A good life

a life abounding in material comforts and luxuries

a life lived according to the moral and religious laws of one's culture.

a life marked by a high standard of living

Elements of a good life are experiencing pleasure, avoiding negative experience, seeking
self-development, or making contributions to others.

The Good Life, mentioned by Kanye West is about living life drama and worry free. Do your
thing, be thankful for what you have, and take full advantage of everything you do have while
still improving on your situation. The Good Life usually consists of being healthy, having
confidence, having fun, partying with different people. Try not to become jealous of
other people and dont make a big deal out of everything in life. Just live your life, have fun, be
positive, and you will be living The Good Life.

by Emrys Westacott
Updated September 01, 2016

What is the good life? This is one of the oldest philosophical questions. It has been
posed in different waysHow should one live? What does it mean to live well? but
these are really just the same question After all, everyone wants to live well, and no-
one wants the bad life.

But the question isnt as simple as it sounds. Philosophers specialize in unpacking

hidden complexities, and the concept of the good life is one of those that needs quite a
bit of unpacking.

For what do phrases like the good life, or living well, mean. They can be
understood in at least three ways.

1. THE MORAL LIFE

One basic way in which we use the word good is to express moral approval. So when
we say that someone is living well or that they have lived a good life, we may simply
mean that they are a good person, someone who is courageous, honest, trustworthy,
kind, selfless, generous, helpful, loyal, principled, and so on. They possess and practice
many of the most important virtues. And they dont spend all their time merely
pursuing their own pleasure; they devote a certain amount of time to activities that
benefit others, perhaps through their engagement with family and friends, or through
their work, or through various voluntary activities.
This moral conception of the good life has had plenty of
champions. Socrates and Plato both gave absolute priority to being a virtuous person
over all other supposedly good things such as pleasure, wealth, or power.

In Platos dialogue Gorgias, Socrates takes this position to an extreme. He argues that
it is much better to suffer wrong than to do it; that a good man who has his eyes gouged
out and is tortured to death is more fortunate than a corrupt person who has uses
wealth and power dishonorably.

In his masterpiece, the Republic, Plato develops this argument in greater detail.

The morally good person. he claims enjoys a sort of inner harmony, whereas the wicked
person, no matter how rich and powerful he may be or how many pleasure he enjoys, is
disharmonious, fundamentally at odds with himself and the world. It is worth noting,
though, that in both the Gorgias and the Republic, Plato bolsters his argument with an
speculative account of an afterlife in which virtuous people are rewarded and wicked
people are punished.

Many religions also conceive of the good life in moral terms as a life lived according to
Gods laws. A person who lives this way, obeying the commandments and performing
the proper rituals, is pious. And in most religions such piety will be
rewarded. Obviously, many people do not receive their reward in this life. But devout
believers are confident that their piety will not be in vain. Christian martyrs went
singing to their deaths confident that they would soon be in heaven. Hindus expect that
the law of karma will ensure that their good deeds and intentions will be rewarded,
while evil actions and desires will be punished, either in this life or in future lives.

2. THE LIFE OF PLEASURE

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was one of the first to declare, bluntly, that
what makes life worth living is that we can experience pleasure.

Pleasure is enjoyable, its fun, itswell..pleasant! The view that pleasure is the
good, or, to put I another way, that pleasure is what makes life worth living, is known
as hedonism.

Now, the word hedonist, when applied to a person, has slightly negative
connotations. It suggests that they are devoted to what some have called the lower
pleasures such as sex, food, drink, and sensual indulgence in general. Epicurus was
thought by some of his contemporaries to be advocating and practicing this sort of
lifestyle, and even today an epicure is someone who is especially appreciative of food
and drink. In fact, though, this is a misrepresentation of Epicureanism. Epicurus
certainly praised all kinds of pleasures. But he didnt advocate that we lose ourselves in
sensual debauchery for various reasons:

doing so will probably reduce our pleasures in the long run since over-indulgence
tends to cause health problems and limit the range of pleasure we enjoy.
 the so-called higher pleasures such as friendship and study are at least as
important as pleasures of the flesh.
The good life has to be virtuous. Although Epicurus disagreed with Plato about
the value of pleasure, he fully agreed with him on this point.

Today, this hedonistic conception of the good life is arguably dominant in Western
culture. Even in everyday speech, if we say someone is living the good life, we
probably mean that they enjoying lots of recreational pleasures: good food, good wine,
skiing, scuba diving, lounging by the pool in the sun with a cocktail and a beautiful
partner.

What is key to this hedonistic conception of the good life is that it emphasizes subjective
experiences. On this view, to describe a person as happy means that they feel good,
and a happy life is one that contains many feel good experiences.

