Open To Debate Podcast: Pursue Virtue Or Pleasure?

 

Just a few months ago and for the first time ever, the U.S. lost its status as one of the twenty “happiest” countries in the 2024 World Happiness Report. Last May, the U.S. Surgeon General declared that our society is dealing with a loneliness epidemic, and we need to find new solutions to combat isolation.

That led nonprofit debate program Open to Debate to seek guidance from two esteemed thought leaders who have carefully considered the question of what happiness truly means. In this week’s episode, Open to Debate looks at an age-old philosophical inquiry: The Pursuit of Happiness: Virtue or Pleasure?

 Arguing on the side of virtue is The National Constitution Center president and CEO Jeffrey Rosen, who recently published the book “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.” Arguing that pleasure is the key to happiness is philosopher Roger Crisp, who is a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Oxford and has written extensively about the concept of hedonism. Vox and New York Magazine journalist Nayeema Raza serves as moderator.

FOR VIRTUE: Jeffery Rosen

"Virtue [means]... self-mastery, character improvement, self-improvement, using your powers of reason to moderate your unreasonable passions and emotions so that you could be your best self and serve others. To use the modern formulation, it's really a form of impulse control, resisting your immediate urges and unproductive emotions like anger, jealousy and fear so you can achieve the calm self-mastery that makes us productive and self-possessed citizens. The idea that arose in the 1960s, that immediate gratification is the source of happiness, that's the position that I'd argue against. The pursuit of happiness requires the pursuit of virtuous self-mastery.”

FOR PLEASURE: Roger Crisp

"When... people promote happiness, what they mean by that is not short-term pleasure. They mean contentment, life satisfaction... That's what I think many people will be aiming at in their life: those sources of long-term happiness or enjoyment...  I'm very disinclined to think that pleasure consists in the absence of pain. It's the balance of pleasure over pain. That seems to me a very clear, intuitively plausible position: anything is good only insofar as it gives you pleasure. Lives are good because of the pleasure or the happiness that we find within them." Open To Debate is a superb debate podcast that teaches the media and listeners how to hold civilized and informative debates instead of partisan screaming matches.