Likes John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life.

Transcript context

…Do you remember her discussion of — I guess she’s considering the Protagoras. Her line on the Protagoras is that Socrates’s hedonism — on which you make decisions on the basis of just pretty much the greatest amount of pleasure, and that’s the only thing that matters — she says, “That’s not supposed to be where we are now; that’s Socrates’s recommendation for reforming our decision-making.” Nussbaum goes on to talk a little bit about what the world is like in which people have done this: Tragedy doesn’t make sense to them anymore because there are no tragic choices; it’s just a matter of quantities of pleasure. If your friend or lover dies, it doesn’t matter because they were just the bearer of a certain quantity of pleasure, and you go look for the pleasure elsewhere. The idea is you’re supposed to start to look inhuman. Then you’re supposed to think, “What kind of decision was it supposed to be, anyway? We’re supposed to be looking to the reform program to make things better for us.” Better by whose lights? I think Nietzsche is prodding you in the same way. I like very much your book about John Stuart Mill, your latest book, called John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life. Let me see if I understand your view properly. It seems to me you’re fairly critical of lives that are full of projects because, in some way, they make people subordinate to external authorities. Is that a fair reading of what you’re suggesting? Let me do a little bit of distinguishing and then say what I think the book was aiming for. A life that’s full of projects in the plural might well be fine, I think.…

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