This book develops an Aristotelian account of the virtue of practical intelligence or "phronesis"--an excellence of deliberating and making choices--which ...

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)

Daniel Russell develops a fresh and original view of pleasure and its pivotal role in Plato's treatment of value, happiness, and human psychology. This is the first full-length discussion of the topic for fifty years, and Russell shows its relevance to contemporary debates in moral philosophy and philosophical psychology. Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life will make fascinating reading for ancient specialists and for a wide range of philosophers.

In this volume of newly commissioned essays, leading moral philosophers offer a comprehensive overview of virtue ethics.

In Philebus, Plato makes clear his view that pleasure is actually part of the agent's own goodness, because her goodness consists in, among other things, the sorts of attitudes she has and perspectives she adopts in the various dimensions of her life, and her pleasure is itself just such a crucial attitude and perspective. When Plato says that pleasure is necessary for happiness, he does not mean that good character could never be enough for happiness without pleasure. Rather, as the (...) dialogue unfolds he reveals that pleasure is actually a part of good character as a whole, the product of reason's transforming all dimensions of the self. Since good character, or virtue, is this sort of whole, pleasure is necessary for happiness, because virtue is sufficient for happiness. Thus, the key to understanding Plato's position can be found in his analysis of the nature of pleasure and how it functions in a person's life. This chapter argues that in Plato's Philebus the pleasure of a virtuous character is necessary and important for happiness because it is a necessary and important part of that character, which, in turn, is what determines happiness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virtue as "Likeness to God" in Plato and SenecaDaniel C. Russell (bio)In The Center Of Raphael's Famous Painting"The School of Athens," Plato stands pointing to the heavens, and Aristotle stands pointing to the ground; there stand, that is, the mystical Plato and the down-to-earth Aristotle. Although it oversimplifies, this depiction makes sense for the same reason that Aristotle continues to enjoy a presence in modern moral philosophy that Plato (...) does not: quite simply, Plato's ethics looks too fantastic. And Plato's ethics never looks more fantastic than in the claim that our highest good is to be like God.We find this view, in various forms, in the Phaedrus, Timaeus, Laws, Republic, and Theaetetus, as well as in the Phaedo and Philebus,1 and the ancient Platonist Alcinous in his Handbook of Platonism tells us that likeness to God () is Plato's "official" position on our final end.2 Nonetheless, this view receives very little press today: many philosophers are unaware of it; some have simply ignored it or dismissed it as an idle metaphor; and most of those who have taken it more seriously have also tended to find it too otherworldly to be of much relevance to us. This latter response is due in large measure to viewing likeness to God from the perspective of the ancient Neoplatonist Plotinus.3 But there is certainly no guarantee that Plotinus's perspective on likeness to God gives us an especially accurate reconstruction of Plato's view; indeed, the interpretation of this idea was a matter of considerable controversy among Neoplatonists, some of whom offered far less other-worldly interpretations than Plotinus's.4 [End Page 241]In any event, unraveling likeness to God in Plato requires a fresh approach that makes the greatest sense of it within Plato's larger moral philosophy. And in fact we find just such a promising understanding of likeness to God when we take a fresh look at it through Stoic lenses, and through the lens of Plato's Philebus: in both we find the idea that virtue is part of the divine realm right alongside the down-to-earth idea that virtue is rational activity in relation to the world as we find it. This is not to suppose that the Stoic conception of likeness to God is an interpretation of, or descended from, Plato's conception.5 It is simply that the Stoics also found it helpful to think of virtue as likeness to God, and it will be enough if the Stoic conception opens up the range of possibilities for understanding such an idea, allowing us to see philosophical alternatives that might take us some distance towards interpreting Plato, and that may have remained otherwise out of view. Such an understanding of the idea that virtue is likeness to God as we find in the Stoics, I argue, offers just this sort of promising and unexplored alternative in Platonism.One thing that is quite clear is that Plato means for likeness to God to offer us some insight into the nature of virtue. We see this in the Timaeus, where Plato offers a model of the three-part soul, in which mastery of the parts is justice (42 a-b) and happiness (90b-d), and is what likeness to God comes to (42b-d, 47a-c); clearly, then, the virtue in question is moral virtue. Rather curiously, Plato depicts this constitution of soul as a sort of motion which is of the same kind as the motion of the universe itself (90c-d):6 as the universe consists in orbits which are orderly and reconciled in their motion, so the human soul consists in the different orbits (44d) of reason, passion, and desire, which are out of harmony when we start life, but become more orderly as we mature (43a-44d). Although this is difficult talk, it is clearly meant to depict a self-mastery of the whole soul under [End Page 242] the leadership of reason (43a-44d), which is the same as justice, and which consists in the reconciliation of one's inner motions by reason (42b-d).7 Thus we "stabilize the... (shrink)

