Abstract

When he claims that it is hard to be happy when “exceedingly ugly, basely born, or alone and childless,” Aristotle introduces a notorious puzzle about his theory of happiness: if happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with virtue, why should appearance, family, and social life affect it? In this paper, I propose an answer to this puzzle. Against Martha Nussbaum, T.H. Irwin, and John Cooper, who maintain that “external goods” like beauty, health, and wealth, are constitutive parts of Aristotelian happiness, I argue that the deprivation of such goods diminishes happiness only insofar as it prevent a person from being virtuous, and I suggest that deprivation often prevents a person from being virtuous not by making virtuous action impossible, but by corrupting a person’s attitudes and character.