The good life and morality: VCE Philosophy

What this dot point is asking

The previous study design asked you to examine how the good life relates to morality: whether living well for yourself (prudential value, wellbeing) and living morally (acting rightly toward others) coincide, conflict or come apart. You must explain the ancient view that virtue is necessary for flourishing, set out the challenge of the happy immoralist, and evaluate. The high-band answer keeps the two notions of good distinct (good for me versus morally good) and tests each theory of the good life against the possibility of a flourishing villain.

Two senses of good

The whole topic turns on distinguishing two evaluations of a life. A life can be good for the person living it: high in wellbeing, prudentially successful, the sort of life it is in your interest to have. A life can also be morally good: the person acts rightly, is just and honest, treats others well. The question is how these relate. Are they the same, so that you cannot truly flourish without being moral? Do they overlap but sometimes conflict, so that morality can require sacrificing your own good? Or are they independent, so that a thoroughly immoral person could nonetheless live an excellent life for themselves?

The challenge: the Ring of Gyges

In Plato's Republic, Glaucon tells of a shepherd, Gyges, who finds a ring that makes him invisible and uses it to seize the kingdom by murder and adultery, entirely undetected. Glaucon challenges Socrates: give one such ring to a just person and one to an unjust person, and surely both will act unjustly, because no one is just willingly but only for fear of being caught. The deeper claim is that injustice, if you can get away with it, pays: the perfectly unjust person who keeps a reputation for justice gets all the rewards and bears none of the costs, and so lives better than the just person who is wrongly thought unjust and suffers for it. This is the sharpest statement of the worry that the good life and morality can diverge.

The eudaimonist answer: virtue is part of flourishing

Plato answers that justice is a kind of health of the soul, an inner harmony between reason, spirit and appetite. The unjust person, however successful externally, has a disordered, conflicted soul and is therefore wretched, like a body riddled with disease however rich its owner. So acting unjustly harms the agent, and the just life is also the happiest life. Aristotle reaches a related conclusion: since eudaimonia is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, the virtues (including justice) are constitutive parts of flourishing, not mere means to it, so one cannot flourish while vicious. The Stoics go furthest: virtue is the only good, so the immoralist, however comfortable, lacks the one thing that makes a life good. On all these views morality is internal to the good life: to live well just is, in part, to live virtuously.

Evaluation

The eudaimonist position has genuine support. There is real psychological truth in the claim that wrongdoing corrodes the agent, through guilt, fractured relationships, the loss of trust and self-respect, and the anxiety of concealment. Friendship and love, which feature on almost every account of wellbeing, seem to require honesty and fair dealing, so a thoroughgoing immoralist may be cut off from major goods. On an objective list theory that includes moral goodness or deep relationships, the villain's life is impoverished by definition.

But the challenge is not so easily dismissed. The eudaimonist seems to assume that vice always disturbs the soul, yet some wrongdoers appear untroubled, even thriving, the contented tyrant with loyal friends, wealth, and no guilt. Against a hedonist or desire-satisfaction theory of wellbeing, such a person can score very highly: they feel good and get what they want, so their life goes well for them even though it is morally bad. This suggests that whether morality is necessary for the good life depends on which theory of wellbeing is true: it follows on a virtue-based or objective account but not on a hedonist or desire account. A further worry is that making virtue pay risks distorting morality itself, since acting justly only because it secures your own flourishing looks like a self-interested motive rather than a genuinely moral one (the point Kant presses in insisting moral worth lies in acting from duty).

Judgement: the good life and morality overlap substantially but are not simply identical. The eudaimonist is right that wrongdoing typically damages the agent and cuts them off from relationship-based goods, so for almost all real people the moral life and the good life run together. But the case of the genuinely contented immoralist shows the connection is not strictly necessary on every theory of wellbeing; it holds only if flourishing already includes virtue or objective goods. The most defensible view is that moral goodness is a central component of the best human lives and a strong contributor to wellbeing, rather than something every successful life must contain by logical necessity.