MODULE 6

THE GOOD LIFE

LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of this lesson, the learner should be able to:

• Examine what is meant by a good life
• Identify how humans attempt to attain what is deemed to be a good life.
• Recognize possibilities available to human being to attain the good life.

INTRODUCTION
Many philosophers have attempted unlocking the old philosophical question,
“what is the good life?” “how should one live well?” “what does it take to live
fruitfully?
In this module, these questions will be answered as we understand all about
achieving the good life, what every individual strives throughout his or her life.

What is meant by a good life?

According to Westacott (2018), there are three ways by which we can

understand what is meant by a good life or living well.” These are the moral life,
life of pleasure, and fulfilled life. Read the article below:
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What is “the good life”? This is one of the oldest philosophical questions. It has
been posed in different ways—How should one live? What does it mean to “live
well”?—but these are really just the same question. After all, everyone wants to
live well, and no one wants “the bad life.”

But the question isn’t as simple as it sounds. Philosophers specialize in unpacking

hidden complexities, and the concept of the good life is one of those that needs
quite a bit of unpacking.

The Moral Life

One basic way we use the word “good” is to express moral approval. So when we
say someone is living well or that they have lived a good life, we may simply mean
that they are a good person, someone who is courageous, honest, trustworthy,
kind, selfless, generous, helpful, loyal, principled, and so on.

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 They possess and practice many of the most important virtues. And they don’t
spend all their time merely
pursuing their own pleasure; they devote a certain amount of time to activities that
benefit others, perhaps through their engagement with family and friends, or through
their work, or through various voluntary activities.

This moral conception of the good life has had plenty of champions. Socrates and
Plato both gave absolute priority to being a virtuous person over all other
supposedly good things such as pleasure, wealth, or power.

In Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, Socrates takes this position to an extreme. He argues

that it is much better to suffer wrong than to do it; that a good man who has his eyes
gouged out and is tortured to death is more fortunate than a corrupt person who has
used wealth and power dishonorably.

In his masterpiece, the Republic, Plato develops this argument in greater detail. The
morally good person, he claims, enjoys a sort of inner harmony, whereas the wicked
person, no matter how rich and powerful he may be or how many pleasure he
enjoys, is disharmonious, fundamentally at odds with himself and the world.

It is worth noting, though, that in both the Gorgias and the Republic, Plato bolsters
his argument with a speculative account of an afterlife in which virtuous people are
rewarded and wicked people are punished.

Many religions also conceive of the good life in moral terms as a life lived according
to God’s laws. A person who lives this way—obeying the commandments and
performing the proper rituals—is pious. And in most religions, such piety will be
rewarded. Obviously, many people do not receive their reward in this life.

But devout believers are confident that their piety will not be in vain. Christian
martyrs went singing to their deaths confident that they would soon be in heaven.
Hindus expect that the law of karma will ensure that their good deeds and intentions
will be rewarded, while evil actions and desires will be punished, either in this life or
in future lives.

The Life of Pleasure

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was one of the first to declare, bluntly, that
what makes life worth living is that we can experience pleasure. Pleasure is
enjoyable, it’s fun, it’s...well...pleasant! The view that pleasure is the good, or, to put
I another way, that pleasure is what makes life worth living, is known as hedonism.

The word “hedonist,” when applied to a person, has slightly negative connotations.
It suggests that they are devoted to what some have called the “lower” pleasures
such as sex, food, drink, and sensual indulgence in general.

Epicurus was thought by some of his contemporaries to be advocating and

practicing this sort of lifestyle, and even today an “epicure” is someone who is
especially appreciative of food and drink. But this is a misrepresentation of
Epicureanism. Epicurus certainly praised all kinds of pleasures. But he didn’t
advocate that we lose ourselves in sensual debauchery for various reasons:

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 • Doing so will probably reduce our pleasures in the long run since over-
indulgence tends to cause health problems and limit the range of pleasure
we enjoy.
• The so-called “higher” pleasures such as friendship and study are at least
as important as “pleasures of the flesh."

• The good life has to be virtuous. Although Epicurus disagreed with Plato about the value of
pleasure, he fully agreed with him on this point.

