The Question That Never Leaves: On the Good Life

Recovered still, Source SIGNAL 07-2025, integrity 72%.

SIGNAL 07-2025 // Fragment: The Question That Never Leaves: On the Good Life

Translation Confidence: 23
Recovered From: /ghost_archive_2025/
Declassification Date: 2025-09-25

I. The Question – What Should I Do?

There are moments when the world stops being theoretical. A decision has to be made. Someone needs help. Something is at stake. And in those moments we are forced to ask: What should I do?

It’s not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s choosing whether to tell the truth. Whether to forgive. Whether to keep going. Sometimes it’s just a sense that something is expected of us, and we don’t know what that something is. The question doesn’t wait for us to feel ready. This isn’t about strategy or preference. It’s not about what’s most useful, or even what’s most likely to succeed. It’s about what is right, and how we even begin to define that.

For some people, right and wrong seem clear, handed down by tradition or belief. But for many, those boundaries feel less certain. We live among conflicting duties, competing values, and an endless stream of choices, most of them made without perfect knowledge, and almost all of them affecting others.

What should I do? becomes less about the action, and more about the person acting. What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of world am I helping to shape? What will I regret?^[1]

Philosophy has wrestled with this question from the beginning, not as a technical problem, but as a human one. In this essay, we’ll look at three figures who offer different visions of moral life: Aristotle, Confucius, and Iris Murdoch. Each sees morality not as a fixed code, but as a form of cultivation: shaped over time, through habit, attention, and care.

II. The Historic Spark – Three Paths Toward the Good

The question What should I do? is often framed as a matter of rules, obligations, or outcomes. But many of the most enduring philosophers have approached it differently. Not by offering a list of commandments, but by focusing on how a person becomes capable of making the right choice.

Aristotle, writing in 4th century BCE Athens, believed that the good life was one of eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing or fulfillment. But flourishing, for him, wasn’t achieved by chance. It required the development of virtue, shaped through repetition and guided by reason. What we should do, in Aristotle’s view, is less about obeying rules and more about becoming the kind of person who naturally chooses well.

Confucius, who lived several centuries earlier in 6th century BCE China, saw moral life as rooted in relationship and ritual. For him, ethical living wasn’t abstract, it was woven into the fabric of daily life, through respect, humility, and proper conduct. One becomes good not in isolation, but through practicing virtue within family, community, and tradition.

Iris Murdoch, writing in mid-20th century Britain, brought a different kind of moral attention. Influenced by existentialism, Platonism, and Christian thought, she rejected the view of the moral agent as a free, rational chooser. Instead, she saw morality as a matter of inner vision: how clearly we perceive others, how much we let go of self-centered fantasy, and how deeply we attend to the reality of what is before us.

Each of these thinkers remind us that doing the right thing is not always obvious. That we are not born ready. That goodness is something that must be shaped in us, over time.

III.1 – Aristotle: Becoming Good by Doing Good

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira, a small city in northern Greece. He came of age in a period when the structure of Greek society was shifting. He studied at Plato’s Academy in Athens for twenty years, but eventually moved beyond his teacher’s more abstract metaphysics. Where Plato sought the eternal forms beyond this world, Aristotle turned his attention toward the workings of life.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his moral philosophy. In Nicomachean Ethics, named for either his father or son, Aristotle doesn’t ask what morality is in theory, he asks how people become good. His central claim is deceptively simple: we become virtuous by practicing virtue.

“Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.”
- Nicomachean Ethics, Book II ^[2]

For Aristotle, human beings are defined by their capacity for reason. But reason alone is not enough. To live well, one must also develop the cultivated ability to respond appropriately to the world. This means training our desires, emotions, and actions through experience and reflection.

His ethics is grounded in virtues. Each virtue exists as a “mean” between extremes: courage lies between recklessness and cowardice, generosity between wastefulness and stinginess. The virtuous person isn’t just someone who acts rightly by chance, but someone whose habits, judgments, and emotions are all aligned over time.

Importantly, Aristotle does not view morality as a set of rules imposed from above. There is no universal checklist. What is right depends on the situation, the individual, the context. This means ethics is practical, grounded in lived reality. As he writes:

“The good for man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, in a complete life.”
- Nicomachean Ethics, Book I ^[3]

This concept of eudaimonia is not a feeling, but a kind of fulfillment. It is achieved not through pleasure or material success, but through rational, virtuous action over the course of a life.

