An earlier version of this paper was read at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Faculty of Law, Department for Roman Law, Budapest, February 21st, 2025. Thanks to Professor Nadja El Beheiri, Chair of the Department of Roman Law, for the invitation.
Introduction
Happiness ought to be the last end and first principle of ethics, law, and rights. By happiness, I mean here the reality pointed to by Aristotle with the term eudaimonia. I will largely be relying on Aristotle, and on his greatest medieval interpreter and developer, Thomas Aquinas, to establish my thesis. But my aim is not primarily to establish what those thinkers thought, but rather to understand the reality about which they were thinking. Nevertheless, I will attend to the ways in which the reality grasped by Aristotle in the concept eudaimonia is different from that often referred to in modern times by such words as “happiness.” I will begin (1) by looking at the Aristotelian conception of eudaimonia, paying particular attention to two features of it that contrast it with the way that happiness is often conceived of in modern discourse: (1.1) Happiness is an objective state of a human being, and (1.2) happiness is a common good. Next (2), I will consider how happiness is the principle of law (2.1) and rights (2.2).
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