Good, theories of the

5. The good life

One of the oldest questions of moral philosophy is what the best life is for a human being. A standard view in ancient Greek philosophy was that there are three types of life: a contemplative or philosophical life; a life of virtuous political activity; and a hedonistic or money-making life. Plato and Aristotle agreed that the contemplative life is best and the political life second best; in their view, only those who do not know the true pleasures of contemplation and virtuous action resort to hedonistic pursuits (see Eudaimonia; Hedonism).

The idea that so specific a life can be identified as best may seem paradoxical. If there is a best life for human beings, does that mean it is the best life for any human being, regardless of personal endowments or natural tastes? On this view, lives are like looks: there may be a best way for each person to look, but the best way for you to look may not, unfortunately, be the best way to look. Some philosophers argue that this makes no sense: how can a certain way of life be better for you, if there is no way in which you could enjoy, appreciate, or be interested in such a life and still be yourself?

What sorts of arguments might be used to show that one type of life is best? Plato favoured a test of experience: we should take as authoritative the preferences of those people who have experienced the kinds of activities central to all three types of life. John Stuart Mill (1861) suggested that this test could be used to identify those pleasures whose ‘quality’ is so high as to outweigh considerations of ‘quantity,’ and so which belong in the best life (see Mill, J.S. §9). Aristotle appealed to his own idea of function: if human beings have a function, the person who performs the human function well must lead the best life. But Aristotle also thought we could identify certain criteria which any good life must meet, and rate lives by the extent to which they fulfil these criteria: the pursuits central to a good life must be active, pleasant, self-sufficient, and done for their own sake alone. Moore’s theory suggests a simpler account: the good life is one that consists of intrinsically valuable states and activities, such as appreciating beauty, having friends, and seeking knowledge.

Perhaps the most common strategy is to appeal to human psychology, to what people actually care about. Classical utilitarians argued that human beings care about only two things: getting pleasure and avoiding pain. The best life must therefore be the one with the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. Others claim that the goodness of your life is a function of how many of your desires are satisfied and the strength of those desires. But the content of your desires and their strength may be determined in unfortunate ways by the limitations of your knowledge or imagination, and this has led some philosophers to adopt an idealized version of this account: the good life for you is the one you would choose under conditions of perfect knowledge and imaginative reflection.

But we must also ask whether the good life and the happy life are the same. The early modern philosophers’ distinction between moral and natural goodness brought this question sharply into focus. They thought of happiness as a natural good and many of them believed that reason demands the pursuit of happiness just as obviously as it demands the practice of virtue. Yet virtue does not always bring happiness. Are human beings then subject to conflicting demands of reason? Ancient Greek philosophers had raised a parallel question, whether being virtuous is a good thing for the virtuous person. But ancient and modern solutions are different in an important way. For the Greeks, the answer lay in demonstrating that the qualities we ordinarily regard as moral virtues really are qualities that make us good at the performance of the human function – qualities without which we would be incapable of choosing and acting well. Once this is established, it is evident that a virtuous person will necessarily have a better life. Modern philosophers, however, are more inclined to believe that happiness and virtue are independent. Many modern philosophers have therefore tried to produce what Rawls calls ‘congruence’ arguments: arguments that show that the pursuit of virtue will also bring happiness, and so that the two kinds of good, although independent, come together in practice. But others have drawn a more austere conclusion, namely that a life which is both morally good and happy is open to us only in favourable circumstances – circumstances which must be secured by divine arrangements or, more optimistically, by political action.