What constitutes a 'good life'?

25 Centuries ago, Greek philosophers asked what constitutes a good life? We are still trying to figure out the answer. The only thing certain about ethical enquiry, is that nothing is certain; but that doesn't stop us asking the question and coming to our own conclusions.

 

For some of us, we turn to religion to guide our morality, to say this is the word of God, this is how morality is spelled out, this is how we should behave in our mortal time here for if we do not, the gates of Heaven may be barred to us when we are judged.

 

This in my interpretation is morality by fear and morality by fear in my opinion is not a morally true path. If our moral path is chosen by fear, for example, we choose not to kill or rape or steal only because of fear of God or in fear of police intervention, then are we really living a moral life at all?

 

This of course goes back to Plato's analogy of 'Gyges ring' which states for example, if we were invisible and had no way of being detected, we would simply fall in to evil ways of murder and rape and theft! This is the belief we live moral lives out of fear, not out of choice and given true freedom, we would all be living out our base animal desires.

 

For Aristotle the question was not so much "What is the right thing to do?" but more "What is the best way to live?" Aristotle came to the conclusion of 'Eudaimonia' a sort of flourishing and this was to be achieved by aspiring to moral excellence. This Aristotle would bring about the greatest happiness to a persons soul.

 

Jeremy Bentham created 'utilitarianism' that being maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain. Utilitarianism is a flourishing and popular philosophy today for obvious reasons, unfortunately many people have not actually read the original source and bastardised the original Philosophy to suit their own interpretations.

 



Monty Python concluded that it was ‘nothing very special’: ‘try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then …’

 

Jean Paul Sartre believed we are 'condemned to be free' we are our own authors of the meaning of our own lives. By this Sartre meant there is no religious punishment, only that the punishment may well be social ostracisation.

 

This plays well with Darwin's 'theory of evolution' and more recently supported by Richard Dawkins that we are simply an accident of nature and we should live a more moral life as a way to live a good life, because the moral life would maximise our overall happiness. Perhaps a selfish reason but no more selfish than doing the right thing out of fear.

 

Then again Machiavelli's advice to princes everywhere was 'It is better to feared than to be loved'. We see this almost daily on the news and in our lives where people either singularly or in gangs, prefer to instil fear in others to maximise their happiness quota, of course, there's always a bigger fish...

 

So do we live a good life now for a ticket to a better world after our mortal death? Or should we do as the ancient Greeks insisted and make man the measure of all things? Shouldn't we as privileged with the power of logic and choice over our base instincts strive for the higher moral ground? Shouldn't we all try to do the right thing by each other?

 

Until we reach a satisfactory consensus I doubt humanity will ever be able to 'get along' together and the debate of what constitutes a 'good life' may well rage on another 25 centuries.