Everyone should strive to ensure that they live a good life and take efforts to ensure that other individuals do the same.What is good:Humans by nature desire the good. (Republic VI, 505e) Even though the exact definition of the good may differ depending on ones own subjectivity, it can generally be explained in that, people try to maximize the amount of good things in their life as opposed to bad. The good has an inherent ability to cause happiness. This can be illustrated in any number of ways. Little argument would be made to the fact, that if I were to win the lottery today, it would be perceived as a good event and would make me very happy. Its important to know that good things causing happiness are subjective. A slave who is given a light workload will perceive that as a good event and that would make them happy. Its also important to note that there is a temporal sense to the good. For example, if I were to miss the bus, I would immediately perceive this as bad. However, if I learned that this bus later crashed and everyone was killed, I would then perceive my missing the bus as good. In a more extreme example, a serial killer who gets pleasure out of strangling young women to death and videotaping it, would perceive such an occurance as good. This further emphasizes that the good is highly subjective, depending on ones own point of view. Logically, nobody would ever wish for bad things to happen to them. For example, the serial killer would probably not want to be in the place of the young woman he is strangling to death at the time. In the temporal sense, he may consider what he did as bad, when he is later sentenced to death for his actions. It logically follows that the good can be said to be whatever an individual perceives as being positive. Although Sisyphus was condemned to roll a stone up a hill for the rest of his life by the Gods, one could only imagine that he was compelled to do this. (Camus, pg. 122...
