GOOD FOR YOU

by MARK LEBAR
Runnheads: PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL GOOD FOR YOU QUARTERLY

Abstract: Theories of human well-being struggle with a tension between opposing intuitions: on the one hand, that our welfare is subjectively determined by us as individuals, and on the other that there are objective constraints on what can count as our good. I argue that accounts driven primarily by subjectivist intuitions fail to come to grips with the signicance of objectivist intuitions, by failing to explain where our objectivist intuitions come from and why they are important, and defend an alternative account of human welfare what I call Aristotelian Constructivism .

Contemporary accounts of human well-being usually accord pride of place to our subjective attitudes. They do so to accommodate strong intuitions that what is good for you is, in large part, determined by you as an individual by what you nd satisfaction in doing, by the aspects of your life which give you pleasure through your attitudes and judgments about your life. Your attitude toward your own life matters deeply because you are the one who experiences that life. It affects you as it affects no other. It is your life. Thus there is simply an ineliminable subjectivity to the value of well-being. But we have competing intuitions which suggest that human welfare is not simply a function of our attitudes, even setting aside ideas about other ways our lives might be good (morally good, in particular). We dont think that getting what we want or think is good for us necessarily is good for us. We think a child who suffers brain damage which severely limits his cognitive development has suffered a serious blow to his well-being, and this is true regardless of his attitudes to the capacities he retains and the life he eventually leads. There seem to be importantly objective aspects to our good as well. I believe that subjectivist accounts fail in an important way to come to grips with the signicance of these objective aspects, and in this paper I sketch a conception of human welfare1 which does a better job of explaining our objectivist intuitions than its subjectivist competitors. I do not claim that subjectivist accounts ignore such intuitions; on the contrary, a
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great deal of energy goes into managing them in various ways. But subjectivist theories fail to explain adequately where our objectivist intuitions come from why we have them, and why they are so important in understanding our good. The alternative I shall defend I call Aristotelian Constructivism. On it, well-being is a construction of practical reasoning, in a way I shall describe. It differs from subjectivist views in denying the authority they accord to individual welfare subjects in determining their welfare, and explains why we have the objectivist intuitions we do. I begin with a bit of exploration of our objectivist intuitions, and show how one recent subjectivist conception of welfare the happiness theory of L. W. Sumner fails to explain them. I then sketch Aristotelian Constructivism in Section II, and in Section III I rebut two lines of objection to my account.

I.

Explaining objectivist intuitions

Objective considerations might enter into our thinking about human welfare in either or both of two ways.2 First, it might be that some things are simply objectively necessary for human welfare. These things might contribute to your living well without the mediation of your attitudes. One might hold that you simply ought to go in for things such as friendship, health, intellectual development, and so on, irrespective of your particular attitude towards them.3 A second form of objectivist intuition is at a theoretically more fundamental level. The idea here is that there are constraints on what counts as welfare that are not themselves the products solely of the subjective attitudes of the welfare subjects themselves. The legacy of objective conditions on welfare goes back to Aristotles formal conditions on accounts of the human good: the good an adequate account picks out must be nal, complete, and so on.4 A contemporary counterpart is Sumners insistence (as we shall see) that authoritative subjective welfare judgments must be informed and autonomous.5 Such constraints may at rst blush seem unmotivated. But theres no doubt that our subjective attitudes can go wrong in a variety of ways: We can hold false beliefs. For example, suppose I believe that I am in perfect health while in fact I am suffering from a growing brain tumor that will wipe out most of my cherished cognitive capacities and cause me excruciating pain before killing me. Under such conditions, we would likely discount my judgment that my life is going well. Or consider someone whose happiness is based largely on what she takes to be a loving, intimate, satisfying relationship with her spouse, while the faithless husband is engaged in a giant charade, does not return her love, and is manipulating her for
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nancial reasons. It is at least tempting to say that, in such cases where your happiness is crucially based on a false belief your judgments about your welfare are mistaken. The thought is that the attitudes which determine your assessments of your own welfare must not be riddled with grave factual error. We can have defective values. Consider an eighteenth century AfricanAmerican slave, whose life has been shaped by his masters to preclude autonomy. Now, a natural reaction to such a fate would be to abandon hope for anything different to accept life as it comes just for the sake of being able to face each new day. The slave might be capable of a degree of subjective satisfaction with his lot which we would be inclined to dismiss as an authoritative judgment of welfare. As Amartya Sen cautions us:
A person who has had a life of misfortune, with very little opportunities, and rather little hope, may be more easily reconciled to deprivations than others reared in more fortunate and afuent circumstances. . . . The hopeless beggar, the precarious landless laborer, the dominated housewife, the hardened unemployed or the over-exhausted coolie may all take pleasures in small mercies, and manage to suppress intense suffering for the necessity of continuing survival, but it would be ethically deeply mistaken to attach a correspondingly small value to the loss of their well-being because of this survival strategy. 6

