[From Greek eudaimonia: good fortune, happiness, flourishing.]
(ethics) Any theory that puts personal happiness and the complete life of the individual at the center of ethical concern. Although the term could potentially be used to refer views that value the flourishing of humanity as a whole (such as humanism and anthropocentrism), in practice it is nearly synonymous with individualism and philosophical egoism. Aristotelianism is perhaps the prototypical form of eudaimonism since it provides a well-rounded account of human flourishing and its ethical centrality. By contrast, existentialism rejects happiness as a bourgeois fantasy, and even Stoicism and Epicureanism advocate not individual fulfillment but typically the lack of pain or emotional disturbance.