Virtue ethicists sometimes say that a right action is what a virtuous person would do, characteristically, in the circumstances. But some have objected recently that right action cannot be defined as what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances because there are circumstances in which a right action is possible but in which no virtuous person would be found. This objection moves from the premise that a given person ought to do an action that no virtuous person would do, (...) to the conclusion that the action is a right action. I demon‐strate that virtue ethicists distinguish “ought” from “right” and reject the assumption that “ought” implies “right.” I then show how their rejection of that assumption blocks this “right but not virtuous” objection. I conclude by showing how the thesis that “ought” does not imply “right” can clarify a further dispute in virtue ethics regarding whether “ought” implies “can.”. (shrink)

Abstract:In this essay I examine restrictions on labor as takings of property: a liberty to work is property, and restrictions of that liberty are takings. I set property in one’s labor within a unified framework for all forms of property, understood as a social institution for balancing two freedoms: freedom to act even if it interferes with someone else, and freedom from interference. As such, property includes not only possession but also use and disposition. To restrict use or disposition is (...) to alter those freedoms, which is a taking of property, including property in one’s labor. I understand such takings to be justified insofar as they benefit the persons whose freedoms are altered, taking up the question of when restrictions on use and disposition of labor are to the benefit or the harm of excluded workers. Appreciating that labor is property, and that restrictions on labor are takings, reframes the justificatory burden that restrictions on labor must bear. And where that justification is lacking, this approach reframes the nature of the wrongs that unjustified restrictions perpetrate, especially against the most vulnerable workers. (shrink)

Many libertarians believe that self-ownership is a separate matter from ownership of extra-personal property. “No-proviso” libertarians hold that property ownership should be free of any “fair share” constraints, on the grounds that the inability of the very poor to control property leaves their self-ownership intact. By contrast, left-libertarians hold that while no one need compensate others for owning himself, still property owners must compensate others for owning extra-personal property. What would a “self” have to be for these claims to be (...) true? I argue that both of these camps must conceive of the boundaries of the self as including one's body but no part of the extra-personal world. However, other libertarians draw those boundaries differently, so that self-ownership cannot be separated from the right to control extra-personal property after all. In that case, property ownership must be subject to a fair share constraint, but that constraint does not require appropriators to pay compensation. This view, which I call “right libertarianism,” differs importantly from the other types primarily in its conception of the self, which I argue is independently more plausible. (shrink)

Rosalind Hursthouse wrote in 1999 (On Virtue Ethics, pp. 5-7) of a gap in virtue ethics in the shape of the virtue of justice. Many years on, that gap persists. Our aim is to make a beginning on that virtue, but here we find an obstacle in its treatment by Aristotle, whose thinking about the virtues we otherwise find so rich. Whereas Aristotle took the virtue of justice to be concerned exclusively with one’s treatment of others, we begin instead with (...) the idea that justice also concerns how one treats oneself. Like Hursthouse, we think virtues are corrective of human failings. We argue, first, that being unjust to oneself is a failing that is not only perilous but all too frequent in human experience. The idea that justice is strictly other-regarding gets going only on the assumption that the way humans are prone to fail in their dealings with others is in taking too much interest in their own welfare. Taking inspiration from the work of Jean Hampton, we argue that a pernicious type of self-abnegation—what Hampton called “the loss of self”—is also a common failing among humans, both in their relations with others and in their own practical reasoning about their lives. This failing—a failing of giving persons their due—is a failing for the virtue of justice to correct. We then examine Aristotle’s rejection of the possibility of being unjust to oneself, in Nicomachean Ethics V. Aristotle’s arguments rest on demonstrating the impossibility of committing injustice against oneself in any of the forms characteristic of strictly interpersonal injustice. Rather than arguing that Aristotle begs the question, though, we argue that his approach rests on its starting assumption that the failings for the virtue of justice to correct are failures to give others their due. But considering the human proneness also to self-abnegation, we heirs of Aristotle’s should hope for an understanding of the virtue of justice that is rich enough to include giving oneself one’s due as well. Lastly, we outline the virtue of justice understood as correcting the failure of not giving persons their due, including oneself. Our approach centers on the idea of advocacy, focusing on the duty that parents have to advocate for the fair treatment of their children and, as those children mature, the transference of this duty to those children to be advocates for themselves. We conclude by exploring the extent to which such an account would fit an otherwise broadly Aristotelian approach: the sense in which such a virtue is a “mean,” the emotions and desires with which it is concerned, and its status as a particular virtue as opposed to virtue as a whole. We hope to honor Rosalind Hursthouse by continuing in her philosophical spirit, confronting Aristotle where we are surprised to find ourselves disagreeing considerably with a philosopher we generally find insightful, on an issue we find deeply important. -/- . (shrink)