The slaves evaluative capacities have been distorted in such a way that his positive attitude toward his life fails to justify counting it as a way human beings should seek to live. These are just two motivations for thinking there are objective conditions that attitudes about well-being must satisfy in order to count as determining how well one is living.7 Objective constraints of the second sort may or may not lead to objectivism of the rst sort. But both kinds of objectivist intuitions stand in tension with the authority subjectivist theories of welfare accord our own subjective judgments. A subjectivist theory, as I shall use the term, is one which requires that you have some attitude of approval or endorsement toward something for it to contribute to your welfare. An objectivist account of welfare, by way of contrast, is one which denies the necessity of your having any such attitude. The divide between these kinds of views is thus over the possibility of something contributing to your welfare despite your apathy or even hostility toward it.8 As I have indicated, our intuitions about that possibility pull us in both directions. Consequently, it is a challenge to unify them in a satisfactory account of our welfare judgments. Subjectivist accounts of the human good do not ignore this challenge. They could not do so and maintain any serious claim to capture what we think of as human well-being, precisely because both kinds of intuition have a solid place in our thinking. Typically subjectivist accounts begin with the idea that our good is crucially connected to what we desire, or at
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least have some sort of pro-attitude towards, and then try to accommodate the objectivist intuitions by qualifying the subjective attitudes which count for welfare. They accept that such attitudes are not sufcient for welfare, and stipulate conditions subjective attitudes must satisfy in order to constitute well-being. But this is an inadequate response to the issues our objectivist intuitions raise. In particular, there is insufcient attention paid to the question why we have these intuitions. Why do they have the force they do in shaping our concept of human well-being? The very considerations that make subjective attitudes insufcient to constitute welfare should lead us to wonder about their necessity for constituting welfare as well. They point to a need for theories of welfare to go beyond an accommodation of our intuitions and address a deeper issue of our nature as creatures who can thrive or struggle in the ways our notions of welfare pick out. We need, as I shall put it, a normative theory of persons as welfare subjects to establish an adequate account of the human good. To see this, it is useful to consider Sumners theory. Sumner recognizes the problem, and proposes a quite sophisticated form of subjectivism in order to meet it. It is thus instructive to see how and why it fails. Sumners authentic happiness account of well-being is thoroughly subjectivist. Welfare is, he says, a concept that is applicable only to subjects: beings possessing a unique, enduring, centre of consciousness.9 and the welfare of such subjects depends on the states of their consciousness. In the case of human subjects, an adequate theory of welfare must make our well-being logically dependent on our attitudes of favor and disfavor.10 There may be other standards of value applicable to human lives, but welfare is one that is essentially subject-relative: if your life is going well in respect of welfare, it must be going well by your own lights. Thus, your well-being is not merely your life being good for you as measured by some abstract standard; if it is good for you it must be because you regard it as good for you. Sumner attempts to accommodate our objectivist intuitions by imposing on subjective attitudes a requirement of authenticity. His strategy is to argue that, when your attitudes are formed in response to certain kinds of false information, or by evaluative capacities that have been crippled in certain ways, those attitudes are not truly your own, and thus are not authoritative as to your well-being. Such a failure does not, however, undercut the fact that you may be happy. Sumner insists that we distinguish between happiness and welfare.11 Happiness is, he argues, properly understood as being entirely mind-dependent. There is a sense in which if you believe you are happy, then you are happy. But the same, he maintains, cannot be said of welfare, which depends on facts about the world. Even if you are happy, you are not faring well if your happiness is a product of false beliefs or defective values. The notion of authenticity Sumner
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deploys has two components to deal with such failures: an information condition and an autonomy condition. I shall focus on the latter. The autonomy condition is directed at defective-values cases, such as that of the slave. The intent is to avoid conditions in which peoples capacities to make value assessments have been crippled. It is possible to shape and condition the aspirations of people so that, as Sen put it, they may be more easily reconciled to deprivation than others who are more fortunate, and Sumner maintains that assessments of welfare made within value structures that have been distorted in these ways do not have the authority of value structures that are the product of more normallydeveloped reective processes. However, he rejects the idea that there is some objective standard of value some independent criterion by which the values that drive assessments of welfare can be tested. Imposing a value requirement based on such a standard would be objectionably dogmatic, unacceptably patronizing and puritanical.12 Instead, Sumner proposes a sort of negative procedural test for authenticity. As long as the welfare subjects values have not been forged in social conditions which erode the individuals capacity for critical assessment of his values, including the very values promoted by that process itself, we can regard his values as in the pertinent sense his own.13 Thus the theory remains strongly subjective. While their assessments of their own welfare are defeasible on either information or authenticity grounds, individuals are the ultimate authorities concerning their own welfare.14 Nevertheless, while Sumner strives to minimize the objectivity of these authenticity conditions, they are objective requirements on welfare judgments. Their applicability to the welfare judgments of particular subjects is not itself a matter of the acceptance or endorsement of those subjects. Even if you reject the application of these requirements to your own case, and maintain that your judgments as to your welfare are authoritative irrespective of the authenticity conditions, in Sumners view that is irrelevant. Subjective authority is not unlimited. Sumners view is neither unique among subjectivist theories nor implausible in this respect. The suggestion that your welfare is determined by what you actually desire or have a positive attitude towards is after all not very credible, and all plausible subjectivist accounts try in one way or another to deal with that fact by imposing conditions on subjective attitudes or desires. Sumners account is only a sophisticated strategy for doing what all subjectivist accounts must do: limit subjective authority. The interesting question is why they must. Why should our determinations of welfare not be completely autonomous and authoritative? Sumners autonomy condition is motivated by Sens worries about preferences formed in conditions of extreme deprivation. The problem, Sumner laments, arises from the malleability of personal values: There seems to be nothing
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in [the Authentic Happiness theory sans autonomy condition] which would rule out nding fulllment in forms of life which are trivial or exploitative or demeaning.15 Yet what entitles us to rule out trivial, or exploitative, or demeaning notions of welfare? Isnt this stipulation as unacceptably patronizing and puritanical as other conditions? Here Sumners theory exhibits a deciency characteristic of subjectivist accounts. As he deploys his authenticity conditions, they are not readily explicable in terms of the theory of welfare he provides. Instead, they are responses to intuitions that impose themselves as it were from the outside upon the nal shape of that theory. They are in this sense exogenous to it, and it is important to consider why those intuitions exert the pressure they do. An account of our concept of welfare should in fact help to explain them. But on this point subjectivist theories are silent. Sumner can respond that an attitude that fails the autonomy condition does not qualify as the subjects own attitude. After all, failure of that condition means that the values by which the subject is judging his own life are not, in some important sense, his own they have been imposed upon him in a way which makes critical endorsement or rejection impossible. Sumner has given an account of subjects as creatures capable of consciousness of their conditions and hinged his account of welfare on the evaluations they make of their own conditions.16 And when the authenticity conditions fail to hold, the evaluations they make are, in the pertinent sense, not their own. Thus the theory does within its own purview offer an explanation of the origins of the intuitions that motivate imposing the authenticity conditions on the attitudes of welfare subjects.17 However, this response is not adequate. For what the authenticity conditions demand goes far beyond the requirements of subjectivity. The contented slave is no less a subject for all his loss of autonomy. Moreover, nonhuman animals can be (and are) welfare subjects in the only sense Sumners theory of subjects requires: my dog is straightforwardly a welfare subject in Sumners sense. But no authenticity conditions apply to his attitudes, because we recognize that such conditions are not needed. There is simply no way the attitudes of animals can fail to be their own. However, with human beings with persons we have a concern that does not apply to other welfare subjects. We recognize that our appetites, and our cognitive and evaluative capacities, can be manipulated and deformed, to a point at which we say the attitudes they generate should not be truly attributed to us as our own.18 We thus make normative judgments that cannot emanate from facts about us merely as subjects. They arise from our conceptions of ourselves as agents and persons. No theory of mere subjects can explain why your subjective attitudes are not sufcient for your well-being. Thus we need more than an account of ourselves as subjects; we must understand when your attitudes and judgments are your own, not merely as a subject but as a person. This requires a theory of
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what persons truly are or ought to be a normative theory of persons and a theory conned to considering us merely as one kind of welfare subject among others cannot provide it. The constraints explained by a normative theory of persons exert a powerful force in shaping our attitudes about well-being, so such a theory must thus play a central role in an adequate account of welfare. An adequate theory of welfare must, as Sumner insists, be descriptively adequate: it must capture and explain core intuitions about our concept of welfare and the ways we use that concept in everyday practical contexts. In particular, it must be faithful to our core beliefs about welfare.19 But some of these beliefs are objectivist, and can be explained only by focusing on our conceptions of ourselves as persons. They are in tension with the radical respect for individual autonomy which motivates subjectivism. For subjectivist theories they are (as it were) raw data which can be accommodated, but only by qualifying the very motivations for subjectivism in the rst place. This is a problem for any theory that is driven by the conviction that in some way your attitudes determine what is good for you. The force of that conviction must be constrained in order to do justice to our objectivist intuitions, and even when the constraints are characterized with great skill and insight, as in Sumners account, the underlying question where they come from and why they must be taken into account goes unanswered. An adequate theory of welfare should not only cleave to our intuitions but explain them. What we need is a conception of what we are, of what we are like, as a way of motivating both our subjectivist and objectivist intuitions, and of integrating them within a single account. This is the challenge of supplying what I have called a normative theory of persons. I will now turn to sketching a theory I believe meets that challenge, and can make sense of both kinds of intuitions about welfare. A word of caution is due rst. Though I think Aristotle might endorse much of the following account, I do not offer it as an interpretation of Aristotle. Instead, the rubric Aristotelian Constructivism is intended as an indication of the source of its inspiration. The focus of my interest is in a set of claims about the human good about what it is good for us human beings to seek in our lives.20

