The introduction explains the nature of the study, its motivation, its basic structure, and its organization. It draws special attention to the way the book offers a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s account of individual happiness that is remarkably interesting philosophically. It also emphasizes the roles of individual happiness, common happiness, and Holistic Eudaimonism in Aquinas’s efforts to produce a unified ethical system in which law, virtue, and grace also have an important place.

Because the full reconstruction emerges piecemeal over the course of the study, this chapter starts by summarizing the most fundamental ways in which Aquinas connects the big-picture elements of his ethics through his understanding of happiness, both individual and common. The chapter then offers reasons for thinking that Aquinas’s ethics of happiness is still worth taking seriously today. In particular, it focuses on three illustrative aspects that make Aquinas’s ethical views distinctive and appealing. The first is Aquinas’s account of the nature of happiness and how that account fits into his broader understanding of well-being. The second is Aquinas’s account of the relationship between the right and the good. The third is Aquinas’s account of the most comprehensive role that virtue plays in ethics and human life.

This chapter explains the many ways in which individual happiness and common happiness are related to Aquinas’s account of virtue. It begins by arguing that virtue is strictly necessary in order for an individual to be happy, but still virtue is not a constitutive part of that happiness. Rather, it is strictly necessary because virtue alone enables the individual to engage in and enjoy genuinely good activities. The chapter then argues that, still, according to Aquinas, virtue is more deeply related to common happiness than individual happiness inasmuch as a character trait is a virtue of character fundamentally because it enables a person to play their part in realizing the common happiness of their community, not their own individual happiness. The chapter thereby establishes the third element of Aquinas’s Holistic Eudaimonism. The remainder of the chapter shows how the master virtues of general justice and charity as well as a whole host of other particular virtues concern aiming at and securing common happiness for the community.

How are virtues constituted psychologically? The virtues of caring or substantive virtues are dispositional concerns for the good in its various aspects: the well-being of people and other animals, the avoidance or relief of their suffering, the reconciliation of enemies, knowledge and truth, justice, proper formation of sensual desire and pleasure, and one’s duties. Generosity, compassion, forgivingness, justice, and the sense of duty are examples of virtues constituted by such caring. Because the caring is virtuous only if directed to real goods, the concerns need to be shaped by correct thought (understanding). The virtues of caring divide into direct (for example, generosity) and indirect (for example, justice). Another class of virtues – the enkratic – are powers, abilities, or skills of self-management. These, too, require understanding – of self and how to manage it in the various situations and influences of life. Examples are self-control, courage, patience, and perseverance.

This chapter asks where Kant stands on one of the most famous contentions of ancient ethics: the so-called Unity of the Virtues, the claim that a person who has one of the virtues must have all of them. The twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics was partly prompted by explorations of this proposal – its centrality to ancient theories and its presumed implausibility for philosophers today. Kant announces that he rejects three ancient premises about virtue, the first of which is “there is only one virtue and one vice”. The chapter argues that he thereby rejects the Unity of the Virtues, as the Stoics conceive of it. For Kant, virtue-singular is prior to virtues-plural, but it is not one. The virtues-plural are not parts of virtue; the latter is not a whole in the way the Stoics take it to be. Nevertheless, Kant shares more with the ancients than with twentieth-century philosophers writing on the topic. He endorses the premise that virtue-singular is prior to the virtues-plural.

The Stoics have sometimes been credited with concern for appropriately moral motivation, based on their distinction between those actions they classify as appropriate (kathēkonta) and those they characterize, in addition, as done on the basis of virtue (katorthōmata). This chapter argues that the Kantian and Stoic views closely resemble one another in this respect: just as Kant’s motive of duty requires a singular interest in the rightness of dutiful action, so the Stoics suppose that virtue and actions that originate in virtue are the only objects of fully rational desire. Both theories recognize, as well, that many of our cognitions are not transparent to ourselves, so that we are often unaware of our own motives. This recognition speaks to the depth and complexity of Stoic intellectualist psychology and underlies Kant’s claim that the effort to understand our own moral condition is a “wide” duty of virtue.

This chapter argues against a dominant reading of the Stoics according to which all appropriate actions (kathēkonta), whether drinking when thirsty or standing firm at a critical juncture in battle, count equally as “duties” (officia). All scholars interpret the Stoic Sage’s perfection to imply that absolutely every token action of the Sage counts as a (morally) perfect action (katorthōma), with the result that there is no category of actions constituted by the morally permissible. Appreciating the significance of the misunderstood Stoic category of “intermediate appropriate actions,” however, makes clear that there are actions that follow nature, but that are simply concerned with pursuing “promoted indifferents.” Thus, it is argued that the Stoic position recognizes a class of permissible actions – even for the Sage, whose perfection consists rather in never acting contrary to virtue. The Stoics are thus much closer to Kant and their Socratic heritage than has been previously recognized.

Kant repeatedly describes the moral theory and practice of the Stoics as “sublime,” indeed as eliciting “the most sublime sentiments that have ever existed.” This is often understood as an expression of approval, since what is sublime is said to arouse our admiration. I argue, however, that the description is not a generic expression of approval, but a specific description of Stoic moral theories and their peculiar appeal. For however much we admire the thoughts and actions Kant calls “sublime,” our attraction to them is always accompanied with repulsion. To be sure, attraction and repulsion both belong to Kant’s representation of moral duty, which elevates us as it humiliates our self-conceit. Its very name he calls “sublime.” Yet in the end, moral goodness is not so much sublime as beautiful. In coming to appreciate this, we may deepen our appreciation of Kant’s interpretation of the Stoics, and his distance from them.

