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This chapter focuses on ethics at the market level, arguing that, contrary to popular wisdom, the market is not amoral. In typical contemporary framings, the market is presumed to be both inherently good-as in, the best way to do business and organize society-and yet amoral, in terms of bracketing out or holding at bay ethical judgments. The chapter includes a detailed discussion of the meanings of the market in everyday talk in addition to including accounts of historical and contemporary cases where the presumed “super-agency” of the market led people and societies astray. The chapter also reviews relevant research on happiness, especially as it bears on conceptions of economic productivity and success. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the possibilities for the ethical reform of the market through making visible what we mean when we invoke the term “market.”

This chapter returns to questions of happiness, eudaimonia, virtue, and the reframing of ethics in work and life. Reviewing some of the key points of the previous chapters, it explains the value of looking beyond specific ethical decisions to the very ways ethics are typically approached and framed. Ethics, it asserts, is relevant even in instances that are not readily identified as requiring ethical decisions. The chapter argues that rather than thinking about ethics as work, as something over and above everyday work life, professionals would do well to embrace ethics as relevant to their entire array of everyday practices. Ironically, as ethics becomes “non‐special,” its application can lead to greater happiness. The chapter offers several contemporary cases to illustrate a new, non‐heroic framing of virtue at work. Through this reframing, a revived and revised theory of virtue ethics can enhance conversation about ethics, especially when we are profoundly questioning how we do business.

This concluding chapter seeks to review the whole argument of the book to sustain the polemical claim made in the book that neo‐liberalism in fact does not possess the intellectual coherence to distinguish itself clearly from Social Democracy which in the twentieth century was one of the main aims of neo‐liberals. There is a clear distinction between neo‐liberalism and libertarianism but not between neo‐liberalism and Social Democracy. This chapter seeks to underpin this claim not just be reviewing the arguments set out thus far in the book, but also by considering further points at issue, particularly for example ideas about power and the contrast which turns out to be important between power over and power to and the relationship between power and markets in these two dimensions.

This chapter outlines three arguments on behalf of a duty to vote: the Agency Argument, the Public Goods Argument, and the Civic Virtue Argument. The Agency Argument held that citizens should bear some causal responsibility in helping to produce and maintain a just social order with adequate levels of welfare. The Agency Argument asserts that voting is necessary to do this. The Public Goods Argument holds that nonvoters unfairly free-ride on the provision of good governance. Failing to vote is like failing to pay taxes—it places a differential burden on others who do the hard work of providing good government. Meanwhile, the Civic Virtue Argument holds that voting is an essential way to exercise civic virtue, and civic virtue is an important moral virtue.

This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were more than nonce works, instead retaining commercial appeal long past their performance dates. This chapter cross‐reads masques from different venues, contained within plays, intertextually mentioned in pageants, parodied in ballads, and recorded in gossip. Masques' habitual intertextual allusiveness contributes to the genre's self‐conscious explorations of how drama constitutes authority, their canniness contradicting New Historicist symptomatic readings. Case studies include two intertextually related masques of 1617–18 (White's Cupid's Banishment, produced by a London girls' school, and Jonson's courtly Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue); a cluster of 1630s masques of temperance (Milton's Ludlow masque Comus, Davenant's courtly Luminalia, Thomas Nabbes's public theatrical masque Microcosmus, Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayor's show Porta Pietatis); and Shirley's spectacular 1634 Triumph of Peace.

This conclusion to the book emphasizes that Royce's philosophy of loyalty does not necessitate becoming a moral hero, but simply necessitates that we be loyal, and insofar as it lies in our power, be loyal to loyalty. It is urged that our lives have sense and meaning if we are loyal, and our lives are genuinely moral if and only if our loyalty is loyal to loyalty. Such loyal living is what recognizes and strives to fulfil the universal need to be helped, devoting our loyal service according to our unique capacities, aptitudes, relationships, interests, and talents. In our quest to live loyally, we will undoubtedly endure times of defeat, but if loyalty is what makes life meaningful, then a defeat of one's loyalty must never be taken as final.