II.

Aristotelian Constructivism

The inspiration for the conception of welfare I wish to advance is an underappreciated aspect of Aristotles account of friendship. Aristotle repeatedly makes the striking assertion that a friend is a second self (literally, another myself philos allos autos).21 The fact that he reiterates the locution suggests that something important to his understanding of
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friendship is behind it. More to the point, I think something signicant about human welfare lies behind it. The phrase occurs in several different contexts. In its rst occurrence in the NE, Aristotle is noticing how the good of the befriended enters into the friends thinking. A friend wishes and does what is good for his friend; he wishes him to exist and live; and he grieves and rejoices with his friend (IX.4: 1166a39). It occurs again in Aristotles account of why a virtuous friend is naturally desirable for a virtuous friend (IX.9). Here the value of the friends consciousness of the existence and goodness of his friend supports Aristotles conclusion that even (especially?) the virtuous needs friends. His idea seems to be that friendship is bound up with thoughts about where ones own good lies, where the friends good lies, and how these might be connected. Aristotle seems to have in mind a conception of the human good on which we can share goods in interesting ways. On this conception, its a mistake to think of our respective goods as being entirely distinct in friendship, but neither do we lose our sense of selves as individuals. Aristotle notes that friends remain severed (diespastai) from each other, and this preserves a sort of individuality that we intuitively feel friendship should transform but not destroy. What conception of the human good could ground this sort of sharing? The idea at the heart of Aristotelian Constructivism is that our good is something we construct, and that this constructive process both underwrites and engages our connections with others. The theory is motivated by the idea that, to understand what is good for us, we must understand what kind of creature we are. It begins, that is to say, with a normative theory of persons. This is something that Aristotle has lots to say about. Once again, his account of friendship is a useful place to begin. In NE IX.4, Aristotle makes a remark that is often overlooked in discussions of his conception of our nature:
[The good mans] opinions are harmonious, and he desires the same things with all his soul; and therefore he wishes for himself what is good and what seems so, and does it (for it is characteristic of the good man to exert himself for the good), and does so for his own sake (for he does it for the sake of the intellectual element [dianoutikon] in him, which is thought to be the man himself ); and he wishes himself to live and be preserved, and especially the element by virtue of which he thinks [ phronei ]. . . . The element that thinks [noun] would seem to be the individual man, or to be so more than any other element in him (1166a1224).

The good man, he goes on to say, is the best lover of self: the true selflover is he who:
graties the most authoritative element in himself and in all things obeys this. . . . A man is said to have or not to have self-control according as his intellect [ noun] has or has not the
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control, on the assumption that this is the man himself, and the things men have done from reason [logos] are thought most properly their own acts and voluntary acts. That this is the man himself, then, or is so more than anything else, is plain, and also that the good man loves most this part of him (1168b3069a2).

Aristotle writes about the good man, and the good man is just the one who acts for the sake of the man himself. Aristotle is drawing on what he takes to be commonsense attitudes and beliefs about ourselves and our identities. The part of ourselves he thinks we take to be most truly ourselves is our reason, more particularly that part of our reason by which we act our practical reason.22 This insight reafrms the conclusion of the notorious argument of NE Book I that the ergon (characteristic activity23) of human beings is activity of soul in accordance with, or not without, rational principle [logos] (1098a8); in the present context it is an expression of widely-shared beliefs about ourselves, used to explicate and shore up claims about friendship. Why should you take your practical rationality to be your truest self? And if you do, what does this conception of your self tell you about your good? Aristotles answers to these questions go back to the beginnings of his discussion of our good. He begins his argument in Nicomachean Ethics with the idea that as agents we live our lives pursuing ends. Some ends we seek for the sake of other ends, some we seek just for themselves, so that they fall into a sort of hierarchy. Whether it is right or not that, as he says, the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim (I.1: 1094a2), it is certainly right that we are aimers. The fact that we are that we have ends which we prioritize both unconsciously and deliberately is a fact about the kinds of creatures we are. Aristotle seizes upon this fact to argue that a clear grasp of what is atop that hierarchy (that is, our ultimate end or telos) must be of great importance to us in prioritizing what we seek and thus in living our lives. This fact about us as agents explains why we take our practical rationality to be so central to our conceptions of ourselves. Our practical reason is what imposes order and structure on the ends we seek, and thus makes us the particular creatures we are. It is no great problem for us to acquire ends; we cant help doing so. If nothing else, the welter of our desires gives us ends to seek. The problem is in prioritizing and harmonizing the cacophony of ends we might seek. This is the work of our practical reason. Its task is constructing who we are and what we will become, in virtue of the way it fashions a life of agency of end-seeking out of the possibilities open to it. We can understand the excellent activity of the soul Aristotle speaks of in NE 1.7 as seeing ones life as a rationally-ordered structure of ends, and utilizing that insight as an organizing principle for ones life and activity. We are, as it were, the architects of our own continued existence:
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existence is to all men a thing to be chosen and loved. . . . We exist by virtue of activity (i.e. by living and acting), and . . . the handiwork [ergon] is in a sense, the producer in activity; he loves his handiwork, therefore, because he loves existence. And this is rooted in the nature of things, for what he is in potentiality, his handiwork manifests in activity ( NE IX.7: 1168a6 8).

