Death and Morality

 How does our mortality matter to morality? Aristotle wanted to know the answer to questions like: Money, wealth, beauty are sought for the sake of what higher good? Virtue is sought for the sake of what higher good? The inquiry stopped with eudaimonia, the fulfillment or perfection of our nature, and thus a deep kind of happiness or contentment. Aristotle thought all moral inquiry stopped there. Happiness in that deep sense was for the sake of nothing other than itself. That was self-evident for him. But when you factor in death, as Plato's Socrates did, happiness in this world loses much of its significance. What's the point of eudaimonia when you and everything you love will perish and all will be as though you and all you love and cherish never existed? And of course misfortune can destroy the most virtuous person, whom then no one would call happy in any sense.

 

   Here a fault line that runs through the whole tradition. The question “Why eudaimonia?” does not arise within Aristotle’s framework, but it becomes almost unavoidable once death is brought to the foreground, as Plato did through Socrates.

 Aristotle, as I said, stops inquiry with eudaimonia. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues that 1) Every action aims at some good. 2)Some goods are pursued for the sake of something else. 3) But there must be a final good pursued for its own sake. 4) That final good is eudaimonia: human flourishing/happiness. Aristotle thinks the inquiry stops here because the claim is self-evident: everyone ultimately seeks to live well. The question “Why flourishing?” does not arise for him because flourishing is what it means to succeed as the kind of being we are.

      Aristotle knows that human beings die but death does not play a philosophical role in his ethics. Eudaimonia is measured across the span of a complete life. Misfortune can diminish it, but virtue still gives life dignity and nobility. The deeper existential question, namely, whether the entire project of flourishing is meaningful in the face of death, does not really arise. In Aristotle’s world the cosmos itself is intelligible and ordered, and human flourishing participates in that order. End of story.

   Plato’s Socrates raises the deeper question, however. Death changes the stakes. In dialogues like the Phaedo and the Apology, Socrates asks a more radical question: What is the value of life as such if death annihilates everything? The philosopher becomes someone who learns to detach from the transient world because the ultimate good lies beyond it – philosophy is a preparation for death, as Socrates puts it. Thus Plato begins to shift the center of gravity: the good life is not simply flourishing within this world, but orientation toward a transcendent Good.

     Indeed, death creates the existential problem. Once death is taken seriously, the Aristotelian stopping point becomes unstable. What is the point of flourishing if everything you love and cherish will perish? This question has haunted philosophy ever since. Aristotle would say: morally grounded happiness does not need further justification; living well is intrinsically worthwhile while it lasts; a noble life has its own dignity even if it is finite. This is attractive to those of us who are naturalists and believe this life and this world exhaust what reality has to offer. In modern terms this becomes something like humanistic virtue ethics.

      But for many people, myself included, this answer feels incomplete. For Plato, and later Christianity through thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, death reveals that earthly flourishing cannot be the ultimate horizon of the good. Human beings are oriented toward a good that transcends mortality. Otherwise, death negates anything good and loveable in life. Thus eudaimonia becomes only a partial or imperfect happiness. Ultimate fulfillment lies in participation in the eternal Good. This restores meaning to moral striving even in the face of suffering or martyrdom.

       Modern philosophy often removes that transcendent horizon while retaining moral seriousness. This creates the tension I have been exploring with thinkers like Raimond Gaita. We want to say: cruelty is absolutely evil;

love and justice matter infinitely. But we are less confident about a metaphysical framework that secures that meaning. Death then reappears as a philosophical problem.

    Indeed, Dostoevsky – I am currently rereading The Brother Karamazov in a new (and excellent) translation (Katz) – dramatizes the issue. Ivan Karamazov experiences this tension. If innocent suffering ends in death with no ultimate redemption, he concludes that the moral order of the world is unintelligible. Alyosha Karamazov embodies the opposite intuition: that love reveals a deeper reality which death cannot finally destroy.

     Death does two things philosophically. It exposes the fragility of human flourishing. But it also intensifies the question of ultimate meaning. If everything ends in oblivion, one may still pursue virtue. But the claim that morality has ultimate significance becomes harder to defend.

      There is a real divide between two visions of ethics. One vision, with roots in Aristotle, says:

Flourishing is enough. Meaning lies within the span of life. I think of Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum as two fine contemporary philosophers who work out such a view. The other, with roots in Plato and then Christianity, says: The moral seriousness we experience seems to point beyond mortality. And perhaps that is why the question of death returns again and again in the works of those philosophers that have shaped my thinking: Plato, Aquinas, Dostoevsky, Pieper, Murdoch, Weil, Gaita. Death is not just a biological event. It is the point where the question “Why live well?” becomes inseparable from the question “What ultimately is real?”.