Paul Bloomfield's recent book, The Virtues of Happiness: A Theory of the Good Life, is a new attempt at an ancient project – what Bloomfield and others call the ‘Holy Grail of moral philosophy’ – namely, that of articulating a definitive response to the challenge of immoralism and egoism, a response that demonstrates why living immorally is not just irrational but actually prevents one from living a truly happy and fulfilling life. Bloomfield's claim is that ethical virtue is necessary for, and partly constitutive of, happiness, rightly understood not as mere subjective pleasure or judgments of satisfaction, but as eudaimonia: a genuinely choiceworthy life that is good for the one who lives it (the ‘Good Life’). This, he stresses, is not as strong as the Stoic thesis that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for the Good Life, full stop, since tragic circumstances, not to mention torture-racks, may prevent a virtuous agent from truly living happily. Nonetheless, living virtuously, argues Bloomfield, will make an agent as happy as it is possible for her to be, given her circumstances and the vicissitudes of human frailty and fortune, while living immorally in the name of furthering one's own private interests, on the other hand, is ultimately self-defeating.

The basic idea is that genuine happiness (qua the Good Life) requires properly appreciating and respecting the inherent value of important things in one's life, including, especially, the value of oneself and other human beings, as opposed to delusively exaggerating or depreciating them, and only someone with well-developed ethical virtues and practical wisdom can do this. Bloomfield makes this case over the course of three long chapters, the first two focusing on the negative case (immorality harms its perpetrator) and the third focusing on the positive (virtue benefits its possessor). I will concentrate on two central elements of Bloomfield's account. The first is his admirable and unconventional framing of the ancient problem itself. The second is Bloomfield's (to my mind) less successful justification of morality to the egoist and immoralist.

Bloomfield starts with what he calls ‘The Question’ (essentially what Bernard Williams calls ‘Socrates’ Question’): ‘How ought I to live?’ This question, as posed by the Greeks and by Bloomfield (and Williams), is not restricted to asking, ‘How ought I to live, morally speaking?’ Rather, The Question is simply the highest-order, all-things-considered question of practical reasoning that agents face in deciding how to act and shape their lives, and is thus open to all kinds of potential considerations or reasons that could be brought to bear in successfully answering it. Bloomfield finds much of moral philosophy fixated by two kinds of answer to The Question. First, ‘moralists’ claim that morality – construed as a system of impersonal reasons and other-regarding requirements restricting the pursuit of private interest (i.e. morality as ‘what we owe each other’) – has the highest normative authority in an individual's practical thought and thus should always override claims of self-interest. Second, ‘immoralists’ or ‘egoists’ (Bloomfield mentions Thrasymachus and Hume's Sensible Knave) claim that considerations of self-interest (personal-interest, prudence, etc.) should have the highest authority in an individual's practical thought such that, wherever moral norms conflict with one's self-interest, one should give up on morality in the name of efficient promotion of self-interest, assuming one can get away with it.

Bloomfield rightly notes that both the moralist and the egoist share a fundamental – and disputable – presupposition, one that's so widespread and embedded in modern moral thinking that it often gets overlooked entirely: the idea that morality and self-interest/prudence are two essentially distinct norms of conduct, and two essentially distinct forms of value, goodness or rational consideration in our deliberations about what to do and how to live. On this view, which Henry Sidgwick dubs the ‘fundamental dualism of practical reason’, moral goodness is one kind of value/goodness/reason (likewise, one aim or species of practical thinking) that's basically social and impersonal in nature, and prudential goodness is another, conceptually distinct kind of value/goodness/reason (likewise, another aim or species of practical thinking), that's individual or personal in nature and often in conflict with the moral. As Bloomfield notes, we find versions of the supposed dualism or bifurcation of practical reason in Kant, utilitarianism, contractarianism, Prichard's dilemmas, as well as in much contemporary research on well-being (well-fare, happiness, etc.), in so far as such research treats well-being as fully abstractable from any substantive notion of moral goodness or virtue (e.g. as pleasure or life-satisfaction). Bloomfield thinks that this dualism leads to a kind of ‘schizophrenia’ of practical reasoning (turning an agent into ‘a house divided against itself’) and makes satisfactorily answering The Question and defending morality against the egoist largely impossible (p. 21). One of the chief virtues of Bloomfield's book is the exceptionally clear terms in which it exposes this dualism and the threat it poses to articulating any coherent and satisfying account of the proper relation of self and other-regarding considerations in practical rationality or practical wisdom.

