Groundhog Day and the Good Life

Abstract

Groundhog Day is a splendid film about the good life. To be sure, it does not offer a complete theory of The Good Life; it is a Hollywood blockbuster, after all, no more, no less. However, it presents us with Phil— the protagonist— and at the beginning of the film, Phil’s life clearly is a poor one, whereas at the end of the film, it is clearly a good one. I feel that if we could only understand what exactly it is that makes the difference between Phil’s poor life at the beginning and his good life at the end of the film, we will have grasped something important about what makes lives go well. In this article, I shall endeavour to develop just such an understanding. What makes lives go well is, of course, one of the oldest and most important questions in moral philosophy and in the course of time philosophers have come up with a number of answers. To name but the three most prominent ones, these are: hedonism, desire satisfaction accounts, and objective list theories. All of these theories have points in their favour, but all of them also face some serious problems and limitations. I will shortly introduce the theories and the film, and then discuss the constituent of the good life that the film illustrates. I shall argue that hedonism and desire satisfaction accounts cannot explain this constituent satisfactorily, and that, while objective list theories can, they can do so only in a very specific manner. I will end by refuting an objection to my account based on the film Good Will Hunting, a 1999 film directed by Gus van Sant, starring Matt Damon.