Are you resolved?
Here we are at the beginning of the year, the time when convention suggests we should begin again by wiping the slate clean and setting a new agenda. This is justification for that strange annual activity: the proposal and implementation of New Year’s resolutions. The idea of using the start of the year as a time to make an explicit commitment to a series of future actions is an old one. It can be dated back by at least 4,000 years to the time of the ancient Babylonians, who made promises to their gods during the Akitu festival (starting in March) to return borrowed items and pay debts for good favour.
Given the importance of making promises to the gods, we can see this approach was one which almost inevitably was going run into trouble, the kind of trouble that comes from making future promises given humanity’s persistent failing to keep them. Despite the evidence being against them, this hopeful practice has continued as a aspiration and a target for many groups since then, evolving through a series of similar activities, including the Roman tradition of honouring Janus (the god of beginnings) right through to the time set aside for Wesleyan Christian covenant renewal services and finally continuing right up to today’s largely secular focus on establishing future targets for the coming year largely comprising self-improvement plans on a variety of topics including health, finance, and personal habits.
Well, that’s what we are advised is the case when we read the relevant article in Wikipedia which adds the somewhat salutary observation that people still continue to make New Year’s resolutions despite overwhelming evidence that success rates have and remain rather low.
Apparently, it has always been the case that these personal commitments seldom last longer than the end of January and very few resolutions are sustained to the end of the year. I couldn’t find much about the success rate for promises made by Babylonians or Romans, but John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, recognised more success in sustaining future plans could be achieved by making these resolutions public. He developed the institution of “Covenant Renewal Services” on New Year’s Eve/Day, involving Bible readings and hymns, influencing later watch night services. That was one way to increase commitment as there is a lot of evidence that embarrassment has a better chance of working than private commitment. However, the level of achievement for covenant renewals hasn’t been revealed, so the success of that particular approach isn’t known.
Today the commitment to New Year resolutions has become victim to it having been made into yet another ‘business’. In the 21st Century there are a plethora of schemes and systems to be discovered (and paid for) to ensure commitments made at the beginning of the year are recorded and monitored, even though in recent decades the focus is increasingly secular, having shifted from religious vows to individual targets concerned with personal self-improvement goals like tasks and recurrent practices related to health, career, and relationships. It is claimed around 40-45% of people today make resolutions, but only about 8% succeed, in examinations on the success of focusing on goals like weight loss, finances, and exercises. Those figures come from various studies reported in a variety of popular magazines including Psychology Today and Forbes.
Those figures seem rather hopeful, however. If resolutions are personal, there is little to encourage adherence. Those Babylonians understood the importance of public commitment when they tied their future plans and commitments into the celebrations in honour of the new year, although it should be noted that for them the year began not in January but in mid-March, when the crops were planted. During a massive 12-day religious festival known as Akitu, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the reigning king. This was the time when they also made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any objects they had borrowed. If the Babylonians kept to their word, they believed their (pagan) gods would bestow favour on them for the coming year. If not, they would fall out of the gods’ favour—a place no one wanted to be.
There is another perspective on this, one which is less about the importance of offering a goal to be achieved as evidence of commitment – and to impress a leader. To some degree New Year’s resolutions can be seen as one part of our attempts to lead a good life. However, a good life is concerned with a great deal more than annual promises. The idea of aspiring to live a good life has as long a history as committing to some resolutions for the coming year, but trying to live a good life is concerned with a process that is far more demanding than developing and failing to sustain annual resolutions.
I have written on the task of leading a good life over the course of many years in articles, books and talks. However, they have only been exegeses and elaborations on the thoughts of great philosophers, and especially the Ancient Greeks. Among these, Plato remains supreme. Some 2,500 years ago he explained his view was that the good life involved achieving inner harmony by aligning your soul (your reason, spirit, and your desires or ‘appetite’) with the demands of virtuous living, using “reason to understand the importance of the virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, and at the same time mastering your desires” Plato explained that following this path would result in leading you toward true happiness (eudaimonia) rather than focussing on the short term, pursuing fleeting physical pleasures.
Plato was advocating an approach that required self-knowledge, moral reflection, and living virtuously, with reason guiding actions towards truth, not just external rewards or sensory gratification. As he explained it, living a good life is one in which ‘Reason governs, while allowing your Spirit to support you, and your Appetites to be satisfied appropriately, creating a life of inner balance between these three practices’.
Plato went much further and argued that Virtue is based on Knowledge, and that understanding the ‘form’ of “the Good” comes through reason which leads to wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, which are essential for well-being. However, while Plato’s perspective rested on a carefully articulated philosophical framework, he noted that this approach wasn’t just about a complex set of ideas about ideas, but that it also requires Self-Mastery by overcoming and controlling impulses and desires to act in accordance with reason.
Plato was really demanding. True happiness he suggested comes from within, not pursuing extrinsic rewards like wealth, power or fame. For me, one of his most telling concerns was with meaning and purpose, with the intention and the feeling you are making real progress, and you are working toward goals aligned with your values. Nor is this just about nurturing relationships, but it also requires a commitment to personal growth through continuous learning, exploring new ideas, and developing resilience.
There is a problem in all this in the 21st century which is that in our ‘modern’ world we are easily distracted and eminently distractable. Web sites, television programmes and other broadcasters work hard to grab our attention. The clamour of the news, the allure of the new and the babble of the world around us all conspire to pull us away from a commitment to upsurge a good life. Why not just enjoy what is happening around us?
