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LIFE AS THE GREATEST GOOD [doc: Good]

N.W. DeWitt in Epicurus and his Philosophy writes, "The belief that life itself is the
greatest good conditions the whole ethical doctrine of Epicurus. He sees life as narrowly
confined between the limits of birth and death. Soul and body are born together and
perish together. Thus the supreme values must be sought between the limits of birth and
death."
C.J. Herrick in The Evolution of Human Nature writes, "Because the basis of all value is
life itself, what the biologist calls 'survival value' is primeval and unescapable. It can
never be outgrown, however much added to it. From this primordial value all others have
been individuated in a hierarchy of values that culminates in man's most refined
intellectual, esthetic and moral satisfactions.
"We start with the proposition that it is biologically good to be alive. Without vitality
there can be no biology, good or bad. What preserves and enriches life is biologically
good, that is, it is good for the organism. If the good did not outweigh the evil, then the
urge for life would disappear....In biology there is no uncertainty about the meaning of
the word 'goodness'. The moral laws of naturalistic ethics are not decrees of some
extranatural power. They are the laws of nature and as such they are self-executing.
"Transgression of these laws brings its own penalty. If you drink whisky to excess, your
health is impaired. If you drink wood alcohol, you die. In so far as our personal and
social codes of moral law conform with the scientifically validated principles of
biological values they are right, and any deviation from these principles brings disaster.
And ignorance of the law excuses no man. To succeed in life we must conform our
moral codes to nature as it is."
***
The obvious is that of which we are most oblivious. But such ignorance of the obvious is
easily explained. For who is not blind to the eye out of which he looks? What we are in
as our taken-for-granted environment - as water to the fish- is that of which we are most
unaware. What we as self-conscious, modern persons are most unaware of is that life
itself is the greatest good - life itself is the primary end or supreme value of every living
thing.
For any life form, life obviously must be the highest value or greatest good. Life is the
end to which all things must be directed if the organism is to continue. The bio-logic
seems irrefutable. If an organism valued something more than life it would be dead.
Living is what a life form is designed to do and it cannot do anything else. By definition
when a life form stops doing the only thing it can do it goes out of existence.

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Only humans, because of consciousness, can choose not to do what every other life form
has no choice but to do. We can choose not to live. We can choose to value something
higher than life, to pursue an end other than life. But we do not do this intentionally out
of knowledge. We only do this unintentionally out of ignorance and misdirected or
immature consciousness. We only come to disvalue life by a confusion or perversion of
means swapped for ends.
The end of any life form must be life. And pleasure is the means by which the end of life
is achieved. Every life form is evolutionarily designed to always choose the most
pleasurable activity and avoid pain. Pleasure always serves the end of life - it directs the
organism to interact with its environment to obtain what it needs to continue living. The
pleasure mechanism is an infallible evaluator of what the organism needs to take notice
of if it is to survive.
Only in conscious human beings has this mechanism turned fallible. With our species
culture began taking over the job of programing from the gene. Our pleasure mechanism
evaluates according to how culture has conditioned it to satisfy its organism's innate
needs. The individual's natural needs are the given but how they are satisfied is decided
through the person's cultural upbringing.
If that upbringing teaches a culture-logic whose premises are counter to the natural biologic then the human organism will be disordered and its pleasure mechanism will
become fallible. Such is what has happened in the West. We have come to disvalue life
by perverting or inverting our pleasure mechanism from a means into an end, thus
displacing the natural end of life itself.
Instead of using our pleasure as the means to further the end of life, we are abusing our
life as a means to further the end of pleasure. We see this in all aspects of human life.
We now live for the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex rather than using the pleasures
of eating, drinking and sex to further life. We abuse our bodies to die prematurely from
the pursuit of pleasure as the goal for which we sacrifice our life. We kill ourselves with
and for entertainment as our directive end.
Humans unlike other life forms must be taught by members of their own species to value
life as the primary good. We do this by the establishment of a vital Norm of rules,
custom and religion which regulate individual desires to align with a life-furthering
common good. When a culture's Norm is patterned after life-enhancing pleasures which
result in social harmony, the individuals within that normal culture find their lives
generally meaningful and rewarding.
By this definition of a Norm, our current Western culture is growing increasingly
abnormal. Adults are no longer teaching the young the proper pleasure pursuits to further
life. A significant proportion of people are now confused about what is normal versus
what is abnormal and what they should value. They have either lost sight of the ultimate
good of the value of life or have never been trained to see it. Life has lost its meaning for

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a significant number of people with depression, substance abuse and crime a common
result.
Education is the only antidote to this disastrous reversal of the normal sequence of
pleasure-as-means to pleasure-as-end. The enhancement of human life must be made the
directive good and end of all social activity. Unless we live to value life we will die from
disvaluing it. Another more life-affirming cultural Norm will take the place of our lifedenying one just as has happened so many times before in history.
This is what the true philosophers such as Plato or Spinoza can teach us. They show that
life is the greatest good and pleasure rightly used is the means to ensure this most
fundamental of all ends. The greatest pleasure for the philosopher is to consciously know
life and reflect its meaning to others by fully reflecting upon that meaning as the reality
of what is.
Only the man in love with wisdom, the philosopher, can guide the undeveloped
consciousness to do more than entertain its pleasure centers thereby short-circuiting its
life energy and shortening its life. An individual's desire when turned in and back upon
itself becomes a mean, nasty, and meaningless, dead-end. That same desire properly and
normally turned without and forward to others and the environment assures the
furtherance of meaningful life in the social exchange of human care and concern.
The philosopher wants to draw out of us and bring to our attention what we are most
oblivious of: the end-value of life. He challenges us to commit ourselves to critical
thinking whereby self-control can lead to cooperation in creating a community based on
consistent and realistic care. He wishes to turn us from the oblivion of pleasure to life
lived consciously and responsibly as the greatest good.