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sat es beatus (Catull. 23.27)In the aggressively philosophical poem 23, Catullus attempts to change Furius’ mind about how he perceives his poverty, ‘advice’ which has been identified as either Stoic or Epicurean. Irrespective of the precise school of thought, it is clear that the poet ridicules Furius in eudaimonistic language. The poet of social commentary seeks to define the beatus uir. In fact, the term beatus has rich philosophical resonance and Catullus uses it in several other poems where attitudes to wealth form a significant backdrop to the poet's social posturing. Catullus was no philosopher. He employs the language and ideas of different schools, and, while his work does not reflect a coherent philosophical position, he was writing at a time when public discourse increasingly drew upon philosophical language and topoi. I will examine Catullus’ use of the term beatus in poems 9, 10, 22 and 23 to demonstrate that the poet draws a contrast between its different meanings across these pairs of adjacent poems. I will argue that Catullus contrasts the eudaimonistic and material meanings of the word to show the differences between clear-sighted wisdom and deceptive pleasures, between the good life and a life filled with goods.

American rights discourse makes it difficult to generate responsibilities for the well-being of the communities within which human personhood is formed. Gregory S. Alexander’sProperty and Human Flourishing(2018) focuses on the obligations that property owners owe to the communities in which they are embedded. Drawing on a communitarian ontology—as opposed to atomist ontology—and writing in the spirit of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and thinkers of the liberalism of flourishing, Alexander endorses human flourishing as the central ideal of the good life, and argues that ownership of property is justified insofar as it facilitates the opportunity of persons to live flourishing lives.

As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay focuses on the role of institutions as agents of peaceful change from a perspective that emphasizes the importance of a wide spectrum of human emotions to better understand the less quantifiable but nevertheless important conditions for being able to sustain initiatives for peaceful change. It aims to throw light on the often overlooked psychological and emotional hurdles standing in the way of agents’ ability to undertake and sustain action designed to lead to peaceful change. To do so, the essay returns to the pioneering work of Ernst Haas and his important concept of “spillover.” The essay shows that the neofunctional understanding of spillover was a theoretically important innovation, but that it was missing three essential elements: an understanding of the need for positive emotions and ontological security; an understanding of the link between values and identity; and a realization of the importance of a shared vision for the “good life.” To illustrate the problems with Haas's version of spillover, but also to highlight the significant potential of the theory, the essay turns to the crisis of the liberal international order as an example of a forum where the agency to undertake peaceful change seems to be faltering. The essay concludes that the ability of the liberal order to effect peaceful change is currently hampered because the order is characterized by negative emotions, contested values, and a vision of the good life that is seen as mainly a benefit for the cosmopolitan elite.

Some philosophers take the ascetic sage as a test case for the plausibility of theories of welfare. They maintain that attitudinal hedonism entails that the sage lives the good life, since he enjoys meditation, solitude, peace and quiet, and so on. Some of the longest-enduring traditions of asceticism, however, deny that the sage takes attitudinal pleasure in these kinds of things. A group of Upaniṣads aptly named the Saṃnyāsa, or Ascetic Upaniṣads, for example, explicitly states that the sage neither enjoys nor despairs in earthly states of affairs. The attitudinal hedonist might argue that the sage of the Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣads lives the good life nonetheless, since he takes immense and constant pleasure in the ātman– the eternal, immaterial self. The sage's immense and constant pleasure in the ātman, however, also commits the attitudinal hedonist to the stronger claim that the ascetic lives the best life possible. The sage's life seems less than optimal, however, because he enjoys only one thing to the exclusion of all other things.

The value of health states is often understood to depend on their impact on the goodness of people's lives. As such, prominent health states metrics are grounded in particular conceptions of wellbeing – e.g. hedonism or preference satisfaction. In this paper, I consider how liberals committed to the public justification requirement – the requirement that public officials choose laws and policies that are justifiable to their citizens – should evaluate health states. Since the public justification requirement prohibits public officials from appealing to controversial conceptions of the good life, liberals committed to this principle face a significant puzzle.

Suppose you hear that according to the so-called science of happiness, a particular activity or circumstance should lead to happiness. But, based on your own experience, your sense is that it doesn't lead to happiness for you. Which should you trust? Two friends, Alexis and Mitra, debate these and other questions.

