I want to talk to you today about the final end, about the purpose of life.

And as you can imagine, there's disputes and debates among different philosophers as to what that would be.

And I want to draw today on the thought of Thomas Aquinas and also on various contemporary psychological accounts.

And I want to try to integrate these two things into kind of one

vision. So let me start off a little bit with the contemporary psychology. There's a lot of

research done about happiness. And they've compared different kinds of groups. So let me ask you,

who would you say on average is happier?

Black people or white people?

Now, obviously, a particular white person might be very happy or very sad,

or a particular black person might be very happy or very sad.

But if you took 100,000 white people, 100,000 black people,

who would you say, would you guess, on average

would be more happy?

Well, the research showed that there is really no significant difference between different

racial groups that basically everybody was pretty much equally happy.

Well, what if we compared men and women? Again, not a particular

man and a particular woman, but on average, you know, men on average and women on average,

who would be more happy if we compare those two? Well, according to Jonathan Haidt in his book,

The Happiness Hypothesis, again, the answer is it makes no significant difference.

All right.

Well, what if we compare different age groups, you know, 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds,

40-year-olds, young people versus old people, right?

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