Varieties of Happiness: Eudaimonism and Greek Ethical Theory

When the story of the history of ethics is told, the ancient Greeks are often grouped together as eudaimonists. This usually means that an individual’s happiness or well-being is the ultimate justification for or against any action. Henry Sidgwick influentially puts the point in contrast with modern ethical theories:

in Greek moral philosophy generally, but one regulative and governing faculty is recognized under the name of Reason—however the regulation of Reason may be understood; in the modern ethical view, when it has worked itself clear, there are found to be two—Universal Reason and Egoistic Reason, or Conscience and Self-love. (2012 [1886], 194)

Modern ethical theories separate considerations of an agent’s well-being from a distinctively moral category of practical considerations irreducible to well-being. This makes it easy to see how morality could require sacrificing one’s happiness. The ancients subsume all normative considerations under a single practical principle, so that doing the right thing is always good for us.

Iakovos Vasiliou would like to change our telling of this story. The Greeks, too, he believes, did not seek to reduce what is moral or virtuous to what is beneficial. His book advances this aim by distinguishing different ways happiness might feature within an ethical theory, and then presenting evidence that for Plato’s Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the early Stoics, happiness, despite being an important goal for our actions, was not the only goal.

The book has much to offer to scholars and advanced students of ancient Greek ethics, especially to those who feel the pull of the orthodoxy Vasiliou challenges. In addition to refining the concepts we use to describe ancient ethical theories, it offers significant interpretations of key texts and new solutions to interpretive puzzles across a range of figures. Though Vasiliou is careful to treat the various historical figures separately, the upshot of his analyses is in every case that interpreters have overlooked practical considerations besides or beyond attaining happiness.

The book’s introduction distinguishes various senses of eudaimonism scholars might have in mind. First, eudaimonia might function as a practical principle, one’s ultimate aim in acting; this can be divided up into three types. On the traditional view, eudaimonia is a comprehensive practical principle, specifying the end of all deliberate, non-acratic actions (as Sidgwick says that reason does in Greek moral philosophy). But if there is more than one ultimate aim, eudaimonia specifies only one such aim, the agent’s own good—a prudential practical principle. This leaves open that an agent might act for an ultimate end that is not their good (as modern ethicists hold, per Sidgwick). Alternatively, if eudaimonia is a superseding practical principle, then it is a ubiquitous limiting condition of action that leaves room for discretion within its bounds, like the aim of staying within budget. If eudaimonia is not a practical principle, it might be an ideal from which we derive an adequate conception of virtue. Vasiliou calls this, unsympathetically, the “Eudaimonist’s Hope”. Finally, eudaimonia’s role in a theory might be to motivate an agent to act virtuously.

With these distinctions, Chapter 1 surveys the views of noted interpreters, identifying some as targets (Julia Annas, Terence Irwin), others as possible fellow travelers (Rosalind Hursthouse, Sarah Broadie).

Chapter 2 examines Plato’s Euthydemus, Meno, Protagoras, Lysis, and Gorgias for evidence of Socrates’ eudaimonism. Vasiliou finds Socrates repeating that everyone wants to be happy; happiness consists in having good things and using them rightly; and acting virtuously overrides other considerations. What Vasiliou does not find is any explicit statement that what it is to use something correctly is to use it to one’s benefit, i.e., that virtue is reduced to the agent’s benefit. The exception to this is the Protagoras, which identifies the good with pleasure and relates virtue to the art of measuring pleasures and pains. This would exemplify the Eudaimonist’s Hope, since it takes virtue to be derivable from an account of the good. But Vasiliou follows other interpreters in taking the Protagoras to develop a hypothetical position attributed to the many developed over the course of the dialogue that does not represent Socrates’ considered view.

To focus on a central example, some of the clearest evidence of Socratic eudaimonism rests on this passage from the Euthydemus:

Since we all desire to be happy, and since we appear to become such from using things and using them rightly, and knowledge is what furnishes rightness and good fortune, it is necessary indeed, as it seems, that every man in every way prepare himself for this: to be as wise as possible. Or not?—Yes, he said.

And surely it is necessary for one who thinks to get this [wisdom] much more than money from his father, and from his guardians and his friends and others and from those who claim [to be his] lover, either foreigners or citizens, begging and beseeching [them] to hand over wisdom, it being neither shameful nor fit for indignation to serve and to be a slave to either a lover or any man for the sake of this, being willing to provide any of the noble services whatsoever in desiring to become wise (282a1–c1).

Wisdom is necessary for happiness and enables all other goods to be used well. But Vasiliou contends that the last clause introduces a constraint on one’s pursuit of that end: “although wisdom or knowledge is necessary for happiness, a person should only do anything fine/noble (kalon) to get it” (59). If virtue acts as a constraint on one’s pursuit of happiness, then happiness is not a comprehensive practical principle, only a prudential principle.