Today, this hedonistic conception of the good life is arguably dominant in Western
culture. Even in everyday
speech, if we say someone is “living the good life,” we probably mean that they
enjoying lots of recreational pleasures: good food, good wine, skiing, scuba diving,
lounging by the pool in the sun with a cocktail and a beautiful partner.

What is key to this hedonistic conception of the good life is that it emphasizes
subjective experiences. On this view, to describe a person as “happy” means that
they “feel good,” and a happy life is one that contains many “feel good”
experiences.

The Fulfilled Life

If Socrates emphasizes virtue and Epicurus emphasizes pleasure, another great
Greek thinker, Aristotle, views the good life in a more comprehensive way.
According to Aristotle, we all want to be happy.

We value many things because they are a means to other things. For instance, we
value money because it enables us to buy things we want; we value leisure
because it gives us time to pursue our interests. But happiness is something we
value not as a means to some other end but for its own sake. It has intrinsic value
rather than instrumental value.

So for Aristotle, the good life is a happy life. But what does that mean? Today, many
people automatically think of happiness in subjectivist terms: To them, a person is
happy if they are enjoying a positive state of mind, and their life is happy if this is
true for them most of the time.

There is a problem with this way of thinking about happiness in this way, though.
Imagine a powerful sadist who spends much of his time gratifying cruel desires. Or
imagine a pot-smoking, beer-guzzling couch potato who does nothing but sit around
all day watching old TV shows and playing video games. These people may have
plenty of pleasurable subjective experiences. But should we really describe them
as “living well”?

Aristotle would certainly say no. He agrees with Socrates that to live the good life
one must be a morally good person. And he agrees with Epicurus that a happy life
will involve many and varied pleasurable experiences. We can’t really say someone
is living the good life if they are often miserable or constantly suffering.

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 But Aristotle’s idea of what it means to live well is objectivist rather than
subjectivist. It isn’t just a matter of how a person feels inside, although that does
matter. It’s also important that certain objective conditions be satisfied.

For instance:

• Virtue: They must be morally virtuous.

• Health: They should enjoy good health and reasonably long life.
• Prosperity: They should be comfortably off (for Aristotle this meant affluent
enough so that they don’t need to work for a living doing something that they
would not freely choose to do.)
• Friendship: They must have good friends. According to Aristotle human
beings are innately social; so the good life can’t be that of a hermit, a recluse,
or a misanthrope.

• Respect: They should enjoy the respect of others. Aristotle doesn’t think that
fame or glory is necessary; in fact, a craving for fame can lead people astray,
just as the desire for excessive wealth can. But ideally, a person’s qualities
and achievements will be recognized by others.
• Luck: They need good luck. This is an example of Aristotle’s common sense.
Any life can be rendered unhappy by tragic loss or misfortune.
• Engagement: They must exercise their uniquely human abilities and
capacities. This is why the couch potato is not living well, even if they report
that they are content. Aristotle argues that what separates human beings
from the other animals is the human reason. So the good life is one in which
a person cultivates and exercises their rational faculties by, for instance,
engaging in scientific inquiry, philosophical discussion, artistic creation, or
legislation. Were he alive today he might well include some forms of
technological innovation.

If at the end of your life you can check all these boxes then you could reasonably
claim to have lived well, to have achieved the good life. Of course, the great majority
of people today do not belong to the leisure class as Aristotle did. They have to work
for a living.

But it’s still true that we think the ideal circumstance is to be doing for a living what
you would choose to do anyway. So people who are able to pursue their calling are
generally regarded as extremely fortunate.

The Meaningful Life

Recent research shows that people who have children are not necessarily happier
than people who don’t have children. Indeed, during the child-raising years, and
especially when children have turned into teenagers, parents typically have lower
levels of happiness and higher levels of stress. But even though having children
may not make people happier, it does seem to give them the sense that their lives
are more meaningful.

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 For many people, the well-being of their family, especially their children and
grandchildren, is the main source of meaning in life. This outlook goes back a very
long way. In ancient times, the definition of good fortune was to have lots of children
who do well for themselves.

