The Good Life: Our Search for happiness:
Definitions
Temperance: restraint of human passions and appetites in accordance with reason; self-control of the
body
Chasity: the integration of sexuality within the person.
Happiness: we find happiness in life by living a good life.
Institutions: Social constructs that give structure and form to a community’s set or systems of meanings,
beliefs and values.
Solicitude: anxious concern for another.
Virtue: Human virtues are firm attitudes, stable dispositions, and habitual perfections of intellect and
will, that govern our actions, order our passions and guide our conduct according to reason and faith.
Friendship: unhesitant opening of one’s heart and mind to the other; it is the altogether free and
independent communication of one’s own person.
Good: that which is morally right: righteousness.
The good life and happiness:
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It is well known that despite all failures, sickness, and disability, people want to be happy. The search to be happy lies behind the
decisions we make, it is one of our goal in life.
The Christian tradition recognizes that God has placed this desire of happiness in our hearts. This desire of happiness is connected
with ethics and morality. Most ethical thinkers propose that in the good that we seek, we also seek happiness.
Philosophers:
Plato (427-347BC)
Plato was Aristotle’s teacher. Plato compared good with the sun: “Just as the sun is the source of light and through its light we can see things, so
the good shines upon all our actions and is in all your actions”. According to Plato good is in contemplation, we cover ourselves in the good and
the good enters our knowing. As contemplatives of the good, philosophers are, according to Plato, closest to the good. They are happy because
they know how to act accordance with beliefs, they make true choices about the value and worth of their actions. In his time Plato has to struggle
against a movement known as “sophism”, which threatened to damage al morality. Sophists held that life is ruled by base needs and desires, not
by reason. In their view, moral values were nothing more than individual or cultural opinion. With sophists ridiculing all moral reasoning about
the good, there could be no agreement on how citizens should act. What ruled the state was the private pleasure of greed, the satisfaction or
elemental needs for food and drink, the desire of power among others. This crisis led Plato to look for something that could stop the social
disorder and anarchy he found in it and through reason. According to him, reason finds the good that pervades everything, the highest pursuit in
life is to contemplate the good.
Aristotle (384-322BC)
Aristotle became a philosopher in the king’s court when he undertook the education of Alexander of Macedonia. His theory has
influenced much of church’s moral thinking. Aristotle’s concern for the good, as was Plato’s, arose out of political consideration. As Plato,
Aristotle was concerned with the short-sightedness of searching for happiness by following one’s instincts and sensual pleasures. The search for
happiness and the good, he felt has more to do with acting intelligently than it does with one’s inclinations. Also, as Plato, he thought that
philosophers were the most likely to succeed in the search for happiness and the good. Aristotle considered Plato’s idea of the good to abstract.
According to Aristotle people do not find the good they find a good. He believes that the good is to be found in God. The good is inscribed by
God into the nature of all created things. Aristotle still thought that Plato was on the right track when he said that contemplation is the highest
good. However, Aristotle’s contemplation is not of the idea of good, but of the good that is within all things. For him it was important to know
the nature of each thing, also for him people are self-directed beings. His advice is to avoid the extremes. Someone who aims at the middle
ground is a good and wise person, a happy person.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 in a noble family. His father, Landulph, was count of Aquino, and his mother, Theodora, was countess of
Teano. When Thomas was 5 years old his parents placed him under the care of the Benedictines of Monte Casino who were to teach him. At the
age of 18, Thomas decided to turn his back on noble privileges and to enter the order of St. Dominic in spite of his family’s opposition. Thomas
died while traveling to the council of Lyons convened by Pope Gregory x, he died at the Cistercian monastery of Fossa Nuova in 1927. St.
Thomas was one of the greatest and most influential theologians of all time. He was canonized in 1323 and declared doctor of the church by Pope
Pius V. Like Aristotle, Aquinas insisted that the ethical comes from the end that is inscribed in the nature of all creatures. Following this natural
desire for the good in the basis ethics. Aquinas held that people were made for happiness, he also said that the fullness of a good life is not to be
found on earth; the full good life comes in the resurrection as God's pure gift. To know how to use one's intellectual and sensual capacities,
Aquinas said one most follow the natural law, which he described as "nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; Through
it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. Much of his ethical writing is taken up in exploring examples of successful living.
