Mark LeBar

Various theorists have offered accounts of how a virtue ethical theory might inform a political theory — here meaning a theory of political legitimacy and authority. These theories claim to support a liberal regimen of authority, and they do, but only to a limited extent. -/- What they cannot support is a justificatory liberal authority structure. Each of the accounts given would authorize coercive force to impose on holders of other theories decisions counter to the values endorsed by those other theories. -/- This is, or should be, a problem for those theories, especially the neo-Aristotelian theories which give pride of place to the exercise of practical rationality and self-direction. They would seem to run afoul of Hursthouse’s Constraint, which requires that a political theory not require vicious action of agents. In authorizing or requiring coercive intervention to advance one’s own conception of the good, at the expense of the authority of those subject to the coercion to advance their own conception of the good, these theories authorize or require vicious action. -/- Defenders of these accounts might meet this challenge in various ways. They might deny that virtue requires justifying coercive action as justificatory liberalism requires. But their focus on self-direction, and the plausibility of the requirement of mutual recognition make this response unattractive. -/- A better way is to augment the theories with a virtue which consists in standing in a relationship of mutual recognition and treating others accordingly. Such a virtue ethic is congruent with the requirements of justificatory liberalism

The project of this paper is to address a complaint, by Prichard, against Plato and other ancients, as committing a basic “mistake” in moral philosophy. The basic mistake is in thinking that we are capable of giving reasons for the requirements of duty, rather than directly and immediately apprehending those requirements. Prichard’s argument that this is a mistake consists in an argument that attempts to give reasons for such requirements always fail. He classes those attempts into two kinds, and one of those kinds is exemplified by Plato. (I leave aside here the second kind.) My response is to show two things. First, Plato does not make the egregious mistake of substituting interest for duty, and thus giving the wrong kind of reason for duty’s requirements, as Prichard alleges. This allegation assumes, first, that they duty and interest are entirely distinct notions, and, second, that we have a clear and accurate sense of the contents and bounds of each. Neither of these assumptions is accepted by Plato, and appreciating what their denial involves is essential to grasping the enterprise of moral philosophy as the ancients practiced it. Second, we should see that enterprise as being comprehensive in a sense Prichard simply ignores. They are seeking what we now call wide reflective equilibrium in judgments about both duty and interest, and to see this I focus on a puzzle in how to understand much of ancient moral philosophizing. This puzzle is how to make sense of the work the ancients see formal constraints on happiness as supporting their preferred views of happiness (or interest). I claim that they way they do so is a mess on any picture other than one of a search for wide reflective equilibrium, and this way of engaging not only our thoughts about duty and interest, but what it is to be human, and to lead a human life, make the ancient model far more satisfying than Prichard’s recommendation that we give it all up as a mistake.

Kant claims that autonomy is possible only if the law that determines the will disregards any incentive grounded in the natural world. Here I develop and defend an alternative notion of autonomy, drawn from the ancient eudaimonists, on which practical reason is grounded in our interest in living well. This allows eudaimonism a conception of the autonomy of the will in which (like Kant’s) the will is the source of its own laws, but in which (unlike Kant’s) it has an object that is thoroughly situated in the empirical world.

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

Kant’s moral theory is sometimes thought to mandate public welfare provision on grounds of beneficence or Kant’s commitment to freedom. However, at no point does Kant argue for welfare in these ways. Instead, the rationale he offers is that public welfare provision is instrumentally necessary for the security and the stability of the state. I argue that this is no oversight on Kant’s part. I consider plausible alternative arguments for public welfare provision, and show why Kant does not espouse them. I conclude that the only viable Kantian justification for welfare is just the one Kant gives.