Eudemonism

EUDEMONISM. - From the Greek εὐ-θαυσινός (εὐθαίμων, good genius, and hence "happy"), it is, in a generic sense, every moral system that places in happiness, individual or social, the end and the very essence of morality. If happiness is understood as pure individual empirical pleasure, e. is confounded with hedonism (v.); if instead happiness is identified with interest, private or public, e. coincides with utilitarianism (v.); which is in turn manifold, according to the various conceptions of the useful itself. E. properly so called occurs when happiness is understood in a rational sense.

Alongside pure hedonism, professed by the Cyrenaic school, it may be said that e. constitutes the fundamental system of Greek ethics. With a utilitarian background in the Sophists, it rises to a purer conception in Socrates, who places true happiness not in the material goods that make life comfortable, but in virtue. Even if Socrates then does not arrive at a rigorous objective foundation of the moral good and of virtue itself, reduced to the knowledge of the good. To this Socratic indeterminacy of the concept of virtue, in which happiness is resolved without residue, Aristippus attempted to remedy, but arriving at grave deviations, who made virtue consist in the wise pursuit of pleasure, and the Cynics (v.) who placed it in the maximum independence from necessity and from external needs. Aristotle, while maintaining the fundamental eudemonistic principle (cf. Eth. Nicom., I, 4 ff.) nevertheless directed the ethical problem toward its true solution, making happiness consist essentially in the perfect development of the specific activity of man, that is, of his rational activity. Virtue was therefore conceived by Aristotle as the inclination and habitual disposition by which man acts rationally, according to his nature, that is, determinately insofar as he is man (Eth. Nic., X, 8, 9). In modern philosophy e. is substantially followed, in various forms, by Descartes, Locke, Wolff, Cumberland, and, subsequently, by the various utilitarian currents (Spencer, Pafendorf, Stuart Mill). A form of negative e. may be considered the pessimism of Schopenhauer, which seeks true happiness in the radical renunciation of life and its developments. An irreducible adversary of every form of e. is Kant, who sees in every end extrinsic to duty and to the law the very negation of morality (cf. Critique of Practical Reason, I, I, ch. 1, Ital. trans. by F. Capra, Bari 1942, pp. 21-68).

E., insofar as it places in enjoyment or happiness, however conceived, the ultimate reason and the formal element of the ethical character of human action, falls into the same fundamental error as hedonism, confounding what is of morality only a concomitant and consequent element with its essential constituent. Psychologically it is true that man in his every action seeks happiness, but the objective ethical end to which human action is bound is first of all the realization of the moral good, according to the determinations essentially connected with rational nature, in relation to the attainment of his ultimate end. That this ultimate end coincides with the perfect happiness of man, to be attained in a further life, whose denial, or at least ignorance, constitutes another substantial defect of the ethical systems considered above, is also a fact that could authorize a form of correct e.; but it always remains true that the objective foundation of moral value is not the formal reason of happiness, but rather the unconditional exigency that the ethical-metaphysical categories of "order," "necessity," "law," "obligation" entail. Which on the other hand does not lead back to the Kantian position: for it is indeed possible to act with a view to the attainment of happiness, whether absolute or relative, and nevertheless to preserve for one's action the fundamental character of morality, when it is undertaken first of all in order to conform to the objective order of duty and of the good, to which the end of happiness remains subordinate and conditioned.

Ugo Vigino