The good life

The question of how a human being ought to live, taken as one question rather than as a list of separate problems.

Theme: Ethics and character
Tradition: Cross-tradition
Term fixed: c. 400 BC

In plain terms

Ancient philosophy asks a question modern philosophy mostly stopped asking: not what is permitted, or what one owes, but how a person ought to live.

The difference matters. A theory of obligations tells you what you must not do and leaves the rest open, which is most of a life. A theory of the good life is about the shape of the whole thing - what to pursue, what to care about, what a life would have to contain to have gone well.

And it is answerable in a way the modern question is not. You can be told you have kept every obligation and wasted your life, and the complaint is intelligible. Whatever it is complaining about is the subject here.

As a philosopher would put it

The classical schools each answer it directly. Aristotle: activity in accordance with virtue over a complete life, with contemplation as the highest. Epicurus: tranquillity, friendship and the discipline of desire. The Stoics: virtue alone, with everything else indifferent. Each is a competing prescription rather than a competing analysis, and each includes a practice.

The modern narrowing is what Anscombe and Williams both diagnose. Ethics became the theory of obligation - what is required, permitted and forbidden - which leaves the question of how to live to individual preference and treats it as outside philosophy's remit.

The recovery has come from several directions: virtue ethics after Anscombe, Williams's attack on the impartial standpoint as unable to accommodate the projects that give a life its shape, Nozick's and Nagel's work on meaning, and the growing literature on meaning in life as distinct from both happiness and morality. Wolf's account - that meaning arises where subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness - is the most influential recent formulation.

Where you meet it

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed the same men since 1938, beginning with 268 Harvard sophomores and later adding 456 men from inner-city Boston. It has run for more than eighty years, into a second generation, and is the longest study of its kind.

Its most-reported finding is that the strongest predictor of health and satisfaction in later life is the quality of close relationships - stronger than income, social class, cholesterol or IQ. Men who were most satisfied in their relationships at fifty were the healthiest at eighty.

The caveats matter and are not usually reported with it: the original cohorts were entirely male, overwhelmingly white, and drawn from two narrow populations, so the generalisation runs well beyond the sample. What the study does establish is that the ancient question can be given empirical purchase at all - and that when it is, the answer that emerges is closer to Aristotle on friendship than to anything the twentieth century expected.

What is actually disputed

Whether philosophy can answer it.

One view is that the question is prior to and larger than moral theory, and that a discipline unable to address it has mistaken a part for the whole. The other is that it is not a philosophical question at all - that beyond the constraints morality imposes, how to live is a matter of individual temperament and choice, and that a philosopher recommending a life is exceeding their competence.

The second position has the better argument about authority and the worse account of what the discipline has actually done for most of its history.

A further disagreement concerns whether the good life and the moral life coincide. The ancient schools assume they do - virtue is constitutive of living well. Williams's argument is that they can conflict, that morality is one consideration among others rather than an overriding one, and that a theory requiring a person to abandon what gives their life meaning has asked for too much.

Commonly confused with

the moral life Whether living well and living rightly coincide is exactly the question, and the ancient schools assumed an answer that modern philosophy does not.
quality of life A health and welfare measure. The question here is about what a life should be for, which no index addresses.
the meaning of life Meaning and living well are related and separable. A meaningful life can be miserable, and a pleasant one can be empty.

Defined against

Duty An ethics of what one must not do and an ethics of how to live are different projects, and the second was largely displaced by the first

Philosophers

Socrates The question in its original form
Aristotle The most complete classical answer
Epicurus The rival answer, and its practice
Epictetus The Stoic answer, taught as training
Michel de Montaigne The question asked essayistically rather than systematically
Friedrich Nietzsche The demand that one's life be affirmable in full

Works

Republic The question posed and pursued
Nicomachean Ethics The systematic answer
Principal Doctrines The Epicurean prescription
Meditations The Stoic answer in daily practice
Essays The question handled without a system
After Virtue The argument that the question was lost

Schools

Old Academy Where the question is central
Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) Where it receives its fullest answer
Epicureanism Where the answer is tranquillity
Roman Stoicism Where it becomes daily discipline
Renaissance Humanism Where it is recovered
Communitarianism Where it returns to political theory

Related concepts

Flourishing c. 340 BC · Happiness c. 340 BC · Virtue c. 340 BC · Meaning of life 1942 · Wisdom c. 340 BC

Socrates makes it the question - not how to be successful or pious but how one should live - and Bernard Williams's remark that this is the question ethics inherits is the standard modern statement of why it survives.