Posted: September 18th, 2017

Ethical Inquiry

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Thought Paper 2: Instructions and Topic
Please read all of the instructions for your second thought paper. It is very important that you follow the instructions and write on the topic provided here. If you have any questions, either post those questions on the course Webpage Discussion Board or send me an e-mail with your questions.
I. Thought Paper Instructions
1. Thought papers must be double-spaced, 12 point type, Verdana, Arial or Times New Roman font, black font type, with 1″ margins. Your name and “PHIL 301 – Thought Paper 1” must appear in the upper left-hand corner. You must include a total word count in the upper left-hand corner, and your must properly number the pages of your thought paper. Do not have a separate cover page; begin your thought paper on page 1. Failure to follow these directions may result in a 5-15% grade reduction on the thought paper.
2. You may approach the thought paper in whatever way you feel best reflects your own style, interests and beliefs about the topic. However, you must incorporate, in a substantial way, the ideas of at least three (3) of the following: Aristotle, Aquinas, Sartre and Huxley. Moreover, you must state and explain your own views relating to the question. If you use any writings or ideas from other people (e.g., from books, newspapers, WebPages, journals, etc.) you must provide the appropriate citation. You may use whatever style you are most familiar, though you must include all the relevant bibliographical information as well as the relevant page numbers. Thought papers must be at least 2250 words (excluding your name, references, page numbers, etc.)
3. As noted above in (2), you must make at least some use of, and reference to (this includes the relevant page numbers) at least three (3) of the following: Aristotle, Aquinas, Sartre and Huxley. This means referring specifically to ideas of the authors you choose to include in your paper, and documenting the use of and reference to those ideas with the appropriate citations in your paper. You must have at least six (6) relevant references to the readings themselves; two (2) each from at least two authors. Of course, you may use other references (books, articles, etc.) in addition to these required references. You must always provide the full bibliographic information for all references that you use in your thought paper.
4. You must have an opening paragraph that summarizes the problem with which you are going to deal in your paper and the approach you will take in dealing with the problem. You also need a closing paragraph at the end of your paper that summarizes the principal finding(s) in your paper, and that clearly states your own opinions about the topic with which your paper dealt. Thus, to some degree, the closing paragraph will mirror your opening paragraph, though it does go beyond it in summarizing the conclusions of your analyses and your own final opinions.
5. Two of the criteria for assigning grades to your thought papers are spelling and grammar. For this reason, I strongly recommend that you write your thought paper using a standard word-processing package (e.g., MS WORD) and run both the “spell
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check” and the “grammar check”. Doing this will not necessarily catch every error (in other words, do not use these tools “blindly”), but it will help. In general, remember that grammatically simple, straightforward sentences are good to use.
6. A good, general guideline for writing philosophy papers is Jim Pryor’s “Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper”, online at:
http://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/guidelines/writing.html
7. You need a “Bibliography” at the end of your paper. I recommend using the MLA format for your bibliography. You can find an online version that has most of the formatting information that you need at:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/
(scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the “Works Cited” links for the specifics). In addition, if you quote or use the ideas of someone on the body of your paper, then you will need the appropriate embedded reference. For example, if you quote what Aristotle writes on page 17, you will need (Aristotle, p. 17) at the end of the quotation. You also need the appropriate citation (the Aristotle book) in your bibliography.
8. There are many ways that you can approach the topic of the thought paper. I leave it up to you to discover the format that best captures your own voice and thoughts. However, an important part of the thought paper is to explain (that is, critically reflect upon and justify) you own opinions. One standard way to approach the thought paper is:
(a) Identify, clarify and explain the concepts and methodologies that are relevant to the thought paper topic. In this paragraph, you should clearly state the principal ethical issues with which you will deal in your paper. This is your opening paragraph.
(b) State, clearly and fully, using proper documentation, the views of at least three of Aristotle, Aquinas, Sartre and Huxley, as they relate to the topic. Let me emphasize that the views should relate specifically to the topic of the thought paper. This is often one of the most challenging parts of a thought paper. You need to both understand what the author you are using claims, and then you need to select those claims that are relevant to your topic.
(c) State your own opinions about the topic and explain why you have those opinions. This is, after all, a thought paper whose intent is to have you develop more fully and thoughtfully your own opinions.
(d) In the context of (b) and (c), make the strongest case you can in support of your opinion. Think of it like a courtroom in which you are trying to convince a group of impartial jurors that your opinion is the correct one and that opposing opinions are the wrong ones. Obviously if you are doing this, simply saying, “That’s the way I was brought up”, or “That’s what all my friends think” is not going to win you the jury.
(e) At the end of your thought paper, you should have your final, closing paragraph that includes a summary statement about your opinion. Remember that the goal of your paper is NOT simply to state your opinions. Stating your opinions is part of your goal, but it is not the entire goal. A very important part of your goal is to reflect thoughtfully on the topic, and then to use critical reasoning to explain what you believe and to provide some appropriate justification for your opinions.
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II. Thought Paper Topic
What follows is an article by Emily Esfahani Smith on happiness and the meaning of life that appeared in The Atlantic (from January 9, 2013).
