This chapter explores several fundamental features of ancient Greek and Roman ethics and considers some ways in which these features are still influential in contemporary education. Ancient ethics was generally undergirded by a substantive cosmology and related philosophical anthropology; ancient thinkers often affirmed the existence of some sort of objective logos that served as the ordering principle of the cosmos and in accordance with which human beings ought to order their lives. This two-fold commitment resulted in a focus on cultivating virtue. The chapter also discusses three educational arenas in which commitment to features of ancient ethics is manifested today: arguments for “flourishing” as an aim of education, “character education” initiatives, and the contemporary K-12 “classical education” movement.

This chapter concerns the pursuit of aretē among the sophists. It argues that such pursuit did not mean what it came to mean to Plato and his heirs. For the latter, the goal of human life, called eudaimonia, is personal flourishing; and aretē is used to refer to some highly valued psychological condition crucial to achieving eudaimonia. The sophists use aretē to refer to a psychological condition once. Predominantly, they use aretē to refer to a life of civic success, conceived as success in public affairs, saliently involving the agent’s making significant positive contributions to his fellow citizens and polis. As such, sophistic ethics tends to be civic ethics. Granted this, there is limited evidence of anti-civic ethics among the Sophists. Given traditional views of the Sophists, the locus of this evidence is ironic. It consists of attributions to the Socratic Aristippus and content in the Athenian Antiphon’s On Truth.

Wellbeing is mainly studied by asking people questions. The most common question is about life-satisfaction and replies satisfy standard tests of reliability and validity. Using the Gallup World Poll, the World Happiness Report finds that on a scale of 0–10, 1 in 6 of the world’s population score 3 of below and 1 in 6 score 8 or above – a huge inequality in the quality of life. Another approach is to measure how people feel from moment to moment – their ‘affect’. This can be done by bleeping people in real time or asking retrospective questions about yesterday. This approach is best for measuring the effects of short-term experiences, but less so for measuring a person’s underlying wellbeing. The book rejects the third so-called ‘eudaimonic’ measure of wellbeing, on the grounds that virtue is the means to an end (and not the end itself).

People’s wellbeing is experienced by how far their needs are satisfied. This depends on what they bring to the table (their behaviour, their thoughts, and their genes) and by the social environment in which they live. This determines the structure of Parts II and III of the book. Part IV deals with the role of government.

We make the case in this chapter that work-life balance is an important topic because research has shown that work-life balance influences a host of organizational outcomes (e.g., organizational identification, loyalty, and commitment; turnover, job performance, employee morale, and organizational citizenship) and personal outcomes (employee stress, employee burnout, employee wellbeing, satisfaction with life overall, personal happiness, eudaimonia, satisfaction with family life, satisfaction with social life, satisfaction with leisure life, satisfaction with spiritual life, satisfaction with financial life, etc.).

Prudence is the ability to determine the right course of action for a given situation. The virtue is fundamentally concerned with what we should do to achieve a desired objective, rather than what we should believe. Prudence is also a translation of Aristotle’s concept of phronesis (practical reason), which the Nicomachean Ethics defines as an “excellence of deliberation” (VI.9.9). In his formulation, Aristotle emphasizes the rightness of the ends being pursued, unlike several premodern and modern theories focusing only on the ability to attain desired ends, and which develop a somewhat uneasy relationship between prudence and virtue. Shakespeare makes the ethical challenges of prudence integral to The Merchant of Venice, a play featuring many deliberations over the means to such ends as happiness, wealth, friendship, and love. Throughout the play, Shakespeare takes a largely Aristotelian approach to prudence: characters who “hazard all” to gain noble ends are depicted as the most prudent, while the “shrewd,” who deliberate well but for immoral objectives, inevitably fail. Still, Shakespeare adds a final constraint to the virtue, suggesting that prudence is not a static trait but a dynamic effort to uncover one’s blind spots – and thus a virtue that few can hope to master.

If Aristotle understood virtue (aretē) to refer to the realization of a potential capacity or telos, then how might we understand the world to reach its virtuous potential? What might it mean to view our own global present as not an apex but as a passing stage within a broader process of worlding? Understanding the world as a live entity that perpetually worlds its way into new actualizations -- manifesting the dynamic capacities, potential, and striving of “virtue” -- this chapter turns to Shakespeare as a source for alternative models of world that awaken us to its inherent potentiality. For example, in As You Like It, the condition of exile unlocks a paradigm of seeing otherwise -- and often optimistically -- that runs throughout the play, enabling characters to form new bonds that serve as the basis for individual and communal flourishing. I examine the extent to which the play’s new community of relationships makes a place for nonhuman animals as well as for the pessimism and self-exile of Jaques. Such models enable us to not only see around and beyond the realities of our globalized world but also to perceive alternative formulations of world as already present and alive in the world we live in.

Meaning in life has recently grown into an important study domain within psychology, with accumulating evidence pointing to the experience of meaning as an important aspect of human functioning and a psychological strength in challenging times. It may therefore be a prime candidate for supporting the functioning of adults with dementia, but there is room for improvement in the integration of meaning in life into dementia research and practice. To facilitate progress in this area, the current chapter provides a broad introduction on meaning in life and dementia. We first discuss the state-of-the-art in meaning in life research - its conceptualization and important correlates. Next we discuss the available empirical work on the experience of meaning for people with dementia. This is followed by a reflection on how meaning in life can be understood in terms of a felt sense and a relational construction, demonstrating our societal responsibility in supporting a meaningful life for people with dementia. We end with some suggestions on how we may seek to do this.

In this autoethnographic essay, the author – a drummer – describes how he derives meaning from playing the drum kit. He presents accounts of playing drums both alone and in the context of an original rock band. Drawing from existing scholarship on aesthetic experience and meaning in music making, the author argues that while he plays drums often in a state of flow, it may be unhelpful to construe this – as others have done – as music making for its own sake. Rather than positioning his drumming as autotelic or intrinsically worthwhile, the author explains how he plays for the fulfilment derived therefrom, as part of a life lived in search of eudaimonia – flourishing both individually and as part of a community. Drumming in these contexts is, the author argues, a locus of spirituality, understood through the lenses of embodiment, authenticity, and personal agency as a form of success. Playing drums – for this drummer – provides a connection to, and a window into, his soul.

The chapter seeks to demonstrate that Shakespeare had two rather different – though not completely unrelated – conceptions of happiness. One is the Aristotelian eudaimonistic conception, which Shakespeare understood well and to which (as with everything he touched) he gave memorable expression. He understood its relation to virtue, to ‘proper pride’, and to social status. The other conception of happiness is more distinctive, and is a conception for which, as far as I know, there is not a standard designation. It might be called (usefully, if anachronistically) the Blakean or Nietzschean conception. Yeats called it the property of being ‘self-delighting’. Eudaimonia includes this property, but in itself this property has nothing to do with any conception of moral virtue, and can – though it need not – stand in sharp contrast with such. It may, on the other hand, have some relation to Machiavellian virtù. Pleasure in performing the self is part of it. It is as strongly manifested in some outright villains as it is in some admirable characters, and it is manifested in some characters who are hard to locate on such a scale.