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Articles

Philosophy: A Call to Action

Calvin H. Warner asks if philosophy can improve our lives.

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is to systems of thought,” wrote John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971). This simple comparison elucidates the central task of philosophy rather well.

It seems just as plain to me that happiness is the central value of human existence. But as with truth and justice, determining that happiness is good is hardly an accomplishment: the tricky part is to understand what happiness actually is. Yet knowing what happiness actually is also falls short of telling us how we can attain it; and if we can’t do that then we have missed the point altogether.

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