The Good Life

There is an essential ambiguity or equivocation in the notion of the good life: Does it refer exclusively or first and foremost to a personally fulfilling life, or does it include a robust concern for others? I assume that both self and other must be components. I think desirism helps reconcile the apparent conflict. 

A key insight (or presumption) of desirism is that desire satisfaction need not be self-interested in the narrow sense. I take it for granted that desires can be for anything. It is false that all desire is selfish. There are two ways that one could arrive at the false conclusion. One is conceptually: to infer from the conceptual fact that desires are intended to culminate in satisfaction, to the conclusion that whenever one desires something, one is seeking personal satisfaction. This is an equivocation on satisfaction, since the premise is referring to the satisfaction of the desire, whereas the conclusion refers to the satisfaction of oneself. And even the latter is not what it seems, since one can derive satisfaction from seeing someone else benefiting, even at one’s own expense (for example, when one knowingly makes a genuine personal sacrifice in order to help someone else one cares about or even just feels obligated to help). 

The second way one could arrived at the false conclusion that all desire is selfish is empirically: Just looking at one’s own and others’ behavior could convince one that everything a person ever does has a selfish motive. But, I submit, any reasonable survey of human behavior will conclude that, however selfish human beings may be, we are also fully capable of genuinely selfless acts. They might even be fairly common if one rids oneself of the cynical gaze. (Keep also in mind that an act need not be altruistic in order to be selfless; it could simply be focused on something impersonal -- engaging in an activity, no matter whether stamp collecting or reading or walking or tinkering, for its own sake. It might be argued that, at least taken to excess, these activities could be selfish; but might they then not also be done with disregard for one’s own best interest as well, as a compulsion?) 

So it seems to me that desirism, understood as the recommendation to vet one’s desires before acting on them, would naturally tend toward the (or a) good life in that one will be deriving personal satisfaction from the satisfaction of desires that have survived scrutiny as what one really wants to do all things considered. I am confident that the resultant set of desires (and their relative intensities) would run the gamut, from self-interested to other-interested to simply intrinsic (as well as instrumental desires for things that do not contradict the former, as, for example, waging a war to promote a pacific world would normally seem to do, and that are do-able). 

Of course another component of the good life is good luck. Right now (finally, after 76 years) I am leading a good life. However, I carry around anxieties – most saliently (for purely contingent reasons), the possibility of a stroke or of becoming permanently paralyzed in a car accident. Nothing whatever protects me (or anybody) from these or countless other calamities. Indeed, statistically one or another is almost guaranteed to occur in due time. 

But perhaps the good life might be conceptualized to include a counter-component, namely, reaching a plateau (not to mention being born already on it) whereon one feels that one has experienced or achieved enough to be content to endure (almost?) anything, or die, without regrets. But of course that too requires a great deal of good luck: to be capable of such a temperament and to have reached such a point in one’s life. 

So figuring out what the good life is does not in any way guarantee that one will have one. It might increase the odds, though, for example, by advising the continual vetting of one’s desires. In that sense, then, reflecting on the good life may have some ethical value in guiding one’s life, since it addresses the question: How shall one live?

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