What is a good life

Illustration for “What is a good life” by the American philosopher Judith Butler.

Butler tries to answer the question: “How can one lead a good life in a bad life?”
The text confronts our moral aspirations with the social environment to question its viability: how can we lead “a good life” in a world “structured as a whole by inequality, exploitation and various forms of effacement ?” And first of all, how can we define it? Prosperity and security are not enough; “good life” has a major moral imperative: not to tolerate inequality.” Because “Everyone’s life is involved in the lives of others. It is not a question of investing only in collective actions of universal scope by eradicating the self; personal life must preserve its singularity, but the self will only be “truly human” if it allows itself to be crossed by the social”.

For Le Monde