The ancient Greeks even had a term for it; the ultimate purpose or good for an individual was, in Aristotle’s terms, eudaimonia, and, although translation is not straightforward, MacIntyre suggests that it means something like, ‘blessedness, happiness, prosperity. It is the state of being well and doing well, of a man’s being well-favoured himself and in relation to the divine’.16 So one’s purpose in life is to become the sort of person who exists in this kind of state or condition.
