Title: Secular Beatitude

Abstract: In this presentation I explore the need for a conception of beatitude within secular ethical theory. In the gospels and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, beatitude is claimed to consist in closeness to God or heaven, in participating – to the extent humans are thought capable of this – in the divine. This notion may appear to be among the most dispensable when theorizing ethics apart from theology. I think a complete secular ethics will include a conception of beatitude, however, and in this presentation I attempt to explain why. This ambition may be less surprising if it is viewed also as an entry into the increasingly popular topic of meaningfulness. The phenomenon of secular beatitude theorized here is a type of meaningfulness, but “beatitude” enjoys advantages over terms like “meaningful” that are already secularized. These advantages include (i) more clearly denoting a state of being, as contrasted with merely denoting a property of a life or a set of projects; (ii) more clearly denoting an ideal to be approximated, as contrasted with a quantity to be produced; and above all (iii) more clearly denoting a state or property that consists in relating fittingly to something which is both objectively valuable and external to oneself. As I explain, theorizing meaningfulness as secular beatitude opens a middle path between a speculative cosmic and a deflated subjectivist understanding of the meaning to be found in human life.

Short bio: Jon Garthoff is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Philosophy Department at the University of Tennessee in the United States. His principal research interests lie in ethical theory and political philosophy. He is especially interested in how psychological capacities – including capacities we share with many non-human animals, such as consciousness and thought – underlie and explain claims in ethics, politics, and law.

The event is being co-sponsored by the Center for Social Theory.