2025 was a demanding year for many people. Given that, it might be sensible to recognise the best thing they – and we – can do is to abandon ineffective striving, and settle for some modest goals, but not for anything more than that. If we follow that approach, then perhaps it is a good idea to have a few New Year Resolutions after all. They are unlikely to prove onerous, especially as they will almost always be forgotten by the middle of the year: lead a good life by some voluntary work; make some donations to worthy causes. Sadly, that is the easy and inadequate approach we tend to adopt.
To do more than that is to take our lives and our responsibilities seriously. One determined and persistent guide is Peter Singer. He makes it clear that doing good is essential and demanding work. In an interview with Graham Reilly in the Sydney Morning Herald back in 2015, he explained his views on living a good life which he explained is “trickier and yet simpler than you might think”. In his book The Most Good You Can Do, he suggests we haven’t really thought properly about how we can do the most good it is possible to do in this life. He calls his approach “effective altruism”. How do you live your life in the most ethical way to make the world a better place and in a way that benefits the greatest possible number of people, most of whom you don’t know?
As an example of his approach, Singer aims to get more people to change their ideas about world poverty and what we as individuals can do to alleviate it through his proposal for pursuing effective altruism. He describes his approach as a growing philosophy and social movement which applies evidence and reason, rather than emotion, to working out the most effective ways to improve the world. This is not about donations that give you a “warm glow”. This means living less selfishly, living more modestly and embracing a culture of giving to people less fortunate than you are.
“I think a lot of people do have a sense that they want to make the world a better place. And then you have to think about how I am going to do that. Not only how can I make it better but how can I do as much good as I can with the resources that I have.”. Singer says being a bystander is not an option. “It’s not an ethical option anyway. If we don’t do this, we are doing something wrong. We have an obligation to act.”
In his book, Singer writes of the ways people become effective altruists. He writes of those who deliberately choose to pursue careers that are highly paid, so that they can give more money away and help the most people they can over their lifetime.
In the chapter aptly titled ‘Giving part of yourself’, Singer discusses those effective altruists who donate one of their kidneys to save a stranger.
In his article, Graham Reilly wondered if this might be going a bit far? He responds to Singer by asking if an approach like this wasn’t putting your own life at risk? Singer ‘s response is telling. He notes that it’s been calculated that there’s just a one in 4000 chance that a person will die as a result of giving away one kidney. But even at those odds he says he is not prepared to do it himself, although he admits it would be the right thing to do. I tell him I also prefer my kidneys to remain as a pair.
“I would do it if my daughter needed it and I think many people would,” Singer says. “But to give it to a stranger, nup. I don’t know if I can really defend that decision except to say I don’t like going into hospital and having operations. But that’s not a good reason.”
It is an important, yet challenging reservation. Here, Singer makes a further distinction between what he advocates as a reasonable approach to helping people in need and what he is prepared to do himself. “I see morality as not a black and white thing that either you do what’s right or you’re to be condemned for being a terrible person. I see it more like being on a grey scale and virtually everybody is on that scale.
He firmly believes everybody can and should be on this scale. The rich give more, the less rich, less. You can do a lot of good without earning a lot. You could use public transport instead of owning a car, stop buying stuff you don’t really need, stop measuring your success as a person by how big your house is. “The most solid base of self-esteem is to live an ethical life, that is a life in which one contributes to the greatest possible extent to making the world a better place.”
Crucially, he says, effective altruism needs to use the heart and the head and to be well-directed to be successful. “Many people who give to help poor people in poor countries sponsor individual children, a practice that indicates the need to focus on a particular individual who they can get to know in some way. But it is not as likely to benefit as many people.”
Singer is a powerful advocate for the importance of living a good life and sets a standard most fail to achieve. As he explores in his book, The Most Good You Can Do, (published by Text Publishing in 2015), there are many ways in which we can lead a good ethical life and pursue important and demanding resolutions. It might be a good New Year’s resolution to read his book (and some of the others he has written) as a way to encourage a fuller examination of the life we lead and the value we create for others.
Obviously, not all of us have the determination to match Peter’s standard and adopt his specific approach. At times, it is hard not to think he sets an impossible standard, but at least his comments are provocative and can help his readers rethink and reconsider, even if in only small ways. That doesn’t mean we should abandon making a commitment to leading a good life.
At the beginning of this year, I have been thinking about doing good. As it happens, I have an excellent opportunity to explore this further. The theme for Canberra’s Philosopher’s Cafe in 2026 is identity. In the two groups that meet over the year, we take part in a series of interesting discussions but ones without real consequences, sometimes examining issues that could have real implications for the way we live, even suggesting possible resolutions. However, our focus is on ideas, philosophical topics to consider as the year progresses. They are rewarding, sometimes even provocative, but we could do more.
Given this, could the two groups in 2026 ask ‘How can we, individually or together, take our examination of the philosophy of identity further, to be more than academic, but instead to help each one of us develop insights and practices that will have a real impact on our lives?’ Should we do more than this? Perhaps we could shape our discussions to include adopting Plato’s approach where “Reason governs, while allowing your Spirit to support you, and your Appetites to be satisfied appropriately, creating a life of inner balance between these three practices”.
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