 The most interesting way of learning, the deepest kind of mutual understanding, is to come to a keener appreciation of the debates and disagreements within our respective cultures. That's what's really interesting, and to attend to them. And we may discover that there is a distinctive shape to the debates and disagreements, one placed to the next, but that should be the starting point. And I would like to give a concrete illustration of this general point by looking at one big philosophical debate about the good life within the West. Now, if you were to take a very rough and ready, stereotypic account of the difference between Eastern and Western approaches to the good life, you might say that in the West we think of ethics and political philosophy as a matter of utility and rights, and in the East the good life is about virtue, the cultivation of virtue. But if you look within the Western tradition, there's a very interesting and lively and continuing debate over centuries between accounts of the good life that emphasize utility and rights and autonomy, and accounts of the good life that emphasize virtue. So noticing the disagreements is more interesting, but it's also potentially a way of creating bridges, better, more substantive bridges among cultures than just trying to figure out the fixed views. So, what is this debate about? Well, what is the good life? One answer to that question was offered by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, an English political philosopher who said, it's very simple, maximizing happiness. That's the good life. And what he meant by maximizing happiness was maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain. Now, the appeal of this way of thinking about the good life is it's simple, everybody likes pleasure and dislikes pain, and it's non-judgmental. It doesn't pass judgment on what gives you pleasure or me pleasure. All that matters is that we add it all up and try to maximize. Now, in fact, Bentham emphasized this non-judgmental appeal when he said the quantity of pleasure being the same, pushpin, a children's game, pushpin is as good as poetry. So, some people might like dogfights, going to dogfights might give some people pleasure, other people like going to museums. Who's to say that the preference or the pleasure derived from museums is higher or worthier than that derived from dogfights? People have different tastes. Now, there are familiar objections to this way of thinking about the good life. One of them uses a counter-example of the ancient Roman Colosseum where they threw Christians to the lions for sport. If ethics is all about adding up the balance of pleasure over pain, people argue against Bentham, does that mean that throwing Christians to the lions might be the right thing to do if it's true it causes excruciating pain to the Christian being eaten by the lion? But if there are enough deliriously happy Romans in the Colosseum delighted by this, does that mean this is the good life, the right thing to do? This is a standard and pretty powerful rejoinder to which there are a few responses. One response from a utilitarian would be to say, well, because it's embarrassing if you have a theory of the good life that endorses throwing Christians to the lions in the Colosseum. So, one way of avoiding the embarrassment would be to say, well, you have to consider, as the economists say, externalities. There might be other people out there who are pained by this. Maybe they worry that when they run out of Christians, they'll come for me and that will make me anxious and that unhappiness has to be cranked into the balance. But that's kind of a feeble and contingent response. Other people would say, is that the only reason it's wrong? What about violating the human rights? Aren't there fundamental human rights that are being violated when these people are being used for sport? That's one answer and that's in the broad tradition of utility and rights. But there's another reason to object and that takes us to virtue. Isn't there something wrong with catering to perverse desires? Yes, those people may be taking pleasure, but shouldn't we try to educate them out of taking pleasure in that base spectacle? That's the virtue argument, not the rights argument, against this brutal practice. So that takes us to a second way of conceiving ethics and the good life, which goes back to Aristotle in the West. And Aristotle said that the good life is about seeking happiness, but happiness is not something that is maximized, something where you just add up pleasures and pain. Happiness is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue and by that he meant learning how, not adding up the balance of pleasure over pain, but learning to take pleasure in the right sorts of things. That's what happiness is. And so if people prefer watching dogfights to going to museums, the thing that needs to be done is to try to educate them out of that, to cultivate virtue. Well, how do you do that? Aristotle said by habit. People learn the virtues by practicing them, which is why we can't learn how to be a good person by reading a book or listening to a lecture on philosophy or even by being given a bunch of moral precepts. You become virtuous by practice. You become brave by doing brave acts just by doing just things. You've got to get in the habit of it. Well, that seems circular. How did the habits get going? And how do you know which ones are worth emulating? Well, part of it is you have to figure out whom to look up to, whom to emulate. And you have to be brought up right. And you have to develop good habits from the time you're young. And part of what gets that going is living in a certain kind of community with certain kind of laws. Because part of the point of law on Aristotle's picture is not just to keep people from one another's throats or from committing crimes. The real point of law is to make people good, to cultivate virtue. And that's how you get the good habits going. Now, there are two interesting features of this picture. One of them is that this way of thinking about the good life, about habit, about looking up to exemplary figures, about having to live in a certain way of life with certain rights and rituals and laws, this looks pretty close to a Confucian picture of the good life and how it's acquired. But, and here's the debate within the West, it makes a lot of people, especially in the modern world, uneasy. Because people look at this Aristotelian account of virtue, cultivating virtues, the role of law in forming good habits and say, that sounds like it might be coercive. That sounds like, well, what about choosing for myself the best way to live rather than having to live according to habits that are cultivated by a certain way of life? So, fast forward to another utilitarian who came after Bentham, John Stuart Mill, who wrote this famous book On Liberty. And he said, no, there's a fundamental difference between public and private. The purpose of law is to prevent us from harming one another. But beyond that, the law shouldn't try to make us good. That's good. And yet, Mill disagreed with Bentham who had come a generation before him. Mill didn't think it was plausible to say that dogfights and museums are equally worthy. Mill thought, we can't make sense of a theory of the good life that says there isn't any difference between higher and lower pleasures. So, what then? How can you distinguish the two? Mill's answer was, well, because remember, he was a utilitarian and he wanted to show that there were higher, qualitatively higher pleasures. In fact, he said it's better to be socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Some