How Should You Live? The Great Answers

In this course summary, Lee Braver looks back at the arc of lectures that traced more than 2000 years of Western ethics, and examined five great thinkers’ answer to the question: how should we live? Socrates founded Western ethics by insisting that reason, not myth or tradition, must guide human behavior. He set three requirements for any ethical theory, and three thinkers rose to meet them, which Braver showed critiquing each other in reverse-chronological order. Mill offered utilitarianism and the greatest happiness principle, grounding ethics in empirical observation of how people actually behave. Kant proposed the categorical imperative, building ethics from pure reason alone. Aristotle advanced virtue ethics and the golden mean. Then Sartre arrived to reject any external moral system and insist on the moral responsibility that comes from radical freedom. Braver asks whether each of these thinkers ultimately betrayed Socrates' original mission. The course concludes not with a single answer but with an invitation: engage with these philosophers yourself and decide which one you find most insightful.