The Just Man Struck by Misfortune
Aristotle · Nicomachean Ethics
Picture a man who lived an upright life: honest, courageous, devoted to those close to him. But fate turns against him: he loses his children, his health, his possessions, and ends in pain and abandonment. Nothing can be held against him, his virtue remains intact, and yet his life closes in the most utter misfortune.
Was his life, in spite of everything, a good one? In other words: is happiness safe from misfortune, or can it be torn away from us?
What it does in the debate
Objects to Eudaimonismattacks the position
If flourishing requires external goods, the highest good stays hostage to fortune: illness, exile, the death of loved ones can shatter it.
- Flourishing, the eudaimonist grants, also requires certain external goods: health, friends, the means to live, a measure of good fortune.
- But then the highest good depends on what no one controls: illness, exile, the death of loved ones can shatter it, like old king Priam who loses everything at the end of his life.
- A final end that a stroke of luck can tear away is not fully our own: one would have built one's life on what fortune lends and takes back.
Therefore So either the highest good remains hostage to fortune, or it must be sought on the side of what alone depends entirely on us.
Objects to Virtue / moral perfectionismattacks the position
Holding virtue to be the only good forces one to call the misfortune-stricken just man happy: making the good invulnerable means denying that loss and pain are real evils.
- The perfectionist holds virtue to be the only good, and the rest, health, possessions, loved ones, to be 'indifferent': the upright person would stay happy even in the most utter misfortune.
- But to call this man happy strains language: the loss of his children, the pain, the abandonment are real evils, not mere indifferents.
- Making the good invulnerable to fortune comes at a price: one must deny that these losses are evils, and so impoverish what we call a good life.
Therefore So virtue may not suffice for happiness: to grant that misfortune mars a good life is to admit goods that uprightness alone does not provide.