modes of life just are higher. But how to establish that? He said, without being judgmental, that's the thing. He said, well, if someone has experienced both, whatever that person decides gives the most pleasure, that's the higher. That's the higher. Good. Well, that's kind of unsatisfying. In fact, to test this, I show my students a clip from Hamlet and then a clip from The Simpsons. And I ask them which one they enjoyed watching more. And the majority say The Simpsons. And then I ask which one they think is higher. And they all say, almost all. Shakespeare, Hamlet. So, there can be a difference between, even where we've experienced both, what we like and what we really think is higher. So, this I don't think is a satisfactory solution to the question of virtue, but it shows that there is a powerful temptation to find a way not to be judgmental, not to embrace the full conception of the good life that affirms virtue. So, I don't think Mel's experiment succeeded. I think it's an illustration, though, of the attempt to wrestle with this tension, this debate, internal to the Western tradition of the good life and of philosophy. And what strikes me is that it isn't so easy to do away altogether with the idea of virtue in giving an account of the good life. We try, we in the West at least, try time and time again. And I experienced this. I remember this was a personal experience. Back when I was a graduate student in the 1970s at Oxford. And I would go to Professor Sen's lectures as he was then giving them on welfare economics. And I learned a lot from those lectures. And I also remember there was an extracurricular dispute going on in those days in Oxford. They still had some all-women's colleges. They weren't yet mixed. And the all-women's colleges had rules against overnight male visitors. But times were changing. This is the mid-70s. And pressure grew to relax these rules at St. Ann's College, which was one of the all-women's colleges. Now, not everyone was in favor of liberalizing the rules. The traditionalists were against it. But they were embarrassed to give the real reason for their objection. And they translated their argument into utilitarian terms. We can't allow overnight male guests. They said, well, why exactly? They said, it'll increase the costs to the college. Well, how would it increase the costs? They were asked. Well, they said, the men will want to take baths. And that will use up hot water. Furthermore, they said, we'll have to change the mattresses more often. So the reformers met these arguments by adopting the following compromise. They said each woman could have a maximum of three male guests each week, overnight guests, and overnight each guest paid 50 pence to defray the costs to the college. The next day, the Guardian newspaper had a headline saying, St. Ann's Girls 50 Pence a Night, which demonstrates that the language of virtue can't really be translated into the language of utility. It's a persisting feature, maybe, between a good life and a possible bridge between the understanding of the good life in the West and in the East. Thanks very much. So we have time for two questions. Let me first say that it was tremendously enjoyable, as always, to listen to. The one thing is the critique of the pigs. I'm not sure I would agree with that, because there's a Socrates versus being a pig. It's a statement that deprived pigs of social interaction with other pigs and food. And it turns out that the pigs preferred to be with other pigs rather than have food. So let's not be too harsh against pigs. Anyway, let's have time for two questions. I wonder if you might say a word about perfectability. That is, that virtues aren't stagnant. They're not something you just discover. But the body of thought that talks about the ways in which we may really love dogfights, but something in our souls may long for other things too. Yeah, well, that's exactly the idea. That we may have a lot of de facto desires, the satisfaction of which gives us pleasure. But that doesn't mean that the good life consists in satisfying those desires and those preferences. And in one way or another, all of us, I think, as human beings, bump up against that feature of desire and of judgment and of aspiration. And this is why I think that, I mean, the case against the dogfights, you know, the Puritans tried to get rid of bear baiting. Bear baiting was a sport in the early American colonies. And looking back, we think that that was a cruel sport and that it was objectionable because of the pain that it inflicted on the animals. But the Puritans objected to bear baiting, not because of the pain it inflicted on the bear, but because of the pleasure it gave the bear baiter. That's an instance of the virtue argument or the aspirational argument of trying to change what gives people pleasure in a way that elevates us and enables us to realize our highest human faculties or our nature or our souls depending on how you would want to characterize it. Do you think that one has to have a vision of the good life to have perspectives on a better life? Well, here is one of the debates that occurs internal to these various traditions. My own view is yes, but I can't say that that's, I can't associate that view authoritatively with one or another tradition. That's, your very question is one of the central debates within the political philosophy and debate about ethics, certainly in the West and arguably in other traditions as well. Last question. What if you live in a society where you're surrounded by people whose virtues are really, really odd and weird? Weird. Weird, yeah. So that's one way of asking this. So sometimes when I teach virtue ethics, students and especially female students argue that great acts of liberation were associated with getting away from virtues. So women could be liberated because liberal societies started to get rid of old fashioned virtues. Thank you. If virtues are fixed and given once and for all, then they are suffocating in a source of conformity. In fact, that's what makes people wary about any conception of the good life that says habit matters. In fact, there is one branch of philosophy that says really to act morally is to rise above habit and ritual. To think for ourselves, to will for ourselves autonomously, the moral law. And so on that picture, habit and tradition and rituals are prisons in a way, obstacles to living freely and living authentically. And if traditions and virtues were just fixed once and for all, then they would be that kind of prison. But just as we've been discussing here tonight, just as cultures are full of contestation and debate within themselves, so the right way to interpret a tradition or a habit is contestable. And so what keeps or what can keep habit from becoming mere habit, a kind of rote mindless behavior, is teaching people and creating a way of life that encourages people to interpret and to reinterpret and to argue about what the tradition actually requires. To argue about what makes this habit or this ritual or this element of tradition important. And that's how culture does change through the roiling contestation and argument about how really to interpret the tradition, whether it's a constitutional tradition or whether it's how to read the Bible or whether it's how to read Menchus. There are competing interpretations, so that creates a critical space for reflection that prevents habit from becoming a prison, but that doesn't require trying as if to shed our skin, to step out of ourselves, out of our identities, out of tradition as such, and to imagine that we can achieve the good life purely on our own devices.