Daniel Haybron’s recent book, The Pursuit of Unhappiness, includes a defense of a normative notion of well-being. Haybron’s main contribution is to argue that a central component of well-being is the fulfillment of one’s “emotional nature,” that is, fulfillment as a unique individual who is such as to find happiness in some things rather than others. We argue that the contrast he draws between his view and “Aristotelian” views of well-being is problematic in two ways. First, Haybron says that unlike (...) the self-fulfillment theory, Aristotelian theories of well-being are “perfectionist” theories; we argue that Haybron’s concerns about “perfectionism” should be distinguished from Aristotelian eudaimonist theory. Second, Haybron’s self-fulfillment theory makes an individual’s well-being wholly dependent on that individual’s make-up, and we argue that that is a bad fit with our considered convictions about well-being. (shrink)

How can an ideal of human flourishing reveal what attributes are virtues, as eudaimonism aspires to do, when not all virtuous lives flourish? The standard answer is that even if circumstances prevent one from attaining that idealized life, still one’s life approximates to the ideal the more one’s character approximates to the ideal. However, exploration of methods of idealization reveals that “approximation” is ill-suited to contexts in which factors interact, as virtue and circumstance do. Instead, eudaimonism helps us understand the (...) distinctive excellence of humans by providing a perspective on what is distinctly human about a distinctly human mode of life, namely practical intelligence in making use of one’s circumstances, whatever they may be. This is an alternative understanding of the method of idealization in eudaimonism about virtue, and so the chapter ends with reflections on some uses and limits of idealization in virtue theory. (shrink)

Idealizations help us understand the world by simplifying it. When factors make discrete contributions to an outcome, leaving factors out can make it easier to identify the contributions of factors that remain. But typically in economics, factors are not discrete but interact; how can isolating some factor X from some factor Y help us understand a reality in which X’s contribution depends on what Y contributes? I argue that Ronald Coase’s method in ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ illustrates how idealization (...) can aid our understanding of a world in which factor Y (transaction costs) has an effect on factor X (transactions), by making plain precisely that effect, and so making it easier to see features of the actual world that obtain because of that effect. ‘Coasean’ idealization is therefore especially useful for understanding targets in which factors are not discrete but interact, as is so often the case in economics. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on Plato's Protagoras. This dialogue that has received enormous attention in discussions concerning Plato on pleasure because toward the end of the Protagoras Socrates discusses a form of hedonism, on the basis of which he then bases his subsequent argument on the nature of virtue and action. Since this hedonism facilitates his argument, it is natural to conclude that Socrates must endorse it. And, of course, this would mean that Plato, at least at some point in his (...) career, was a hedonist. (shrink)

This chapter begins with reflections on the nature of value with Plato in the Euthydemus. This provides insight into the different sorts of roles that different goods play in our life, and thus presenting a crucial choice between ways of thinking about what happiness is — a choice we may not have realized we had: in particular, a choice between the idea that happiness depends on the things in our life in regard to which we act and choose and the (...) idea that happiness depends on the wisdom with which we act and choose in regard to those things. It is shown that Plato defends the latter idea in the Euthydemus, as he argues that happiness depends on how we give each part of our life the right sort of place in our life considered as a whole. The idea of giving things the right place in our life is called the ‘rational incorporation’ of them. The chapter explores what it could mean for pleasure, in particular, to be rationally incorporated into a person's life on this model of practical rationality. (shrink)

