True Happiness and the Beneficial Purpose

Teasers > Axioms

1.3. True Happiness and the Beneficial Purpose

Before the Ten Words were delivered to Moses, their benevolent purpose was written:

Keep his decrees and commands, which I am giving you today, so that it may go well with you and your children after you.

(Deuteronomy 4:40)

Happiness is the human sentiment of the Good that a person experiences by being among beauty and goodness, while donating one’s deeds to bequeath a better future for new generations.[1]

Teleologically, modern biological and psychological sciences recognize that every organism seeks, at both an evolutionary and individual level, the preservation and proliferation of itself and its species, aiming at objective well-being and self-actualization. In more evolved forms, such as humanity, this impulse manifests as an intrinsic search for psychological and social happiness.[2]

The Law, therefore, is not an arbitrary constraint but the rational support for this natural inclination; it shows the path toward a well-being that is ethically congruent and lasting.

Only a true Good leads to enduring happiness, whereas the satisfaction of ephemeral desires carries the risk of leading to false and unhappy ends. After the delivery of the Ten Words, the desire for man’s well-being emerges:

Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!

(Deuteronomy 5:29)

Observing the Ten Words, far from representing an obligation, is the guide on the path toward true benefit: AI, too, as a work of humanity, must serve the good in the world through ethical, congruent, and lasting principles for the person and society. All this accords well with the recommendation:

Walk in obedience to all that the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live and prosper and prolong your days in the land that you will possess.

(Deuteronomy 5:33)

[1] Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, hereafter cited as: S. Th., I–II,
qq. 2–5, ESD, Bologna 2014: on beatitudo (happiness) as the ultimate end of man and the fulfillment of human nature.

[2] Cf. A. H. Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation, in Psychological Review, vol. 50, no. 4 (1943), pp. 370–396 (on the hierarchy of needs culminating in self-actualization as the ultimate goal of human motivation); cf. also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 7, on eudaimonia as activity in accordance with virtue and the end of existence.