The Question of How We Should Live (NoHN)

Image taken from tbclife.net

A question was posed in our textbook Who Are We? and it is, " They asked the right questions:--how should I live?...but lacked the passionate disinterested use of reason in the pursuit of truth, which is necessary in order to answer these questions." ( page 32)

This may be a silly question, but the first thing I need to answer for myself before I can answer this question is what is the truth? Who decided what it is? Normally it's whatever the larger group has decided. However, isn't that an ad populum fallacy? Just because the majority accepts something as the truth does it inherently become the truth? Unfortunately, yes. It leaves little room for disagreement or change. If I can't even discern for myself what the truth is then how can I follow Socrates' guidelines and use a disinterested use of reason to pursue the truth of how we should live? I feel as if some things are just a series of questions that can not be instantly answered. One can see the truth as being whatever one believes  but then that truth is not the truth for another person. Is the way we should live a universal thing? Is the way we should live a value? It can not be a physical trait because people live in all sorts of different places and under different living standards and practices. Is the way we should live not an is but an are, are there ways we should live? Is there more than one value, more than one characteristic? I think that there might be.

People get their values for living from different sources: the bible, family, tradition, society. The Bible says that we must live our lives for the Lord, society states that we must live our lives and achieve something, traditions use to state that some people/genders should live their lives in very specific ways. Is somebody wrong or is everybody right? Is it okay to just piece together for yourself how you should live?

The book states that Socrates saw ethics as a way to figure this out(32). I see a flaw in that. Ethical behavior is dependent on groups, and as history as shown us, some of the supposedly ethically correct things that people have done have not been ethically correct to others.


I attempted to answer that question for myself, and as you can see, all I came up with were more questions.



~Ama-Bemma