Abstract

This paper addresses a complaint, by Prichard, against Plato and other ancients. The charge is that they commit a mistake is in thinking that we are capable of giving reasons for the requirements of duty, rather than directly and immediately apprehending those requirements. I respond in two ways. First, Plato does not make the egregious mistake of substituting interest for duty, and thus giving the wrong kind of reason for duty’s requirements, as Prichard alleges. Second, we should see that the ancient ethical enterprise as being comprehensive in a sense Prichard simply ignores. The ancients sought what we now call wide reflective equilibrium in judgments about both duty and interest, and to see this I focus on a puzzle in how to understand much of ancient moral philosophizing. This puzzle is to make sense of the work that formal constraints on happiness do to support their preferred views of happiness (or interest). This way of engaging not only our thoughts about duty and interest, but about what it is to be human and to lead a human life, make the ancient model far more satisfying than Prichard’s recommendation that we give it all up as a mistake.