Kant presents his conception of the highest good as steering a path between Epicureanism and Stoicism. However, in spite of his differences with Stoicism, namely, his rejection of the ideal of the sage as unattainable for human beings and his insistence upon a conception of freedom of the will that is absent from the ancient doctrine, Kant’s position, especially in the 1790s, ends up being closer to original Stoicism than he recognizes, or at least lets on. Contrary to Kant’s interpretation, the Stoics did not reduce happiness to consciousness of one’s virtue, but allow for the pursuit of happiness as ordinarily conceived within the limits of nature – and so does Kant. Yet Kant’s later conception of the highest good as happiness to be realized in the natural history of the human species, thus in nature, is close to the Stoic doctrine. And, contrary now to some commentators, while Kant still thinks that the possibility of the highest good on this conception needs a theistic underpinning, this is definitely not a specifically Christian position, because it involves no salvific role for Christ.

This chapter considers the presentation of virtue and happiness in the Meditations and asks how far this matches the distinctive features of Stoic thinking on these topics. The main topics considered are (1) the virtue–indifferents distinction, (2) the presentation of the virtues as forming groups or as unified in some way, (3) the virtue-happiness relationship and the idea of happiness as ‘the life according to nature’, meaning according to human or universal nature (or both). Overall, it is suggested that, although Marcus’s focus in the work is on the contribution of these ideas to his overall project of ethical self-improvement, his presentation largely reflects the ideas and connections between them that we find in the standard ancient accounts of Stoic ethics.

What does Heidegger mean by “curiosity” and why does he characterize it as a kind of epistemic vice, when most contemporary accounts view it as a virtue? Being and Time disparagingly notes that curiosity “concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known” (BT 217/172); the curious person busies herself with “entertaining ‘incidentals’” (BT 358/310). Building on previous work – wherein I argue that virtues are best understood as tendencies to cope well with existential obstacles to flourishing (McMullin 2019) – I show that curiosity as Heidegger frames it is an epistemically vicious misunderstanding of self and world arising in large part from our tendencies toward impatience, arrogance, and fear. Because Heidegger’s account of curiosity in Being and Time is not well-developed, we will look at nearby texts to get a better understanding of this sometimes-overlooked concept in Heidegger’s corpus.

Perhaps the most pressing threat to agonistic democracy, indeed to any form of participatory democracy, in contemporary life is neoliberalism. I conclude the book, then, by considering how neoliberalism undermines the material conditions, citizen capacities, and forms of life necessary to practice radical democracy, and then imagine how local experiments in grassroots democracy can contest neoliberalism and renew the civic life of persons and communities. One such example is participatory budgeting initiatives, wherein portions of municipalities’ public funds are made subject to the deliberation, determinations, and authority of citizen assemblies. I analyze one particular instantiation of this democratic practice in Cascais, Portugal, showing how it has served to re-engage ordinary persons in the democratic system, develop their capacities for self-governance, and make constructive use of conflict-negotiation for democratic ends. I conclude by suggesting that grassroots democratic practices like these provide contexts in which citizens can cultivate the kinds of democratic virtues necessary for sustaining an agonistic politics.

Pleasure was a problem for members of the Roman elite – or so moralists felt. In his treatise on the good life, Seneca stresses the insidious threat posed by the attractions of sensual pleasure, while asserting that only the subhuman will want to surrender themselves completely ... Seneca’s language presents pleasure as fluid, both engulfing and invading its hapless victims. His insistence on its seductive dangers could be read as betraying a certain fascination with pleasure.

This chapter of the handbook proposes a developmental ethics, an organic moral theory grounded in (1) humanity’s deep evolutionary history, (2) the malleability of the child’s neurobiological structures that undergird moral functioning, and (3) the influence of cultural practices on neurobiological development. The chapter addresses the following questions: What kind of creature are we? What qualities do we need to live a full life? What kinds of capacities make each a proper member of the species? What influences our development? Answers center around perhaps the most critical influence on human development, our species’ evolved nest. In humanity’s ancestral context, nestedness is a lifelong experience with particular import in early life. Moral virtue emerges from holistically coordinated physiological, psychological, spiritual systems oriented toward holistic communal harmony, social attunement, receptivity, and interpersonal flexibility. Understanding how the evolved nest scaffolds biopsychosocial and moral development reveals why antisocial behavior is so pervasive in modern Western culture – and it provides a baseline for redesigning society to promote prosociality.

Chapter 3 shifts to the period in which the constitutional debates following the revolution of 1688 gave way to a long period of greater political stability. The Tories were ousted with the coming of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714, after which the Whigs settled into power under the leadership of Robert Walpole. The chapter first shows how the Whig oligarchy was opposed by a new generation of ‘commonwealthmen’, notably Trenchard and Gordon, and by a more conservative opposition led by Bolingbroke, who appropriated many ‘commonwealth’ themes. Next the chapter surveys the success of the Whigs in countering these opponents and cementing themselves in power. After their triumph over the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 the Whigs presided over an outpouring of patriotic sentiment. They were congratulated for repudiating arbitrary power, granting the people a voice in making the laws and guaranteeing their basic rights, and thereby ensuring that Britian was genuinely a free state.