Member-only story
The highest good of them all — Part I
Is it wisdom, virtue, or good judgment?
What is the highest good in life, the summum bonum, the thing to which all else is going to be subordinate? This question took up a lot of the energy and time of the ancient Greco-Romans, and to some extent one can differentiate among the various schools of ancient philosophy by the way they answered it. For the Epicureans and the Pyrrhonists it was ataraxia, that is, tranquillity of mind; for the Cynics and Stoics it was excellence as a human being, or virtue. For the Cyrenaics it was physical pleasure. And so on.
Even a number of religions and non-Western philosophical traditions assume a highest good: the worship of God for the Christians, the achievement of Enlightenment for the Buddhists, social harmony for the Confucians. Etc.
We could quibble that there may be more than one highest good, i.e., a small set of equally valuable goods (summa bona) that nevertheless rank higher than anything else. But that wouldn’t really change the debate much. It would still remain true that if the concept of summum bonum makes sense, it behooves us to identify such good and structure our life around it. Otherwise, we risk getting to the end of it and finding out that we have, in an important sense, mislived.
