The 'Good Life'

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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 ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Confucius, as well as more recent works by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, before we then discuss and apply these 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.