We discuss workers’ dignity in hierarchical organizations. First, we explain why a conflict exists between high-ranking individuals’ authority and low-ranking individuals’ dignity. Then, we ask whether there is any justification that reconciles hierarchical authority with the dignity of workers. We advance a communitarian justification for hierarchical authority, drawing upon Confucianism, which provides that workers can justifiably accept hierarchical authority when it enables a certain type of social functioning critical for the good life of workers and other involved parties. The Confucian communitarian perspective shows that promoting workers’ good life or well-being is an important condition for protecting their dignity.

In this article I seek to show the importance of spirituality for a neo-Aristotelian account of ‘the good life’. First, I lay out my account of spirituality. Second, I discuss why the issue of the place of spirituality in the good life has often either been ignored or explicitly excluded from consideration by neo-Aristotelians. I suggest that a lot turns on how one understands the ‘ethical naturalism’ to which neo-Aristotelians are committed. Finally, I argue that through a deeper exploration of the evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life as ‘meaning-seeking animals’ we can come to better appreciate the importance of spirituality for human beings throughout recorded history up to the present and why we can be described ashomo religiosus.

Charles Taylor opens the essay “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” with the stark claim: “Foucault disconcerts.” Foucault disconcerts, on Taylor's reading, because he appears to repudiate both freedom and truth. Where other Western thinkers have sought to “[make] ordinary life the significant locus of the issues that distinguish the good life,” the Foucault of Discipline and Punish seems to refuse this Enlightenment valuation. After puzzling alongside Foucault, and the implications of his thought for freedom and truth, Taylor finally queries what drives Foucault to adopt a Nietzschean model of truth and argues to the contrary that we can trust in progressive change from one form of life to another because its politics intuitively derive from our personal discovery of “our sense of ourselves, our identity, of what we are.” These changes entail that “we have already become something. Questions of freedom can arise for us in the transformations we undergo or project.” For Taylor, the link between personal and political discovery is so tight, so intuitive, and such a clear barometer for progress and change, that the insistence on incommensurability, let alone its use to challenge Enlightenment values, simply is perverse. And so Taylor concludes his essay by asking of the late Foucault two questions: “Can we really step outside the identity developed in Western civilization to such a degree that we can repudiate all that comes to us from the Christian understanding of the will?” and “Is the resulting ‘aesthetic of existence’ all that admirable?”

The aim of this article is to offer a mitigated moral justification of a much maligned emotional trait,pity, in the Aristotelian sense of ‘pain at deserved bad fortune’. I lay out Aristotle’s taxonomic map of pity and its surrounding conceptual terrain and argue – by rehearsing modern accounts – that this map is not anachronistic with respect to contemporary conceptions. I then offer an ‘Aristotelian’ (albeit not Aristotle’s) moral justification of pity, not as a full virtue intrinsically related toeudaimoniabut as a positive moral quality that has instrumental value in developing and sustaining a certain intrinsically valuable state of character – namely compassion. The justification offered is mitigated in the sense that it does not elevate pity to a virtuous disposition, constitutive of the good life; yet it does offer a crucial counterweight to Aristotle’s own denunciation of pity.

This essay introduces and defends a new analysis of prudential value. According to this analysis, what it is for something to be good for you is for that thing to contribute to the appeal or desirability of being in your position. I argue that this proposal fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value and well-being; enables promising analyses of luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice and paternalism; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity and envy; and satisfies various other desiderata. I also highlight two ways in which the analysis is informative and can lead to progress in our substantive theorizing about the good life.

The central question of ethics is ‘How should I live?’. It covers not only actions (‘what should I do?’), but more broadly, our reactions and our characters, questions of what we should feel and how we should be as people. This has been the central concern of theories of virtue. Aristotle claimed that a virtue is a character trait that enables us to ‘stand well’ in relation to our desires and emotions. To be virtuous with regard to a type of emotion – anger, sadness, joy, fear, etc. – is to feel that type of emotion ‘at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Ch. 6, 1106b).

