Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics

Abstract Eudaimonia is a term introduced to modern virtue ethics to mark out the idea of human flourishing or happiness in life, as opposed to hedonist and other accounts of happiness as an emotion or experience. Versions of virtue ethics that are eudaimonist typically explain virtue first and eudaimonia as its aim, or eudaimonia first and virtue as productive of it. This approach leads to interpretations of virtue as instrumental to eudaimonia, in ways that clearly fail to do justice to virtue. This chapter introduces eudaimonia and virtue in a way that shows how different accounts of virtue relate to appropriately different accounts of eudaimonia, and vice versa. It then shows that this account has resources to show what is wrong with objections that eudaimonist virtue ethics cannot account properly for right action, or for the force of morality.