What makes practical rationality special as a characteristic activity is that it is at once both an activity and the product of that self-same activity. In reasoning practically about your life and its structure, you create a life for yourself, and through your love of your capacity to do so, you make that life one in which your truest self yourself as practical reasoner and rational planner is protected, sustained, nourished, and developed. The life you live is in this sense the realization of what you are potentially, and you see yourself in, identify with, yourself in this characteristic activity most of all. The conception of welfare at work here is constructivist in that there is no prior and independent order of objects and relations providing a criterion for the principles governing what constitutes well-being, no standpoint external to the parties own perspective from which principles of welfare may be specied.24 The possession of practical wisdom (and hence virtue NE VI.13) consists precisely in an appreciation of what things, activities, projects, and so on will contribute to a good human life a life that is eudaimon, the sort of life each of us, as a human being, aspires to, insofar as we can make sense of ourselves as practically rational beings at all. Such things have prudential value just because and insofar as they contribute to the good human life as fashioned by practical wisdom. It is not the case that they have some prior and independent value which is recognized by practical wisdom and incorporated into the good life. Their value is not recognized or discovered. Instead, it is constructed. The value arises because of their incorporation into a good life by the virtuous person. Of course, practical wisdom consists, at least in part, of recognizing the natural properties of things capable of taking on this kind of value. A ne wine may have prudential value as incorporated into the life of a virtuous person, and its value comes only through that incorporation, but part of practical wisdom consists in recognizing the natural properties of wine through which it, but not (say) motor oil, is suitable to do so. One might doubt the constructivist credentials of this account. After all, though I have claimed that it is free of any prior and independent criterion for welfare, one might worry that there is such a criterion being smuggled in through the norms which practical reasoning must satisfy in order to count as practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is, after all, simply the successful exercise of practical reasoning, where success is reckoned by the achievement of a good human life, a life high in prudential value.
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Thus, it may appear either that there is a covert independent criterion for prudential value at work, or that the account is viciously circular in specifying prudential value as what is constructed by practical wisdom, after picking out practical wisdom as practical reasoning that is effective at constructing prudential value. On my view there is no such prior and independent criterion for wellbeing beyond the deliverances of practical wisdom. There is, however, a kind of circularity in the account, but it is not vicious. There is no canon to appeal to beyond the deliverances of practical wisdom for what counts as practical wisdom, but we share very broad attitudes as to what counts as a good human life, and share judgments about what counts as success or failure in achieving it. There is an explanatory circle here, but structurally it is no more vicious than the circle by which we recognize effective logical reasoning. There is no canon by which to recognize success or failure at logical reasoning beyond our capacity for logical reasoning itself. (If there were such a canon, we would rely on our faculties of logical reasoning in order to apply it.) But nevertheless we are capable of recognizing success and failure in logical reasoning. Likewise, there is no canon by which to recognize success or failure at practical reasoning beyond our capacity for practical reasoning itself (and if there were, we would rely on our practical reasoning faculties in order to apply it). Nevertheless we are capable of recognizing success and failure in practical reasoning.25 We want our children to learn as much as we can teach them to make them successful practical reasoners, just as our parents tried to teach as us much as they could to make us successful practical reasoners. We strive to identify, codify, and articulate what we have recognized precisely because we know that there is practical wisdom, and there is the absence of it, and we know how important the difference is. This conception of self-construction has strong afnities with other constructivist theories of persons, notably the neo-Kantian work of Christine Korsgaard. She has articulated a theory of moral normativity that depends on the conceptions we have of ourselves what Korsgaard calls our practical identities.26 Moral obligation, she argues, can be grounded only in a conception of ourselves as creatures who need reasons. Our nature as reective animals both gives rise to our questions about the source of normativity of our reasons and provides the answer to those questions. Because we are creatures of a certain sort (that is, animals with reective consciousness) we need reasons. And, she says, because we are creatures of that sort, our reasons are normative. Korsgaards notion that we construct ourselves through our practical reasoning ts well with Aristotles thoughts about our truest selves and our love for ourselves as our own handiwork. Indeed, Korsgaards constructivism confessedly takes root in her reading of Aristotles metaphysics. It is characteristic of living beings, she says, that each living being is:
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so designed as to maintain and reproduce itself: that is, to maintain and reproduce its own form. It has what we might call a self-maintaining form. So it is its own end; its ergon or function is just to be and to continue being what it is.27

In the special case of human beings, our characteristic activity is practical rationality, and our practical rationality has a reexive component:
Being a person is not a state, but rather an activity. A persons practical identity needs constant construction and reconstruction, because it is constantly, as we might put it, threatened and at issue in the same ordinary way an animals physical identity is constantly threatened and at issue. So just as to be an animal is essentially to be constantly engaged in the activity of making oneself into that kind of animal, so to be a person is to be constantly engaged in the activity of making yourself into that particular person. 28

Our ergon is the exercise of our practical rationality, so as to sustain and develop our capacity for that characteristic function. There is a further, and important, reexive component to the Aristotelian account of our natures and thus the human good. The exercise of practical wisdom has as its object the realization of that very good for the reasoning subject himself. Aristotle cites as a mark of a man of practical wisdom that he is:
able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect, e.g. about what sorts of thing conduce to health or strength, but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general (NE VI.5: 1140a26 8).

