Hacker News Reader

Comment by johan_larson | Hacker News Reader

I'd be more enthusiastic about such requirements if humanities/lib-arts courses actually provided a solid answer to how one should live and what one should want. But they don't. They provide lots of different answers, with no great way to choose between them. Going through a mass of required reading only to reach the conclusion that living for bling+bitches is actually a pretty OK idea doesn't seem like a good use of time.

View on HN

"...only to reach the conclusion that living for bling+bitches is actually a pretty OK idea."

Actually, essentially all of the suggestions agree that living for "bling+bitches" is a pretty poor idea. For different reasons, of course.

Hedonism is respectable enough that textbooks in ethics keep presenting it. The other ethical approaches kick it in the shins pretty hard, but no one seems to have a decisive refutation. Ethicists from other traditions just think hedonists are punks.

This is true. On the other hand, many of the approaches that get kicked around as "hedonism", like Epicurus, are pretty far from "bitches+bling".

>They provide lots of different answers, with no great way to choose between them.

...that's the point.

The entire purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn about what is important to you personally, what it means to be a person in a world full of other people making that same journey, how to understand the events that lead to where we are today, how to think about and approach new ideas, how to evaluate and process new information and so on. Your comment that shows a misunderstanding of the liberal arts reflects a core failure of the education system that is unfortunately all too common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com