Your Vision of a Life Worth Living: Paper 3

1500 word (maximum) paper outlining your own personal vision of a life worth living. (30 percent of final grade)

The purpose of this course is to equip you to ask and begin to answer the question: What makes a life worth living? You’ve examined multiple answers to this question formulated within various traditions of reflection. You’ve analyzed Yale’s institutional vision of a life worth living, as well as that of (some of) your peers. Now it’s your turn.

The key question is: What is your vision of a life worth living?

In shaping your answer, it will be helpful to reflect on the course questions that we’ve carried with us through the class:

• What does it mean for life to go well, to be led well, and to feel good?
• What should we do when we fail to live such a life?
• To whom are we responsible?
• What is a human being, and what is their place in the world?
• What place, if any, does suffering have in a good life? How should we respond to suffering, our own and others’?

In addition, take some time to consider these questions:

• What are the commitments and the costs of your vision of the life worth living?
• What reasons and/or motivations and/or truth assertions do you have for accepting the vision of a life worth living that you are presenting?

You may provide responses to all of these questions or only a subset. If your paper responds to multiple of the course questions, make sure to include some discussion of how your answers to the different questions relate to each other. If your paper responds to only one of the course questions, give some indication of why that limitation fits with your vision of LWL. If you decide to frame your vision without reference to any of the course questions, include a justification of your decision.

One might distinguish between your vision of the life worth living and your vision of your life worth living — that is, your vision of flourishing life for all human beings and your vision of your particular flourishing life (the life you want to live). As we have seen throughout the semester, it is difficult to articulate a vision for your own life without saying something universal about the purpose and meaning of human lives generally. But different visions will be more or less modest about what one can say universally about the life worth living. So, in terms of which should be the focus of your paper, it will depend very much on your own vision and how you see these two relating. Ideally, your paper will say something about each, though emphasis will likely fall in one place or the other.

Recommendations and Guidelines:‍

• Fear not. This essay will not be etched in stone and you should expect (hope, even) that your answer to this question will change (i.e., mature) over the coming months and years. This paper should serve as a “snapshot” of where you’re at on this crucial question as of April/May 2024.
• It will be helpful if you think about the different status various claims in your paper have. Some will be assumptions – things that you take for granted about the world from which you then make arguments about a LWL. Others claims will be conclusions that are supposed to follow from those assumptions. Still others will be neither of those. They might, for example, be claims that you think fit well with your vision but aren’t essential parts of it. Identifying what status particular claims have will make the logic of your vision clearer to you, and flagging them in your text will make that logic clearer to your reader(s).
• Your essay need not subscribe to any of the traditions we have discussed.
• If you do borrow insights from one or more of the traditions we’ve look at, be mindful of how what you’re borrowing is necessarily transformed as you take it outside its tradition of origin. It may not be possible to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to “cherry-picking” from various traditions.

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