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.
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Notes
Philosophical narrativists recognize that that not all great stories make for lives high in well-being (Hamlet, for example)—the best interpretation of their view, as we’ll see, is that certain elements of good stories make for good lives. Some might still want to claim that good stories make for meaningful lives; that won’t be my focus here.
De Bres criticizes standard narrativism about well-being for its fixation on what she calls the “bloodless” causal relations between the events of a life (2018, 8)—although Shape of a Life shows us that the conjecture that causal relations matter for well-being has considerable intuitive power. For more on various forms of psychological narrativism about well-being, see Rosati (2013), de Bres (2018), and Feldman (2004, 131–141). Strawson has prominently argued that this view fails to capture the variety of healthy psychologies, including his own; for some psychological-narrativist responses to Strawson’s view (2004), see Rudd (2007, 69–70) and MacKenzie and Poltera (2010).
Indeed, Vitrano makes an objection to standard (non-psychological) narrativism about well-being that’s different from those we’ll consider here: that there’s no one objectively correct set of narrative relations among the events of a life (2017, 572–573). If this is true, then assessing our lives along narrativist lines might not just be inadvisable but outright impossible.
Velleman words the original case slightly differently—one couple facing a choice rather than two different couples (1991, 55).
The claim that Couple A’s marriage leads directly to their happiness, and Couple B’s does not, rests on the assumption that it’s possible for one life to be more cohesive than another. You might be skeptical (as a referee was) that it’s possible to compare two lives’ causal cohesion in this way; in that case, the problem only gets thornier for Velleman. We’ll return to this question of causal connection briefly at the end of the paper.
See also Velleman (2009, 201–202).
Gingerich writes of the common phenomenon “in which people want to escape from being precisely who they are. This is the appeal of costume parties, the anonymity of the city, and travel to places where nobody knows you” (Unpublished, 15).
This intuition isn’t Velleman’s alone; see bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel’s (2014) claim that he doesn’t want to live past 75 (and see McMahan, 2002, 175–176). On the other hand, Vitrano points out that this would guide our end-of-life choices in some troubling ways (2017, 574), and see also Fischer (2005, 386–387).
Non-narrativists criticize narrativists for this—see Bradley’s contention (2009, 156) that judgments about narrative and the shape of a life are aesthetic, rather than prudential, and Kauppinen’s (2015, 213) response. We’ve already seen that narrativists don’t think all great stories make good lives; we’ll discuss the limits of the parallels between life and literature further in Sect. 7.
Bradford considers, but ultimately rejects, the idea that the narrative structure of an achievement increases the effort required to achieve it (and so increases its value) (2015, 43–46).
We should recognize, too, that these features can all come in degrees; a life can be more or less cohesive and so on (Clark, 2018, 374).
Although Velleman’s earlier work makes the narrativist claims we’ve discussed above, he makes a version of this point in later work (although with a slightly different conception of narrative in mind) (2009, 204).
See, for example, Gingerich’s (2022; Unpublished) work on the value of spontaneity.
We saw this come up in our initial discussion of Velleman in Sect. 3—there, I said that I find it intuitively plausible that we can identify direct and more indirect causal chains in a person’s life; if you don’t, then that brings you straight to this issue.
Thanks to a referee for inviting me to talk about this. It’s also notable, as this referee pointed out, that (some) of the most plot-driven and narratively tidy works of fiction are those not normally classified as great literature—crime thrillers, romance novels, etc.
To their credit, some narrativists recognize this (see, for example, Brännmark’s list of disanalogies between life and literature) (2006, 67–70). A referee pointed out that one of the entries on this list—literature is supposed to entertain, but this isn’t the purpose of life—is especially important; we should do our best not to conflate the aesthetic qualities of literary narratives with the prudential qualities of lives.
Kauppinen argues persuasively that a life of “maximal variety” might not be the best life (2012, 367).
Perhaps highly narratively structured lives have meaning that more varied lives don’t, even when those looser lives are higher in well-being; again, there may be a difference between what gives lives their meaning and what makes them prudentially better or worse.
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Acknowledgements
I received helpful comments on previous versions of this paper from Craig Agule, Matt Braich, Colin Chamberlain, Eugene Chislenko, Jonathan Gingerich, Ying Liu, Paige Massey, and referees at Philosophical Studies. I’m also grateful for feedback from audiences at the Northeast Normativity Workshop, the University of Notre Dame, and the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress.
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The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.
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Berg, A. Do good lives make good stories?. Philos Stud 180, 637–659 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01918-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01918-6