You should reflect on the claims that Smith makes in light of the readings from Aristotle, Aquinas, Sartre and Huxley. In this context, you should begin your paper with a paragraph in which you clearly state the principal ethical issues with which you will deal in your paper. The second paragraph should be one in which you identify and state the most important claims and arguments in the Smith article. Once you have done that, then you should critically assess those claims and arguments from the perspective of at least three of these authors (i.e., at least three of Aristotle, Aquinas, Sartre and Huxley). Would the authors about whom you have chosen to write agree or disagree with the claims and arguments of Smith? WHY would they agree or disagree? After you have done that, then you need to state your own opinions (referring to the Smith article as well as the views of the three authors about whom you have already written) and justify your own opinions by explaining why you believe that your opinions are correct. In a final, summary paragraph, you should summarize the principal points made in your paper. What is important is that you demonstrate an understanding of the concepts used by the authors about whom you are writing, be fair in your assessments of the views and arguments of Smith, and present your own critical, reflective reasoning about the issues raised in the Smith article.
Some of the questions you will need to think about and address are, Is there truly a difference between a life that is happy and a life that is meaningful? What does it mean to be happy? Is it possible to life a meaningful life and yet not be happy? How does one discover what makes one’s life meaningful? Is the meaning of life something we create for ourselves or is it something that it given to us from outside (e.g., from God)? Is it possible to believe that one is living a meaningful life, but be mistaken?
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There’s More to Life Than Being Happy
By Emily Esfahani Smith
“It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”
In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished — but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, “Life is
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nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation.” Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, “Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?”
As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl writes, “it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
Viktor Frankl [Herwig Prammer/Reuters]
In 1991, the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club listed Man’s Search for Meaning as one of the 10 most influential books in the United States. It has sold millions of copies worldwide. Now, over twenty years later, the book’s ethos — its emphasis on meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self — seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. “To the European,” Frankl wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.'”
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According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high — as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word “happiness” in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy, without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. “It is the very pursuit of happiness,” Frankl knew, “that thwarts happiness.”
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This is why some researchers are cautioning against the pursuit of mere happiness. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, psychological scientists asked nearly 400 Americans aged 18 to 78 whether they thought their lives were meaningful and/or happy. Examining their self-reported attitudes toward meaning, happiness, and many other variables — like stress levels, spending patterns, and having children — over a month-long period, the researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways, but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life, the psychologists found, is associated with being a “taker” while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a “giver.”
“Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,” the authors write.
How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry.
Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior — being, as mentioned, a “taker” rather than a “giver.” The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire — like hunger — you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.
“Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others,” explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. “If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need,” the researchers, which include Stanford University’s Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, write.
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What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.
The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life “you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.” For instance, having more meaning in one’s life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television.
“Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy,” Baumeister told me in an interview.
Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment — which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.
Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. “Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life,” the researchers write. “Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future.” That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.
Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. “If there is meaning in life at all,” Frankl wrote, “then there must be meaning in suffering.”
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Which brings us back to Frankl’s life and, specifically, a decisive experience he had before he was sent to the concentration camps. It was an incident that emphasizes the difference between the pursuit of meaning and the pursuit of happiness in life.
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Peter Andrews/Reuters
In his early adulthood, before he and his family were taken away to the camps, Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna and the world. As a 16-year-old boy, for example, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and one day sent Freud a two-page paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl’s talent, sent the paper to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. “I hope you don’t object,” Freud wrote the teenager.
While he was in medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. Not only did he establish suicide-prevention centers for teenagers — a precursor to his work in the camps — but he was also developing his signature contribution to the field of clinical psychology: logotherapy, which is meant to help people overcome depression and achieve well-being by finding their unique meaning in life. By 1941, his theories had received international attention and he was working as the chief of neurology at Vienna’s Rothschild Hospital, where he risked his life and career by making false diagnoses of mentally ill patients so that they would not, per Nazi orders, be euthanized.
That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field.
As Anna S. Redsand recounts in her biography of Frankl, he was at a loss for what to do, so he set out for St. Stephan’s Cathedral in Vienna to clear his head. Listening to the organ music, he repeatedly asked himself, “Should I leave my parents behind?… Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?” Where did his responsibility lie? He was looking for a “hint from heaven.”
When he returned home, he found it. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten Commandments — the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.
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The wisdom that Frankl derived from his experiences there, in the middle of unimaginable human suffering, is just as relevant now as it was then: “Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is.”
Baumeister and his colleagues would agree that the pursuit of meaning is what makes human beings uniquely human. By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves — by devoting our lives to “giving” rather than “taking” — we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/266805/
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The article above discusses and makes use of the views of Viktor Frankl. Here are two videos in which Frankl himself discusses the central question: What is the meaning of life?
(1) “Search for Meaning in Life Today with Viktor Frankl”, online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_Cey-UZX-E
(2) “Viktor Frankl: Why Believe in Others”, online at http://www.ted.com/talks/viktor_frankl_youth_in_search_of_meaning