Do good lives make good stories?

Abstract

Narrativists about well-being claim that our lives go better for us if they make good stories-if they exhibit cohesion, thematic consistency, and narrative arc. Yet narrativism leads to mistaken assessments of well-being: prioritizing narrative makes it harder to balance and change pursuits, pushes us toward one-dimensionality, and can't make sense of the diversity of good lives. Some ways of softening key narrativist claims mean that the view can't tell us very much about how to live a good life that we can't find in other theories of well-being; while there are smaller-scale ways we can incorporate narrativist insights into our views of well-being, narrativism should not be a universal organizing principle for our lives.

Publisher

Springer

Publication Date

1-28-2023

Publication Title

Philisophical Studies

Department

Philosophy

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01918-6

Keywords

Well-being, Narrative, Prudential value, Narrative unity

Language

English

Format

text

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