The 'Good Life'
Full course description
The focus of this course lies on how (digital) technologies can influence the good life and related notions such as quality of life, happiness, and well-being. We will investigate how the idea of a good life is visible already in the way societies are organized – think for instance of the welfare state - and taken into account by policy makers. The guiding concern is: to what extent can (digital) technologies contribute to or negatively impact the good life?
We will introduce the topic by looking at how different disciplines (philosophy, psychology, cultural and media studies, social sciences, history, political economy) have approached the good life, and we will critically investigate how and where these theories overlap and deviate.
We will introduce the topic first by looking back to Aristotle’s writings in his Nicomachean ethics and the recent academic debate on virtue ethics before we then discuss and apply Aristotle’s ideas to contemporary examples and the societal and academic debates around them. We will investigate the use of technologies to quantify and qualify the self (e.g. apps that measure our heartbeat and fitness), eHealth in general and questions that relate to it as e.g. who is responsible for health? Is it the user? Is it the welfare state? We will look at the use of robots (care robots and sex robots) and how we relate to them. When we think about technologies and the good life, we also need to investigate design and ask whether we can engineer the good life.
Course objectives
At the end of this course, you will be able to:
- understand academic theories concerning the good life (well-being; happiness; quality of life) from different disciplines (philosophy, psychology, cultural and media studies, social sciences, history, political economy).
- apply these theories to (digital) technology and, vice versa, being able to relate examples and case studies of technologies to theories, concepts, debates, and authors.
- build and problematize arguments regarding social, ethical, philosophical, political implications of (digital) technologies (these implications might problematize the good life:students can think of possible solutions to overcome problems).
- understand and critique the tension between individual and community values in engineering, technology, and the ‘good life’.
Prerequisites
None
Recommended reading
We encourage students to buy the novel Machines like Me by Ian McEwan (2019) as we will repeatedly refer back to the story in the course.