Bloomfield's suggestion is that we reject the presupposition that morality is essentially social or impersonal in nature, thus essentially separate from personal/prudential goodness, and treat morality ‘formally’ as simply whatever is the correct, all-things-considered answer to The Question (p. 28). Both self-regarding and other-regarding considerations may thus count as ‘moral’, so long as they bear on what leads us to live the best kinds of lives open to us, overall. This reconceives the moralism/egoism dispute, not as a contrast between morality and self-interest, but as a dispute within morality (‘widely’ construed) about what values and ideals are most conducive to living the best life. It's important to Bloomfield that both the egoist and the moralist can, in principle, follow him thus far and accept that each party celebrates a set of values and ideals as central to the truly Good Life (hence, both have a ‘morality’), while seeing the other as self-deceived and duped by pseudo-values that fail to lead to the best life. This sets the stage for Bloomfield's responses to the egoist, which are intended to start from premises shared by moralists and egoists alike. (A ‘moralist’ of the Kantian stripe might already worry, however, that Bloomfield's setup leaves out a suitable notion of categorical moral obligation, or moral necessity: what we must do or not do, as opposed to what it would be good or best to do.)

Bloomfield now mounts various arguments for the essential role of virtue in happiness and the happiness-undermining nature of vice, the first and I think most important of which, ‘the Ontological Argument’, goes like this. Egoists will agree that a genuinely desirable and Good Life is inconsistent with deep states of self-loathing, or hating oneself. More broadly, both egoists and moralists accept that the Good Life necessarily requires self-respect – but they disagree about who (egoist or moralist) really has self-respect (pp. 46–50). The ontological argument roughly says that immorality undermines the immoral agent's self-respect – it's implicitly self-disrespecting, whether the agent is aware of this or not – and thus undermines her capacity for genuine, non-delusive happiness.

Why does immorality undermine one's self-respect? Bloomfield's ontological argument trades on a distinction (drawn from Stephen Darwall) between two kinds of respect: (i) ‘appraisal respect’, i.e. respect for a person's particular achievements, actions, intelligence, etc., and (ii) ‘recognition respect’, i.e. respect for something as an instance of an inherently valuable type of thing, as an end-in-itself, with intrinsic or non-instrumental worth (p. 61). Bloomfield argues that, whatever a given individual's particular achievements may be (the objects of appraisal respect), all human beings merit recognition respect purely in virtue of our shared ‘essential property’ of being human beings. Though he mentions that ‘rationality’ or ‘agency’ could count as the relevant shared essential property, Bloomfield settles on humanity, in a basic naturalistic and biological sense (i.e. the property of being a member of Homo sapiens), as what gives us an inherent worth that demands recognition respect. With this idea in place, Bloomfield argues that egoists must make one of two serious, happiness-undermining mistakes concerning recognition respect.

On the one hand, egoists might deny that very category of recognition respect, and thus reject that human beings have any respect-worthy inherent worth simply qua human. In such a case, Bloomfield says, ‘[egoists] have to deny that people are not merely instruments, which implies that they deny part of what makes them [i.e. egoists] be who they are as individuals and makes them be more than mere instruments’ (p. 63; emphasis added). In so doing, egoists partly deny, perhaps unknowingly, their own status as respect-worthy beings. On the other hand, egoists might recognize the category of recognition respect, but confusedly hold that only they have the relevant recognition-respect-worthy status (namely, humanity). This, argues Bloomfield, amounts to a failure to ‘treat like cases alike’, which is a ‘normative principle of thought’, and this implies that the egoist's supposed self-respect is ‘fraudulent’ – and so is her happiness, on the aforementioned shared assumption that (non-delusive) self-respect is essential to happiness (pp. 62–3). Either way, the egoist, in acting immorally, disrespects herself by failing to recognize and properly value (respect) the ‘fundamental ways [she is] essentially no different than [her] victim’ (p. 64). Bloomfield follows this with a second argument, the ‘Epistemological Argument’, which holds that the self-respect necessary for happiness requires self-knowledge: namely, knowledge of one's own recognition-respect-worthy humanity and the fact that it's shared with other humans. So egoists, who neglect the value of others’ humanity out of an inflated judgement of self, fail to know who they are at a fundamental level, and thereby fail to live the Good Life (pp. 72–9).

Neither argument is especially convincing. Consider, first, Bloomfield's idea that the biological category of humanity grounds recognition respect: that we are all essentially humans and that this shared biological essence (or natural kind membership) makes us equals such that, when I fail to respect another person qua human (Homo sapiens), I disrespect my own recognition-respect-worthy status qua human (Homo sapiens) (p. 68). But why is an agent committed to properly valuing their ‘humanity’ in this sense? The mere fact that my biological kind is metaphysically essential to me (i.e. I would cease to exist without the property of being human) doesn't make it particularly evaluatively significant. It is also (arguably) metaphysically essential to me that I am a carbon-based life-form and a spatially and temporally extended object, as are other people. But if these latter metaphysically essential aspects of me are not normatively significant (I don't disrespect myself qua carbon-based life-form or spatio-temporal object in harming other carbon-based life-forms or spatio-temporal objects), we need a further argument to show why my metaphysically essential membership in a biological species-group is normatively significant, i.e. a compelling reason for recognition respect. We can imagine an egoist responding to Bloomfield like this: ‘Whatever shared “essential properties” I have with others, this is my life, my one particular life to lead. Why should I care about respecting the property of (happening to be) a member of some biological species more than leading my one life as I see fit? My species-type matters to me about as much as my phylum and kingdom-type: it's got nothing on my personal wishes.’ Bloomfield must show why this response misfires.

