Hiram Crespo's Blog - Posts Tagged "fontaine"
The Humanist Book Review
2014 closed for me with this amazing review of Tending the Epicurean Garden by Cornell University classicist Michael Fontaine, which was written for Jan-Feb 2015 issue of The Humanist, a publication of the American Humanist Association.
The reviewer had previously written works comparing Epicureanism (favorably) with the work of psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. This influenced his response to my book.
The review represents the ideas expressed in my book fairly and sets accurate expectations for readers, and then it closes with a Szasz-inspired challenge to contemporary Epicurean thinkers:
This raises many complex ethical questions, for which we should expect no easy answers. For-profit health care does create a clash between the interests of patients (who want to heal) and the interests of Big Pharma, one of the biggest lobbies in DC whose interests are for patients to purchase, to become dependant, and to keep purchasing, their products. For-profit health care creates a distortion of our values and views that must always be factored into our ethical considerations.
That is just one problem. Then there is the matter of social control via medication, and if Big Pharma profits from keeping the population doped and influences policy, does this not create a (pardon the pun) lethal cocktail of serious moral problems? Some ethical questions we may ask are: who is really pulling the strings when people are doped? Who decides a diagnosis? And to what extent is a person with a certain psychiatric condition (say, schizophrenia) still responsible for his actions?
In my book, I discuss hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill, which explains how people who suffer great losses or good fortune (even if they’ve won the lottery or lost limbs), always return to a normal, natural, stable level of happiness and how certain pleasures decrease once we get used to them. Therefore, the science of happiness teaches us that we must always have a long-term perspective and while (to cite my own words) my general view is that science should serve to maximize everyone’s pleasure/comfort and minimize everyone’s pain/discomfort, and while I think Epicureanism is about control of our experience, this should not be translated as meaning that addiction-creating drugs should always be favored. Long-term health, ataraxia and stability should be favored, and it is always with this perspective in mind that we should conduct hedonic calculus and make ethical choices.
This is likely to inspire more blogs and discussions among Epicureans in the future. In the meantime, please enjoy and share the review by Michael Fontaine of Tending the Epicurean Garden.
The reviewer had previously written works comparing Epicureanism (favorably) with the work of psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. This influenced his response to my book.
The review represents the ideas expressed in my book fairly and sets accurate expectations for readers, and then it closes with a Szasz-inspired challenge to contemporary Epicurean thinkers:
In candidly pinpointing self-control as a means of achieving happiness, Crespo puts himself squarely at odds with the dominant ethos of the medicalized society in which we now live.
This raises many complex ethical questions, for which we should expect no easy answers. For-profit health care does create a clash between the interests of patients (who want to heal) and the interests of Big Pharma, one of the biggest lobbies in DC whose interests are for patients to purchase, to become dependant, and to keep purchasing, their products. For-profit health care creates a distortion of our values and views that must always be factored into our ethical considerations.
That is just one problem. Then there is the matter of social control via medication, and if Big Pharma profits from keeping the population doped and influences policy, does this not create a (pardon the pun) lethal cocktail of serious moral problems? Some ethical questions we may ask are: who is really pulling the strings when people are doped? Who decides a diagnosis? And to what extent is a person with a certain psychiatric condition (say, schizophrenia) still responsible for his actions?
In my book, I discuss hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill, which explains how people who suffer great losses or good fortune (even if they’ve won the lottery or lost limbs), always return to a normal, natural, stable level of happiness and how certain pleasures decrease once we get used to them. Therefore, the science of happiness teaches us that we must always have a long-term perspective and while (to cite my own words) my general view is that science should serve to maximize everyone’s pleasure/comfort and minimize everyone’s pain/discomfort, and while I think Epicureanism is about control of our experience, this should not be translated as meaning that addiction-creating drugs should always be favored. Long-term health, ataraxia and stability should be favored, and it is always with this perspective in mind that we should conduct hedonic calculus and make ethical choices.
This is likely to inspire more blogs and discussions among Epicureans in the future. In the meantime, please enjoy and share the review by Michael Fontaine of Tending the Epicurean Garden.