Practical wisdom itself the cognitive and conative hub of the virtuous character is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man (1140b5). So Aristotle is interested in a form of perfection that has as its target just the kind of life which is high in welfare. This provides the answer to our question about what follows for the human good from this conception of our nature. Your good lies in the realization of the ends that are fashioned according to practical wisdom including, rst and foremost, the development and nurture of yourself as a creature who is capable of assimilating the tumult of your impulses into a coherent schedule of ends and plans for realizing them. Aristotle says that this is the truest form of self-love, because it is love of that part of you that is most truly yourself. Conversely, the goal or aim of that capacity is itself your well-being. It is important to see that this conception of welfare is not narrow and restrictive, but far-ranging and inclusive. What is good for you is, above all else, to excel in practical reasoning to be practically wise and to go in for those things that practical wisdom picks out as leading to, tting into, or constituting a good life for you. Our cultivation of ourselves
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through practical rationality takes into account not only those features of ourselves we share with others of our kind, but also the distinctive interests, capacities, and desires congruent with our characteristic activity as practical reasoners that are particular to us as individuals. Thus, we build lives for ourselves, and in so doing design and construct the persons we are. Your good takes the form of the realization of that activity characteristic of human living practical reasoning coupled with the particular features of your makeup as an individual. Thus, Aristotelian Constructivism recognizes a signicant degree of authority of welfare subjects in their judgments as to their own welfare. After all, it locates welfare in the wise exercise of practical rationality, and generally there is no one better situated to judge where the path of practical wisdom lies than the wise agent herself. She has a kind of access to the facts about her that go into her practical deliberation that others simply do not have. Thus she is uniquely situated to make judgments concerning her welfare. But it is also true that we share intuitions about what kind of life can count as a good human life, and these shared judgments limit the authority of individual subjective attitudes to determine welfare. Aristotles recognition of shared attitudes about human well-being structures his account of eudaimonia in NE I. He begins with observations about our end-seeking natures and draws attention to our shared intuitions about our highest good (teleion agathon). He believes that we have widelyshared ideas about what such an end must be. There will be general agreement, he claims, with the idea that eudaimonia is that good, but there will be disagreement among accounts of eudaimonia (NE I.4: 1095a19f ). He then embarks on an argument intended to gain our acceptance of his account of eudaimonia (virtue plus external goods NE I.8: 1099a30f ) by leveraging our general agreement as to what our highest good must be like.29 His argument rests on the way we understand ourselves as human beings. When we recognize the kind of creatures we are our characteristic activity as rational we see that these conditions can be met only through the kind of life his account of eudaimonia identies as our highest good. Thus the highest good for you is the highest human good, and so must take into account (centrally) what kinds of beings humans are.30 On Aristotelian Constructivism, this is a matter of conceptual dependence. Its idea of human welfare is driven by a particular normative theory of persons: a notion of human beings as rational animals as creatures of a certain kind for which individual self-construction is necessary. It is a conception of us and of our good which does justice to widely-shared and strong beliefs not only about our good, but about what we share with other animals and living beings and what differentiates us; about our need for friendship and our capacity for deep connection with others; in short, about what we are like.
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Thus the theory gives us a principled way of reconciling our subjective and objective intuitions about human well-being. Our subjectivist inclinations are honored in the focus on making ones own life worth living. Certainly much of the motivation you have for living in the way recommended by Aristotelian Constructivism is that the life you will live in consequence will be good for you; you will experience it as satisfying, and have the sorts of attitudes towards your life which count for welfare. At the same time, the view has patent objective commitments. Given the central role of practical rationality, it is clear how false beliefs of certain sorts can derail the project of living well. It is also clear why the kinds of formative inuences that characterize defective-value cases diminish or eliminate the possibility of living as Aristotelian Constructivism says you should. Those inuences are deplorable precisely because they are inimical to the enterprise of constructing your life through the effective exercise of practical rationality. They block both the development of practical rationality and access to the kinds of intellectual, affective, and environmental resources needed to construct a good human life. That is what explains our intuitive conviction that the slave cannot be faring well as a human being, even if he experiences no discontent with his condition. Moreover, it explains why we are disinclined to see his contentment as an authoritative judgment about his welfare. Sumner is quite right that such a judgment does not really reect the attitude of an autonomous human being with the capacity to form and revise the values by which he will judge his own life and the lives of others. By hypothesis, the slaves contentment is a product of the maldevelopment or malformation of his native capacities to form and revise his values critically. But Aristotelian Constructivism can, while subjectivist accounts cannot, readily explain why this matters. It is only because he is a person, not merely a welfare subject, that this concern comes into play. It matters just because that capacity is central to what it means to be practically rational, and our practical rationality is crucial to what we are as human beings. The inhibition or distortion of those capacities are great evils to the victim, because they rob him of the possibility of realizing what is so central to a good human life. It is precisely because autonomy is so closely related to the good of practical wisdom that it gets the intuitive toehold that Sumner recognizes. But the story about the good of practical rationality for persons is a story that Aristotelian Constructivism, not subjectivism, is entitled to tell. This crucial capacity of Aristotelian Constructivism is, I believe, a great virtue in comparison with subjectivist accounts of welfare. But it comes at what some see as a cost. In imposing constraints on subjective authority about welfare it is open to worries about the appropriateness and suitability of such constraints on a notion that is as highly subjective at its heart as human well-being is. I conclude by addressing two such objections.
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III.

Two objections

The rst complaints about the objective commitments of Aristotelian Constructivism target the very idea that there might be objective standards for welfare. Richard Kraut observes that objectivist conceptions of good human lives bear the burden of identifying and justifying the objective ideal(s) involved, and he complains that no one has worked out a detailed and plausible theory that satises these demands.31 Aristotles view of what can constitute an excellent use of reason, in particular, is too narrow.32 The dangers of this narrowness are revealed when we consider what Aristotle must say about seriously handicapped individuals, such as those belonging to the category of what he referred to as natural slaves those incapable of rational deliberation. Aristotles view is inhumane in making self-esteem and vitality difcult for them, given the fact that the human ideal is out of their reach: a person who wants to see some good in his being alive will nd it hard to do so if he and others judge that his life can never be well lived.33 Objectivist doctrines like Aristotles ought, Kraut maintains, to be adjusted to reect the capacities and circumstances of each individual. Is Aristotelian Constructivism inhumane in virtue of its lack of such exibility? Much of the answer, I believe, comes from accepting Sumners distinction between happiness and well-being.34 For the purposes of Krauts concerns, it makes sense to recognize a sense in which happiness is entirely mind-dependent, and distinct from a notion of welfare which is partly dependent on facts about the world. Aristotles conception of eudaimonia corresponds more closely to the latter notion than to the former, but much of the bite of Krauts objection draws on the assumption that if welfare is unattainable, then happiness is impossible as well. Consider severe mental retardation. Such an afiction clearly forecloses the possibility of a good life by Aristotelian standards. But that does not entail that the severely retarded cannot be happy, nor that their lives are not worth living. What it entails is that such a life is not a good human life, and that is beyond dispute.35 The question Aristotle was interested in (and the one propelling our investigation into human well-being) is what kind of life is a good life for those of us fortunate enough not to suffer these sorts of handicaps. Hence there is little bite to the objection that the theory does not apply to those who are markedly different in the very properties that establish the characteristic way human beings live their lives. A related concern is that this conception of the human good is too intellectual in its demands for a grasp of that good as part of practical wisdom. Sarah Broadie argues that seeing practical wisdom as tak[ing] its cue from an explicit, comprehensive, substantial vision of [human good without restriction] amounts to thinking of ourselves as having a Grand End.36 But this, she says, is no part of Aristotles model of practical
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wisdom, as it implies that the person of practical wisdom would have . . . to be a philosopher or to have absorbed the teachings of philosophers.37 Rosalind Hursthouse agrees with Broadie that this is an implausible conception of Aristotelian practical wisdom, and adds:
When philosophers start implying that it is a necessary condition of virtue that the virtuous have reected long and hard about what eudaimonia consists in and worked out a picture of what is involved in acting well so comprehensive and substantial that it can be applied and its application justied in every suitable case, we may be sure that they are falling victim to what could be called the Platonic fantasy.38

