Do the adventures of Wolfgang and Volker in the short film Life is Wunderbar provide a confirmation or refutation of Locke and Hume’s empiricist account whereby the happiness and the Good are associated with the presence of pleasure and absence of pain and/or Bentham’s

Assignment Task

Building on your first assignment, this assignment now requires you to take an argumentative position on a topic discussed in class.

Happiness and the Pursuit of Pleasure

We will then read and discuss together short excerpts from the following associated topic readings for this week from Locke, Hume, and Bentham (all found on Leganto) as well as critically interrogating ChatGPT prompts and results:

Questions

1. Do the adventures of Wolfgang and Volker in the short film Life is Wunderbar provide a confirmation or refutation of Locke and Hume’s empiricist account whereby the happiness and the Good are associated with the presence of pleasure and absence of pain and/or Bentham’s

   principle of utility whereby the Good involves the net maximization of pleasure?

2. Empathy and the Golden Rule: Are they enough?
3. with a reliable ethical guide? What are the limits of empathy and the golden rule?
4. How successfully can the deliberately paradoxical existential formula of becoming who we allow us to preserve what is positive about the Born this Way’ idea – that it provides the compelling moral force of recognition, solidity, immutability, and belonging – but without also buying into what is potentially negative about the Born this way idea, namely that it risks rendering us victims of our biology by undermining the Goods of individual freedom, autonomy, and our ability to take charge of our own story?