Theme
The good life
41 philosophers, 6 traditions
How should one live, and what makes a human life go well? Traditions have answered with virtue, tranquil pleasure, harmony with nature, or an end to suffering.
What makes a life good for the person living it? Philosophers now often call this the question of well-being, and usually sort the answers into three kinds: a good life is one of pleasure, one in which our desires are satisfied, or one that contains things worth having whatever we want, such as knowledge and friendship.
Much older answers take the form of advice on how to live. In India, the Buddha taught that craving brings suffering, and set out a path by which suffering can end. In China, Confucius placed the good life in moral cultivation through family and ritual, while the Daodejing counselled simplicity and freedom from excessive desire. In Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle held, in different ways, that well-being is bound up with virtue; Epicurus made tranquil pleasure the goal, and the Stoics held that virtue is the only good.
Later thinkers carried the question on. Al-Farabi saw ultimate happiness in the human intellect’s conjunction with the Agent Intellect; Mill defended pleasure but ranked some pleasures above others; and Nietzsche asked whether we could affirm our lives even imagining them repeated in every detail.
Through time
6th century BCE
Laozi
Disorder, personal and political, comes from excessive desire. The Daodejing counsels living in accord with the ways of nature (ziran), with simplicity and quietude, and acting without self-serving desire (wuwei); its sage does not act as conventional morality expects.
Pythagoras
Live by a disciplined rule: careful observance of ritual, restrictions on diet and rigorous self-control. The Pythagorean way of life was admired for its rigour, and probably aimed at the soul’s best possible future lives.
Confucius
A good life is one of moral self-cultivation. By working “at the roots”, above all respect within the family, and by practising benevolence (ren) and ritual with real reverence, anyone can become a junzi, a person of exemplary character whose virtue supports harmony in family and state.
5th century BCE
Socrates
“The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” Socrates, who embraced poverty and took no money for his work, made it his mission to improve the souls of his fellow Athenians by questioning them about what matters most: courage, moderation and the state of their souls.
The Buddha
A life driven by craving is bound to suffering, because we cling to what is impermanent as “I” and “mine”. But suffering can cease, and the Buddha taught a middle path between indulgence and self-mortification, with training in wisdom, ethical conduct and concentration, that leads to its end.
Democritus
The good is an inner state, cheerfulness (euthymia), a mind free from fear. It comes from moderation in pursuing pleasures and from not depending on fortune, as a kind of care for the soul.
4th century BCE
Diogenes of Sinope
The good life is life according to nature, which for a human being means according to reason. It needs no possessions, status or home, only the hard training that frees us from convention and makes us self-sufficient.
Drew on Socrates
Aristotle
The highest human good is eudaimonia, or flourishing: fully realising our nature by developing our human capacities in a life lived according to reason, not a matter of subjective preference. As political animals, humans can flourish only within a city, which exists “for the sake of living well”.
Epicurus
Pleasure is the aim of life, meaning the absence of pain in the body and of turmoil in the mind (ataraxia). It is reached by keeping to natural desires, living prudently and justly among friends, and seeing through the fear of death and of the gods.
Drew on Democritus
3rd century BCE
Hipparchia
Virtue lies in living by nature, free of convention, wealth and shame, and in a self-sufficiency that hardship only strengthens.
Chrysippus
Happiness is nothing other than virtue, and virtue is knowledge of good and evil, gained by studying the rational order of nature. Health has some value, but it is not a good, and nothing outweighs virtue.
1st century CE
Seneca
Virtue alone is sufficient for happiness; health and wealth have value but add nothing to it. Philosophy is the therapy that frees us from violent emotions and teaches us to use our time well, whether in public life or in retirement.
Epictetus
Happiness depends only on what is up to us, our own judgements and choices. By treating health, wealth and reputation as “externals”, and correcting the judgements that make us fear and grieve, we become free, whatever happens.
Drew on Socrates, Chrysippus and Diogenes of Sinope
2nd century CE
Sextus Empiricus
Tranquillity does not come from finding the truth, as the dogmatists hope. It comes, almost by accident, when we suspend judgement and stop troubling ourselves over which of two opposed views is correct.
Marcus Aurelius
Only virtue is good and only vice bad; health, wealth and reputation make no difference to happiness, which lies wholly in our own power. So we should live by reason, welcome whatever the whole allots us, and work for the good of all people as fellow citizens of one cosmic city.
About 400 years later
6th century CE
Boethius
Riches, office and pleasure are goods of fortune and cannot make us happy. Happiness lies in virtue, wisdom and self-sufficiency, and in the end in the highest good, so even a prisoner awaiting death has not lost it.
Drew on Aristotle
8th century CE
Śāntideva
The best life is that of the bodhisattva, devoted to ending the suffering of all beings. It is cultivated through the perfections of generosity, discipline, patience, effort, meditation and wisdom, which support one another.
10th century CE
Abu Bakr al-Razi
Live moderately, as Socrates did in his maturity, avoiding pleasures that bring more pain in the long run. Beyond that, the philosophical life imitates God in wisdom and justice, and leads the soul towards its liberation from the body.
Drew on Socrates
al-Farabi
Ultimate happiness is the human intellect’s conjunction with the Agent Intellect, and the way to it is philosophy, which begins with logic and a curbing of the passions. Later philosophers reported, though, that a lost commentary of his dismissed such conjunction as a tall tale.
Drew on Aristotle
11th century
Zhang Zai
The goal is to fulfil one’s original nature and become a sage. Overcoming the material desires of our physical nature through learning and ritual, we come to see that all things share one substance, and care for everyone as family.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Human beings were made to pursue knowledge and to do good deeds. Together these free the soul from nature’s captivity and its darkness, so that it returns to the higher world it came from.
