Posted on by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

Happiness as the Principle of Ethics, Law, and Rights

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. My thanks to Professor Nadja El Beheiri, Chair of the Department of Roman Law, for the invitation. A pdf can be found here.

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). 

1 The Conception of Happiness in the Aristotelian Tradition

1.1 The Objective Character of Happiness

Aristotle’s term eudaimonia was translated into Latin with felicitas and beatitudo, and is traditionally translated into English with “happiness.” For Aristotle, whether or not someone is eudaimon is an objective feature of his life. A life that is eudaimon is a life about which one can say without any qualification: “It is good.” Eudaimonia is thus the end or purpose of human life; it is the fulfillment of human life. Because of this objective character of eudaimonia, many Aristotelians today prefer to translate it with “flourishing,” rather than “happiness.”1

The problem with the English word “happiness,” as with similar words in other modern languages (such as Glück in German), is that it has long been used to signify subjective contentment—an affective state following on the attainment of desires and drives.2 The difference between the way modern words for happiness are used and the way the Aristotle uses eudaimonia is well illustrated by an aphorism of Friedrich Nietzsche’s: “If one has one’s why of life, one can endure almost any how. Man does not seek happiness; only the Englishman does.”3 For Aristotle happiness is precisely the why of life, the final cause and highest good itself, not the how, the comfortable circumstances of life.

“Flourishing,” on the other hand seems closer to eudaimonia, because flourishing is an objective state of well-being. Whether and organism is flourishing is something that can be judged on the basis of objective criteria, not merely subjective emotion.4

The term “flourishing,” however, is used not only of human beings, but of plants and animals as well. But Aristotle uses eudaimonia exclusively to speak of the kind of flourishing that is proper to a rational being. Only a rational being can be eudaimon. Aristotle remarks that not even children are properly speaking eudaimon, they cannot flourish as rational creatures yet, because they do not yet have the use of their rational faculty.5

Aristotle begins with a nominal definition of eudaimonia— “the highest of all the goods related to action,” that is, the goal that we all seek in living, the end or purpose for which other things are desired, but which is itself desired only for itself.6 But then Aristotle moves from that nominal definition to a real or essential definition of happiness. What is happiness? What is the true final goal of our lives?

Aristotle answers this question by considering the human beings own ergon, the activity that belongs to them as such. What can a human being do that no other natural thing can do? Here, Aristotle follows the account given by Socrates in Plato’s Republic: a things own ergon, the proper activity or work or function of a thing. Socrates defines this as that which only this thing can do, or which it can at least do better than other things.7 For example, the knife’s proper ergon is to cut. One could also cut with a spoon or a fork, but not as well as with a knife. To cut is the activity or work or function of a knife. The proper ergon of an eye would be to see, of a flautist to play the flute, etc. In each case the goal or end of a thing is to do its ergon, its work, well. The end or purpose of a knife is to cut well, of an eye to see well, of a flautist to play the flute well.

The quality that enables a thing to do its own activity well is called by Plato and Aristotle arete, virtue. This is the most general definition of virtue: the quality that enables a thing to do its own activity well. The virtue of a knife is sharpness, the virtue of an eye is keenness, the virtue of a flautist is skill in playing the flute.8

Aristotle applies this analysis to human beings. What is a human being’s own ergon, his proper activity or work? As a living thing, the proper activity of a human being will be a living activity, but it will not be merely nourishment and growth, since all living things share in this, nor will it be sensation and sensual pleasures, since the animals have this as well. There is only one kind of life that left that could be what he is seeking:

So there remains a certain active life of that which possesses reason; and what possesses reason includes what is obedient to reason, on the one hand, and what possesses it and thinks, on the other. But since this [life …] also is spoken of in a twofold way, one must posit the life [of that which possesses reason] in accord with an activity, for this seems to be its more authoritative meaning. And if the work of a human being is an activity of soul in accord with reason, or not without reason, and we assert that the work of a given person is the same in kind as that of a serious person, just as it would be in the case of a cithara player and a serious cithara player, and this would be so in all cases simply when the superiority in accord with the virtue is added to the work; for it belongs to a cithara player to play the cithara, but to a serious one to do so well. But if this is so—and we posit the work of a human being as a certain life, and this is an activity of soul and actions accompanied by reason, the work of a serious man being to do these things well and nobly, and each thing is brought to completion well in accord with the virtue proper to it—if this is so, then the human good becomes an activity of soul in accord with virtue, and if there are several virtues, then in accord with the best and most complete one.9

That is, the end or goal of human life is activity with reason (meaning both the act of reason itself, or the acts of other faculties of the soul insofar as they are guided by reason) done in accordance with the best virtue.