Broadie and Hursthouse are thus offering a variant on Krauts objection, except that the point here is not that the good human life is unavailable merely to the severely retarded, but also to anyone without a fair degree of philosophical sophistication and the capacity to develop a full-blown theory of practical rationality. There certainly would be a problem if Aristotelian Constructivism implied that only a philosopher could live a good human life, or that the practically wise person must have an explicit theory of value and action of the sort Hursthouse contemplates. But it does not. It does imply that the fuller your understanding of what is good for human beings, and the greater degree that understanding guides your thought, emotions, and actions, the better you will live. Aristotelian Constructivism clearly puts a premium on a reective understanding of what is valuable and good for human beings. But there is no reason to think such an understanding is unavailable to the philosophically unsophisticated. The objectivism of the requirements of Aristotelian Constructivism is appropriate for creatures like us, but not beyond our aspirations. A second line of objection to the strategy of Aristotelian Constructivism targets its perfectionist elements. Sumner presses the point that your welfare must be good for you, must be seen by you as being good, and he maintains that in this respect welfare (prudential value) differs from (especially) perfectionist value. A life is high in perfectionist value if it involves excellence in some worthwhile attribute: moral worth, for example, or intellectual or creative accomplishment. It may be possible to assess your life from a perfectionist standpoint, and evaluate it against some objective standard by which a human life is a better (or worse) instance of its kind. But, says Sumner, this sort of value need not correspond with your own, subjective, assessment of your life. It is conceptually possible that you might have a life that is high in perfectionist value but in which you feel miserable, or a life high in prudential value that is still not a good specimen of a human life. Since perfectionist value need not reect or rely upon the subjective attitudes of the person whose life exhibits that value, it lacks the kind of subjectivity that is necessary for
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prudential value and thus for human welfare. Sumners objection to perfectionist value has two components. His primary worry is that, in virtue of its lack of subjectivity, it is just the wrong sort of thing to play a part in prudential value (in fact in ethical good of any form). He also worries that the rationale for perfectionist value is in a way promiscuous: if perfection is valuable, then there is value in all sorts of implausible places. I will consider these issues in reverse order. Sumner attributes the historical genesis of both problems to Aristotle, with his idea that the human ergon is important to understanding what is good for us. As Sumner has it, the problems begin because Aristotle sees a conceptual connection between a things distinctive functional excellence and its welfare.39 This perfectionist theme is exacerbated by modern environmental ethicists such as Robin Atteld and Paul Taylor, who build on it to expand the range of welfare subjects.40 As Sumner understands their strategy, ethical value is attributed to the lives of any organism merely by following out the logic of the Aristotelian framework.41 They use the idea that each organism can be understood as having a biological function to ground a conception of living things as having goods of their own, even though nonhuman organisms lack the subjective attitudes human beings have. We can tell in a natural enough way when organisms are functioning well or badly, and this is enough to ground talk of benet and harm for them. Thus, we can understand them as having welfare. Moreover, it is natural enough to see the kind of perfectionist value that is realized in their better functioning as being an ethical value as something that gives moral reasons for action. Sumner complains that perfectionist value so construed is too broad to ground prudential value. Mountains and rivers have goods in this sense, as do stars and biotic communities. Does it make sense to think of them as welfare subjects? Are they capable of prudential value? Seemingly not. Moreover, the creation of perfectionist value seems limited only by our imaginations in classifying things into kinds capable of better or worse exemplication. Any concrete particular exemplies innumerable kinds, each capable of value in perfection, so that perfectionist value seems to run amok. As Sumner puts it, as a category of good it settles on just about everything.42 This makes it unt as a plausible candidate for ethical value: The superabundance of perfectionist value entails that there will often be no ethical point to promoting or protecting it.43 We have no reason to think we are obligated to try to make things better examples of their kind, given the limitless number of kinds of things there are, and perfectionisms incapacity to distinguish between those that are, and those that are not, morally signicant. Sumners second objection is that defenders of perfectionist value make the cardinal error of confusing facts about what is objectively valuable in functional terms with what is subjectively valuable as measured by the
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attitudes of welfare subjects themselves. He complains that views that give a signicant role to perfection do so by conating prudential and perfectionist value they equate a creatures welfare with its distinctive excellence.44 This mistake is especially grievous because the two kinds of value are so different. The problem is not merely that they are not the same kind of value not just that one does, while the other does not, reect subjective attitudes. Even worse, the two kinds of value are often in tension or conict with each other. For human beings, in particular, perfectionist value and prudential value sometimes diverge, and sometimes we must choose between them. There may be nothing in it for you, in terms of prudential value, to realize whatever perfectionist potential you might have as an excellent specimen of our kind. As Sumner puts the point, our:
perfection is in no way determined by [our] interests or concerns. . . . Perfectionist evaluation imposes on an individual standards derived from the species as a whole; it exemplies the hegemony of the natural kind. . . . Objective values . . . emanate from a standpoint which is external to us as individuals, and because their status as values requires no afrmation or endorsement of them on our part. . . . promoting any objective value as a foundational good for ethics will infringe autonomy or individuality.45