Aristotle’s approach is often called virtue ethics, and it continues to shape moral philosophy today. Unlike utilitarianism (focused on outcomes) or deontology (focused on duty), virtue ethics asks: What kind of person are you becoming?

His legacy is not a fixed moral code, but a method of cultivation: pay attention to your actions, learn from experience, seek balance, and refine your habits Not for perfection, but for character.

III.2 – Confucius: Harmony Through Ritual and Relationship

Confucius, or Kong Fuzi, was born in 551 BCE in the state of Lu, during a time of political fragmentation known as the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China. He lived through an age marked by corruption, war, and the decline of hereditary nobility. The old bonds of society were fraying. For Confucius, the question of moral life was inseparable from this breakdown. What should I do? was not just personal, it was civilisational.

Unlike many Western philosophers, Confucius did not write a systematic treatise. His teachings were preserved through conversations, sayings, and short reflections compiled in The Analects. These fragments form the heart of Confucian thought, which would go on to shape not only philosophy, but governance, education, and culture across East Asia for centuries.

At the center of his ethics is the idea “Ren”, often translated as benevolence, humaneness, or co-humanity. Ren is not a single act of goodness. It is a quality of moral presence in all relationships: parent to child, friend to friend, ruler to subject. To be truly human, for Confucius, is to cultivate moral character in every interaction.

“To be able to practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue... Gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness. If you are grave, you will not be treated with disrespect. If you are generous, you will win all. If you are sincere, people will repose trust in you. If you are earnest, you will accomplish much. If you are kind, this will enable you to employ the services of others.”
- The Analects, Book XVII ^[4]

But virtue is not developed in isolation. It is cultivated through ritual, including formal ceremonies and extending to everyday conduct: bowing, speaking, mourning, dressing, honoring the dead. These rituals are not empty gestures; they are habits of reverence, shaping the heart through the body^[5]. For Confucius, right action is learned through repetition, correction, and example.

He also placed great importance on learning from the past. Moral clarity, he believed, is preserved in tradition, because tradition contains the accumulated wisdom of a moral order tested over time. As he writes:

“I transmit but do not create, I am faithful and fond of antiquity.”
— The Analects, Book VII

Yet Confucius was not conservative in the sense of blind obedience. He insisted that rulers should be moral exemplars, not tyrants; that power must be matched by virtue. A society in which people know what is right but see it violated by those above them becomes disordered. Ritual and virtue, for him, must be embodied from the top down.

Confucius’ ethics are fundamentally relational, not individualistic. It is deeply social, grounded in obligation, in love, and in the slow work of becoming worthy of trust. Beneath the etiquette and structure lies a deep human concern: how to live together well. For Confucius, moral life is about living rightly with others, again and again, until it becomes who you are.

III.3 – Iris Murdoch: Attention, Love, and the Inner Life of Morality

Iris Murdoch was born in 1919 in Dublin and spent most of her life in England. She was a philosopher by training, a novelist by profession, and a thinker deeply concerned with the moral condition of the modern individual. Writing in the shadow of the Second World War, at a time when existentialism and analytic philosophy dominated opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum, Murdoch charted a different course: one that reconnected ethics to interiority, vision, and love.

In works like The Sovereignty of Good^[6] and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals^[7] (1992), Murdoch rejected the popular notion that moral choice was simply a matter of rational decision-making. She saw that vision as too shallow; too focused on the will, too confident in the self, and too blind to how deeply we are shaped by our own illusions.

“The moral life… is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices.” ^[8]

For Murdoch, morality is not episodic. It is constant. It is not about rules or outcomes, it is about the quality of our attention. She draws heavily on Platonism, especially the image of the Good as a light that illuminates rather than commands. The central moral task, for her, is to see the world clearly, which means seeing others as they truly are, not as we wish or fear them to be.

This kind of seeing takes work. It requires a turning away from the self. We are not naturally transparent to ourselves, Murdoch insists. We are full of stories that serve our ego, and those stories distort how we see others. To become good, then, is not to follow rules, but to undo ourselves, to slowly uncloud our vision through acts of patient, honest attention.

