Value Decision - A Challenge for CSIA Students

To prioritize Virtues: Success or Happiness, What is more important? 

Success and happiness are both great values that modern people consider significant in their lives. They both happen frequently in our lives, they keep repeating with other nouns too. Which means, it is hard to prevent virtue collisions spontaneously. These two worths are interrelated. Success brings happiness, but it does not mean that those who do not succeed cannot be happy. Like this, as an individual person has different priorities and they seek for different values, collisions occur frequently and naturally in people’s lives.

First point people can think about is whether one (of two values) is a required condition. If success is a required condition for happiness, people can think of physical success. Some might not seek physical success in aspects of finance or acknowledgement from other people. However, all people in the world think that they want to be or to do something. The reason for that is because all humans automatically have the emotion of ‘desire’. So it is concluded that success should be first executed to become happy; people ultimately seek for happiness or accomplishments. Now let’s think about ‘happiness’ seekers. Some research shows that the meaning of happiness is an emotion filled with frequent positive feelings. Through this evidence, some have doubts whether we can truly define success as success when happiness is excluded. Success conclusively represents academical, ornamental, career, or commercial feats. They therefore doubt the logic of the argument that different forms of achievement elicit happy feelings.

A quality of life depends on the level of various virtues. The topic of this article, prioritizing success and happiness was one of the significant philosophical questions in 2023. Through this talking point, students can consider their priorities in their life. Even though some researchers define virtues in their own way, we should remember that standards of being happy are different from person to person. Regardless of how a person wishes to be happy, we should always strive to fulfill the goals set before them. Highlighting that pain is inevitable and growth is optional, why don’t we think of personalized life priorities?