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This chapter develops a theory of categorical normativity, of those principles that have authority over us regardless of our ends and interests. It argues that there is an intimate connection between these norms and the conditions of agency. In this respect, it offers a version of constitutivism. But the version of constitutivism defended is unique in a few respects. First, it is naturalistic: agency is an emergent property, like the properties of biology and economics. Second, it is social: agency is something constructed by the complex interaction of agents. And third, it supports the normativity of a particular contractualist procedure: adhering to Kant’s Formula of the Realm of Ends is a condition on agency, and so a categorical requirement.

The mature version of Plato’s doctrine of the virtue is examined through a detailed study of the several virtues. The theory of virtues expressed in the Republic represents a definitive improvement of the position of the early dialogues. Plato does not reduce any more virtues to something else but rather considers them as ends in themselves. This change is due to the different perspective according to which the definitions of the virtue have not to be expressed in non-moral language. Moreover, a key role is played by the doctrines of the tripartition of the soul, which suggests virtue to be the condition of the soul in which each part acts properly.

Chapter 4 focuses on the Euthydemus to discuss Socrates’ theories of happiness and wisdom. Firstly, it is pointed out that Socrates may be labelled as “eudamonist” because of the claim he makes in the Euthydemus that happiness is a general and not a particular virtue. Secondly, Socrates’ instrumentalist view according to which the different virtues may be means to one end, i.e., happiness, is examined. Thirdly, several arguments are discussed according to which Socrates demonstrates that wisdom is the only good.

The core of the fifth chapter is the study of the problems that appear to be involved in Socrates’ prospective. After a consideration of the difficulties that seem to emerge from Socrates’ instrumentalist approach to happiness, attention is devoted to the role played by the craft analogy. According to this analogy, virtue is similar to a craft since a knowledge of the means is necessary for a separate end. This doctrine is illustrated making reference to Aristotle because, although used by Socrates, the craft analogy is never defined in the dialogues.

This chapter examines two plays, King Lear and All's Well that Ends Well, in relation to García Márquez's Sonnet 106. It first looks at archival anachrony in Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold and studies some of the novel's chapters. Finally, it identifies the characters who are anachronistic in King Lear and the chronicle of a foretold death in All's Well that Ends Well.

Derrida's essay “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends” assumes and performs a certain virtualization (or actuvirtualization) of the teaching body. Long before its time, it keeps open the question of the future, tying its possibility to a series of relations and resistances shaping up around the “virtual.” For all these reasons, this chapter argues that “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends” is one sign of the “fidelity of a guardian” engaged in a certain “double keeping”.

This chapter examines several recent attempts to interpret Kant in the light of two classic objections to his moral philosophy: the “rigorism” objection (the charge that Kant’s view of moral duty demands a motivational purity that is impossible to realize) and the “formalism” objection (the claim that Kant’s supreme moral principle, the Categorical Imperative, is too indeterminate to be action-guiding). These interpretations helpfully bring out a number of features of Kant’s project that are responsive to such charges. The question posed is whether the core of Kant’s distinct position in moral theory can be maintained in such attempts to interpret a “Kant” responsive to these objections.

Chapter 3 tackles ‘problem’ comedy to investigate how equivocally Catholic material is resolved into the structurally happy (if tonally ambiguous) endings of Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well. Here the Catholic costumes of the pilgrim's, friar's, and nun's habits are both highly legible and awkwardly polysemous. Measure for Measure plays with the conflicting connotations of religious habits, and in interrogating the relation between the inner self and the fashioned self, it goes on to debate the limits of selfhood and the nature of otherness. Isabella's status as a novice nun marks her rejection of comedy's social and sexual values, thus the role highlights the ethical demands the genre and Christianity make on the self. By contrast, Helen adapts to the generic strictures of All's Well: the multiple associations of her pilgrim's garb create a representational flexibility that enables her to win a happy ending, but also questions its terms.

Chapter 4, entitled ‘Distribution’, explores some tonal and interpretative consequences of the large-scale distribution of insides within and between Shakespeare’s plays. Particular attention is paid to how Shakespeare guides audience sympathy for his characters through the selective distribution of insides: that is, how some characters are given copious private speech while others are denied it altogether, or how insides are distributed differently according to variables like gender or class. I show how Shakespeare’s distribution of sympathy and his distribution of insides are closely intertwined and inflected according to gender and class in three plays from three different phases in his career: The Taming of the Shrew, All’s Well that Ends Well, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

This chapter drills down on an aspect of Kant’s transcendental idealism that has not received much attention: specifically, Kant’s claim that God is not the creator of appearances, and that space is ‘not a thing as a divine work’. By ensuring that God is not the cause of space, time and causation, Kant considers that he has solved the problem of our dependence upon God. Of particular interest to theologians, it is specifically our dependence upon God that is an unproblematic type of dependence. God creates us in a reciprocal and non-determined community of noumenally free beings, the ‘Kingdom of Ends’. If we were dependent upon other created causal determining factors, that would indeed threaten freedom; but an implication of transcendental idealism is that we are dependent upon God alone, and not upon contingent and created determined series. This theological implication of transcendental idealism is further developed by Schleiermacher.