Now, the end or goal of man is eudaimonia, happiness. Therefore, eudaimonia is the activity with reason, done virtuously. That is, virtuous activity.

Happiness is the principle (beginning) of morality, because everything that we do ought to contribute to it either directly or indirectly. The last end is the first beginning. Bad human actions are bad because they are incompatible with happiness, good actions are good because they contribute to, or partially constitute, happiness.

Eudaimonia is an objective reality; a person is objectively eudaimon if there are living a life of moral and intellectual virtue; it is not merely subjective contentment or pleasure. Nevertheless, Aristotle argues, the virtuous life will in fact be pleasant and joyful. To attain the good toward which the faculties of our soul tend will naturally lead to joy or delight. Joy is the natural result in the desiring faculty of attaining the good sought.10 Joy (pleasure) is not the end or goal of our lives, but it is something that naturally supervenes on our attaining our goal, just as “the bloom of youth supervenes on those in the prime of life.”11

1.2 Happiness as the Common Good

Aristotle argues that the happiness, as the highest good of man, is the good sought by the most complete and authoritative form of human community:

We see that every city-state is a community of some sort, and that every community is established for the sake of some good (for everyone performs every action for the sake of what he takes to be good). Clearly, then, while every community aims at some good, the community that has the most authority of all and encompasses all the others aims highest, that is to say, at the good that has the most authority of all. This community is the one called a city-state, the community that is political.12

The human good is therefore not a merely private good but is rather the common good of the complete human community, koinonia teleios: the polis, the city-state. For it is only in a complete human community that the aim of virtuous life can be attained. Hence political community is “self-sufficient,” since it has everything that it needs to achieve the complete human good of happiness: “A complete community [koinonia teleios] constituted out of several villages, once it reaches the limit of total self-sufficiency, practically speaking, is a city-state. It comes to be for the sake of living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living well.”13

Happiness, the life of virtuous activity is thus not a merely private good, but the common good of a community. In fact, the happiness of an individual and of a complete community are the same thing:

For even if [the human good] is the same thing for an individual and a city, to secure and preserve the good of the city appears to be something greater and more complete: the good of the individual by himself is certainly desirable enough, but that of a nation and of cities is nobler and more divine.14

But how can the human good be the same for an individual and for a city? If happiness is activity with reason done virtuously, isn’t it something individual to each person? My activity is not your activity. Achilles’s acts of bravery are not the acts of anyone else.

Virtuous activity becomes a common good of the city in two ways. In one way by being directed to a common object: the true and the just are common objects towards which the members of the community strive together.15 Just as victory is the common end of the acts of martial virtue, uniting the action of soldiers in an army, so the objects of political virtue can unite the virtuous actions of citizens or subjects of a political community.16 In a second way virtuous  becomes the common good of the citizens through friendship. “It seems too that friendship holds cities together,” Aristotle writes, “and that lawgivers are more serious about it than about justice.”17 A friend is a second self and so the virtuous activity of a friend is a good for his friends. The noble deeds of great men in a political community become a good shared among all their friends, first those closer to them, but then to all their fellow-citizens who honor their deeds.18

2 Happiness as the Principle of Law and Right

2.1 Happiness and Law

Since happiness is the final end and first principle of action both for an individual human being and for a human community, it must lie at the root of the laws which order such a community. As Aristotle puts it:

Matters defined by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these we declare to be just. The laws pronounce on all things, in their aiming at the common advantage [tou koine sympherontos…] As a result, we say that those things apt to produce and preserve happiness and its parts for the political community are in a manner just. The law orders us to do the deeds of the courageous person (for example, not to leave the order of battle or to flee or to throw down our weapons), and those of the moderate person (for example, not to commit adultery or outrage), and those of the gentle person (for example, not to strike or to slander someone), and similarly also in the case of the other virtues and corruptions; the law commands the ones and forbids the others.19

The laws aim at the happiness of the community, which consists in virtuous activity, and hence they command acts of virtue and forbid acts of vice.

