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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Summer 2004 : Living Well

Living Well: Ethics and the Good Life

by Eugenia Smith

Valerie Tiberius
Photo by Leo Kim

Valerie Tiberius

Associate professor, philosophy

Education

B.A., M.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Ph.D., University of Toronto

Selected publications

Deliberation About the Good: Justifying What We Value, 2000.

“Cultural Differences and Philosophical Accounts of Well-Being,” forthcoming, The Journal of Happiness Studies

Awards

Fellow, Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences

University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, 2002

Young Scholar, Cornell University

Loves teaching because…

“I can open students' minds to thinking about things they've always taken for granted. The big question that we start with is ‘Who counts, morally speaking? Or what counts?' The most common view is that it's people who matter, who have moral standing. Some think it's people and other animals, or that it's anything alive, or anything alive plus the ecosystems, natural environments. It's really a cool thing to get students to think about expanding their moral universe.”

Working on…

A book titled "The Reflective Life.”

To relax, she…

Keeps moving: yoga, biking, hiking, kayaking, cross-country skiing—with her partner, Walker; and her dogs, Gryphon and Sammy.

Reflections on the good life:

“A moral life is a reflective life. But the reflective life involves a lot of unreflective moments. When you get completely absorbed in things, that's part of a good life, to be able to withdraw from reflection and just live. If you're always reflecting on what you're doing, or about how it fits into your life or contributes to living a good life, you're not really living any more. This view reflects the influence of both my father, an educational psychologist, and my mother, an artist, who imbued in my sister and me that we should always follow our bliss.”

Her bliss is…

Friendship, good works, nature, and (her guilty pleasure) "a little trash TV now and then.”

Her dream vacation:

A trip to New Zealand, with its "fjords and glaciers, snow-capped mountains, ocean, wildlife …. On a kayak trip in one of the sounds, we had about 30 dolphins swimming beside us and later saw about 50 blue penguins!

Trace the elaborate and complex circuitry of Valerie Tiberius's thinking, and you'll arrive at some deceptively simple ideas: There are good actions and bad actions. It's better for people to be happy than to suffer. And some things are "just flat-out wrong.”

“The good life" is very probably something most of us aspire to. Yet we may—and do—disagree, sometimes vehemently, about how we define and achieve it: In our fragmented and fractious postmodern world, one person's truth is another's travesty.

Tiberius believes that these individual differences in perspective matter. But she also believes that "there are real goods and evils in the world,” and certain moral principles that most "reasonable people" affirm and by which they measure their conduct.

In developing a moral philosophy for the 21st century, Tiberius intends to demonstrate that self-interest is "not ultimately at odds with a moral point of view": We may (and often do) act both ethically and in our own self-interest. Indeed, she says, "Virtue isn't really so rigid and old-fashioned. At its source, it is multi-textured and very democratic.”

Philosophy for the good life

If the word philosopher conjures the rarefied air of metaphysics and symbolic logic, Tiberius, a McKnight Land-Grant associate professor of philosophy, breezes into the picture as a tonic burst of pure oxygen. Sure, she's conversant with Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein. Her nimble mind has traveled far and wide across philosophical traditions from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell. But what grabs her isn't high theory. It's the alchemy of mixing philosophical ideas, social science data, personal observations, and lived experience into a recipe for a kind of gourmet concoction she calls the "good life"—a life lived well and reflectively, with integrity, and with a healthy mix of self-interest and concern for others, including our non-human cousins.

The grail of Tiberius's research is a moral philosophy that brings personal fulfillment and moral rectitude into a harmonious balance. It is a philosophy that people will live by "not because it's right in some abstract sense but because it's consistent with their own sense of how they should live and what makes them happy,” says Tiberius. "Ethical behavior begins with an individual's subjective sense of what kind of life is worth living.”

Lest we think subjectivity puts us on wobbly moral ground, Tiberius offers a pragmatic defense. "Living well" is important to people, she says, and so any moral system that ignores self-interest is, in the end, morally vacuous—no one will buy into it. Surely an ethic that takes into account people's subjective experience of the world beats one that is logically flawless but insupportable in daily life.

But doesn't such a moral system simply ratify selfishness? No, says Tiberius: "The good life for any given person is highly individualistic,” she grants. "It's absolutely true that individual experiences matter. It's better for individuals to be happy than to suffer. But that doesn't mean there are no standards beyond an individual's point of view. The big picture includes regard for others.”

Any notion that subjectivity is inherently selfish reflects "a very pessimistic view of human nature,” she adds. Her view—based on her own personal observations as well as on hard research—is rosier.

“The kind of life that is personally fulfilling involves doing morally decent things,” says Tiberius. "When we sacrifice our own pleasure for the sake of others, that makes us feel good—we're ‘doing the right thing.'" Composting and recycling, for instance, may not be fun, but we can derive pleasure from our small contributions to a healthier planet.

Besides, says Tiberius, virtuous people—people who are giving and compassionate—have more friends and generally better lives. "People don't like mean people,” she declares. "And mean people aren't very happy. There's empirical data to back that up.”

The reflective life

How we justify our values and our behavior is an important philosophical concern for Tiberius. As she defines it, the good life is a "reflective life,” governed by a system of values that gives us not only reasons for behaving a certain way but also solid but flexible standards for judging the morality of our actions.

“You don't get to pursue your own good willy-nilly,” Tiberius says. "If you feel like abusing animals or dumping toxic waste into the Mississippi, that doesn't mean you just go ahead and do it." She holds individuals and industries to the same measure of conduct: For any action, they must weigh the perceived benefits to themselves against the potential for harm to others and to the environment.

In Tiberius's ideal moral universe, when we justify an action we perform a complex "balancing act." We begin with a big-picture view informed by social and cultural norms, learned moral and religious values, and "everything we know from empirical observation to be true about the world, about events and consequences and human motivation and behavior.”

To that complex mix we also bring a broad interdisciplinary understanding of the sciences and humanities. And it's all refracted through our own individual moral and experiential lens.

Ethics and the environment

Tiberius developed the philosophy department's first environmental ethics course as a way of integrating two of her reigning passions—nature and philosophy. A vegetarian and animal welfare advocate whose father was a "serious environmentalist,” Tiberius says, "I grew up going on long hikes, learning about the natural world, and having great philosophical conversations with my dad.

“I learned at an early age that people can be brought to value the welfare of other species if they understand enough about the natural world. Our own good is related to the good of the environment and of other creatures in many ways.”

In her classes, she encourages her students to see those connections. "We talk about what is actually done to animals, for example, from the stockyards to our dinner tables,” she explains.

“For me, not eating meat is a moral commitment. But I am very against preaching to my students. It's not my job to convince them of anything. I want to give them the tools to be reflective and deliberative.

“I want them to think about what their views are about things, why they take the positions they take, and how their choices affect biosystems and other species.”

It's an article of faith with Tiberius that spending time in the natural world and with other species improves both our character and the quality of our lives. So, too, does taking steps to protect the environment

“Our interactions with a natural environment are the kinds of authentic experiences that make us whole,” she says. "Nature is particularly good at putting us in touch with something that has value beyond its material worth and market value.

“Economic models and cost-benefit analyses of environmental practices are shortsighted. If you look to the next generation and the next, the costs of our current practices far outweigh the benefits. At least that's the environmental side of the story.

“On an individual and subjective level, empirical data indicate that money, status, and power do not contribute to happiness. A walk in the park beats shopping any day.”