Eudaimonia

Eudaimonia

You can have good food, good friends, a good day. Aristotle’s ethical enquiry is concerned with the good life for a human being. The word Aristotle uses for this is eudaimonia, which is sometimes translated as ‘human flourishing’ or ‘living and fairing well’.

Aristotle has in mind the good life for a human in a broad sense. Eudaimonia is not just about following moral laws (e.g. Kant), or pleasure (e.g. utilitarianism), or being successful – it’s about all these things together and more. It’s a good life in the moral sense as well as in the sense that it’s the kind of desirable and enjoyable and valuable life you would want for yourself.

Eudaimonia is a property of someone’s life taken as a whole. It’s not something you can have one day and then lose the next. Good people sometimes do bad things, but this doesn’t make them bad people. Likewise, people who have good lives (eudaimons) can sometimes have bad days.

Aristotle says that eudaimonia is a final end. We don’t try to achieve eudaimonia as a means to achieve some further goal but instead it is something that is valuable for its own sake.