Search Results

Be yourself, we are told, and happiness will follow. Discovering and developing our “authentic self” does indeed contribute to happiness by tapping into wellsprings of enjoyment and meaning. Yet authenticity is not a simple or sure guide to happiness. It is not even an independent guide, for what makes us happy is itself an important indicator of our deepest desires. Moreover, authenticity has multiple aspects that can be in tension with each other: wholehearted caring, self-honesty, self-acceptance, self-creation, and self-realization. In addition, authenticity connects with other values that can be in tension with happiness. Decisions about whether to use biomedical enhancements provide helpful illustrations of these complexities.

The origins in Ancient Greece of the problem of free will and determinism are briefly described. A preliminary discussion of determinism that includes a discussion of the problems pertaining to its definition as well as its truth is provided. The recent history of discussions reveals general skepticism both about classical compatibilism and the conditionalist version. Given that the concept of free will is usually characterized in one of two ways—self-determination or counterfactual power—the discussion begins by looking at the compatibilist–incompatibilist controversy over self-determination. It is argued that self-determination must be understood as self-regulation or autonomy rather than self-fulfillment and that influential theorists do not take seriously enough the possibility of autonomous self-suppression. Self-regulation can be exercised by the Deliberative Self or the Reflective Self and it can take place autonomously or heteronomously. It is then proposed that self-determination be construed as deliberative/reflective (DR)-autonomy.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Great Rationality Debate in cognitive science—the debate about how much irrationality to attribute to human cognition—detailing the contrasting positions of the Panglossians and Meliorists. It then discusses individual differences in the Great Rationality Debate, dual process theory, and the features of Type 1 and Type 2 processing. It argues that the statistical distributions of the types of goals being pursued by Type 1 and Type 2 processing are different and that important consequences for human self-fulfillment follow from this fact. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter explores what economists called “productivity lag,” a trope of national decline in America during the early 1970s that revolved around the family. More specifically, it considers cultural anxieties about the nation's productive capacity that surfaced at the same time. It begins by tracing the problem to the postwar years, when productivity rates rose steadily but began to slow down in the steel and automobile industries by the late 1960s. It then discusses the argument that the lag could be attributed to a “new breed” of workers who were no longer responsive to the economic incentives that had compelled the previous generation of men to work. It also looks at corporations' implementation of quality of work life programs that utilized the psychological language of self-fulfillment to boost efficiency. Finally, the chapter examines the revival of a “producerist ethic” in response to deindustrialization, the expansion of the service sector, and the end of the family wage.

This chapter asks why white, middle-class American women were so fascinated with all things Hawaiʻi in the two decades after statehood. It also looks at why Hawaiʻi's export market linked racial and ethnic boundary-crossing with women's self-fulfillment. The mainland marketing of Hawaiʻi offered a virtual version of the kinds of cross-cultural exchange taking place in Hawaiʻi itself, urging ordinary mainland women to envision themselves as liberated, globe-trotting cosmopolitans. Cookbooks and apparel manufacturers suggested that the acts of eating Hawaiian food and wearing clothes produced in Hawaiʻi could catalyze a new, more relaxed, racially enlightened worldview. Yet the mainland consumption of Hawaiʻi was also made possible by the expansion of racially segregated suburban developments, where racial liberalism could be performed without disrupting racial inequality.

This chapter provides an analytical discussion of some major themes in Gewirth's Community of Rights and Self-Fulfillment. The focus of the chapter is on how rights- and duty-bearing agents interact to create political community, and how the rights to freedom and well-being posited by his moral theory include the right to develop a conception of the good life to be pursued through political community. Such a community will enable capacity-fulfilment, self-respect, and self-esteem. The chapter draws out of Gewirth's work the notion of a reasonable, situated, mutualist self, able to cooperate with other such selves to enact both the just and the good.

This chapter argues that despite the fact that marriage rates soared in postwar France, there was also a widespread perception that the institution was in crisis. Once considered a key to social and national stability, marriage became associated with self-fulfillment and personal happiness after World War II. Although this new notion of marriage implied that marriage carried more emotional significance than in the past, it also inspired fears that the divorce rate would rise, as marriages founded on personal happiness would unravel once one partner was dissatisfied. Experts, therefore, crafted a number of responses, such as marriage preparation courses and marriage counseling, intended to shore up both marital and national stability.

Self-knowledge is a persistent—and paradoxical—theme in medieval mysticism; union with God is often taken to involve a loss of self as distinct from the divine. Yet an examination of Christian contemplatives in the Latin West between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries who work not just within the apophatic tradition (which emphasizes the need to move past self-knowledge to self-abnegation) but also within the affective tradition (which portrays union with the divine as involving self-fulfillment) demonstrates that self-knowledge in medieval mysticism was not seen merely as something to be overcome or transcended. Instead, self-knowledge is viewed (particularly in the works of medieval women contemplatives) as an important means of overcoming alienation from embodied human existence.