In his Summa theologiae, St Thomas Aquinas develops this Aristotelian notion of law, arguing that happiness as a common good is the principle from which law arises:

By virtue of the fact that law is a rule and measure, it has to do with the principle of human acts. Now just as reason is the principle of human acts, so too within reason itself there is something which is the principle with respect to everything else. Hence, this must be what law is chiefly and especially concerned with. Now in actions, which practical reason is concerned with, the first principle is the ultimate end. But, as was established above (q. 2, a. 7), the ultimate end of human life is happiness or beatitude. Hence, law must have to do mainly with an ordering that leads to beatitude. Again, since (a) every part is ordered toward its whole in the way that what is incomplete (imperfectum) is ordered toward what is complete (perfectum), and since (b) a man is part of a complete community, law must properly be concerned with the ordering that leads to communal happiness (ad felicitatem communem).20

The first principium, the first beginning, of law as a practical matter is the last end. And since happiness is the last end, it is the first beginning of law. And since happiness is virtuous activity, law should be based on wise deliberation about what is conducive to virtue in the community. Hence St Thomas includes the common good in the very definition of law: “Law is an ordering (ordinatio) by reason, directed toward the common good, made by one who is in charge of the community, and promulgated.21

St Thomas’s conception of law is in deep continuity with Aristotle and the whole Socratic tradition, which see politics and legislation as being essentially concerned with fostering virtue. But he is at odds with modern political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who see politics and legislation as being directed to the defense of the rights of human beings. The notion of rights in modern philosophy is itself quite different from St Thomas’s notion of “right” (jus), and of Aristotle’s notion of “the right” (dikaion). It is to this difference that I now turn.

2.2 Happiness and Right

The Latin word jus (or ius), usually translated in English by “right,”22 but sometimes (rather confusingly) by “law,” was used by the Roman jurists to signify a wide range of analogically related concepts.23 St Thomas Aquinas takes over many of these meanings of jus from the jurists, and shows the order that exists among them, an order founded in the reality which they bespeak. In doing so, St Thomas makes use of the insights of Aristotle into the nature of the just. St Thomas’s account has been further developed by Thomist philosophers such as Louis Lachance24 and Henri Grenier,25 and by jurists influenced by Thomas such as Michel Villey26 and Javier Hervada.27 Despite their differences, these thinkers are agreed on the most fundamental insights.28

Thomas gives the following account of the order of the analogical meanings of jus:

It is common for names to be switched from their primary imposition in order to signify other things. For instance, the name ‘medicine’ was first imposed to signify a remedy given in order to heal someone who is sick, but was later switched to signifying the art by which healing is accomplished. So, too, the name ‘ius’ was first imposed to signify the just thing itself, but (a) was afterwards switched to signifying the art by which one knows what is just and (b), further on, was turned to signifying the place in which justice (ius) is rendered, as when someone is said to appear in a court of justice (comparere in iure), and, further on, (c) ‘ius’ is also used for the judgment rendered by someone whose office is to deliver justice, even if what he decrees is unjust (iniquum).29

The first meaning, Thomas says, is “the just thing itself.” This is equivalent to what Aristotle would call to dikaion, the just.30 Later scholastics will call this jus objective (objective right). What is meant is the thing or action that is due to another as a matter of justice.31 Since the virtue of justice is the firm will to give to each their due, it presupposes that there are things that are due to others, these things are “rights.”32 For example, care is due to a child by its parents. The care is the child’s right, its jus. Or taxes are due to the government of the political community, the taxes are the government’s right. Or a fair share of the spoils of battle is due to Achilles—it is his right. Or money is due to the baker who gives me a loaf of bread; the money is the bakers right. 

The reason why certain things are due to others is that there is a distribution of things. This distribution can be called the basis of rights.33

The distribution of things begins with the eternal law, through which God distributes things for the common good of his creation—both the intrinsic common good of the harmonious order of the whole of creation, and the extrinsic common good of God Himself as the object of happiness. Rational creation’s participation in this eternal law is called “natural law.” The objective rights distributed by natural law can be called “natural rights.” These are what Aristotle calls “just by nature” or “natural right” (physei dikaion).34 These are things due to human beings on account of nature. Thus, among the examples above, care from parents is due to children by natural law: God has given this right to children. And he has given it, ultimately, that they might attain happiness.

In the second place, the distribution of things is made by human law and human custom, which specify the natural law for the sake of the common good of temporal happiness and peace. Thus, the taxes due to the government are determined by human law, and the particular share of the spoils due to a warrior is a matter of custom. 