To what extent did scholars use science to pursue the good life in the seventeenth century? How to articulate the Scientific Revolution with ethical questions? These are the questions at the core of the investigation led by the historian of science Matthew Jones in his bookThe Good Life in the Scientific Revolution. At first glance, his project is simply an extension of research on the social history of truth that has encouraged historians for two decades to decipher the moral norms that gave credit to the use and production of scientific knowledge. Civility, politeness, honor led to specific research that highlighted the cultural and social context surrounding the practices of scientific innovation in the Classical Age. This book deepens these questions by asking how mathematical practices were considered moral reflections. This article will discuss the contribution of this book by first examining the three attempts at experimenting mathematical morals led by Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz. The article then shows how Matthew Jones successfully draws on the work of Pierre Hadot by considering mathematical exercises as spiritual exercises. In a third broader step, the article examines how the book exemplifies a return of the moral issue in Anglophone history of science in the last twenty years while the French classical epistemology has avoided this kind of questioning. The article argues that these approaches open up avenues of research for historians to better understand the relationship between science and passion, science and spirituality, and more largely science and religion in the early modern period.

Since Immanuel Kant, moral reasoning has been divorced from classical theology and reinscribed onto self-contained individuals. Shorn of theological particularities, modern ethics tries to identify behaviours to which every right-thinking person can assent. A basic premise of classical moral philosophy, however, was that if we know who we are and what ourtelosis, then we can have a good idea of how we ought to act. In his christology, Barth reappropriates this classical view of ethics and situates it christologically. Because Jesus’ human nature finds its being andtelosin his divinity, Barth found an ethical pattern in theanhypostasis-enhypostasisdoctrine. Restoring people to their proper place as creatures rather than Kantian demi-gods, Jesus shows us what it means to be truly human by being obedient to the Father. We cannot divinise individuals or the church, but the church existsenhypostatically. Thisanhypostatic-enhypostaticchristological pattern orders our activities, making worship the first task of ethics. In prayer and in Sabbath keeping, Jesus shows us his utter dependence on God through supplication and rest. In these acts of worship, Christians act as they were created to act. We respond obediently to our Creator. But we also find an orientation towards other people in christology. Love of enemies has everything to do with the content and shape of God's command. It is involved in thetelosof human life in being Christ-like.

One of Horace's best-known allegations inEpistles1 is that where in the world you are is neither here nor there, as long as you have peace of mind (animus aequus):caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.strenua nos exercet inertia; nauibus atquequadrigis petimus bene uiuere. quod petis, hie est,est Vlubris, animus si te non deficit aequus.(Hor.Ep. 1.11.27-30)Cross the sea, and you change your climate, not your mental state. Restless idleness drives us on. In ships and chariots we seek the good life. What you seek is here, it's even at Ulubrae—if your mind is only at peace with itself.This turns out to be one of the book's hugest lies. It makes all the difference how Horace and his correspondents are placed when he is writing to them: Rome is different from backwater Ulubrae, Baiae from Brundisium. InMorals and Villas in Seneca's Letters, John Henderson has attached similar importance to named locations in calibrating metaphorical distance between Seneca and the correspondent of hisEpistles, Lucilius. This paper aims to close a gap of two centuries between two of the most disparate figures in Latin literature: the same Seneca, that knotted-up recluse, and another Lucilius, the laughing cavalier satirist. The link: a journey made from Rome to Sicily, or, more precisely, the uses of the road to Sicily in epistolary-philosophical discourse (by way of Horace'sSatiresandEpistles). Lucilius'Iter Siculumand Seneca's mental journeys to Sicily in theEpistulae Moralesare related stages, I will argue, in the philosophical applications of travel writing.

Hillforts have always been central to interpretations of Iron Age society and Ian Armit's paper in this journal (2007) re-introduces the question of whether or not they represent ‘endemic warfare’. This response will critique claims for warfare in the Early and Middle Iron Age of Wessex and present an alternative view of hillforts and how they may have been used. It is argued that within dispersed small scale agricultural societies the communal building, maintenance, and use of hillforts can act to structure the sociality of people whose interests are in creating a harmonious existence. Within this view, hillforts act as metaphors for the managing of emotional relationships within groups of people as they go about their daily lives.

The title of George Egerton'sfirst collection of short stories,Keynotes(1893), announces a concern with the beginnings of sequences, the first principles from which larger patterns are orchestrated. The stories introduce premises from which new social and sexual relations may be engendered and individual existential choices made, a philosophical intent that harks back to the preoccupation in classical Greek thought with the nature of the Good Life and how to live it, which Friedrich Nietzsche renews for modern Western philosophy. Egerton's broad but nonetheless radical engagement with Nietzschean thought can be traced through the references she makes to the philosopher inKeynotes, which are widely credited with being the first in English literature. Indeed, such allusions are, as Iveta Jusová observes, “the most frequent literary reference[s] in Egerton's texts” (53). They were also recognised and mobilised against her by some of her earliest critics.