12th century
Avempace
The good life is spiritual health, and its peak is intellectual: to grasp the pure intelligibles and join the Active Intellect. Pleasure follows knowledge “like the shadow of something else”, but we should seek knowledge for the sake of truth, not pleasure.
Hōnen
Liberation from the cycle of birth and death cannot be reached in the present age through one’s own practice. It comes by saying the nembutsu in complete trust in Amida’s vow, a path open to everyone, whatever their learning or moral worth.
Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
What is good for us is pleasure, especially the higher pleasures of knowledge, and what is bad is pain. Even helping a stranger where no one sees is justified by the rule that, if people generally acted this way, pleasure would be maximised and pain minimised.
Drew on Abu Bakr al-Razi
About 500 years later
17th century
Elisabeth of Bohemia
Good intentions are not enough for virtue or happiness: our actions can miscarry, even our reason is subject to luck, and we cannot be content without knowing all their effects. Happiness needs the right conditions for using reason, not only its right use.
18th century
Dai Zhen
A good life fulfils the wants and feelings we all share, and virtue extends that fulfilment to everyone: benevolence means sharing the fulfilment of life with everyone else. Moral failure comes from selfishness and from failing to see the right patterns.
Drew on Zhang Zai
Jeremy Bentham
Pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil, and all our motives are grounded in them. The right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness, measured by the intensity, duration and extent of the pleasures and pains it causes.
Salomon Maimon
Nothing is good without limitation except the striving after knowledge. Morality and truth bind us in the same way, and, much as Aristotle held, the highest virtue and pleasure lie in philosophical contemplation.
Mary Wollstonecraft
A good life is one governed by reason and self-command, for women as much as for men. Education should make both sexes independent, virtuous and fit to be good companions, parents and citizens.
19th century
Arthur Schopenhauer
Since life is endless striving and so suffering, the best we can do is quiet the will: through art, through compassion for all who suffer, and at the limit through ascetic renunciation, which brings an ocean-like calm.
John Stuart Mill
Happiness, meaning pleasure and the absence of pain, is the sole end of human action. But pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity, with those of the intellect, feelings and imagination ranking higher, and it is best for individuals to have the freedom to develop their own characters.
Drew on and argued against Jeremy Bentham
Friedrich Nietzsche
As belief in the Christian God collapses, so must the morality built on it. Nietzsche’s ideal is to affirm life without them: to “give style” to one’s character, and to live so that one could affirm one’s life as it is, even imagining its return in every detail.
Drew on and argued against Arthur Schopenhauer
20th century
G. E. Moore
Goodness is a simple, indefinable property, not pleasure or anything natural. Among the things good in themselves, friendship and the appreciation of beauty stand out; the right action is the one that produces the best outcome.
Argued against John Stuart Mill
Jean-Paul Sartre
We are condemned to be free and wholly responsible for what we make of ourselves, and for the wider situations of oppression we live in. Living authentically means facing that freedom in anguish rather than fleeing it in bad faith.
Mou Zongsan
The goal is sagehood, through the moral intuition we all possess. Unlike Kant, who could only hope that God would crown virtue with happiness in an afterlife, Chinese philosophy shows that virtue and happiness necessarily coincide, without appeal to God or an afterlife.
Albert Camus
Life has no meaning that reason can find, yet the absurd does not justify suicide. We should live in full consciousness of our fate, with passion for life and scorn for false hopes, as Sisyphus does in his endless labour.
Argued against Jean-Paul Sartre
Elizabeth Anscombe
Modern moral philosophy has lost its way: the moral “ought” makes sense only within conceptions of ethics that no longer survive, and ethics needs an adequate philosophy of psychology first. Some acts, such as intentionally killing the innocent, are always forbidden.
Iris Murdoch
Morality is less a matter of choosing than of seeing: of attending justly and lovingly to other people as being as real as oneself, against the pull of fantasy and self-absorption. The Good, in a Platonic sense, is what that attention seeks and loves.
Drew on Jean-Paul Sartre
Philippa Foot
Virtues are good in the way any living thing’s capacities are good for its kind of life. Moral judgements are objective, rooted in facts about human beings rather than in personal attitudes.
Drew on Elizabeth Anscombe and Aristotle
Alasdair MacIntyre
A good life is lived through the virtues, learned in practices and communities and given unity by the story of a whole life. Modern individualist morality, cut loose from any shared good, cannot supply this.
Drew on Aristotle
Bernard Williams
No moral theory can capture how to live: ethical life is too untidy, and morality’s demand for impersonal obligation would alienate people from the projects that make their lives worth living.
Drew on Friedrich Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill
Terms on this page
- ziran
- Naturalness, literally being “self so” (自然): how things are when they follow their own course. The Laozi uses it to describe the workings of the Dao, and Guo Xiang held that social roles too arise naturally.
- wuwei
- Nonaction (無為): acting without contrivance, letting things take their natural course. In the Laozi it is how naturalness (ziran) is put into practice.
- ren
- Humaneness or benevolence (仁), the cardinal Confucian virtue. Cheng Hao treated it as the whole of human nature, by which a person forms one body with all things and feels their pain as their own.
- junzi
- The gentleman or exemplary person (君子): the moral ideal of the Analects, whose way is marked by benevolence, rightness, ritual propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness.
- euthymia
- Cheerfulness: one of the names Democritus gave to the good, an inner state of mind.
- eudaimonia
- Happiness, flourishing or living well. For Aristotle it is achieved by fully realising our natures, developing our human capacities to the highest degree.
- ataraxia
- Freedom from mental disturbance, or tranquillity: the Epicurean goal of life, together with the absence of bodily pain, and for Pyrrhonian sceptics the reward of suspending judgement.
Sources
- Roger Crisp, Well-Being, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy