Welcome

The Good Society aims to help students become catalysts for change and agents for human flourishing. Our class is distinctive in its embrace of positive social science, which focuses on success cases of progress as the basis for learning about how to bring about the common good. By the end of class, our students will learn how leverage existing scholarship, identifying and assessing evidence from success cases to guide change in other contexts. We start by giving students space to reflect on their values and visions for a good society…and teach them the social science skills of observation and interviewing to gather data about how other people envision a good society. Despite our class title, we want students to recognize that there is not one good society. People have different ideas about what flourishing means…and students need to confront this reality—-and learn to work within it––to affect real meaningful change in a pluralistic world. We aim to cultivate curiosity and humility in our students. In this course, students will learn how to employ comparative logic to identify novel pathways to human flourishing.