Chapter 1 Happiness At the beginning of Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle quotes a line of wisdom literature inscribed on an ancient stone on the sacred island of Delos. It proclaimed that the three best things in life are "Justice, Health, and Achieving One''s Desires." Aristotle trenchantly disagrees. According to him, the ultimate goal of human life is, simply, happiness, which means finding a purpose in order to realize your potential and working on your behavior to become the best version of yourself. You are your own moral agent, but act in an interconnected world where partnerships with other people are of great significance. Aristotle''s own teacher was Plato, himself the disciple of Socrates who famously said "the unexamined life is not worth living." Aristotle regarded this is as somewhat harsh. He knew that many people-perhaps the majority-live intuitively and often unreflectively, but they enjoy great happiness, on "autopilot" as it were.

He would have shifted the emphasis to practical activity and to the future, and his alternative motto might have been: "the unplanned life is unlikely to be fully happy." Aristotelian ethics put the individual in charge. As Abraham Lincoln saw, "Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." Rather than working on autopilot, Aristotelian ethics put you as sole pilot at the full control panel. Other ethical systems place far less emphasis either on your individual moral agency or on your responsibilities toward others. Aristotelian ethics share the starting point of the moral agent with ethical egoism, associated with the early modern philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), but nothing else. This system recommends that every individual consciously act so as to maximize their own self-interest. Imagine you are hosting a tea party for ten of your neighbors.

You know that two are vegans. But vegan sandwiches are three times as expensive as ham sandwiches. If you buy two servings of vegan sandwiches, there will be less food all round for everybody. The egoist would ignore everyone else''s needs and choose whether to cater for the vegans depending on her own personal eating habits. If she were not a vegan, then she would certainly not want her helping of ham sandwiches diminished by having to cater for anyone else''s different preference. If she were a vegan, then she would ignore the deprivation suffered by all eight carnivores receiving smaller helpings and simply ensure that there was plenty of vegan food available for herself, and order a private extra serving. Utilitarians, on the other hand, seek to maximize the happiness of the greatest number, thus focusing on consequences of actions: for utilitarians, a result involving eight happy carnivores completely trumps the accompanying problem of two miserable vegans. Utilitarianism gets difficult when the minorities are very large: a tea party with, say, four miserable vegans and only six happy carnivores would begin to feel decidedly unfestive.

Followers of Immanuel Kant emphasize duties and obligations, asking whether there should be a universal and fixed law about the proportion of different kinds of sandwiches available at tea parties. Cultural relativists, on the other hand, have insisted that there is no such thing as a universal moral law. Everyone, they say, belongs to a group or groups which do have their own internal laws and customs. Across the planet, there are many cultures and communities which eat no pig products at all; there are others which cannot comprehend vegetarianism or even tea parties. Aristotle would instead realize that the decision about the sandwiches could not be made abstractly in a vacuum. He would set aside time to think about the problem and make plans. He would look behind catering plans to make his intention conscious-if it is to make all ten neighbors feel welcomed and well fed, because that would make the whole community nicer for everyone to live in, conducing to individual and collective happiness, then his decision would need to maximize the possibility of that intention being fulfilled. There would be little point in offending even a minority of the guests.

He would then consult interested persons, including the invitees and the caterers, to test the water on possible reactions. He would think about previous parties he had held or experienced, review precedents and very likely discover a way round the whole problem from looking at the history of tea parties-serving non-dairy cakes which everyone liked, for example, rather than the divisive sandwiches. He would also make sure that he personally enjoyed the types of cake he then chose, because unnecessary self-denial has no place in his philosophy of respect toward self and others. Aristotle''s ethical system is versatile, flexible and practical to implement in daily life. Most of the real-world psychological steps toward increasing contentment outlined by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness: A Practical Guide to Getting the Life You Want (2007) bear a startling resemblance to Aristotle''s philosophical recommendations, and she indeed cites him with approval. His leitmotifs are working with the situation you find at hand, forethought, an unrelenting focus on intentions, flexibility, practical common sense, individual autonomy and the importance of consultation with others. The basic premise of Aristotle''s notion of happiness is wonderfully simple and democratic: everyone can decide to be happy. After a certain amount of time, acting rightly becomes ingrained as a habit, so you feel good about yourself, and the resulting state of mind is one of eudaimonia, Aristotle''s word for happiness.

This Aristotelian pursuit of eudaimonia is often attractive to agnostics and atheists, but is in fact compatible with any religion which emphasizes the individual''s moral responsibility for their own actions and does not assume that frequent guidance, reward or punishment come from any external divine being. But since Aristotle himself did not believe that god interfered in the world or was interested in it in any way, his program for achieving happiness was a system in itself. The Aristotelian will not expect to find rules about tea parties in any sacred text. But she will not expect to be hit by god-sent retribution if her tea party goes badly wrong, either. Living in a competent and planned manner is something you elect to do to control your life and destiny. Since this control is traditionally assigned to a god or the gods, there is a sense in which it can make you "godlike." Eudaimonia, however, is not so simple to explain. The eu- prefix (pronounced like "you") means "well" or "good"; the daimonia element comes from a word with a whole range of meanings-divine being, divine power, guardian spirit, fortune or lot in life.

So eudaimonia came to mean well-being or prosperity, which certainly includes contentment. But it is far more active than "contentment." You "do" eudaimonia; it requires positive input. In fact, for Aristotle, happiness is activity (praxis). He points out that if it were an emotional disposition which some people are either born with or not, then it could be possessed by a man who spent his life asleep, "living the life of a vegetable." Aristotle''s definition of happiness is not constituted by material prosperity of any kind either. A century earlier, another northern Greek thinker, Democritus, whom Aristotle admired, had talked about "happiness of the soul," and had insisted that it definitely did not derive from the possession of livestock or gold. When Aristotle uses the word eudaimonia, he likewise means "happiness of the soul," as experienced in the consciousness of the sentient human.

According to him, life itself consists of having an active mind. Aristotle was convinced that most people get most of their pleasure from learning things and wondering about and at the world. Indeed, he regarded the attainment of an understanding of the world-not just academic knowledge, but understanding of any aspect of experience-as the actual goal of life itself. If you believe that the goal of human life is to maximize happiness, then you are a budding Aristotelian. If the goal of human life is happiness, the way to achieve it is by thinking hard about how to Live Well, or being alive in the best way possible. This requires self-conscious habit, which Aristotle does not think other animals are capable of. The deceptively simple adverb "well" can mean "competently" in a practical sense, "morally" in terms of being kind, and "fortunately" or "with felicity" in terms of enjoying happiness and pleasant circumstances. On 4 July 1776, the brand new United States Congress ratified the text of the Declaration of Independence drawn up by Thomas Jefferson.

Its epoch-making first sentence reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is well known that the ancient Roman Republic was a model for the Founding Fathers of America, but that telling phrase "the pursuit of Happiness" shows that Jefferson was immersed in the philosophy of Aristotle as well. Four years later the constitution of Massachusetts (1780) followed suit: government is instituted for the common good, "for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people." Aristotle believed that the way we educate future citizens is crucial to whether they can fulfill their potential both as individuals and in comm.