This article addresses an idea central to liberal debates on civic education: the spillover thesis. Both egalitarian liberals and their religious opponents in these debates claim that liberal civic education creates spillover effects into the way individuals assess the meaning of their own lives. Some religious citizens fear that their politically reasonable conceptions of the good life are being undermined by education that emphasizes the practice of autonomous reasoning. Egalitarian liberals usually acknowledge this risk or cost, but deny that religious citizens should be given special dispensation from the burdens of autonomous reasoning. Some may even hope that conservative religious beliefs will be eroded by the practice of liberal civic education. This article disputes the spillover thesis. Given the best evidence available from the field of cognitive psychology, we challenge the notion that critical personal reflection about public matters is bound to spillover into critical reflection about private moral matters. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that human beings are usually well equipped to compartmentalize and are capable of reasoning in different ways depending on the context. Thus, reasonable citizens of faith are not necessarily unduly burdened by programs of civic education; nor are liberal programs of civic education necessarily going to lead us to a more secular society of autonomous thinkers. The article also speaks to a broader civic humanist tradition in political philosophy that includes Plato, Tocqueville, Rousseau, and Marcus Aurelius. For these authors, the success of a political enterprise is seen to crucially depend on the inculcation of a robust and comprehensive system of private virtue. For without private virtue, there is no public virtue. If we are correctly interpreting the available psychological research, private virtue need not be as crucially relevant for the success of common political enterprises. The inculcation of private moral virtue does not so clearly translate into making good leaders, voters, and public servants.

In this paper I discuss Plato's conception of expertise as a part of the Platonic theory of a good, successful life (eudaimonia). In various Platonic dialogues, Socrates argues that the good life requires a certain kind of knowledge that guides all our good, beneficial actions: the “knowledge of the good and bad”, which is to be acquired by “questioning ourselves and examining our and others’ beliefs”. This knowledge encompasses the particular knowledge of how to recognize experts in a given technical domain. The central element in Socrates’ account of an expert is what I call the truth-and-caring criterion: an expert has to make seeking the truth and avoiding (avoidable) error her supreme epistemic goal and she has to make caring for common goods the supreme goal of practising her expertise.

This article looks at currently bestselling biographies in urban China as popular histories of the national self from 1949 to the present. In their retrospective narrations of the Cultural Revolution and economic reform, they identify a reorientation of life away from ideological community and towards market rationality. I locate this shift also in the history of the publishing industry that produces them and analyse how publishing practices and values have changed from Mao to Jiang, to argue that a reconstitution of the “good” has been effected by the deployment of old rhetorical goals under structurally new conditions. Extended into the broader political arena, this suggests that institutional continuity in contemporary China masks a reconstitution of governance itself, from direct intervention and political control to administrative regulation and commercial competitiveness. Communist revolutionary ambitions are now redefined and fulfilled through economic success in commercial enterprise. Contrary to the prevalent notion that such couplings are contradictory and unsustainable, I argue that a mutually generative relationship currently exists between the two.

ConsiderLives for Headaches: there is some number of headaches such that the relief of those headaches is sufficient to outweigh the good life of an innocent person.Lives for Headachesis unintuitive, but difficult to deny. The argument leading toLives for Headachesis valid, and appears to be constructed out of firmly entrenched premises. In this article, I advocate one way to rejectLives for Headaches; I defend a form of lexical superiority between values. Based on an inquiry into the notion of human well-being, I argue that no amount of headaches is sufficient to outweigh the disvalue of the loss of a good life. Though this view has been thought subject to devastating objections, these objections are not dispositive against the form of value superiority I advance here.

Constructivist political theory, championed most prominently by John Rawls, builds up a conception of justice from the minimal requirements of political life. It has two powerful attractions. It promises a kind of civic unity in the face of irresolvable differences about the good life. It also offers a foundation for human rights that is secure in the face of those same differences. The very parsimony that is its strength, however, deprives it of the resources to condemn some atrocities. Because it focuses on the political aspect of persons, it has difficulty cognizing violence done to those aspects of the person that are not political, preeminently the body. Constructivism thus can be only a part of an acceptable theory of justice.

