The Admirable Life and the Desirable Life

Abstract

Recently virtue ethicists have given a lot of attention to the connection between two senses of a good life: the moral sense and the sense of a happy or flourishing life. Socrates insisted that a virtuous life is both necessary and sufficient for happiness, a claim that is as hard for us to accept as it was for the jury in Socrates’ trial. Still, many moral philosophers continue to exercise their ingenuity in arguing that the moral life is at least necessary for the happy life, even if not sufficient, but even this weaker claim is unconvincing to many. It seems to me that whenever someone makes a claim that stretches credibility and it continues to influence countless reflective persons for millennia, it is worth examining the motives behind it.