Sumner believes these problems show two things. First, perfectionism is to be rejected as an element of ethical value tout court, let alone prudential value. It is certainly too distantly connected with what is good for us as welfare subjects to play any role in an account of prudential value. Second, welfare and prudential value must be limited to subjects capable of experience. If welfare is subjective, then it follows that it can inhere only in subjects that is, beings capable of a certain kind and level of consciousness.46 These problems doom the proposal that perfectionist value constitutes or even contributes to prudential value. It is the wrong kind of thing to do so, and there is too much of it. To respond to these charges, we must go back to the alleged source of the problems. I believe the concern for perfectionist value Sumner attributes to Aristotle was in fact motivated by a more fundamental concern for prudential value. Aristotelian Constructivism suggests one way that perfectionist and prudential values can be seen as converging even interdependent and of great ethical value. Aristotle does indeed think that something like perfectionist value plays an important role in human welfare, and it may even be right to read him as arguing that our welfare lies in perfecting ourselves as the kinds of creatures we are that is, as practically rational human beings. But this is best understood simply as the claim that a kind of perfection is needed for welfare that you cannot have the one without the other. There is nothing to suggest that he conates the ideas.
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Sumners reading of Aristotle focuses, as many accounts do, on Aristotles conception of characteristic function (ergon) for human beings.47 But we should understand Aristotles ergon argument as a provisional outline for a specication of the human good, which Aristotle subsequently revises.48 On this reading, the perfection of the human function is central for, but not completely determinative of, human welfare. Aristotle, like Plato before him, was struck by the psychological fact that living well has great practical and motivational hold on us. It matters greatly to us that our lives go well that we live in ways that are high in prudential value. In trying to arrive at a specication of those ways, he looks at humanity, and at our good, with a naturalists eye, as well as with the eye of a moral theorist. He is interested in how humans go about living their lives, under what conditions they thrive, and so on. And important aspects of the conditions under which we thrive depend on the kinds of creatures we are. It would be an odd theory of human welfare indeed that was generated in the abstract, devoid of constraints imposed by the basic anthropological facts about us. Yet those facts are what Aristotles perfectionism comes to. He recognizes that there is a characteristic sort of thing it is to live a human life, and maintains (plausibly) that there can be better or worse instantiations of that sort of thing, and that the way you instantiate it matters for your welfare.49 But he does not conate the notions of prudential value or welfare and the perfection of the human ergon. Despite the fact that perfectionist value and prudential value are different kinds of value, they do not pull us in conicting directions. In fact, perfection is valuable only when and because it contributes to living well as the kind of creatures we are. We have seen that the capacities we are to perfect are aimed at prudential value. Since prudential value is itself the perfectionist target, prudential value and perfectionist value cannot pull apart in the way Sumner suggests. Moreover, if we see perfectionist value as contributing to prudential value in the way I have suggested, the problem of surfeit of value disappears. We are not, or at least not primarily, interested in perfectionist value for its own sake; just as Sumner says, there is too much of it. Our interest in our perfection as the kind of creature we are arises from its substantive implications for our prudential value. Our interest in our welfare picks out of all the possible kinds of perfectionist value just one kind which matters ethically: that which bears on our living lives we nd satisfying. This kind of perfectionist value matters, while others do not, because most kinds of perfection lack a sufciently direct connection with our welfare. So Sumner is right that not all perfectionist value matters ethically, but wrong to assume that no principled distinction can be made among the kinds of perfectionist value between forms of perfection that are ethically reason-giving and others that are not. Aristotles concern with perfection derives from the value one form of it contributes to welfare,
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and that allows him to make the distinction Sumners argument makes necessary. It is a contingent fact that we do well we nd our lives to be satisfying when we live well by the standards Aristotle argues for in his focus on practical wisdom and virtue. Aristotle does not even maintain that perfectionist value is sufcient for prudential value. His view was notorious in the ancient world for its rejection of the idea that virtue was sufcient for happiness: the world needs to cooperate a bit with even the virtuous in order for them to live well. But the contingent connection between perfectionist and prudential value is no mere accident. It is rmly rooted in natural, biological and anthropological facts about us: about the conditions under which we, as members of the species to which we belong, thrive. Thus, these objections to the objective and perfectionist elements of Aristotelian Constructivism do not tell against it. It remains uniquely capable of both integrating and explaining both the subjective and the objective poles of our intuitions about the human good. I have obviously not defended the view against all subjectivist alternatives, though I hope I have made clear the deep problem facing any subjectivist approach. If I am right, we have good reason to think that Aristotelian Constructivism is attractive as an account of human welfare in ways that subjectivist theories cannot be. The crucial issue in modern accounts of the human good is this: to what degree are the judgments of individual welfare subjects as to their own welfare authoritative in determining their welfare? I have argued that Aristotelian Constructivism identies and explains crucial objective constraints on those judgments, in such a way that we can see why they have the authority they generally do. It is thus a promising account of human welfare.50 Dept. of Philosophy Ohio University, Athens, OH
NOTES I treat welfare, well-being, prudential value, and human good, as synonymous. Of course there are conceptions of good human lives which do not specify such goodness in terms of well-being or welfare, unlike the tradition of eudaimonism of which my account is a specimen. But even accounts that do not equate prudential and moral value recognize prudential value, and can simply understand human good as I use the term to refer to that value. Since my focus is the human good, I conne my attention to human welfare subjects, though exactly how our ordinary concept of welfare extends to other welfare subjects is an interesting question. I take it the account I give can be generalized to other species in useful ways, but I do not attempt to do so here. 2 The distinction I draw here is similar to the distinction Sumner rightfully insists upon between the sources and the nature of welfare. See Sumner, L. W. (1996) Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 16; cf. also p. 45.
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3 Cf. James Grifn (1986) Well-Being, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 53ff., and Sumner (op. cit., pp. 180ff.) on standard human goods. 4 Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE), Book I. 5 Sumner, op. cit., pp. 156ff. 6 Amartya Sen (1987) On Ethics and Economics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 456. 7 Examples of accounts (in addition to Sumners) which address worries of these kinds include those of Richard Arneson (1989) Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare, Philosophical Studies 56; Richard Brandt (1979) A Theory of the Good and the Right, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 115ff., and (1996) Fact, values, and morality, New York: Cambridge University Press, ch. 2; James Grifn (op. cit., pp. 12 ff.); Peter Railton (1986) Facts and Values, Philosophical Topics 14; Connie Rosati (1996) Internalism and the Good, Ethics 106; and Henry Sidgwick (1907/1981) The Methods of Ethics, Indianapolis: Hackett, ch. IX. 8 There are various ways to draw this distinction. One might equally well divide the conceptual space by identifying just how much of a role is accorded to subjective attitudes. An extreme form of objectivism would deny them any role at all, while an extreme form of subjectivism would make pro-attitudes not only necessary but sufcient for welfare. But the interesting views are (as is to be expected) between these implausible extremes. Given that extreme objectivism is ruled out, then as I see it the interesting dispute is over the claim that positive subjective attitudes are necessary for well-being, and I will try to make clear below why I believe that claim should be rejected. 9 Sumner, op. cit., p. 30. 10 Ibid., p. 38. 11 Sumners strategy here is anticipated by David Brink (1987) in his Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 220 1, n. 6. 12 Sumner, op. cit., pp. 1656. 13 Ibid., p. 170. 14 Ibid., p. 171. 15 Ibid., p. 162. 16 Ibid., p. 30. 17 I thank Wayne Sumner for pressing this line of argument in discussion. 18 This concern is at work in Rosatis worries about alienation (Rosati, op. cit., pp. 302ff .). 19 Sumner, op. cit., p. 12. Strictly speaking, for Sumner descriptive adequacy involves four cardinal virtues for a theory of welfare: delity, generality, formality, and neutrality (ibid., p. 18). What I refer to as descriptive adequacy here pertains to the delity condition. 20 Similar accounts appear in the work of a number of modern theorists. See especially Brink (op. cit.,), Marcia Homiak (1981) Virtue and Self-Love in Aristotles Ethics, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11, and Nancy Sherman (1987) Aristotle on Friendship and the Shared Life, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47, and (1993) Aristotle on the Shared Life, in Badhwar (ed.) Friendship: A Philosophical Reader, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 21 Cf. NE IX: 1166a31, 1170b6, 1171b32; Eudemian Ethics VII.12: 1245a29; see also Magna Moralia 1213a12. 22 Both nous and phronesis are referred to in these passages, rather indiscriminately, but the context makes clear that it is nous understood generically as our capacity for agency that we value. 23 Aristotles term ergon is often translated as function, but it is perhaps better understood as picking out the idea of a characteristic way we go about doing what we do.