From the heydays of HTA in the 1970s, it has been argued that ethics should be a part of HTA. Despite more than 30 years with repeated intentions, only few HTA reports include ethical analysis, and there is little agreement on methods for integrating ethics. This poses the question of why it is so important to integrate ethics in HTA? The article analyzes ten arguments for making ethics part of HTA. The validity of the arguments depend on what we mean by “integrating,” “ethics,” and “HTA.” Some of the counterarguments explain why it has taken so long to integrate ethics in HTA and why there are so many ethical approaches. Nevertheless, some of the arguments for making ethics part of HTA appear to be compelling. Health care is a moral endeavor, and the vast potential of technology poses complex moral challenges. A thorough assessment of technology would include reflection on these moral aspects. Ethics provides such a moral reflection. Health technology is a way to improve the life of human individuals. This involves questions of what “the good life” is, and hence ethical issues. Trying to ignore such questions may inflict with the moral foundation of health care: to help people. Additionally, HTA is anevaluation, and as such also a reflection on values. Hence, there is a profound affinity between HTA and ethics. Accordingly, ethics cannot be “integrated” in HTA as ethics is already a constitutive part of HTA. However, ethics can be acknowledged and emphasized.

It may be nearly impossible to use standard principles to make a decision about a complex ethical case. The best decision, say virtue ethicists in the Aristotelian tradition, is often one that is made by a person of good character who knows the salient facts of the case and can frame the situation appropriately. In this respect ethical decisions and strategic decisions are similar. Rationality plays a role in good ethical decision-making, but virtue ethicists emphasize the importance of intuitions and emotions as well.Virtue ethics suggests a reconciliation of the factual and the normative. Virtues may explain as well as justify actions. The same is true of other psychological states and events. That psychological terms have normative implications does not render them useless in explanation. As Aristotle does not distinguish cleanly between the normative and empirical, so many moral philosophers today reject the is-ought dichotomy. They are prepared to learn from economists, psychologists, and other empirical scientists who offer information about the nature of the good life and of values. Social psychologists who study community or corporate culture suggest a close relationship between organizational and ethical features, much as Aristotle saw a close relationship between politics and ethics. We should infer from all this that in business ethics there is good reason for philosophers and organization scholars to work closely together.

In these comments on Fred Feldman's Pleasure and the Good Life, I first challenge the dichotomy between sensory and attitudinal hedonisms as perhaps presenting a false dilemma. I suggest that there may be a form of hedonism that employs the concept of a ‘feel’ that is not purely sensory. Next, I raise some problems for several of the versions of hedonism explored in the book.

At the beginning of last year, Fortune Magazine announced its "100 Best Com panies to Work For 2006." Many of these companies wer exceptional in erms of the extras they made available to employees: healthcare, on-site childcare, work life balance, telecommuting, sabbaticals, and other unusual perks. But "[w]ork that really matters . . . [is] what makes Genentech the Best Company to Work For in 2006" (Morris 2006). Genentech, a biotech company based in San Francisco, uses "In Business for Life" as its motto. Two recent books?James O'Toole's Creat ing the Good Life: Applying Aristotle 's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness and Marvin Brown's Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership?take up questions about the relationship between our business or organizational lives and our development as moral agents and citizens. To make sense of this relationship, both books draw on the ancient Greek view of the good life and the good community. The authors' choice for intellectual guidance is particularly well suited to the task at hand. Philosophers such as Aristotle understand ethics in a way that does not allow us to separate what we owe ourselves from the communal good. We cannot make sense of individual identity apart from membership in political community, and this stricture applies even to individuals who organize with others in society for private gain. To be sure, O'Toole and Brown come to very different conclusions

Michael Oakeshott's concerns about political developments in twentieth-century Europe seem to shape his philosophical writings. Yet Oakeshott persistently portrays himself as a philosopher who has little practical interest in politics. This essay argues that Oakeshott's genteel conception of the good life leads him to develop a political doctrine for practical reasons while disclaiming any practical motives. His diagnosis of collectivist politics in the 1930s reluctantly solicits a philosophical defense of a pluralist political order that is hospitable to his ethical ideal. His writings concerning the self, society, and state develop such a defense. Yet for Oakeshott, political engagement is incompatible with gentility because it conflates worldliness with spirituality. Oakeshott, therefore, disavows the practical aspirations that shape his work.

