At the heart of debates about the common good is the question about the nature of the good life. That question is difficult enough to answer within a basically homogenous society, but it can be significantly more challenging in an avowedly pluralistic one. Left unexamined, wide-ranging diversity of beliefs and opinions cause well-intentioned people to talk past one another, assuming more common ground than they actually have. Different religions and worldviews may share vocabulary, yet they assume radically different meanings.

In What is the Good Life? Perspectives from Religion, Philosophy, and Psychology, editors Drew Collins and Matthew Croasmun bring together scholars from eight distinct worldviews to answer the titular question. This interfaith dialogue, funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, is non-polemical. The authors do not interact with each other’s essays but were each given the assignment to interact with three basic aspects of the good life: agency, circumstance, and affect. The degree to which the contributors succeed in presenting a coherent vision of human flourishing varies based on the presuppositions of their respective worldviews. The book sets out to be “an invitation to discern the shape of flourishing life in dialogue with the visions” of the other positions (p. 6). The book provides striking evidence that the very question presupposes categories of thought that have particular Western and perhaps even Christian foundations.

The relative incongruence of the question of human flourishing with some worldviews quickly becomes apparent in the first three chapters on the Hindu, Buddhist, and Ruist (or Confucian) vision of the good life. To varying degrees the authors of these chapters, each an adherent of the vision they are describing, struggle to discuss the three elements they were assigned. All three positions demonstrate some limited concern for the external conditions of humanity and see the good life primarily as either the attainment of liberation from ignorance for the Hindu (p. 23), or a “profound understanding of the interconnectivity of all phenomena” for the Buddhist (p. 58), or self-transformation toward one’s “due state of being” through efforts at “self-cultivation” for the Ruist (p. 87). These three worldviews are distinct from each other–indeed, the authors nod to the radical diversity within their own movements–but they share the common conviction that the good life is an achievement of an internal disposition. They do not entirely ignore the external goods of the material world, but physical reality is obviously a secondary concern.

Chapter 4 provides a more satisfying answer to the question of the good life by offering a contribution from Judaism which sees “human flourishing as service to God through fidelity to God’s covenant and its commandments” (p. 93). This necessarily implies a specific embodied, communal reality. However, the authors are careful to argue that God’s commands are not universal. They are particular to Jewish people in light of their historical relationship with God (p. 112).

In chapter 5, the Christian vision of human flourishing offers the first holistic, universal account of the good life, framing it through the paradigm of the Bible’s grand narrative: creation, fall, redemption, consummation. It is the only perspective that answers both the problems of external suffering and internal longing. The authors focus primarily on a Pauline account of flourishing, yet this chapter stands apart due to its coherence and success in addressing the central questions of the volume.

Chapter 6 presents a Muslim vision of the good life. The authors offer no definition of the good life, but simply jump between passages from their sacred texts (and commentary on those texts) that in some way tie to ethics and belief. It is a challenge to engage with this perspective, since the chapter is largely incoherent.

Chapter 7 shifts from religious perspectives to a utilitarian perspective, which argues that the good life “is a life with the greatest possible surplus of happiness over misery” (p. 177). The perspective is internally coherent, but when presented in the context of the other chapters, the absence of a source of value within utilitarianism is apparent. In other words, utilitarianism works (to some degree) because it borrows concepts like “misery” and “good” from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The authors appeal to ideals like “common sense” and doing “good things,” which presuppose values their calculus does not support.

More overtly, in chapter 8, the vision of Positive Psychology is assumed to be “compatible with a number of philosophical and religious traditions” (p. 204), as it pursues a “good life that is empirically testable” (p. 203). As such, this last chapter function less as a distinct approach to the good life and more as a way to measure whether the good life has or has not been achieved according to other perspectives. The authors leave unanswered basic questions of how one would measure whether a population has achieved the internal dispositions commended by some of the earlier perspectives in the book.

The strength of this book is that it sets each of the eight worldviews in parallel with adherents attempting to answer the same, central question. While the most compelling response to the titular question is offered by the Christian authors, a critical skeptic may counter that this has something to do with the nature of the question and framework proposed by the editors, which seems to favor worldviews that are more closely associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. In What is the Good Life?, Collins and Croasmun present a helpful sample of perspectives, but the result, while interesting, seems too eclectic in form to serve as a vital resource for interfaith dialogue.

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