The pandemic has forced many of us to rethink our answers to some of life’s deepest questions: How should we treat other people? Should we practice a religion? Does it matter what we believe? What would make our lives meaningful?
Thankfully, we’re not alone. Virtue ethics, as Notre Dame’s Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko contend, offers a method for reasoning about, and gaining new insights into, these age-old questions.
On this episode, Sullivan and Blaschko join Commonweal assistant editor Griffin Oleynick to discuss insights from their new book The Good Life Method: Reasoning through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning, based on their popular course at Notre Dame.
For further reading:
- “Inside the Seminary,” Paul Blaschko
- “The Problem with Lazarus,” Meghan Sullivan
- “Highbrow Self-Help,” Charles McNamara
- “Should Philosophy Retire?”, George Scialabba
“In a world of constant optimization, we feel pretty quickly crushed.”—Meghan Sullivan