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See Anthony Kenny (1965) Aristotle on Happiness, in Barnes, Schoeld, and Sorabji (eds.) Articles on Aristotle, vol. 2, New York: St. Martins Press, p. 27. 24 The phrases quoted are John Rawls, from his explanation of the sense in which his theory of justice is constructivist. See Rawls (1999) Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory, in his Collected Papers, ed. S. Freeman, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 311, 353. 25 And, note, this is not merely a matter of effective means-end (instrumental) reasoning. 26 Christine Korsgaard (1996) Sources of Normativity, New York: Cambridge University Press; and (1998) Reply to Voeller and Cohon, delivered at the Central Division meeting of the APA. 27 Korsgaard, 1998, op. cit. 28 Ibid. 29 It must, for example, be nal or complete (teleion) good in itself and not merely instrumentally valuable and self-sufcient (autarkes) incapable of improvement by the addition of any other good. 30 Subjectivists often help themselves to this idea, without taking into account the theoretical context which justies Aristotle in doing so. For example, Sumner maintains that the only intelligible explanation for the fact that standard human goods will show up on most subjects lists of constituents of their welfare is that that is the kind of creatures we are (Sumner, op. cit., p. 181). So he is not impervious to considerations that bear on us as individuals in virtue of being of the kind we are. But he fails to recognize that these facts about us have deeper implications as to our welfare. 31 Kraut, R. (1979) Two Conceptions of Happiness, Philosophical Review 88, p. 190. This complaint is no longer representative of Krauts thought; he attacks subjectivism in his (2002) Aristotle: Political Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, esp. ch. 2. 32 Ibid., p. 191. 33 Ibid., pp. 1901. 34 Sumner, op. cit., pp. 157ff., and as suggested by Brink, op. cit., pp. 221, n.6. Much of the answer is provided by the distinction, but also at work are differences in interpretation of Aristotle (especially, of the role of reason in a good life). Kraut argues for the idea that Aristotles ideal human life is one of philosophical contemplation (op. cit., p. 191, and in his (1989) Aristotle on the Human Good, Princeton: Princeton University Press), a view Sumner accepts (op. cit., p. 70). I believe there are good reasons to reject this as an interpretation of Aristotle, though this is not the place to make that case. However, if Sumner is right in his reasons for rejecting theoretical inquiry as an account of the human good, we also have strong reasons from ethical theory for crediting Aristotle with a more practical conception of the role of reason in the human good. 35 Even Kraut acknowledges that when we wish future happiness for a baby, our wishes are not just that they be happy by their own subjective standards (Kraut, 1979, op. cit., pp. 1878). What we wish for them is much more like a good human life, in a sense which includes satisfying objective standards. Kraut claims that it would be silly to say that happiness has two different meanings: one when we wish children a happy life, and another when we assess the happiness of adults (1979, op. cit., p. 189). It is not so clear that this is silly, at least if we recognize that our judgments can be distinguished along the lines Sumner recommends. 36 Broadie Sarah (1991) Ethics with Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 198ff. 37 Ibid., p. 199. 38 Hursthouse, Rosalind (1999) On Virtue Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 137. 39 Sumner, op. cit., p. 71.
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Ibid., p. 72f. Ibid., p. 74. 42 Ibid., p. 212. 43 Ibid., p. 213. 44 Ibid., p. 78. 45 Ibid., p. 214. 46 Ibid., p. 209. 47 Ibid., pp. 71ff. 48 Cf. Everson, Stephen (1998) Companions to ancient thought: 4 Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 99ff. 49 On the idea of a characteristic form of human life, see Michael Thomson (1995) The Representation of Life, in Hursthouse, Lawrence, and Quinn (eds.) Virtues and Reasons, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 50 This paper beneted from a workshop sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies, to which I am deeply in debt, and from comments by respondents Richard Kraut and Wayne Sumner, as well as panelists Talbot Brewer, John Hasnas, Samuel Kerstein, and George Klosko. I have also beneted from comments from and discussion with Julia Annas, Bennett Helm, Scott Carson, Andrew Cohen, Scott Gravlee, Eric Mack, James Petrik, Doug Rasmussen, David Sobel, and James Summerford.

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