Patient: Do you think I have low self-esteem?
Therapist: No, it’s about right.
How do we know whether our own evaluation of ourselves, and of our lives as a whole, is accurate or justified? How can we tell if we’re genuinely living a good life?
MacIntyre (2016, p. 222) makes the bold claim that at least eight different goods can be identified that contribute to a good life. These are:
- Good health and a standard of living – food, clothing, shelter – that frees one from destitution
- Good family relationships
- Sufficient education to make good use of opportunities to develop one’s powers
- Productive and rewarding work
- Good friends
- Time beyond one’s work for activities good in themselves, athletic, aesthetic, intellectual
- The ability of a rational agent to order one’s life
- The ability to identify and learn from one’s mistakes
He immediately continues:
Many excellent lives are so despite the absence from them of one or more of these. But the more of them that are absent the more resourceful an agent will have to be in coping with the difficulties that their absence causes. Such resourcefulness includes an ability to recognize what would have to be changed and what could be changed either in her or himself or in the social and institutional order that the agent inhabits in order to achieve and enjoy the goods constitutive of the good life. (MacIntyre, 2016, p. 222)
A page later he explains why goods 3 and 7 are especially decisive:
It is by their initial education as practical reasoners and by their subsequent exercise of their reasoning powers in the making of such choices that agents play their part in determining the goodness of their lives. (MacIntyre, 2016, p. 223)
Taken together, these passages show that when other goods are missing or threatened, it is above all the quality of one’s education in practical reasoning (no. 3) and the developed ability to order one’s desires and actions rationally (no. 7) – precisely the resourcefulness MacIntyre describes – that determines whether an excellent life remains possible.
It is hard to argue against this list: these eight goods will support human flourishing in virtually any social and political order. The question that belongs to every one of us is therefore straightforward: Which of these goods do we actually possess in reasonable measure right now?
And for those of us whose days are spent inside universities – as students or as teachers – a second question arises: Taken as a whole, does the particular form of university life we inhabit sustain and enlarge these goods, or does it quietly corrode them?
References
Alasdair MacIntyre (2016). Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
(Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Harvesters)
