“A good life is one that is lived in accordance with moral virtue. Moral virtue consists in the habitual disposition to act on right desires, and to avoid acting on wrong ones.” – Aristotle.
“You may wonder what is meant by right and wrong desires. To understand the difference, one must be able to make the distinction between needs and wants.
Needs, as Lord Keynes astutely observed, are desires so basic that they exist without regard to what is offered in the marketplace and without an individual’s comparing his own condition or possessions with those of others; whereas, in contrast, wants are desires that are induced by what is offered in the marketplace intensified by an individual’s comparing what he has with the possessions of others.
Needs are absolute. Wants are relative.
Almost all of us want things we do not need, and fail to want things that we do need.
The attainment of happiness, the achievement of a good Life, is beyond the power of government to provide. Moral and intellectual virtue, which are internal and only within the power of the individual to acquire for himself, is where the influence of your training and schooling comes in.
How has your training and schooling aided and abetted your efforts in this direction?
The things you need for a happy, good life can be summarized under seven headings: 1. You need physical health, vigor, and your senses. 2. You need a decent supply of subsistence, living and working conditions conducive to health, 3. You need political goods, such as civil peace and political liberty, with protection of individual freedom by the prevention of violence, aggression, coercion, and intimidation. 4. You need social goods such as equality of status and treatment in all matters affecting the dignity of a human being. 5. You need the goods of personal association such as friend and family relationships. 6. You need the goods of the mind: intellectual knowledge, understanding, a modicum of wisdom, both personal and speculative, together with skills of the mind such as inquiry, the habits of critical judgment and creative production. 7. You need the traits of character, such moral virtues as temperance, fortitude and justice, creating habits of not yielding to wants that will get in the way of your acquiring the goods you need.
You may be tempted to think the primary reason for going to college and getting an education is that it will help you not just to earn a living but to forge you to the front in the race for the accumulation of worldly goods.
This is an egregious error made by too many Americans today – among them parents and educators.
There is a great deal of talk about the inutility of a college education because it does not guarantee its’ graduates will become worldly successes in monetary terms. There is talk about substituting specialized vocational training for college.
This talk is profoundly misguided for the following reasons:
First, success in the pursuit of happiness cannot be equated with success in the accumulation of a vast amount of monetary wealth. All a man needs to lead a good life is a moderate amount of wealth. To have more than one needs is to have an excess that puts a great strain upon one’s moral virtue, for it permits one to gratify wants that may interfere with one’s attainment of the real goods that one needs.
The least important reason for going to college is that it will help one gain wealth.
The most important reason is that it will help one lead a better life. It can do that only to the extent that it contributes to the formation of moral and intellectual virtues.
Unless the chief reason for going to college is to learn what needs learning in order to lead a decent life [as a good citizen], then one is better off not to have gone to college at all.
The principal contribution colleges and universities can make to the pursuit of happiness is in the virtues – those traits of character which regulate the way you conduct your life.
Moral habits are formed at an early age. Whether or not the individual forms good habits of choice and of action depends largely upon the influence of family and friends. Colleges and universities can do little to confirm good habits or alter bad ones, nor should this be held against them. The ancient Greeks were correct in that moral virtues cannot be taught in schools or inculcated by teachers.
We are left with the formation of the intellectual virtues as the main contribution to be made by institutions of higher learning:
Wisdom is beyond the province or power of any school to cultivate. Wisdom cannot be attained in youth or during prolonged immaturity of those who remain students under institutional auspices. Wisdom is the ultimate intellectual good that comes only with years of experience and after a lifetime of learning.
Understanding – may be attained in school, but its development in depth is, like wisdom, is a product of mature years and of sustained inquiry.
For anyone to become an ‘educated person’, it is necessary for their learning to continue throughout their lifetime.
If your education has given you an introduction to the world of learning, given you skills that help you use your mind creatively, and if it has inspired you with a zest to use these skills, then it has done for you as much as you have any right to expect.
Whether you take advantage of the education you have received depends entirely on you. It will depend on the choices you make in the activities and occupations that fill the free hours of your life. The chief ingredients of a life well lived are the activities of learning and of creative production.
If you do that then there is a reasonable chance that when you graduate from this world at the end of your life, it can be said that your life was a happy one.”
– Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, “Education and the Pursuit of Happiness” commencement address at the University of Denver, 29, May 1976
