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Chapter 14 summarizes the main points of the book. The reader is reminded that Part I focused on the descriptive concept of happiness. This is not itself an evaluative concept; it is probably a matter of psychology. The main philosophical theories about the nature of happiness so construed were critically examined. Attitudinal Hedonism about Happiness was then offered as a more plausible alternative. Part II started with a discussion of the relevant concept of welfare, or well‐being. It was suggested that welfare tracks happiness—the happier you are, the better your life is going for you. Part III contained discussion of some questions concerning interactions between the philosophical theory of happiness and empirical research. An approach to the measurement of happiness was sketched. This approach emerges from the theory of happiness defended in Part I. Questions were raised about the philosophical relevance of empirical research on happiness.

Because of their eudaimonistic structure, ancient theories have been criticized as egoistic, but this is a mistake, overlooking the place in them of philia or ‘friendship’, covering particular relationships, and of justice; both require other‐concern, the question for ancient ethics being how far this should extend.

Amartya Sen mentioned the case of a “demeaned and demoralized housewife” who has been brainwashed into thinking that a constricted life such as hers is appropriate for a woman. Thus, she is satisfied with that life. A simple form of Whole Life Satisfactionism implies that this housewife (‘Bertha’) is happy. A typical form of eudaimonism then implies that Bertha is enjoying positive welfare. This may seem implausible. Wayne Sumner responded by claiming that for a person's happiness to contribute to her welfare, that happiness must be “authentic”. Chapter 9 contains discussion of a series of cases intended to show that the restriction to authentic satisfaction yields problematic evaluations in certain types of cases. The relevance of these cases for Attitudinal Hedonic Eudaimonism is then assessed. It is claimed that theory yields defensible (though possibly surprising) accounts of the welfare of people such as Bertha. Perhaps it's better to be non‐autonomously happy than not to be happy at all.

An ancient objection to eudaimonism is based on the idea of “disgusting happiness”. Steven Cahn developed an interesting version of this objection based on a fictional character—Judah Rosenthal, from the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Judah passes all popular tests for happiness but is utterly morally corrupt. His case casts doubt on the naive identification of happiness with welfare. It's not clear that the case is decisive. Nevertheless, a form of eudaimonism that is intended to circumvent this problem can be developed. According to this novel form of the theory, the welfare value of each episode of happiness must be adjusted so as to reflect the extent to which the object of that happiness deserves to be enjoyed. It is left to the interested reader to determine whether the modification is really needed.

This chapter presents basic features of the three main families of Western ethical theories: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. The main task is to clarify how to distinguish consequentialism in general from virtue ethics in general. Virtue ethicists typically assert eudaimonism is a close connection between virtue and the agent’s own flourishing, whereas consequentialists deny this. Moreover, consequentialist theories endorse agent-neutrality, whereas virtue ethics is agent-relative. Consequentialism is appealing, but faces damaging objections; some of these can be blocked by switching from direct consequentialism to indirect consequentialism. The three families of theories offer different responses to intrinsic value: consequentialism seeks to promote it, deontology to respect it, and virtue ethics to embody it. The chapter discusses the definition of hedonism and presents alternative accounts of well-being.

Popular reports indicate that some empirical researchers have discovered that the curve of lifetime happiness is U‐shaped; others have discovered that it is inverted U‐shaped; and others have found that it is a straight line. Perhaps the researchers were focusing on distinct phenomena. But then which of them was actually studying happiness? We need to determine the nature of happiness before we set out to plot its curve. The attempt to determine the nature of happiness is a philosophical project, not to be confused with the empirical project of trying to determine the typical causes of happiness. There is a further philosophical question: does individual human welfare track happiness? If we can determine what happiness is, and if we come to think that welfare tracks happiness, then we will want to determine whether philosophical reflection can help to shed light on the conceptual foundations of empirical research into happiness.

Eudaimonism is the doctrine that welfare tracks happiness. Section 8.2 contains critical discussion of several proposed tests designed to help us to focus on the concept of welfare. The Crib Test and the Sympathy Test are not entirely decisive. Alternatively, we may be able to identify welfare by noting how it fits into a web including such concepts as benefit, harm, self‐interest, prudence, selflessness, altruism, and quality of life. Amartya Sen suggested that when a person's happiness depends upon “desperate survival strategies”, his welfare may be lower than his happiness level. In section 8.3 the objection is critically examined. Another problem for eudaimonism arises in the case of a person whose happiness is “fragmented”. The extent to which the fragmented happiness of such a person constitutes a difficulty for eudaimonism is discussed in section 8.4. Appendix D distinguishes among several different theories that may go by the name ‘eudaimonism’.

Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics can each be understood as claiming that all human beings desire to live well, and that this desire, when accompanied by correct beliefs about the role of virtue in living well, moves people to be virtuous. Call this claim ‘psychological eudaimonism’ (‘PE’). Neither Plato, Aristotle, nor the Stoics, however, investigate PE's warrant. After identifying the claim in these ancients' writings, this paper argues in their stead that PE is warranted by what is involved in understanding others as rational generally, and what is involved in understanding ourselves as practically rational specifically. The former is interestingly and unexpectedly informed by Donald Davidson’s account of linguistic interpretation. The latter is the ancients’ account of practical rationality itself.