Stephen Darwall's understanding of what kind of life is a good life, good for the person whose life it is, belongs in the same family as, among others, Scanlon's and mine. It is a family of views about well-being which descends from Aristotle, and Darwall has much of interest to say about the good life, and particularly about Aristotle's views on the subject. Many of the observations central to his position seem to me cogent, and are shared by other writers. These include three important propositions: that a good life, one which is good for those whose life it is, is not necessarily the same as a life which they think is good for them, nor does it necessarily consist in their desires being satisfied, nor in the satisfaction of any subset of their desires (e.g. their considered desires, or those not based on any false assumptions).that people aim or intend to do what is worth doing, to have relationships worth having, and engage in goals worth pursuing, and so on, and that all of these, and their combination, are distinct from having a good life (and this explains how people can knowingly sacrifice their own good), andthat what makes the well-being of people worth pursuing, to the extent that it is, what provides reasons for those same people and for others to protect or promote it, is that people are valuable in themselves.

Conventional wisdom among contemporary liberal egalitarians is that taxing individuals according to their “endowment” or “earnings capacity” would constitute an unacceptable intrusion on basic human liberties. In effect, the argument goes, such a scheme would result in a type of slavery - in order to pay the tax, people would be forced to accept jobs commensurate with their identified levels of endowment. The most succinct formulation of this argument comes from John Rawls, who argued that an endowment tax “would force the more able into those occupations in which earnings were high enough for them to pay off the tax; it would interfere with their liberty to conduct their life within the scope of the principles of justice…”This Article examines the Rawlsian objection to endowment taxes and considers whether it can be distinguished from the libertarian claim, advanced most famously by Robert Nozick, that taxation of earnings is unjust because it is “on a par with forced labor.” The Article’s principal claim is that unless one assigns greater moral value to non-market activities than to market activities (a position arguably in tension with the liberal principle of neutrality as between alternative visions of the good life), there is no difference in kind or in degree between the interference with liberty occasioned by the two types of taxes. It follows from this analysis that if one accepts Rawls’s argument regarding endowment taxes, one must also accept Nozick's argument regarding wage taxes. If correct, this conclusion presents the liberal egalitarian with a dilemma: she must either (1) embrace endowment taxes as a moral ideal, rejecting the liberty concerns expressed by Rawls and others, or (2) join Nozick in renouncing the ordinary taxation of earnings, a move that would substantially weaken her commitment to egalitarian outcomes.The purpose of the Article is not to offer any particular resolution of this dilemma, but rather to expose some of the tensions inherent in the liberal egalitarian framework and to suggest that consideration of these tensions is necessary to the development of a more satisfactory liberal egalitarian position on questions of taxation and distributive justice. Toward that end, an alternative framework is suggested for assessing the liberty cost of taxation. It is contended that all taxes-whether on income, consumption, wealth, endowment or other tax bases-interfere with individuals’ pursuit of the good life. For any given level of revenue to be raised through taxation, the recognition and protection of a liberty interest in one type of activity will simply increase the liberty costs associated with unprotected activities. The liberal instinct to shield non-market activity from taxation does not reduce the liberty cost of taxation, but rather shifts it to those whose conceptions of the good life involve the use of markets. This is not to suggest that a concern for personal autonomy should not inform our choice of tax institutions, but rather that the question may ultimately be one of distribution. That is, in fashioning a tax system, how best can we allocate the benefit of being free from taxation's inevitable interference with personal autonomy?

This paper relates Arendt's critique of a labor society to her thoughts on the “good life.” I begin with the claim that in the post-mass production era, Western societies, traditionally centered around gainful employment, encounter a decrease in the relevance of labor and can thus no longer rely on it as a resource for individual or social meaning. From Arendt's perspective, however, the current situation allows for the possibility of a transition from a society based on labor to a society centered around activities. I explore Arendt's different types of activities—labor, work, action—with respect to the question of justice between the genders.

Background: This study investigated which concepts regarding “the good life” are used in mission statements of nursing homes providing care for demented patients.Method: All 317 Dutch nursing homes caring for demented patients were asked to participate; of these, 69% responded. Their mission statements were qualitatively analyzed on content. Whether different types of nursing home differed significantly in the content of their mission statements was investigated by means of χ2 analyses.Results: Six main concepts were found that are considered important for a good life: 1) autonomy and freedom, 2) individuality and lifestyle, 3) relationships and social networks, 4) warmth and safety and familiarity, 5) developing capacities and giving meaning to life and 6) subjective experience and feelings of well-being. It was found that mission statements specifically developed for demented patients attach less importance to the concepts 1) autonomy and freedom and 2) individuality and lifestyle, than mission statements which are also aimed at non-demented residents. Most mission statements turned out to be highly eclectic in content.Conclusion: Nursing homes with a separate statement for demented residents seem to acknowledge the special position of demented residents and the tension between dementia and the ideal of autonomy. Although the eclecticism found in mission statements is understandable, a coherent view on the good life for demented residents should aim for a sound internal structure, and make choices between values. Only then can mission statements provide real guidance for everyday care.