But obviously, there can be other sources of meaning in a person’s life. They may,
for instance, pursue a particular kind of work with great dedication: e.g. scientific
research, artistic creation, or scholarship. They may devote themselves to a cause:
e.g. fighting against racism or protecting the environment. Or they may be
thoroughly immersed in and engaged with some particular community: e.g. a
church, a soccer team, or a school.

The Finished Life

The Greeks had a saying: Call no man happy until he’s dead. There is wisdom in
this. In fact, one might want to amend it to: Call no man happy until he’s long dead.
For sometimes a person can appear to live a fine life, and be able to check all the
boxes—virtue, prosperity, friendship, respect, meaning, etc.—yet eventually be
revealed as something other than what we thought they were.

A good example of this Jimmy Saville, the British TV personality who was much
admired in his lifetime but who, after he died, was exposed as a serial sexual
predator.

Cases like this bring out the great advantage of an objectivist rather than a subjectivist
notion of what it means to live well. Jimmy Saville may have enjoyed his life. But surely,
we would not want to say that he lived the good life. A truly good life is one that is both
enviable and admirable in all or most of the ways outlined above.

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From the above article, good moral would mean to lead us to the good and happy
life. Throughout history, man has persistently struggled in order to attain human
flourishing and has given birth to different schools of thought, which aim for the
good and happy life.

Materialism
The first materialists were the atomists in Ancient Greece. The atomists
philosophers thought that universe and matter are only made up of atoms
“atomos” or seeds. These are indivisible particles, assembled by chance and in a
purely mechanical way.
The founder of this theory was the Greek Philosopher Leucippus and his disciple
Democritus (around 460-370 B.C.). This belief aims that comfort, pleasure, and
wealth are the only highest goals.
Hedonism

Epicurus continued the theory of materialism, which does not buy any notion of
afterlife. The hedonists see the end goal of life in attaining pleasures- “eat, drink,

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 and be merry for tomorrow we die”. They strive to maximize their total pleasure,
the difference of pleasure and pain, and if the pleasure was finally gained,
happiness remains fixed.

Stoicism

Stoicism is one of the schools of thought in philosophy created for those who live
their lives in the real world. It was founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium (early 3 rd
century BC). Stoicism asserts that virtue (e.g. wisdom) is happiness and
judgement should be based acts on behavior rather than words. People do not
have any control and must not rely on external events, only for themselves and
their responses. This philosophy, helps a person to overcome destructive
emotions and acts on what can be acted upon. Stoicism also differs from other
schools of thought with its purpose as a practical application rather than
intellectual enterprise.
Theism

The ultimate basis of happiness for theists is the communion with God. They
believe that they can find the meaning of their existence. Theism is a belief that
one or more gods exist within the universe, and that gods are often omniscient
(all-knowing), omnipotent(all-power), and omnipresent (all-pervasive). This belief
incorporate Monotheism (belief in on god) and Polytheism (belief in many gods).

Humanism

Humanism is another school of thought that affirms that human beings have the
right and responsibility to give meaning and shape their own lives. “it is not theistic
and does not accept supernatural views of reality”IHEU, International Humanist
and Ethical Union.

Further, humanists see themselves not only as the stewards of creation but as
individuals who have control for themselves as well as the world outside them.
Most scientists dwell on this thought that the world is a place for discovery in
seeking ways on how to improve the lives of its inhabitants. As a result, scientists
eventually turn to technology to ease the difficulty of life, that is, to live comfortably.

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 What is the ultimate goal of a good life?
Aristotle was the originator of the concept of eudaimonia ( from daimon- true nature).
He deemed happiness to be a vulgar ideas, stressing that not all desires are worth
pursuing as, even though some of them may yield pleasure, they well not produce
wellness. Aristotle thought that true happiness is found by leading a virtous life and
doing what is worth doing. He argued that realizing human potential is the ultimate
human goal” (Boniwell 2008).
Boniwell (2008) emphasized that feeling good is not good enough for a good life. Each
person must realize his/her potentialities which lead him/her to the greatest fulfilment
-daimon. (see also human flourishing in our previous lesson).

Module 6
ASSESSMENT TASK

1. Define in your own words, the meaning of a Good Life.

2. How can one achieved a good life according to article “What is the Good life?” by
Emrys Westacoot.
3. Can technology lead as to a good life? Explain your answer.

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