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”
— The Sovereignty of Good^[9][10]

Murdoch calls this moral transformation a kind of spiritual exercise. An exercise that takes place in the quiet, often invisible work of looking, noticing, refusing to look away. We become better not by choosing differently in a single moment, but by training the eye of the soul to see more clearly over time.

Unlike Aristotle or Confucius, Murdoch does not point to external patterns, she turns inward. Her ethics are mystical, psychological, and deeply challenging: to do good, you must first stop looking only at yourself.

Her work is especially urgent now, in a time when moral discourse is so often flattened into performance. Murdoch reminds us that ethical transformation is rarely visible. It happens in how we think about people who aren’t there. In the stories we silently tell ourselves. In the unspoken way we frame what others deserve.

IV. Tensions and Echoes – Moral Life Across Distance

Each of these thinkers begins from a different premise. Aristotle starts with habits that form a rational character. Confucius starts with roles that shape us through obligation and relationship. Murdoch begins with inner vision, the clarity or distortion in how we see others.

But they share something quietly radical: none of them believes that doing good is simply about knowing the rule and following it. For all three, moral life is something cultivated.

Aristotle and Confucius: Outer Form and the Patterned Self

Aristotle and Confucius both believe that character is built through repetition. For Aristotle, it is the steady formation of virtue through deliberate practice. For Confucius, it is the disciplined enactment of ritual and duty, shaped in the crucible of family and community.

They differ in where they locate authority. Aristotle looks inward, to reason, and asks each individual to find the mean between extremes. Confucius looks outward, to tradition and relationship, grounding the self in ancestral models and social harmony.

Yet both trust that structure trains the soul. They ask not that we reinvent morality, but that we enter into forms that already hold meaning, and slowly become more capable of goodness by submitting ourselves to their rhythm.

Murdoch and Confucius: The Hidden Labor of Moral Attention

Murdoch’s twentieth-century mysticism and Confucius’ ancient Chinese ritual might seem far apart, but both insist that morality is not primarily made visible. It’s not in grand declarations, but in the soft patterning of perception, intention, posture. Confucius bows properly not to show etiquette, but to shape the self through reverence. Murdoch turns her gaze again and again toward the other, not for performance, but because only in seeing truly can we act justly.

Their tension lies in how they view the self. For Confucius, the self is a node in a network of obligations. It is shaped from without. For Murdoch, the self is an obscuring fog, a prison of ego and illusion that must be slowly burned away. But both believe that right action cannot arise from an untrained self. Ethics is not just about what you choose. It is about what you have made yourself able to see.

Aristotle and Murdoch: Virtue and Vision

Aristotle is confident that the rational self, if trained, can discern the good. Murdoch is less sure. She sees reason as often captive to the ego, and goodness as something more like grace; glimpsed, rather than grasped. Yet her idea that we become better by attending to the good, and by being transformed in that attention, has echoes of Aristotle’s teleological model: we become what we aim at.

Still, there is a sharp tension. Aristotle believes we can become virtuous through rational mastery. Murdoch doubts that the will alone is capable of such clarity.

V. Return to the Question – The Weight of Doing Right

What should I do?

We began with this question in the middle of life, not in a classroom or a courtroom, but in the ordinary space where people must decide how to treat each other. Most of the time, we are not asked to choose between good and evil. We are asked to show up. To respond kindly. To act when it would be easier not to.

Aristotle offered a vision of character built through deliberate practice: what we do shapes who we become. Confucius called us to align ourselves with the deep order of tradition and relationship, refining our conduct as a form of care. Murdoch pulled us inward, toward the long work of unselfing, of learning to look at others with clear eyes and open heart.

They disagree. They start from different places, offer different tools, and imagine goodness differently. But they agree that doing what is right is not a thing that happens at the surface. It is not about checking boxes or mastering a formula. It is something formed in us, through habit, through reverence, through love.

[ARCHIVE FOOTER – TRANSLATION SUMMARY]

Integrity of fragment: 0.72
Recovered sections: 11 of 13
Anomalies detected: [redacted]
Notes: Residual formatting artefacts removed during reconstruction.

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