Insurance shapes the pursuit of the good life. It defines the boundaries of the possible-allowing a young family to obtain a mortgage or a longstanding civic organization to host its annual festival because it has liability coverage. Workers' compensation schemes allow industry to function, and social insurance-at least in some Western countries-protects the least fortunate from the ravages of poverty. The manner in which risk, responsibility, and mutual obligation are understood by a polity shapes the institutions created to help those in need and the way members go about their day-to-day affairs under the legal regime. In their new edited volume, Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon have collected 11 essays that are linked by the common theme that the manner in which risk is constructed has profound implications for the politics of mutual assistance, from private insurance provision to workers' compensation programs and the social safety net. As the book's subtitle implies, the editors believe that the dominant understanding of risk has undergone a reconstruction over the past two decades. In short, we are moving from a society where risk is understood as something to be spread in order to avoid large losses, to one where it is to be embraced in order to enjoy large rewards. In an interesting twist, while individuals are being told to embrace more types of

American frozen foods were originally considered a luxury product; the industry did not develop a mass market until the late 1940s. Only a few years after achieving mass-market sales, however, frozen-food producers tried to segment the market in order to increase profits. This change was partly the result of internal factors, such as technological developments and interfirm competition. The new marketing strategy also hinged on industry executives' shifting conception of the ideal consumer. Frozen-food marketers of the early 1950s envisioned themselves as providing the good life at a low cost to “average” Americans. When profits slowed in the late 1950s, they designed a variety of new products for groups according to their race, age, and class.

Revelation and reason are pivotal in Strauss's project. Yet nearly three decades after his death, questions remain about the essential meaning of this core dimension of his project. Scholarship of recent years has tended to approach his project by situating its position in relation to revelation and reason—to one or the other or to both. Among those who hold Strauss in high regard and inclusive of his former students, those often called Straussians, the view is far from clear. Was Strauss's allegiance withreasonalone, that is, with Athens and classical political philosophy? Did his vocation as a political philosopher and his loyalty to the party of Athens preclude his being open torevelation, that is, open to the possibility that the Bible conveys truth regarding the good life? Or was he beyond a dogmatic attachment whether to reason or to revelation?

