Chapter 9: Living the good life: Ethics, Part 2 (January 5, 2020)

01/05/20 • 14 min

Ethics is about the good life. The study of happiness and virtue helps us understand how we ought to spend our time and live life to the fullest. This topic provides us with an answer to the age-old question about the meaning of life. What most people mean when they ask about the meaning of life is, “What is my purpose?” The answer is to reach your fullest potential. Matthew Kelly has phrased it as: become the best version of yourself. The Church calls it the universal call to holiness and to become a saint. The Ancient and Medieval philosophers called it becoming virtuous and thriving. In the context of Catholicism where God Himself is the ultimate goal, they all mean the same thing. This might not seem very satisfying, but it is, and the evidence is the saints. They pursued holiness with abandon, and the joy practically drips off the pages of their writings and writings about them.

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Chapter 8: Can money buy happiness: Ethics Part 1 (December 29, 2019)

Happiness is one of the words that we use without giving a clear definition. So it is really easy to equivocate with that word (use the word in more than one sense). The types of happiness discussed in the first paragraph are types of happiness, but Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and many other wise people discuss a different type of happiness. You might be wondering why we are discussing happiness in a chapter about ethics, but the Ancients, the Medievals, and the Church all say that happiness is the main point in ethics. Only since the “enlightenment” (when everybody went on a diet) has ethics become about anything else. The classical idea of happiness was when a man reached his fullest potential and is thriving.

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Chapter 10: The Splendor of Truth: Beauty (January 12, 2020)

Beauty is the splendor of truth. If we find something that is truly beautiful, then we know that we have found something true. Most of the time, new scientific theories meet with great resistance within the scientific community; it takes a long time for scientists to be convinced of new ideas. But in the case of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, almost all scientists believed it as soon as they saw it. Even though there was little evidence for it at the time and it had not really been put to the test, most scientists knew that it was right because of its beauty.