Now, the language of ‘humanity’ can be used in different ways: as a purely biological kind, part of a complex classification of living things elaborated in biology departments, and, on the other hand, as something more philosophically rich and value-laden: as in the human as contrasted with the inhuman, and in the Aristotelian idea of ‘fully human life’, or the human ‘form of life’, whose implications extend well beyond what's discussed in biology departments. While the latter may indeed be a respect-worthy, normatively weighty category, Bloomfield seems to slide unjustifiably between these two ideas. Consider also the Kantian/Korsgaardian argument (which Bloomfield's argument resembles in many ways) that, whatever more particular ‘practical identity’ I have (under which I understand and value my own life) itself presupposes a more fundamental identity that I must treat as normative and that I share with others: my humanity. For the Kantian/Korsgaardian, the relevant notion of ‘humanity’, which grounds moral requirements, is not purely biological: it's our autonomy, our rational capacities to ‘set ourselves ends’, to act from and govern ourselves by principles (rather than being governed by them), that which gives us ‘dignity’ and ‘inner worth’, etc. This richer evaluative notion of humanity, like the Aristotelian form-of-life one, strikes me as a more plausible candidate for recognition respect than the biological classification of Homo sapiens (but, notice, these very conceptions of the human being are thus likely to be disputed by the egoist).

Second, even setting aside worries about shared ‘essential properties’, it's not clear at all that any bona fide egoist or immoralist would be swayed by Bloomfield's arguments. This would not be a problem for many Aristotelian thinkers – as Aristotle sees it, one's basic entry into the ethical life is not primarily a matter of argument at all, but formation into particular sensibilities and ways of seeing and responding to things that form the bedrock of one's more reflective evaluative thinking. Bloomfield almost recognizes this point (cf. p. 59), but ends up setting himself the ‘Holy Grail’ goal of reasoning with immoralists from premises they already accept. But telling a murderer that he disrespects his own (biological) humanity equivalently to that of his murdered victim (as Bloomfield does on p. 71) might be met with a laugh. As Bernard Williams puts it: ‘Why are [immoralists] supposed to be listening? What will the professor's justification do, when they break down the door, smash his spectacles, take him away?’ (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, p. 23).

Third, we may wonder if outright egoism – where one sees one's own happiness as ‘the most important thing in the world’, as Bloomfield puts it, and dismisses morality as the stuff of ‘the herd’ – is really the most common and important form of immorality and vice. There may be more common and banal forms of evaluative blindness/numbness to the worth of other people that are not the product of Thrasymachus-like delusions of grandeur, per se, but things like parochialism, closed-mindedness, and corrupting social practices and environments. It's not clear how far Bloomfield's arguments engage with these quotidian immoralities.

Finally, despite the repeated use of and essential role played by concepts of intrinsic value, properly and improperly evaluating things, what one should value, what deserves to be valued, and so on, Bloomfield claims his arguments are metaethically neutral – neutral, that is, between anti-realism and realism, or, as he puts it in Euthyphro-fashion, between the idea that something is made valuable/good because it's desired and the idea that we desire things because we judge that they are independently valuable/good (pp. 27, 53 n. 52, 103 n. 10). I think Bloomfield's project gets off the ground at all only within a broadly realist framework. If something is good simply because it's (actually) desired, it's not clear that we could have a workable notion of something that it's good to desire (or that deserves to be desired) but that is not, in fact, desired – and thus Bloomfield's whole idea that egoists (who are out satisfying their desires) are making mistaken judgements of value/goodness that entail implicit self-disrespect is left hanging. Pure formalisms like ‘consistency’ among desires can't do what Bloomfield needs.

I’ve skipped over many other valuable discussions in Bloomfield's book – including an interesting account of the paradox of happiness, of various virtues and vices, of love, and of Stoicism, among other things. The main reason to read Bloomfield's book is not that it actually solves the (very large, very old) problem it sets out – this is philosophy, after all, and 2,500-year-old perplexities are rarely ‘solved’. Instead, Bloomfield's book is significant for the clarity with which it sets out the problem itself. This invites us to address the problem entirely afresh, without presupposing entrenched orthodoxies about (impersonal) morality and (purely personal) self-interest and happiness.