Yet one might ask whether the clause is meant to restrict one’s pursuit of happiness at all, rather than simply add to the list of extraordinary measures one should undertake for wisdom’s sake. After all, Socrates does not say that one should only undertake noble services. It would be surprising for Socrates to endorse begging and enslaving oneself for wisdom and then raise the bar to undertakings that are noble. A further complication: just before this passage, Socrates counts courage and temperance among the goods that someone ignorant could misuse to their own detriment (281c6–7). Someone lacking in wisdom lacks exactly the thing they need in order to know which services not to undertake in their pursuit of wisdom. And if virtue is among the useful things whose correct use makes us happy, then it does seem that the passage makes eudaimonia a comprehensive practical principle.

In Chapter 3, Vasiliou turns to Plato’s Republic and Symposium. The core argument of the Republic, that the just person is happier than the unjust person, at most gives a necessary condition for happiness. Virtuous actions benefit the soul, and vicious actions harm it, but the fact that virtue is beneficial in a way might meet the dialogue’s dialectical aim—answering Glaucon and Adeimantus’ challenge—without entailing further that one should be virtuous solely for its benefit.

Vasiliou offers perceptive readings of several passages to support his view, especially Socrates’ concession in book 4 that producers might be made happy if they were given extravagant riches (420e6–7). By separating happiness from virtue, Vasiliou can also explain why the philosophers are made less happy returning to govern the city after contemplating but must still do it. Still, an unaddressed line of thought within the Republic is Socrates’ inference in book 4 that in the completely good city or the soul, justice must be whatever is left over after the other virtues are found. After all, this inference draws conclusions about virtue’s content from premises about what a good city or soul is like—the Eudaimonist’s Hope.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Vasiliou proposes that Aristotle distinguishes between happiness (eudaimonia) and a happy (eudaimōn) life. Though Aristotle does not introduce this distinction explicitly, Vasiliou finds that it holds up throughout the work (and in the Politics but not the Eudemian Ethics or Magna Moralia). Happiness is virtuous activity, but a happy life is virtuous activity over a complete life furnished with external goods. Vasiliou moves methodically through the passages where happiness or a happy life is in question, finding that Aristotle’s language often closely respects the distinction. One significant result here is a resolution of a puzzle about external goods: a happy life needs external goods non-instrumentally, but happiness is an activity. Still, at least two passages (1099a31–33 and 1177b24–26), he acknowledges, require squinting.

The distinction by itself is not enough to dissolve the problems arising from Aristotle’s elevation of the theoretical life over the practical life at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics. Vasiliou takes contemplation to be the best kind of virtuous activity. But if virtue is a superseding practical principle, a familiar problem arises: because theoretical wisdom is a virtue, virtue as such does not provide a sufficient basis to prohibit one from choosing contemplation at the expense of justice or courage. Vasiliou addresses this by stipulating that contemplating turns out not to be action (praxis) after all. When we act, we act for the sake of the fine, but when we are at leisure, we do not need to act; we may contemplate instead. Aristotle does, however, associate contemplation with acting and acting well at Politics 7.3 in his defense of the contemplative life from the accusation that it is inactive (1325b16–23; 27–30). And Vasiliou’s conception of leisure as abstention from virtuous action is in tension with Aristotle’s recommendation to lawmakers that temperance and justice, not just philosophy, are important virtues to cultivate for leisure (1334a22–40).

Still, the consequence of finding this distinction, between happiness and a happy life, should be that happiness cannot be a comprehensive practical principle. This is because there are things we do for the sake of a happy life above and beyond the activity of happiness. But one might worry that this now threatens to make the happy life into a new, inclusivist comprehensive practical principle, with happiness (viz., virtuous activity) as a superseding practical principle restricting the agent’s choices to virtuous actions. Virtue might require sacrificing one’s life, but in that case, it seems that a complete happy life is simply not possible, and the best life possible is the one cut short by sacrifice.

Chapter 6 turns to Epicurus, arguing that even an Epicurean who achieves tranquility (ataraxia), attaining katastematic pleasure through understanding about death and the gods, will continue to pursue additional kinetic pleasures, with the preservation of one’s katastematic pleasure as a limiting condition. The upshot is that katastematic pleasure is not a comprehensive practical principle, because after it is achieved, the agent will still have another, further aim. Vasiliou identifies Epicurus as the lone philosopher in the tradition who might endorse the Eudaimonist’s Hope; still, he does not radically revise the content of virtue.

Chapter 7 argues that the early Stoics countenanced a category of action that was neither required nor forbidden by reason or virtue. Of actions, appropriate actions (kathēkonta) are those that accord with nature and are required by reason; they are contrasted with mistakes, which are actions that are prohibited by reason. Vasiliou proposes, however, that intermediate actions are neither required by nor prohibited by reason and that these are action-types that both sages and ordinary people perform. This challenges the orthodoxy that everything the sage does is a right action. Again, the result is that not all actions, even for the sage, are for the sake of the good.

This book is ambitious and provocative, not only in resisting such a dominant scholarly outlook, but also in proposing solutions to long-standing interpretive problems and giving fresh readings of problematic passages. The book’s philosophical merits in particular—its ability to reenvision the ethical landscape, mark out well-chosen distinctions, and carefully scrutinize inferences—make it an engaging read. Working through its arguments reveals the extent to which eudaimonism touches many of the problems historians of ancient philosophy face.

REFERENCES

Henry Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers (Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1886]).