This chapter takes up the question whether Nietzsche's philosophy ought to be characterized as “therapeutic,” as it so often has been, and investigates both his and the Greek skeptics' relationship with “health” as a goal of the philosophic enterprise. It might be objected that the Pyrrhonists' adoption of ataraxia (tranquility) as the ultimate aim of their practice, an aim which has often been linked with indifference, impassivity, and the avoidance of suffering, could not be consistent with any notion of health advanced by Nietzsche. Yet an exploration of the history and etymology of ataraxia—indeed, a genealogy of ataraxia—conducted in light of Nietzsche's longtime interest in the pre-Platonic philosopher Democritus of Abdera illuminates a model of psychological health and well-being that again brings him in line with the Skeptical tradition.

Whether it is to be maximized or promoted as the object of a duty of beneficence, well-being is a vitally important notion in ethical theory. Well-being is a value, but to play the role it has often been assigned by ethical theory it must also be something we can measure and compare. It is a normative concept, then, but it also seems to have empirical content. Historically, philosophical conceptions of well-being have been responsive to the paired demands for normative and empirical adequacy. However, recent work has yet to pay serious attention to the burgeoning field of well-being research in empirical psychology. This might be because the research is new and unknown, or it might be due to uncertainty about how a philosophical investigation would take such research into account. This chapter offers solutions to both of these problems. It provides an overview of well-being research in empirical psychology. It then uses this overview as part of an argument for an empirical informed account of well-being that we call the Value-Based Life Satisfaction Account.

Virtue ethics seems to present a puzzle about the privileged: If moral virtue is necessary for flourishing (which is a core assumption of virtue ethics), then members of privileged groups can only flourish if they are morally good, but it is more plausible to conceive of the privileged as morally deficient than as morally good, since their privileges result from unjust social positions. Thus it appears that they are barred from flourishing, which is odd since one would expect conditions of oppression to prevent the victims rather than the beneficiaries of these conditions from living the good life. The puzzle begins to dissolve when one distinguishes between the contemporary understanding of happiness and the ancient Greek conception of flourishing, for it turns out that privileged people can be said to be happy without granting that they flourish. The distinction helps uncover a key assumption of interdependence behind the belief that even the so-called other-regarding virtues (and not just self-regarding virtues) are necessary for one’s own flourishing; if people are interdependent in such a way that the flourishing of one is tied to the flourishing of all, then for the privileged to flourish they would have to worry a lot more about the well-being of the disadvantaged. This suggests a critical revision to Aristotle’s eudaimonistic theory, by the addition of the claim that a trait that contributes to one’s own well-being cannot count as morally praiseworthy if it detracts from the flourishing of an inclusive social collectivity.

This chapter examines the way that liberatory movements—including both feminist movements and Black liberation movements—offer praise for their best members, holding them up to model the character traits that enable political resistance. This praise appears strange given a eudaimonistic ethics in which character traits that are morally praiseworthy are usually conducive to or constitutive of flourishing, for the character traits recommended for resistance often disable resisters themselves from flourishing. Based on Aristotle’s discussion of “mixed actions,” a description is given of the political resister as displaying “mixed traits” that are routinely unlinked from flourishing and thereby burdened. The problematic traits of the politically resistant self include those such as anger that contribute to maintaining a hard resolve against the oppressors, those such as courage that help resisters take risks and accept loss and sacrifice, and those that resisters must display in their relationships with one another, such as loyalty coupled with an openness to criticism and self-criticism. The chapter includes an extended analysis of one of these questionable virtues, namely anger.

The conclusion addresses a question that emerges given all of the critical revisions to a eudaimonistic virtue ethics that are suggested in the course of the book, and especially given the proposed addition of an odd category of virtues—burdened virtues—that lack the usual feature of virtues because they are exercised in contexts in which flourishing tends to be diminished or unattainable. The conclusion considers how one could identify the virtues under conditions in which the link between virtue and flourishing is so unreliable. Given that the burdened virtues tend to fail to enable their bearers to flourish, one cannot find these virtues simply by beginning with a conception of flourishing and then working backwards from there to see which traits are conducive to or constitutive of such flourishing. What is proposed instead is a variety of ways in which a trait, despite being costly or detrimental, could be otherwise identifiably praiseworthy.

A common theme in the historiography of Greek ethics says that modern ethics is characterized by imperative notions such as ‘duty’—and with a Judeo‐Christian notion of imperatives or commands issued by god—whereas ancient ethics supposedly deals mainly with ‘attractive notions such as ‘good’ and ‘virtue’. This thought is often juxtaposed with the idea that imperative notions betoken a conflict between one's duty and one's good, because an imperative seems to be required only to command people to do what they do not wish to do, which is felt to be inappropriate to the supposed eudaimonism of Greek ethics. In fact Greek ethics makes substantial use of imperative notions, and does not attempt to show that attractive notions are more basic or preferable in ethics.