This introductory chapter begins by exploring the nature of pleasure at a common-sense level. It then shows what sorts of questions we need a more theoretically complete and rigorous account of pleasure to answer, and provides a brief overview of how Plato addresses them.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the view that Plato defends asceticism in the Phaedo. It argues that this view rests on the mistaken assumption that, for Plato, pleasure is bad in its own right, and not in virtue of one's giving it the wrong place in one's life. It is also argued that in the Phaedo, Plato also rejects the hedonist view that pleasure is the good, since taking pleasure to be the good is incompatible with the sorts (...) of priorities one needs in order to make any kind of good out of pleasure in the first place. The chapter concludes by showing how the notion of a conditional good affords a new and richer understanding of Plato's discussion of pleasure and value in the Phaedo. (shrink)

In Republic IX, Plato argues that the supreme pleasantness of the virtuous life is a particularly great consideration in demonstrating that the virtuous life is happy. This raises the question of whether this argument spouses the additive or the directive conception of happiness. On the additive conception, the argument is straightforward: the virtuous life is happy because the virtuous life is also the life of supreme pleasure, and the life of supreme pleasure is happy. On the directive conception, the argument (...) is much more subtle: the virtuous life is happy because the virtuous life is the life of a fully integrated, healthy, and flourishing psyche, as demonstrated by the transformation of the affective dimensions of the virtuous person's psyche, and such a life is the happy life. This chapter set out this need for interpretive care in more detail by looking at its connection to a more general problem for understanding how Plato thinks virtue benefits its possessor in the Republic, to which any adequate reconstruction of the ‘pleasure arguments’ in book IX must respond. It is argued that Plato's strategy is to demonstrate that virtue benefits its possessor on the grounds that the virtuous person, and only the virtuous person, possesses a healthy and harmonious psyche. Plato's conception of pleasure in book IX is a form of apprehending one's life as satisfying and worth living, and his argument is that having the true form of such pleasure means that one's life is, in fact, satisfying and worth living, and that one's psyche is healthy and harmonious. And such pleasure is to be found only in the virtuous person. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Plato's reliance on the directive conception of happiness explains the general course that Socrates' discussion takes with his companions in the Gorgias. It then takes a closer look at Socrates' own argument that virtue determines happiness. Not only does Socrates' argument articulate the nature of virtue as a skill, and the nature of success and flourishing for human beings, but it also removes the gap between virtue and happiness which hedonism — and all forms of the (...) additive conception of happiness — takes to be there, requiring, as it does, that the pleasure of a virtuous life, rather than virtue per se, must be what accounts for the happiness of that life. The chapter concludes by discussing some alternative accounts of goodness in the Gorgias, focusing on the possibility that hedonism need require no such gap between virtue and happiness after all, on the grounds that virtuous activity and the greatest pleasure are identical. (shrink)

In the so-called agreement model of psychic conformity, the passions do not retain their former character, only under tighter rein, but take on a new character altogether. In the competing control model, the passions may conform to reason, but they never change their character so as to cooperate with reason, just as a trained lion conforms to the commands of a tamer whose direction it is never capable of internalizing and cooperating. This chapter argues that these two models appear together (...) in Plato for the simple reason that each captures, in its own way, aspects of our psychology Plato finds too important to ignore. It is further argued that without a psychological model of the agent as a whole, Plato lacks the psychological underpinnings for an account of virtue as the transformation of the agent as a whole, and thus for an account of happiness that is holistic rather than dimensional, consisting not in one's flourishing in some dimension of one's life but in one's flourishing as a harmoniously integrated whole. Consequently, Plato offers a compelling ethical and value-theoretical account of pleasure as a conditional good that is rationally incorporated by practical intelligence, but lacks an adequate unified psychology of the affective and rational activities of the soul to underwrite that ethical and value-theoretical account. (shrink)

Unraveling likeness to God in Plato requires a fresh approach that makes the greatest sense of it within Plato's larger moral philosophy. Such an understanding of likeness to God can be found by taking a fresh look at it through the lens of Plato's Philebus, where we find the idea that virtue is part of the divine realm right alongside the down-to-earth idea that virtue is rational activity in relation to the world as we find it. This chapter argues that (...) the same idea can be found in Stoic ethics as well, in a way that can reveal new options for understanding Plato's conception of virtue as likeness to God. (shrink)