Glück und Wohlwollen: Versuch über Ethik

by Robert Spaemann

Robert Spaemann wants us to question the idea of a life well-lived. In Happiness and Benevolence, he explores the tension between the spontaneity of life, which inevitably heads towards its own satisfaction, and the reflection of reason, which is also necessary for a meaningful human life.This work follows the gravity of this inclination and shows the necessity of complementing Aristotle (the search for happiness) with Kant (the benevolence owed to the other). Spaemann argues, not without parallels in Levinas, that the eudaimonistic theory of ethics going back to Aristotle's foundation of ethics upon a pursuit of self-fulfillment is insufficient to account for the whole depth of obligation which comes from the encounter with the other. It needs to be complemented by an ethics of Kantian obligation, or better, an ethics of benevolence and the acknowledgment of that validity of the claims of the other which are independent of one's own needs. In this sense, an ethics based on happiness and benevolence is a matter of combining Aristotle's "idealism" with Kant's "realism".

Happiness and Benevolence is accessible not only to the philosophical expert, but to the educated layperson as well, and is an excellent resource for scholars of the "life well-lived".

Genres: Philosophy

254 pages, Hardcover

First published January 5, 1999

About the author

Robert Spaemann wurde 1927 in Berlin geboren. Er promovierte 1952 in Münster, war dann vier Jahre lang als Verlagslektor tätig. 1962 habilitierte er in den Fächern Philosophie und Pädagogik und war bis 1992 ordentlicher Professor an den Universitäten Stuttgart, Heidelberg und München.

Reviews

[Kian Zwo Drei · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me (I'm a philosophy teacher at High School) a must-read it if you want to take a closer look at ethics. A brilliant work of great depth and intellectual acuity. It really grabbed me and didn't let go - how often did I hear myself say, "That's it!" - but you can rarely put it that way yourself.
Admittedly, a very critical draft against modern ethical drafts - and precisely for that reason exciting and challenging. Utilitarianism, discourse ethics and system theory all come off badly - at the end of the day, Spaemann's ethics are based on a Christian-Aristotelian world view. But: This judgement can surely only be at the end of the reading, it should not be at the beginning. For if there is one thing Spaemann's arguments are not, it is flat or biased.