What Ancient Ethics Can Teach Us About Happiness

Everybody wants to be happy. We might disagree about how to get there, but the destination itself is nearly universal. So here's a question worth asking: are there ancient sources that could give us a clue?

I sat down with Chester Delagneau, a philosopher and theologian who did his graduate work at Talbot School of Theology (Biola University's graduate program), to talk about his research into happiness, Old Testament ethics, and what it means to live the good life. Chester spent five years researching moral philosophy and Old Testament ethics, and his view of happiness is both more ancient and more radical than what most people expect.

Can You Even Do Philosophy of Religion?

Before we got into the substance, I asked Chester a question I get from students all the time: isn't it against religion to do philosophy? His answer reframed the issue entirely. Think about how God wants us to live in order to flourish. That's an ethical question. And ethics is one of the core branches of philosophy. In classical philosophical terms, "how should we live?" is the question of the good life, and it's been asked by philosophers and theologians for thousands of years.

The two disciplines are approaching the same question from different angles. People sometimes reduce religion to "do what God tells you," but they forget the reason behind the command: God wants us to flourish and be happy. That overlap between divine purpose and human flourishing is exactly where philosophy of religion lives, and it turns out to be fertile ground.

Is Happiness Even the Goal?

There's a common misunderstanding, especially in Christian circles, that God doesn't care about our happiness here and now. It's all about the afterlife. Chester pushes back on this hard. What God instituted from the beginning was intended for people's flourishing. The wisdom literature of the Old Testament (Psalms, Proverbs) is still read today because it speaks to how life works for everyone, not just believers.

Chester's claim is that the kind of happiness he's advocating is something God designed for all people. If we follow the pattern of living that the Old Testament describes, we will flourish. And here's the part that makes the view accessible even to non-religious readers: if the design is real, then it works whether or not you believe in the designer.

I offered an analogy. Imagine a new-age practitioner who invents the "crystal rainbow diet." She says it aligns your chakras. You don't believe in chakras. But the diet happens to contain exactly the right nutrients in the right proportions. It works. Not because the theory behind it is correct, but because it happens to track the truth about human nutrition. Chester's argument about Old Testament ethics works the same way. The ethics may have a theological foundation, but the practical payoff doesn't require you to accept that foundation. The challenge is simply: try it.

The Pleasure Machine

To understand what kind of happiness Chester is advocating, it helps to understand what he's not advocating. Imagine you're independently wealthy and you can afford to be hooked into a pleasure machine for the rest of your life. It's a totally immersive system that pumps you full of dopamine. You feel elated constantly. You could have actual atrocities happening in front of you and you'd feel nothing but bliss.

Would you plug in? Most people say no. And their refusal reveals something important: happiness, whatever it really is, isn't just a feeling. If it were, the pleasure machine would be the obvious choice. The fact that we recoil from it suggests that happiness involves something more than chemical states. It involves engagement, meaning, relationship, and the exercise of our capacities.

Chester frames this in theological terms: we are created in the image of God, which means we have a will, emotions, and intellect. If we're not using those faculties, we're not being fulfilled, no matter how good we feel. But the point stands even without the theology. If you think human beings are more than their chemistry, the pleasure machine isn't happiness. It's a simulation.

The Selfish Hedonist

Chester illustrated the failure of hedonistic happiness with a vivid example. Imagine a friend who is completely self-absorbed. He's obese, sedentary, and lives entirely for eating, drinking, and entertainment. He has his wife work full-time so he can stay home and indulge. He'd rather eat than spend time with his son. He'd rather drink than engage with his wife. He's using the people closest to him as instruments for his own pleasure.

The problem isn't just that he's hurting his family (though he is). It's that he's ruining his own life. By pursuing happiness through selfish pleasure, he's destroying the relationships that would actually make him happy. Chester's point is that this isn't an accident. It's how we're designed. Our happiness is bound up with the happiness of others. When they suffer, we suffer. When they flourish, we flourish. A life built on using others as a means to your own satisfaction will collapse under its own weight.

This connects to a familiar pattern in addiction. You find something that makes you happy for a short period. Then it's not enough. You need more. Eventually, you hit diminishing returns, and you're consuming just to get back to a state of normalcy, not euphoria. The hedonistic path doesn't lead to more happiness. It leads to less.

Righteousness, Justice, and Shalom

The heart of Chester's view rests on two sister virtues from the Old Testament: righteousness and justice. Drawing on the work of Old Testament scholar Klaus Koch, Chester distinguishes them this way. Righteousness is the state of being in right relationship. Justice is the act of being in right relationship. One is the destination; the other is the path.

Justice serves righteousness. You do the acts of right relationship (justice) in order to achieve the state of right relationship (righteousness). And according to Isaiah 32:17, the result of righteousness is peace. In Hebrew, the word is shalom, which means far more than the absence of conflict. It encompasses well-being, wholeness, health, security, and happiness.

This reframes the whole pursuit of happiness. Most people today seek happiness directly. They go straight for the feeling, the pleasure, the dopamine hit. But Chester's argument, grounded in the Old Testament, is that happiness isn't something you can pursue directly. It's the result of living in right relationship with others. Seek righteousness, and happiness follows. Seek happiness first, and you'll get neither.

Ends Exemplify the Means

Near the end of our conversation, Chester made a distinction I found striking. Most ethical thinking falls into the "ends justify the means" framework: happiness is the goal, and we employ whatever means necessary to get there. If wisdom happens to work, great. But if deception or exploitation works, that's fine too. All that matters is the outcome.

Chester flips this. On his view, the ends exemplify the means. Happiness isn't a destination you arrive at by any available route. Happiness is living wisely. It is the state of exercising virtue. The journey and the destination are the same thing. You don't use wisdom as a tool to get to happiness, as if you could swap it out for some other tool. Wisdom is what happiness looks like.

This is a powerful idea, and it echoes virtue ethics traditions going back to Aristotle. Happiness (eudaimonia) isn't a feeling you achieve. It's a way of living you practice.

The Takeaway

Chester's view is that happiness isn't found by chasing pleasure or serving yourself. It's found by pursuing righteousness and justice, by living in right relationship with the people around you, and by exercising the capacities that make you human. The evidence, he argues, is both ancient and empirical: look at the wake of destruction that selfish, hedonistic living leaves behind, and compare it to the lives of people who pursue something deeper.

Whether you accept the theological framework or not, the practical challenge stands: try living this way and see what happens.