Is Creativity a Necessary Part of the Good Life?

Creativity is required for many activities that humans prize, including play, humour, imagination, artistic production, and innovation. The recent use of artificial intelligence (ChatGPT, DALL-E, Gemini) to create artworks, write poetry, and innovate has motivated philosophers to reconsider the ethical challenges of using creative machines. Challenges include the value of originality, the unfairness of plagiarism, the danger of deskilling, and the significance of human embodiment. Nevertheless, there is another reason why outsourcing creativity to machines is a concern for ethicists: various evidence suggests that being creative and living well are correlated. Anecdotally speaking, many creative activities (dancing, singing, life drawing, pottery classes) are taken up for self-care and/or to enhance well-being. There is also empirical support that creativity and well-being are linked, such as a recent a meta-analysis that found a strong correlation between well-being and what the authors call ‘everyday creativity’ (Acar et al. 2020). How can we explain this? This talk will explore how philosophical insights into creativity and well-being can illuminate the empirical connection between these two concepts.