This chapter analyzes Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well in light of the ideology of the ex-gay movement—as a sexual and spiritual conversion narrative about turning men’s “sick desires” from anal, dead ends to vaginal, procreative ends. All ends well only because the play cuts away from two “sex scenes”: Helen’s cure of the king’s fistula and the bed trick, in which the anus tropes the eroticism of both scenes. Both scenes also demystify the work of heterosexual healing they are supposed to effect. Overly insistent on its own happy ending, All’s Well demonstrates how the intractable perversity of fantasy life upsets the teleology of conversion. The play questions the roles of faith and reproduction—two common “proofs” for a full-on conversion of desire into a rigid heterosexual standard, arguing that such efforts inadvertently recognize the fluidity of sexuality, rendering the point of conversion moot.

This chapter examines performances of Shakespeare’s ‘difficult’ or rebarbative heroines through the fin de siècle and beyond, reorienting mainstream critical histories of All’s Well That Ends Well and examining commodity culture and fin-de-siècle sexuality in 1890s performances of Antony and Cleopatra by actresses including Lillie Langtry. The chapter also highlights performances of Shakespeare’s heroines associated with the theatrical and political networks of the suffrage movement. Shakespeare’s co-option as a suffrage playwright is evident from Harley Granville-Barker’s Savoy productions, starring Lillah McCarthy and Esmé Beringer, and criticism by suffrage newspapers. Paulina in The Winter’s Tale became an ideal model of solidarity and support for abused women. Individual fin-de-siècle actresses, as well as influencing their colleagues, inspired other public women as emerging writers and activists.

In common discourse, ‘idealists’ are those who believe in, pursue, or aspire to the highest standards, principles, and purposes. It might be objected that ‘idealism’ in this popular sense is something quite different from the ‘philosophical idealism’ thus far considered. Against that thought this chapter maintains that the two uses of ‘idealism’ are connected, since idealistic perfectionism has always been an important part of the tradition of idealistic ethics. Idealist ethics is commonly based around ideal exemplars used, not simply to illustrate the instantiation of antecedently grasped values, but rather as a way of understanding or conceiving those values themselves. Both developing and criticizing Nicholas Rescher’s discussion of this topic, this general claim is illustrated by consideration of three kinds of ideal: the abstract ideals of Plato’s forms, the notion of the ideal self developed in F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies, and the social ideal of Kant’s Kingdom of Ends.

When we act rationally, we treat things that are good for us as if they were good absolutely. We choose to pursue them, and demand that others respect our choices, thus treating ourselves as ends in ourselves. This argument—Kant’s argument for the Formula of Humanity—establishes that there are two senses in which rationality commits us to the view that we are ends in ourselves. The demands that we make on others commit us to the view that we are ends in ourselves as autonomous lawmakers, and ground our duties to other rational beings. The demands that we make on ourselves when we choose to pursue our good commit us to the view that we are ends in ourselves as creatures who have a good, and ground our duties to other animals. The chapter also examines the difficulties this raises for Kant’s ideal of the Kingdom of Ends.

This chapter considers the extent to which Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, the ideal moral world, itself has some divine properties, in a sense that is documentable and precise, placing Kant in a rich Platonic tradition of philosophical reflection upon the divine. It is shown that the Kingdom of Ends is a state of plenitude, harmony, and happiness, which itself imitates and replicates defining characteristics of the being God, as understood by Kant. The suggestion is made that the concept of ‘God’ or ‘divinity’ is identical with, and stands for, the realm of freedom and reason, with the possibility of harmony. It is suggested that what makes possible a hope in the highest good is the order, plenitude, and harmony found in the Kingdom of Ends, which features are themselves characteristics of the divine being.

The chapter argues that we can construe the relationship between Kant’s account of the moral law and God as a type of concurring moral dependence, on the basis of formal causation, such that the very activity of willing the moral law is a type of participation in the uncreated divine mind. In the end, morality does require divinity, and, even, a (carefully specified) type of divine activity, albeit that we do not arrive at this commitment through a traditional acceptance of the categories of revelation and faith. It is argued that there is a defensible sense of the notion of ‘divinity’ that Kant can be said to have warrant to believe in, given his assumptions about freedom, although it is a rather different sort of divinity from the ‘divine being’ of philosophical (let alone Christian) theism. I suggest that in his final fragmentary writings, Kant might be said to show some awareness of this. This interpretation throws a new light on Kant’s conception of the Kingdom of Ends, whereby the happiness that constitutes the highest good can be construed as an enactment of divinity, through willing the moral law, rather than the contemplation of a divine being.

Theunissen develops the emerging positive proposal by specifying that in virtue of which human beings are relationally valuable. Her starting point is that human value depends on the distinctive relationship we bear to objects and activities of value. In her view this is the capacity for having final ends: roughly, the capacity for pursuing interests, projects, relationships, and self-ideals for their own sake. She offers a new account of this complex cognitive, affective and behavioral disposition, and the analysis contributes to discussions of valuing and care. How does the capacity for having final ends ground our value? By identifying connections between valuing and the good life, Theunissen defends the claim that it grounds our value by making us relationally valuable in the sense that it makes us able to lead a good life—a life that is of value, in the first place, for the person who leads it.