talks about it in terms of virtue. We could use similar terms of being intrinsically good, appreciating the person for who they are, appreciating your connection with them for what it is. Not just something pleasant. And I would say that the relationships that I had in my life with good friends, with colleagues, with my children, with my family, and with my wife to be, fit into that category of intrinsically good, even if they're not always pleasant. And sometimes they actually are quite the opposite of useful. Sometimes they require a lot of you. These are all different things. These are all different goods or values that people have looked at over time. I would like actually to close this by talking about somebody who saw, you know, God and persons as very important and saw a use for all of the rest of these. But decided that wisdom was best. And that is the King Solomon, at least as far as we know him through Scripture. Which, you know, might be a little bit over long, but, you know, he's credited as being a philosophical type. And I think that he really is. Here's how the story goes, at least with one of the versions. God actually says to him, What do you want? I'm going to give you any one of these you pick. Any things. And then he says, This is a bad job that you've got me with this huge, numerous people that seem to be completely unmanageable. I'm going to need some wisdom if I'm not going to totally screw it up. That's the Chronicles version of it. Paraphrased a little bit. And then God says, All right, you picked the right one. You not only get wisdom, you get the rest as well. There's something to that. He picked wisdom because it was useful, but he also picked wisdom because he desired it. Because there was something there that drew him that unfolded itself to him. And it's really interesting. In the biblical texts where wisdom is personified, wisdom unfolds for riches to the one who seeks her. And it's not really pleasant, but there's also an intrinsic value to it. Now, here's where it gets really interesting. Can you pursue wisdom by yourself? Yeah, I think you can. But isn't it so much better when you do it in the company of others?