He identifies four virtues that successful people have:
-Prudence(how to reason well in moral decision making)
-Temperance(how to remain moderate in the exercise of the emotions)
-Fortitude (How to be courageous in the face of life's difficulties)
-Justice (How to act well in relation to others)
Traditionally these have been called the cardinal virtues (Cardinal: from the Latin cardo, meaning hinge). These virtues are the "hinges"
supporting human life. Aquinas identified a second level of moral life. God's self-gift to us is Jesus and the Holy Spirit changes the
way we define what is good. Aquinas here introduces the three virtues of faith, hope and charity. The initiative for these virtues does
not lie within ourselves. For instance Charity is God's love to us. It is because God loves us that we can love others. Faith is God's
self-revealing action before it becomes a virtue in us. These virtues begin as pure gift.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Kant lived in the period of enlightenment, a time characterized by the sweeping away of any sort of authority or religion. Kant rejected any ethics
proposed by Aristotle and Aquinas, which emphasized happiness as a product of doing good. They must find the reason for doing well
within themselves. They must live autonomously. Kant acknowledge the immorality of the soul because he realized that humans could
not achieve the supreme good in this life. There must be a life beyond this life.
Enmanuel Levinas(1905-1995)
Levinas places the infinite good, who is God at the heart of ethics. For Levinas the good comes as a call, a vocation. It does not come from
oneself. Levinas has a great appreciation for things like good food and wine. However he is aware of the danger of being totally
absorbed in caring for oneself.
Three ways of pursuing the good:
A catholic approach to ethics and morality has three components: natural ethics, the role of obligation and the impact of the gospel.
Theological: Natural Ethics:
Thomas Aquinas for instance begins with:
-Questions about human happiness.
-He explores human actions asking how evil enters into humans actions, and how are affected by passions and emotions.
-How actions gradually become habits and virtues.
-He explores human actions from the perspective of God's self- gift.
Virtue: firm attitudes, stable dispositions, habitual perfections of intellect and will, that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our
conduct according to reason and faith. They are the fruit and seed of morally good acts.
Deontological: obligation.
We have to ask ourselves:
-What is the role of obligation in our decision making?
-What must we do in a given situation?
-How do we make a moral judgement, for instance, in a intolerable work situation with an abusive boss or lazy co-worker?
-What are the norms of human action?
Impact of the gospel:
The third component of a Catholic approach to ethics considers the impact of the gospel on us and our actions. The gospel proclaims that the Son
of God has entered human history as a man to open up possibilities for actions that are motivate by God's love in our hearts.
What makes for a good and a happy person?
1)
The standards of excellence of the "good life":
All "good life" starts with you-an agent- initiating a certain orientation in life. The more you repeat an action, the more set in your ways
you become, the more your actions define who you are. The question we ask here is how you as an agent may be helped in your pursuit of the good
life?
a) There are no recipes:
The catholic tradition believes that each person created by God is unique. From birth each of us is called by God to be the person that
he created us to be. That's why we are you unique and irreplaceable and why each vocation is unique and irreplaceable. Hence there are no recipes
that would serve each one in achieving his/her particular goal in life. But knowing the great tradition of human wisdom about life of excellences
helps. That’s the reason why the Catholic tradition emphasizes on the communication of saints, the people who have set standards of human
excellence. They are provided as an example to help us plan our own path in life.
b) Standards of Excellence:
Standards of excellence are sets of best practices. One can learn the rules and the best practices. So it is with human life.
Within the aim of human life it is possible to set standards of excellence.
c) The study and practice of virtue:
A virtue is a kind of excellence. In studying the virtues we can learn the human possibilities for excellence. Put in practice
virtues become the strengths, the solidity of our character. For instance, a just person is someone who consistently acts justly. It is not enough to
have only a disposition for justice for it to be a virtue, but the disposition to be just must be strengthened to not easily be lost. At that point is a
virtue.