In this chapter, Plato’s view of justice is presented, which possibly differs from Socrates’. Plato’s “sufficient thesis” (virtue is sufficient for happiness), is compared with the “comparative thesis” (virtue is always better then non-virtue), held by Glaucon and Adeimantus. A detailed discussion of all the relevant problems of book II, the relation between happiness and justice, is outlined. In conclusion, some aspects of Plato’s view are critically evaluated.

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.

The core argument of chapter 9 is the thesis that the epistemological distinction between knowledge and beliefs introduced in the Meno plays a crucial role in the consideration of virtues. Thanks to this distinction, Plato can indeed dismiss the theory according to which virtues are only instrumental. Therefore, it is demonstrated that the theory of virtue of the early dialogues is the result of having knowledge of the importance of virtues but not a proper and true knowledge of them.

This chapter examines how Plutarch combines Aristotle's definition of friendship, as expressed in the Nicomachean Ethics, with Plato's conception of the soul to describe the ideal marriage, and heterosexual relationships in general, as based on a mutual love of character (philia) supported by an enduring erotic attraction. It first examines the Aristotelian and Platonic background to the essay On Moral Virtue, where Plutarch sets forth his own ethics of friendship, erotic attachment, enkrateia (self-control), and sōphrosynē (temperance). Then it explores the forceful argument that he makes for the virtue of women, and thus for their ability to be the objects of both virtuous philia and erōs, in his Dialogue on Love (Amatorius). Turning to the Lives, the chapter shows how Plutarch has based his narrative of the relationships between Brutus and Porcia, and between Pericles and Aspasia on principles set forth in the philosophical essays.

Father-daughter incest was a disturbingly popular motif in medieval literature; it is the most common form of incest in extended medieval narratives. The oldest version is the late classical Apollonius of Tyre, popular throughout the Middle Ages and dramatized by Shakespeare as Pericles. Brief exemplary versions usually involve consummated incest, and the father dies damned. In longer narratives, the daughter usually escapes in time, sometimes minus a hand; after many vicissitudes, she may be reconciled with her father at the end, as well as with her estranged husband. The main example here is Beaumanoir's La Manekine. The mutilation motif is discussed; both it and the adventures of a daughter fleeing from incest are rare in classical literature. It is suggested that the victimized daughter may be an allegory of Christian Virtue in a fallen world; medieval writers seem more interested in the heroine's adventures than in drawing morals from the initial incest.

In his paper “The Difficulty of Tolerance,” T. M. Scanlon argues that tolerance is sometimes a morally ideal attitude to hold toward other citizens in society with whom one disagrees. My aim in this paper is to critically evaluate this claim, by looking more carefully at the nature of tolerant attitudes and the conditions under which they are, and are not, appropriately directed toward other citizens. I argue that there is a moral tension present even in allegedly “pure” cases of tolerance that Scanlon’s account overlooks. I go on to argue that what Scanlon has in fact given us is a compelling defense of tolerance as a virtue of character, rather than an attitude, and that the virtue of tolerance only rarely calls upon us to take up attitudes of tolerance toward our fellow citizens. I conclude by reflecting on one situation in which a person with the virtue of tolerance may legitimately adopt an attitude of tolerance toward a fellow citizen.

What would Kantian constructivism be like as a normative (not metaethical) theory that focused on ethical, not political questions? First this paper reviews conceptions of the normative/metaethical distinction, general features of constructivism, and the versions of Kantian constructivism described by Rawls, O’Neill, and Hill. It then highlights features of the normative ethical theory that Kant developed in his late work, the Doctrine of Virtue (The Metaphysics of Morals, Part II), proposing that this can be viewed as a normative ethical theory with constructivist features separable from the more ambitious metaethical claims in the prominent Kantian constructivisms of Rawls and O’Neill. When interpreted in this way the Doctrine of Virtue fits well with the constructivist normative theory that earlier the author drew from Kant’s later formulations of the Categorical Imperative in the Groundwork. Finally, the paper responds to some of O’Neill’s objections to Rawls’ constructivisms that would apply as well to the author’s project.