Finally, the distribution of things can be on account of a contract or agreement. Thus, the money due to the baker is a matter of contract. Such contracts are themselves subject to human law for the sake of the common good.

Thus, the distribution of things, the basis of rights, is always connected to law—to the eternal law, made manifest in the natural law, and further particularized by human law, custom, and contract. Law (lex) is, as St Thomas puts it, the “ratio iuris,” it gives the reason why some thing is due to someone.35 Law is the reason of right. Jus is an expression of lex, because lex is the ratio of the just thing. Since law is for happiness as a common good, and law gives the reason for right, then rights are based ultimately on happiness as a common good.

The other senses of jus that Thomas discusses in IIa-IIae q. 55, a. 1, have to do with the role of jurists in determining what rights belong to whom in what circumstances. One sense of jus that Thomas does not mention in that context, although it was used by the Roman jurists,36 and is in fact used by Thomas in other contexts,37 is the sense of jus as a moral power, that is what someone ought to be allowed to do without interference. This sense, and its analogical relation to the first sense, is treated explicitly by later scholastics, who call it jus subjective (subjective right), to distinguish it from jus objective. This analogical extension of the word jus makes a lot of sense. If a thing is one’s right, then the power or license that one has to do certain things to or with the thing is also due to one, i.e. one’s right. For example, if a piece of bread is someone’s jus, then eating the bread is also his jus. That is, he ought to be allowed to eat the bread.

This analogical extension would be unobjectionable in itself.38 Such moral powers do indeed have a foundation in reality, and it makes sense to extend the name jus to them. But in the course of the extension, a fatal reversal took place among early modern philosophers. The analogical extension of jus, right as a power, came to be seen as the prime analogate, and objective right, the object owed to the other, as an analogical extension. On the basis of this reversal, early modern philosophers hold that something is due to another, because of the inviolable moral power that he has of demanding it, rather than the power being an effect of his being owed something. Henri Grenier explains the consequences as follows:

If objective right is understood as right in the strict sense, it follows that subjective right, i.e., right as a power, is measured by the just thing, according to conformity to law. Moreover, since law is an ordinance for the common good, it follows that the whole juridical order is directed to the common good. But, if subjective right is understood as right in the primary, strict, and formal meaning of the term, it follows that the juridical order consists in a certain autonomy, independence, and liberty. For subjective right is not measured by the just thing, but the just thing is measured by the inviolable faculty, which is a certain liberty. Therefore, according to moderns, the juridical order is directed to liberty rather than to the common good. This gives rise to errors among moderns, who speak of liberty of speech, liberty of worship, economic liberty, — economic liberalism, — without any consideration of their relation to the common good.39

This modern liberal understanding of rights as the foundation of the juridical order, reduces the common good to an instrument for individual ends. For liberals the common good is not that in which the members of society find their flourishing and happiness, but rather an order instrumental in bringing about the liberty of all. The true goal is not an actual good, but the maximum freedom for each to determine his good.

This difference between the modern liberal notion of rights and the Aristotelian/Thomistic notion fits with their different understandings of happiness. For the Aristotelian tradition, happiness is objective and common, a good after which individuals strive in common as toward something very great. Therefore, rights are distributed with a view to a great over-arching goal. But for modern philosophers, happiness is something subjective and private—the affective state of desires satiated. Thus, rights are the power to do whatever happens to give you subjective satisfaction, a private good.

