The problem of happiness in Aristotle: answers from Francisco Suárez and Martha Nussbaum

Abstract

The idea of happiness in Aristotle is mediated by the teleological meaning it gives to human life. Life is intrinsically and inherently oriented towards eudemonism, towards the good life. This is, roughly speaking, the foundation of Aristotelian ethics. In this paper, we try to confront the answers, as interpretations, of the idea of happiness obtained by two authors who support their respective ethical theories in the Aristotelian approaches to happiness. However, the answers are quite different, and depend on the metaphysical assumptions of both authors. While Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) from the understanding of the human being as a being in relation, the idea of good life leads him to develop, what some have called a “critical anthropocentrism”, Ignatius inspirited. He never loses sight of the value of the social as the first source for the characterization of the human and the transcendent meaning of the ultimate end of human life. Martha Nussbaum (1947) will use an enlightened interpretation, which will inspire later liberal thought, to justify the radical differentiation of the self as an inescapable step for the recognition of that which makes us human, what she calls “central capacities”. The four hundred years between the two proposals seem to us more than a measure of incommensurability, an opportunity to support the criticism called “methodological individualism”, one of the most controversial that has received the so-called Approach of Human Capacities, developed among others by Nussbaum itself with Amartya Sen from the 1980s.