the destablization and fragmentation of the regime. In this article I argue two things: first, that autonomy ought to be understood, not as a neutral background assumption of liberal theory, but as a partially comprehensive conception of the good in its own right; secondly, that protecting and promoting autonomy need not lead either to illiberalism or to the destabilization and fragmentation of liberal democratic society. Many liberals acknowledge the importance of autonomy in their political and moral theories. Liberals, however, differ markedly in their understanding of this concept and about the role it should occupy in their theories. Rawls, for example, assumes that we have a higher order interest in autonomy, understood in part as the capacity 'to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of one's rational advantage or good'.1 Yet he is critical of the 'ethical' autonomy of Mill and Kant, as well as that of contemporary liberal theorists such as Joseph Raz.2 According to Rawls, the liberal state ought to be 'neutral' amongst rival conceptions of the good life. Rawls criticizes Mill, Kant and Raz because they treat autonomy as a substantive conception of the good, whereas he takes autonomy to be a non-controversial background cultural feature of liberal democratic societies. Given that liberal democratic societies are marked by a plurality of conceptions of the good, Rawls believes that a state that attempts to promote a conception of the good will have to resort to coercion in order to the destablization and fragmentation of the regime. In this article I argue two things: first, that autonomy ought to be understood, not as a neutral background assumption of liberal theory, but as a partially comprehensive conception of the good in its own right; secondly, that protecting and promoting autonomy need not lead either to illiberalism or to the destabilization and fragmentation of liberal democratic society. Many liberals acknowledge the importance of autonomy in their political and moral theories. Liberals, however, differ markedly in their understanding of this concept and about the role it should occupy in their theories. Rawls, for example, assumes that we have a higher order interest in autonomy, understood in part as the capacity 'to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of one's rational advantage or good'.1 Yet he is critical of the 'ethical' autonomy of Mill and Kant, as well as that of contemporary liberal theorists such as Joseph Raz.2 According to Rawls, the liberal state ought to be 'neutral' amongst rival conceptions of the good life. Rawls criticizes Mill, Kant and Raz because they treat autonomy as a substantive conception of the good, whereas he takes autonomy to be a non-controversial background cultural feature of liberal democratic societies. Given that liberal democratic societies are marked by a plurality of conceptions of the good, Rawls believes that a state that attempts to promote a conception of the good will have to resort to coercion in order to the destablization and fragmentation of the regime. In this article I argue two things: first, that autonomy ought to be understood, not as a neutral background assumption of liberal theory, but as a partially comprehensive conception of the good in its own right; secondly, that protecting and promoting autonomy need not lead either to illiberalism or to the destabilization and fragmentation of liberal democratic society. Many liberals acknowledge the importance of autonomy in their political and moral theories. Liberals, however, differ markedly in their understanding of this concept and about the role it should occupy in their theories. Rawls, for example, assumes that we have a higher order interest in autonomy, understood in part as the capacity 'to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of one's rational advantage or good'.1 Yet he is critical of the 'ethical' autonomy of Mill and Kant, as well as that of contemporary liberal theorists such as Joseph Raz.2 According to Rawls, the liberal state ought to be 'neutral' amongst rival conceptions of the good life. Rawls criticizes Mill, Kant and Raz because they treat autonomy as a substantive conception of the good, whereas he takes autonomy to be a non-controversial background cultural feature of liberal democratic societies. Given that liberal democratic societies are marked by a plurality of conceptions of the good, Rawls believes that a state that attempts to promote a conception of the good will have to resort to coercion in order to the destablization and fragmentation of the regime. In this article I argue two things: first, that autonomy ought to be understood, not as a neutral background assumption of liberal theory, but as a partially comprehensive conception of the good in its own right; secondly, that protecting and promoting autonomy need not lead either to illiberalism or to the destabilization and fragmentation of liberal democratic society. Many liberals acknowledge the importance of autonomy in their political and moral theories. Liberals, however, differ markedly in their understanding of this concept and about the role it should occupy in their theories. Rawls, for example, assumes that we have a higher order interest in autonomy, understood in part as the capacity 'to form, to revise, and rationally to pursue a conception of one's rational advantage or good'.1 Yet he is critical of the 'ethical' autonomy of Mill and Kant, as well as that of contemporary liberal theorists such as Joseph Raz.2 According to Rawls, the liberal state ought to be 'neutral' amongst rival conceptions of the good life. Rawls criticizes Mill, Kant and Raz because they treat autonomy as a substantive conception of the good, whereas he takes autonomy to be a non-controversial background cultural feature of liberal democratic societies. Given that liberal democratic societies are marked by a plurality of conceptions of the good, Rawls believes that a state that attempts to promote a conception of the good will have to resort to coercion in order to

Business ethicists have increasingly used Aristotelian “virtue ethics” to analyze the actions of business people and to explore the question of what the standard of ethical behavior is. These analyses have raised many important issues and opened up new avenues for research. But the time has come to examine in some detail possible limitations or weaknesses in virtue ethics. This paper argues that Aristotelian virtue ethics is subject to many objections because the psychology implicit within the ethic is not well-suited for analyzing some problematic forms of behavior. Part One offers a brief overview of the firm and of the good life from a virtue ethics perspective. Part Two develops a number of criticisms of this perspective.

By the summer of 1929, Norman Rockwell was a full-fledged success. At age thirty-five, he had been creating covers for the Saturday Evening Post for thirteen years. A generation of American youth had grown up beguiled by his illustrations for Boys' Life, St. Nicholas, and the Boy Scouts' calendar. For more than a decade, Rockwell's artistry had helped sell Adams Black Jack gum, American Mutual insurance, Sun Maid raisins, and Coca-Cola. As this commercial success modulated into social success, Rockwell, whose father had risen to middle-class respectability in the offices of a New York City textile firm, found himself living the good life in the artists' colony of suburban New Rochelle. The drab apartments and boardinghouses of his youth and adolescence had been left behind. He joined the Larchmont Yacht Club, golfed in clothes from Brooks Brothers, and hosted elaborate parties worthy of Jay Gatsby.