3. THE FULFILLED LIFE

If Socrates emphasizes virtue and Epicurus emphasizes pleasure, another great Greek
thinker, Aristotle, views the good life in a more comprehensive way. According to
Aristotle, we all want to be happy. We value many things because they are a means to
other things: for instance, we value money because it enables us to buy things we want;
we value leisure because it gives us time to pursue our interests. But happiness is
something we value not as a means to some other end but for its own sake. It has
intrinsic value rather than instrumental value.

So for Aristotle, the good life is the happy life. But what does that mean? Today, many
people automatically think of happiness in subjectivist terms: to them, a person is happy
if they are enjoying a positive state of mind, and their life is happy if this is true for them
most of the time. There is a problem with this way of thinking about happiness in this
way, though. Imagine a powerful sadist who spends much of his time gratifying cruel
desires.

Or imagine a pot smoking, beer guzzling couch potato who does nothing but sit around
all day watching old TV shows and playing video games. These people may have plenty
of pleasurable subjective experiences. But should we really describe them as living
well?

Aristotle would certainly say no. He agrees with Socrates that to live the good life one
must be a morally good person. And he agrees with Epicurus that a happy life will
involve many and varied pleasurable experiences. We cant really say someone is living
the good life if they are often miserable or constantly suffering. But Aristotles idea of
what it means to live well is objectivist rather than subjectivist. It isnt just a matter of
how a person feels inside, although that does matter. Its also important that certain
objective conditions be satisfied. For instance:

Virtue: They must be morally virtuous.

Health: They should enjoy good health and a reasonably long life.
 Prosperity: They should be comfortably off (for Aristotle this meant affluent
enough so that they dont need to work for a living doing something that they
would not freely choose to do).
Friendship: They must have good friends. According to Aristotle human beings
are innately social; so the good life cant be that of a hermit, a recluse, or a
misanthrope.
They should enjoy the respect of others. Aristotle doesnt think that fame or glory
is necessary; in fact, a craving for fame can lead people astray, just as the desire
for excessive wealth can. But ideally, a persons qualities and achievements will
be recognized by others.
They need good luck. This is an example of Aristotles common sense. Any life
can be rendered unhappy by tragic loss or misfortune.
They must exercise their uniquely human abilities and capacities. This is why the
couch potato is not living well, even if they report that they are content. Aristotle
argues that what separates human beings from the other animals is reason. So
the good life is one in which a person cultivates and exercises their rational
faculties by, for instance, engaging in scientific enquiry, philosophical discussion,
artistic creation, or legislation. Were he alive today he might well include some
forms of technological innovation.

If, at the end of your life, you can check all these boxes, then you could reasonably claim
to have lived well, to have achieved the good life. Of course, the great majority of people
today do not belong to the leisured class as Aristotle did. They have to work for a
living. But its still true that we think the ideal circumstance is to be doing for a living
what you would choose to do anyway. So people who are able to pursue their calling are
generally regarded as extremely fortunate.

4. THE MEANINGFUL LIFE

A lot of recent research shows that people who have children are not necessarily happier
than people who dont have children. Indeed, during the child raising years, and
especially when the children have turned into teenagers, parents typically lower levels of
happiness and higher levels of stress. But even though having children may not make
people happier, it does seem to give them the sense that their lives are more meaningful.

For many people, the well-being of their family, especially their children and
grandchildren, is the main source of meaning in life. This outlook goes back a very long
way. In ancient times, the definition of good fortune was to have lots of children who do
well for themselves. But obviously, there can be other sources of meaning in a persons
life. They may, for instance, pursue a particular kind of work with great dedication: e.g.
scientific research, artistic creation, or scholarship. They may devote themselves to a
cause: e.g. fighting against racism; protecting the environment. Or they may be
thoroughly immersed in and engaged with some particular community: e.g. a church; a
soccer team; a school.

THE FINISHED LIFE

The Greeks had a saying: Call no man happy until hes dead. There is wisdom in this. In
fact, one might want to amend it to: Call no man happy until hes long dead. For
sometimes a person can appear to live a fine life, and be able to check all the boxes
virtue, prosperity, friendship, respect, meaning, etc.yet eventually be revealed as
something other than what we thought they were. A good example of this Jimmy
Saville, the British TV personality who was much admired in his lifetime but who, after
he died, was exposed as a serial sexual predator.

Cases like this bring out the great advantage of an objectivist rather than subjectivist
notion of what it means to live well. Jimmy Saville may have enjoyed his life. But
surely, we would not want to say that he lived the good life. A truly good life is one that
is both enviable and admirable in all or most of the ways outlined above

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