Reminiscent -Nate Strum

"Do you really value a happiness that will pass away?"(p. 33) We definitely see the stoicism in Boethius here. 

"Man's condition produces anxiety; it never proves wholly satisfactory."(p. 42) This reminds me of the following theorem. People only consciously act if they expect to avert the course of events from a course that they like less to a course that they like more. In other words, acting people act because they prefer one state of affairs to the state of affairs that they expect would occur in the absence of action (otherwise nobody would bother acting). Therefore, action only exists because of dissatisfaction, and, because conscious people never cease to act, perfect contentedness is incompatible with human life!

"Consider, too, that the man lifted up by temporary happiness is either aware or unaware that this happiness is impermanent."(p. 44) This reminds me of the studies that show that people don't rate happiness very differently after a major happiness affecting event (like winning the lottery or losing a limb) than they did before the event.

The argument on pages 56-7 about how small we are reminds me of the argument that our lives are meaningless because we are insignificant. Of course, that argument is a total non sequitur. Even if we consider significance as an objectively measurable thing (like physical effect or social influence), it has no normative implications. 

Okay, Boethius doesn't do too bad of a job in book three, but I've figured out the whole philosophy of happiness thing, so here's my exposition: Given an ordered set of subjective ultimate (ends not means) desires (D1, D2, D3, ... Dn, where D1 is preferred to D2 and so on) and any possible combination of desires can be compared to another, there exists at least one objectively best course of action that will satisfy the person's desires in the best way. In a world of omniscient people, everyone would take the best course of action. Not taking the best course of action is only possible if people are ignorant of the results of their actions, that is, ignorant of the relevant objective causal relationships. Therefore, we reduce the problem of the good life to a question of the technical efficacy of various options. The question of which virtues we should embrace merely depends on our subjective preferences and the objective state of affairs in which we happen to live, and this question can only be answered empirically. You may object that the philosophy of happiness isn't about how to get what we want but is about why we should want what we want in the first place, but I think that you'll find that this aspect of the problem is intractable because the only way to judge the "goodness" or "badness" of a desire is to appeal to that desire's capacity to attain another desire, but this is impossible with ultimate desires, which is what we assumed we were talking about. Therefore, my case is made.

P.S. I commented on Owen's and Sophia's posts.