The Really Hard Problem by Owen Flanagan

Author:Owen Flanagan [Flanagan, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 4

(2) It is a necessary condition of objective flourishing that the virtues an individual displays, and the norms she avows and abides, pass tests for wide reflective equilibrium.

In the next chapter I do two things. First, I examine new work on the neuroscience of happiness and well-being. Eudaimonics should be able to speak about what underpins well-being with or without subjective happiness. And it does. But there are predictable problems associated with measuring happiness, due in part to disagreement about what ‘‘happiness’’

(especially ‘‘true happiness’’) even is. Second, I examine the literature on

‘‘positive illusions.’’ Apparently, many healthy-minded people have false beliefs. These may even be partly constitutive of what makes them happy and healthy minded. Illusions, unlike delusions, are subject to modifica-tion, albeit with resistance. But even they will make epistemically conservative types nervous. Maybe the distinction between subjective and objective notions happiness gives us some leverage. Since many worry that spirituality and religion involve objectionable illusions and/or delusions, this discussion may be seen as a preliminary to my final chapter, titled Spirituality Naturalized?

Appendix

The figure below is Edmund L. Pincoffs’s list of virtues canonized (in various ways) in the West (source: Pincoffs 1986). The table (titled ‘‘the 52

mental factors at a glance’’) is from Abhidhammattha Sangaha (2000).

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