Happiness and the Supreme Good

Is happiness the supreme good? Is it our sole ultimate end, so that whatever actions we choose, we always choose them for the sake of happiness? Medieval thinkers addressed these questions long before they encountered the puzzling line of argument in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics. Their differences of opinion owe something to different impressions they had of Augustine’s teachings.

Again and again Augustine claims that the supreme good is neither virtue nor pleasure nor any other psychological aspect of a human being. The supreme good is God; happiness lies rather in our enjoyment of God. In declaring the supreme good something external to human beings Augustine firmly rejects the anthropocentrism dominant in ancient ethics. As we are made happy by God, so too are we made good by God, not by our own learning and practice.

Did Augustine regard happiness as the ultimate end of all human actions? His successors came to different conclusions, with good reason. In some places, especially in early works, Augustine seems to accept the thesis that whatever we seek, we seek for the sake of happiness. He aims mainly to establish that only eternal, God-given happiness can truly satisfy us. In other works Augustine stresses instead two different kinds of motivations, which he relates to two different kinds of goods: a worthy or intrinsic good (bonum honestum), which has value in its own right, and a merely useful good (bonum utile), which has value only as a means to something else. Worthy goods have ‘‘intelligible beauty’’; these are goods to be enjoyed, never used. Indeed, Augustine claims that the greatest human perversion consists in willing to use objects of enjoyment, or willing to enjoy objects of use.

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The emphasis here - on different motivations we might have for valuing an object or person, not on the allembracing quest for happiness - accords with Augustine’s conviction that we truly love something only if we love it for its own sake.

Boethius (d. c. 524) solved the problem of the supreme good in a way readers today find rather strange. In Book III of his Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae), Lady Philosophy argues that the supreme good is happiness and the supreme good is God. Because there cannot be two different supreme goods, God himself is happiness. The argument depends on the idea that happiness, like goodness and justice, belongs to the divine essence. As it is more correct to say God is goodness and justice than that God is good and just (because God has no accidental properties), so it is more correct to say that God is happiness than that God is happy.

Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) agreed that God is the supreme good, that God is goodness, and that God is justice, but he resisted identifying God with happiness. Hence Chapter 1 of Anselm’s Monologion moves directly from the axiom that whatever we desire, we desire because we regard it as good, to distinguishing between goods with intrinsic worth (honestum) and goods that are only useful. In later works, such as On the Fall of the Devil, Anselm enlists the distinction between two goods to argue for two related inclinations (affectiones) of the will. If we always will whatever we do for the sake of happiness, even for the great reward of eternal happiness, God looks like nothing more than a means to our own ends. Focusing on the problem of motivation, Anselm argues that God must have created humans and angels, beings he holds morally responsible for their actions, with two inclinations of the will: the inclination to happiness or what is advantageous (commodum), which even animals have, and the inclination to justice, righteousness (rectitudo), or what has intrinsic worth. Anselm considers the inclination to one’s own advantage natural and inalienable. In contrast, he thinks that the inclination to justice was separated from human nature through Adam’s sin and can be restored only through God’s grace. Without this inclination, Anselm laments, the will is never free, because our natural freedom of choice is useless.

The study of Aristotle’s Ethics did not alter the basic division between theorists who saw nothing morally problematic about happiness as the end of all our actions and those who did. Like Boethius, Aquinas argued that the highest good of human beings is happiness. Happiness is our ultimate end, so that whatever we desire, we desire for the sake of happiness. Happiness, however, can be understood either as an object or as our attainment or possession of that object. In the first sense, Aquinas explains, God himself is happiness; in the second, happiness is our enjoyment of God. His ethical theory represents the best-known example of medieval eudaimonism.

As Aquinas endorsed, with modifications, the position of Boethius, so Scotus endorsed, with more radical modifications, the position of Anselm. Detaching Anselm’s analysis from its theological mooring, Scotus recast the inclination to justice as an inalienable feature of the human will, indispensable for moral agency. On his view, even fallen human beings without God’s grace can choose actions because we regard them as good in themselves, not merely because we regard them as good for us. Granted, our natural inclination to happiness is so strong that we could not reject (nolle) perfect happiness if offered. Nevertheless, Scotus contends, we could still not will (non velle) such happiness; so the will’s choice would still be free, not necessitated by the natural appetite for happiness.

Ockham carried this line of reasoning to a more extreme conclusion: we could choose to reject even perfect happiness if offered. Did Ockham also claim that we can will evil as such or will evil for its own sake? On this topic there is room for doubt. Unlike most of his predecessors, Ockham considers the axiom, ‘‘whatever we will, we will under the aspect of a good,’’ either true although completely trivial or substantive but false. If what one means by ‘‘good’’ is just anything at all that people will, the axiom is true. On the other hand, if one means by ‘‘good’’ something useful, pleasurable, or intrinsically valuable, the axiom loses its status as a true but empty proposition and becomes a substantive proposition about human psychology. In this second sense, Ockham argues, the proposition is false, because we can will an act we believe to be neither useful, nor pleasurable, nor intrinsically valuable, such as worshipping false gods. Ockham does not say that we can will such an act because we believe it to be evil, only that we can will it while recognizing that it is good in none of the three ways indicated.