From Socrates to Sartre:How Should We Live?

Lee Braver opens this introductory course with the question: what does it mean to be good? This is the question Socrates posed twenty-five centuries ago, and it launches a journey through the most influential ethical theories in Western philosophy.

The course begins with Socrates himself, who never provided an ethical system but taught us what one must look like: universal, action-guiding, and capable of explaining why good things are good.

From there, Braver moves through three great ethical traditions in reverse chronological order, letting each challenge the assumptions of the last. Mill's utilitarianism argues that actions are good when they produce happiness and bad when they produce unhappiness, a simple, intuitive idea that leads to surprising complications: what counts as happiness, whose happiness matters, and whether it can ever be right to sacrifice one person's interests for the greater good.

Kant rejects this entirely, insisting that consequences are irrelevant and only motivation matters. His categorical imperative demands that we act only on principles we could will to become universal laws, and that we treat other people as ends in themselves, never merely as means: we must do the right thing because it is right, not because of what we gain.

Aristotle steps back further still. Though writing more than two thousand years before either Kant or Mill, his virtue ethics challenges the framing both share: that ethics is fundamentally about individual decisions. What matters instead is character, the habits we build over a lifetime that determine who we become. The goal is not to follow the right rules but to cultivate the right kind of person, so that acting well flows naturally from who we are.

The course concludes with Sartre, who challenges all of this. If there is no God and no human essence, he argues, then there are no rules waiting to be discovered. We are radically free, and that freedom is both our burden and our responsibility.

Viewers will come away understanding not just what these philosophers believed, but why their disagreements matter, and how those disagreements might shape the way we live our own lives.