Harvard University 

CGIS South 020

6:00 pm

A lecture by Prof. Candace Vogler (The University of Chicago)

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Harvard Catholic Graduate Student Chaplaincy. 

Free and open to the public.

Lecture Description:

Call both one’s efforts at being a good person and the ways of thinking, feeling, and responding to circumstances that develop while one works to be a good person ‘virtue.’  Let ‘human happiness’ pick out a pattern in one’s life marked by such connected and interrelated goods as love, health, strong family ties and friendships, intellectual engagement, interesting work, a reasonable measure of material security, optimism for one’s future, and availability to experiences of joy and peace.  On some traditional views, the development and exercise of good character—of virtue—is supposed to be enough to guarantee happiness.  On other views, traditional and more modern, virtue and happiness can come apart.  Both sorts of view share the idea that people want happiness.  Both sorts of view share the understanding that acting well can be costly.  In this talk, I will trace some of the tensions between virtue and happiness, urging that, while there may be no guarantee that the living will be easy when we work to be good human beings, the kinds of temporal happiness we can enjoy are only worth going for in the context of our efforts to be good people.

Speaker Bio:

Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy and Professor in the College at the The University of Chicago. She is also Principal Investigator on Virtue, Happiness, & the Meaning of Life Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. She has published "John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology" and "Reasonably Vicious."