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A person of virtue
A quiet hero from the fields
An article from the Toronto Star, of how Percy Schmeiser was being sued by Monsanto. Biotech
companies were taking out patents (A government authority to an individual or organization conferring a right or title, esp.
the sole right to make, use, or sell some...) on plants and forcing farmers to pay licensing fees to have the right to
grow those plants. Schmeiser was brought into the Saskatoon’s Federal Court of Canada that he violated
Monsanto patent rights by growing canola that contained a gene patented by Monsanto to make the
plant resistant to the company’s powerful herbicide roundup. Schmeiser argued that the seeds were not
planted by himself but possibly by crossbreeding with neighbours’ crops, or the Monsanto seeds blew
into his field, been carried by birds or deer or simply falling out of a truck. It didn’t matter how it got into
his field but once it was there the entire crop was owned by Monsanto, even breeds Schmeiser had
developed on his own. Schmeiser owes Monsanto $19,000 in license fees, then the multinational
$153,000 in court costs, the company, Monsanto, charges $15 per acre so in total he owes around
$750,000. For this he has become a folk hero for standing up to Monsanto, and he continues to stand up
to them. “I don’t know how many years we’ve got left, my wife and I, but in the years we’ve got we’ll go
down fighting for the rights of farmers” he said to a standing ovation at St.Francis high school in
Mississauga.
Temperance
-A lot of people misunderstand temperance to mean moderation in eating or drinking. Temperance
touches mainly on three essentials in life: food, drink and sex. Without these three, the human race
cannot exist.
-Temperance means that you should take care of yourself which also means respecting yourself. You
should “preserve” yourself.
-The passion for food, drink and sex are powerful sources. Plato saw these sensual cravings as “an ugly
brute of a horse” which in the human mind, like a rider had to control.
-The virtue of temperance is not about repressing the desire for sensual pleasure; it’s about the
tempting of this desire.
-Temperance is a positive, life affirming capability in life, not a negative, self-denying one.
-For Aquinas, abstinence humanizes our desire for food, sobriety humanizes the pleasure of drinking and
chastity humanizes our desire for sexual pleasure.
Intemperance
-Intemperance is a breakdown from self-preservation. It is a destructive and selfish love, whereas
temperance is a love that is life-giving and selfless.
-It abuses food, drink and sex so that they are no longer there for self -preservation, self- assertion and
self- fulfillment but become objects of addiction.
-Intemperance can also signal that we do not like or love ourselves.
Chastity
“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness… So God created humankind in his
image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1.26-27)
-Living in such a way that our own needs, desires, agendas, and impatience do not get in the way of
letting gift be gift, other be other and God be God.
-We lack chastity when we relate to others, nature, or God in such way that they cannot be fully who
and what they are.
-Sex speaks most loudly about chastity or lack of it. It is only chaste when it does not short-circuit full
respect. Chastity is 90% about proper waiting.
-Chastity is the joyous affirmation of someone who knows how to live self-giving, free from any form of
self-centered slavery.
-This presupposes someone who has learnt how to accept other people, relate with them, while
respecting their dignity in diversity.
-Chastity makes the personality harmonious.
Friendship
- A real friendship is the ability to open your heart and mind to another. The openness of friendship call
for total disarmament belonging to faith. Between friends there can be no built-in reservations, mental
restrictions, or time limits. They must encounter one another not despite their human defects.
-There is also hope in friendship. With hope you cannot let the other person down. For example: “you
can count on me” is usually said and all you can do is hope that you actually can. If they do well at
whatever they are doing for you, you gain trust.
-True friendship exists between those who love each other. It culminates the willingness to spend time
with the other, or one will give up one’s life. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down
his life for friends” (John 15.13).
-With true friendship, a new sphere of existence is created and something quite unique takes place: the
free self-giving of one person to another.
Solicitude
-The good life involves giving and receiving; one cannot live ethically without “solicitude” – without
regard for the other.
-Solicitude is basically when you see an ad on tv for AIDS or just by seeing a homeless man/woman on
the street and want to help them.
Living with and for others
- This short story “poustinia” is comparing the transparency of a window to the transparency to your
goodness. In order for others to be kind to you and yourself to be kind to others you will have to WANT
to.
-In our polluted world, it is hard for us to keep our hearts clean. If we unpolluted our inner selves, then
we will be selfless. If we are selfless, we unpolluted the water, air and earth. Greed pollutes the inner
self before it pollutes the earth.
The good life needs just institutions
-Institutions are stable sets or systems of meaning, beliefs and values. Overtime the values of food,
shelter, education (etc.) become stabilized in social institutions.
-Institutions structure the expectations of people who live together in society. They direct how things
get done in order to promote and protect the social good. They are the backbone of the common good.
-50% of younger people between 18 - 29 are less likely to be involved in frameworks than their
grandparents and great grandparents.
-Canadian Sociologist Reginald Bibby thinks otherwise. He says that 65% if teens will be active among
their community. He believes that today’s researchers believe that today’s teenagers are going to be
“community shapers and institution builders