As I
mentioned to you already, there were numerous attempts in the ancient world
to come up with solutions for the problem of happiness. Some of these
solutions, naturally, were better than others.
Before we
examine some of the more profound attempts to address this question, I 
thought that it might be interesting first to look at some flawed approaches
that have been attempted in the ancient world. Among the less than
satisfactory approaches that I would like to briefly examine are fatalism, hedonism, and immoralism.
There are two
main reason for proceeding in this way: First, almost all of the
great thinkers of the ancient world---Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and
Augustine, among others---developed their own ethical systems as a reaction
to the problems that they perceived in these flawed approaches.
Second, many
of these flawed approaches to happiness are still influential in our own
times and often exert what I believe to be a harmful influence on our
society. It behooves us, therefore, to try to understand where
thinkers in the past have gone astray in their attempt to understand the
nature of human happiness, so that we might avoid falling into the same kind of errors.
Let's begin
our study by examining the Fatalist approach to happiness:
