What Makes Lives Good

The goodness of lives may be thought to depend on the personal satisfaction they provide or on the moral merit they possess. I shall call lives good only if they are both personally satisfying and have moral merit. Thinking of good lives in this way requires understanding the relation between their good-making components.' One possibility is that they are quite unrelated aspects of particular lives. But I find this implausible; because it is not morally indifferent what personal satisfactions people seek; because morally meritorious character-traits and actions are often personally satisfying; and because, as a matter of moral psychology, good lives normally exclude inconsistency of motives and actions which the existence of unrelated aspects of lives is likely to produce. Another possibility is that personal satisfaction and moral merit are due to partially overlapping and partially conflicting aspects of individual lives, and when conflicts occur, one aspect override the other. The difficulty here is in resolving the conflict by justifying the judgment implied by the should. If it is a moral should, it means that morality requires one aspect of our lives to dominate over the other. But if the favored aspect is the one that has moral merit, then the judgment is question-begging; while if morality is said to require personal satisfaction to override moral merit, then the judgment is self-contradictory. On the other hand, the should may not be a moral one. In that case, however, it conflicts with the moral should, and the conflict between aspects reappears as a conflict on a higher theoretical level, where it remains at least as intractable as it was on the lower level

Epistemology · Ethics in medical practice · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics