When I was an inductee for my fraternity, I interviewed several brothers and all my fellow inductees. Out of my eight questions, there was one that almost everybody answered the same—Would you rather be a good person or a happy person?

The number one answer was goodness, outpacing happiness by a wide margin. 

For those who answered that they wanted to be good, it seemed that they wanted to have some relationship with happiness but ended up deciding on goodness instead. For those who chose happiness, by the tone of one of my interviewee’s voices, it was as if he was apologizing to goodness for selecting the other over it, like apologizing to the dog at the kennel for not bringing him home.

However, one student said, “I don’t view them as mutually exclusive.”

Happiness, as that one student said, is not mutually exclusive to goodness. Moreover, happiness is not something we have to put to the side, or worse, apologize for wanting or having. The reason why people feel the need to apologize for being happy is that they don’t see within happiness value, virtue and morality, which is what people typically only see within goodness. But whereas only a few people can sense what that one student said, that happiness and goodness are not mutually exclusive: It is possible to articulate a full-fledged defense of how the two ways of life are actually one. 

To begin, what even is happiness? My answer is the one Aristotle gave: Happiness is the fulfillment of our entire well-being, our eudaimonia. Happiness means as he put it: “To live and live well.”

But what does it mean to live and live well? What are the parameters, and how does one achieve good living?

If we take the first part of Aristotle’s phrase, “to live,” it seems to talk about only our bodies. To live, we need food, water and shelter. We need to go to doctors, dentists and specialists if we come across problems like disorders or cancers. If we don’t, we’ll die. If we do, we’ll live, or in other words, survive. 

Let’s now take the second part of the phrase “to live well.” Sure, we can feed our bodies. But in any of the examples above, have we fed our minds? 

So far, we went to the doctor, the dentist, some specialists; we got food, water, clothing, etc. But would we go to the doctor if we didn’t think we were worth the trip? Would we spend money on food if we didn’t think we were worth the expense? Would we cure a disease if we didn’t think our lives were worth saving?

Here lies a fundamental requirement of living well: self-esteem, i.e., that thing that tells us we are worthy of living on this Earth. Since we need self-esteem, we also need some kind of conception of how to get self-esteem. In other words, we need purpose in our lives. We also need a tool that allows us to make that conception, so we need a tool that will enable us to think long-term, which means we need to develop our reasoning faculty.

So far, we have discovered that we need to feed and nourish our bodies, which is plain. But in order to do so, we need our minds to initiate this fostering of ourselves, which is not obvious. We need to seize the reigns of our own lives in order to live, and the animating force that leads us to pick up the reigns of life is the accomplishment of self-esteem, purpose and the development of one’s own individual rational faculty. 

But how do we get and develop any of these things? We accomplish these immense values by means of virtue. What is virtue? Common parlance offers us a clue. 

We often hear the phrase, “he can _____, by virtue of ____.” 

“He can see, by virtue of his eyes.” 

“He can hear, by virtue of his ears.”

“He can think, by virtue of his mind.”

From these examples, we can see the principle at play. Virtue is that thing that allows us to do something. Thus, to give a proper definition: virtue is how one acts to accomplish one’s values.

Let’s then discuss how this applies in real life. It’s not difficult to figure out how we get food or schedule a doctor’s appointment. But how do we use virtue to attain self-esteem? How is virtue used to develop purpose in one’s life? How does one use virtue to create a healthy mind? Put it this way: which virtue(s) do we use to get these things? 

The answer is the comical response someone gives when choosing between two or more things he wants: “Yes.”

Some virtues are things like justice, productivity, rationality and pride. Can you imagine living and living well without any of these? Can you imagine trying to achieve self-esteem without being just, without judging whether or not someone is good or bad for you? Is there self-esteem without pride, without recognizing your self-esteem as itself valuable? Can you imagine trying to achieve your purpose in life without having integrity, without the tool that lets you stay true to your goals like writing a great symphony or novel? Can you imagine purpose without productivity, without actually walking to the supermarket, without actually writing that novel or symphony you always wanted to create? Is a healthy mind without rationality feasible? Can one understand the long-term consequences of one’s actions if one doesn’t know how to think? (Here listed are some non-material values like writing a novel or symphony. These are, of course, optional. But the need for self-esteem isn’t).

I can go on and flesh out each virtue, but the point stands. Virtue, as such, is a part of living in all its aspects because without it and all its manifestations, living could not go on. Life without virtue would be like sight without eyes, hearing without ears, thinking without minds. 

We are thus at our last task. We have said that happiness is living and living well, attaining one’s well-being, one’s entire well-being: both achieving material and spiritual values like health and self-esteem. We have also said that virtue is necessarily a part of happiness since, without it, no value is possible. How, then, is happiness good? In a word, how is happiness something moral? 

When we think of morality, we think of many different kinds. There’s Christian morality, Buddhist morality, Jewish morality, Muslim morality, secular moralities and many more. However, the question to ask isn’t, “out of all of these, which do we choose?” The question to ask instead is: Why do we need morality in the first place? What problem is a code of morality trying to solve?

To see the problem, think of a plant by a windowsill. If the sun is to the west, the plant tilts to the west. If the sun is to the east, the plant tilts to the east. The same thing happens with animals. If a wild animal is hungry, it will hunt. If it is tired, it will rest. In either case of plant or animal, did either stop and ask itself, “but am I worthy of doing this? Should I be doing that which I am doing?” In either case, no such thing occurs. A plant or animal acts purely by its instincts, which are always formed by its environment. 

Humans, however, are not plants or base animals.

Humans can doubt, be certain, be confident; they can question, get answers and be wrong. In two words, man has free will: No one automatically does or knows things. No one knows what the future holds in precise terms. No one is omniscient. However, one can make a general, abstract plan for any context. This is why morality, by its nature, is going to be abstract: Our principles must be wide enough to be useful for any future context we come across. Without abstract standards and principles, only destruction can result. One need only choose what food to eat, attempt to build a skyscraper or engage in brain surgery without guidelines to see why. Standards and thought-out principles are literally a matter of life and death.

We now know why we need morality: to solve the precarious nature of our lives. But why are we trying to solve this problem? Because, as my English teacher once said, “Life is where all the ‘things’ happen,” which means in our context that only life allows us to live.

What morality allows us to live? 

So far, we have seen together that the point of morality is to guide us in our lives so that we may be able to live. We have discovered that “to live” means living for one’s entire well-being, which requires virtue. But being happy means to live, and this is what morality is trying to achieve…  

It appears we have come full circle. One can replace every time I said the word “happiness” with morality, and the piece would be the exact same.

At this point, there are many who would try to argue a hundred different positions. One need only dive into the history of philosophy to see the assaults on happiness, or the besmudging of happiness to see how those in the past have dealt with the same question of—Would you rather be a good person or a happy person? Such assaults are those like— “Happiness is doing whatever one wants” (Hobbes), “Happiness is about pleasure” (Epicurus), “Happiness is being selfish” (Immanuel Kant).

In the end, I ask that you, reader, see the importance of integrating the two ways of life, of asking the right questions, and of using your own mind to find the requisite answers. If you do, I hold that you will come to the conclusions I laid out today. If you don’t, you may end up befuddled that you have to choose between either a happy life or a moral one, and may not see the hidden third answer in the fundamental question: Would you rather be a good person or a happy person? 

The answer: They’re the same.