  1. Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 54. ↩︎
  2. Cf. MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 196-202. ↩︎
  3. “Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie? — Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das.” [Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung (Leipzig: Neumann, 1889), “Sprüche und Pfeile” §12]. ↩︎
  4. Cf. MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 24-31. ↩︎
  5. Aristotle, Eth. Nic., I.9, 1100a2. ↩︎
  6. Eth. Nic., I.4, 1095a16; I.7, 1097b1. ↩︎
  7. Plato, Republic, I, 352d-353b. ↩︎
  8. Republic, I, 353; Eth. Nic., I.7 1098a. ↩︎
  9. Eth. Nic. I.7, 1098a3–18; trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). ↩︎
  10. Eth. Nic. I.8, 1099a. ↩︎
  11. Eth. Nic. X.4, 1074b35. ↩︎
  12. Pol. I.1, 1252a; trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1998). ↩︎
  13. Pol. I.2, 1252b. ↩︎
  14. Eth. Nic. I.2, 1094b7. ↩︎
  15. See: Michael Waldstein, The Glory of the Logos in the Flesh (Ave Maria: Sapientia Press, 2021), 311-312. ↩︎
  16. The object of virtuous activities is called the “extrinsic” common good, whereas the order within the community, forming in into a community and enabling the achievement of the extrinsic good is called the “intrinsic common good.” ↩︎
  17. Eth. Nic. VIII.1, 1055a23-25. ↩︎
  18. For a fuller account of how friendship makes virtuous activity common in the city see: Edmund Waldstein, “The Primacy of the Common Good,” The Josias, June 19th, 2023. ↩︎
  19. Eth. Nic. V.1, 1129b13-26. ↩︎
  20. Ia-IIae, q. 90, a. 2, c; trans. A.J. Freddoso. ↩︎
  21. Ia-IIae, q. 90, a. 4, c. ↩︎
  22. Spanish: derecho; French: droit; German: Recht. All of these words are etymologically related to Latin rectus or directus, rather than jus. Rectus is derived from the Indo-European root “reg,” meaning straight, and hence, to move in a straight line, to lead straight, to put right, to rule, etc. ↩︎
  23. See: Rafael Domingo, “Ius, ius suum, res iusta: una crítica a la Introducción crítica de Hervada,” in: Persona y Derecho 86.1 (2022), 249-266. Ultimately, I disagree with Domingo’s critique of Hervada, but his discussion of the different senses of ius is helpful. ↩︎
  24. Louis Lachance, Le Concept de droit selon Aristote et S. Thomas, 2nd ed. (Montréal: Les Editions du Levrier, 1948) ; cf. Jean-Pierre Schouppe, “The Eclipse of the Objective Meaning of Aquinas’s Concept of Ius in the Thomist Tradition since Spanish Scholasticism and Its Rediscovery in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in: Loïc-Marie Le Bot and Petar Popović (eds.), The Concept of Ius and the Nature of Law in Thomas Aquinas (Washington DC:  Catholic University of America Press, 2024), 40-70. ↩︎
  25. Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, vol. 4, Moral Philosophy, trans. J.P.E. O’Hanley (Charlottetown: St. Dunstan’s University, 1950), §§ 946-960. ↩︎
  26. Michel Villey, Philosophie du droit, vol. 1, Définitions et fins du droit, 3rd ed. (Paris: Dalloz, 1982). ↩︎
  27. Javier Hervada, Critical Introduction to Natural Law, trans. Mindy Emmons (Montréal: Wilson & Lafleur Ltée, 2006). ↩︎
  28. For a comparison of Villey and Hervada see: Carlos José Errázuriz, “The Reception of Juridical Realism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” in: Le Bot and Popović (eds.), The Concept of Ius, 71-89. I agree with Errázuriz in seeing Hervada as being more convincing than Villey on the points on which they disagree. ↩︎
  29. IIa-IIae q. 55, a. 1, ad 1. ↩︎
  30. See: Lachance, Le Concept de droit selon Aristote et S. Thomas, 25-26. ↩︎
  31. See: Edmund Waldstein, “Rights and the Common Good,” in: Edmund Waldstein (ed.), Integralism and the Common Good, vol. 2: The Two Powers, 9-22. ↩︎
  32. Hervada, Critical Introduction to Natural Law, 9-16; cf. Petrus Hispanus, “Notes on Right and Law,” in: Waldstein (ed.), Integralism and the Common Good, vol. 2, 3-8. ↩︎
  33. Cf. Hispanus, “Notes on Right and Law,” 4. ↩︎
  34. Eth. Nic. V.7. ↩︎
  35. IIa-IIae, q. 57, a. 1, ad 2. ↩︎
  36. See: Charles Donahue, Jr., “Ius in the Subjective Sense in Roman Law: Reflections on Villey and Tierney,” in Domenico Maffei, Italo Birocchi, Mario Caravale, Emanuele Conte, and Ugo Petronio (eds.), A Ennio Cortese (Rome: Il Cigno Edizioni, 2001), 1:506–35. ↩︎
  37. See: Dominic Legge, O.P., “Do Thomists Have Rights?,” in: Nova et Vetera, English Edition, 17.1 (2019): pp. 127–147. ↩︎
  38. The following paragraphs are based on: Waldstein, “Rights and the Common Good,” 21-22. ↩︎
  39. Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, vol. 4, Moral Philosophy, trans. J.P.E. O’Hanley (Charlottetown: St. Dunstan’s University, 1950), § 950. ↩︎