Societies differ in their inhabitants’ mental well-being. Many affluent and democratic countries, such as the UK and Australia, rank significantly lower in mental well-being than many developing countries, such as Tanzania and Dominican Republic. Many societal factors can either decrease or improve the mental well-being of the people living in those societies. Much of the contemporary burden of depression arises from an evolutionary mismatch between human psychobiology and contemporary western lifestyles characterized by chronic stress, social fragmentation, physical inactivity, circadian disruption, and ultraprocessed diets. These conditions promote low-grade systemic inflammation and dysregulate evolved mood-regulation systems. However, there are measures that societies can implement to address these issues. These include providing safer and more stimulating childhood environments; promoting healthy lifestyles through various policy measures; refining societal values from status competition toward eudaimonia; using evolutionary psychology and biophilic design in urban planning; and giving more opportunities for individuals to discover their ikigai, “a reason for being.” More broadly, not all cultural and technological innovations are inherently negative for human health and well-being. It would be sensible to take advantage of the best parts of these innovations and developments while continuously acknowledging the core constituents of a well-led and fulfilling life.

This chapter examines the key features of Critical Ethical Naturalism (CEN) through a sustained engagement with Aristotle’s ethics and politics. Four central dimensions of CEN are explored. First, its account of humans as community beings, mutually constituted and co-developing, is illuminated through Aristotle’s notions of character friendship and our intrinsically political nature. Second, the Aristotelian conception of eudaimonia clarifies CEN’s understanding of human flourishing. Third, CEN’s claim that all humans are, in a sense, ethical naturalists, owing to their inherent dispositions to care, is reconsidered alongside Aristotle’s view that rational agents choose to endorse caring tendencies not merely because they are natural but because they are good. Finally, the chapter explores CEN’s recognition of human vulnerability and the social conditions that inhibit care, drawing parallels with Aristotle’s critique of defective political systems. Aristotle’s notion of organic social development also deepens the analysis of authenticity in CEN and its relation to human flourishing.

This chapter articulates what methodologism as pragmatism means. A central tenet of this view is that doing is constitutive of both meaning and knowing. Methodologism holds that meaning and knowledge arise from following a method – a procedure oriented towards achieving the desired outcome of fixing beliefs or keeping rational conversation going. This framework applies to all epistemic practices. Moreover, methodologism asserts that what is known is not independent of how it is known, thereby bridging the gap between ontology and practice. This line of thought has important precedents in the work of William James, John Dewey, Thomas Kuhn, and others. Crucially, it is the community of practitioners who determine what counts as correctness or incorrectness. Given the diversity of communal rules and regimes of reasoning, pluralism emerges as a natural consequence. Membership in and choice between communities thus carries normative weight. Discursive rationality allows for comparisons between communities in terms of their rationality. Ultimately, it is not merely useful but an ethical obligation – a societal duty to uphold rational practices as a condition of human flourishing.

This chapter explores the intersection of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Husserl’s phenomenology within the context of dementia research, emphasising the concept of habits. By introducing curability as the counter-pole to vulnerability, the chapter highlights a shift towards integrating medical and philosophical perspectives. It argues that embodied practices, regarded as meaningful, are key in both preventing and treating dementia. Through Aristotle’s ethics, the chapter examines malign habitualisation in touch with the preventive turn. Here, the vice of intemperance is related to excessive alcohol consumption, alcohol dependence, and Korsakoff’s dementia. Through Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter examines the power of benign habitualisation, connecting embodiment, narrativity, and affectivity. Drawing on a video of Marta Cinta, a former ballerina with Alzheimer’s, the chapter rethinks influential concepts, such as narrative identity and second nature, through the lens of embodiment. The chapter ultimately demonstrates that embodied habits, when perceived as meaningful, can aid in balancing health, well-being, and eudaimonia. Focusing on the affective sphere, the study contemplates whether we can still feel home in embodied habits despite dementia.

This chapter explores Aristotle’s account of the good life as presented in the Nicomachean Ethics, emphasizing his empirical, observational approach to virtue, social life, and human flourishing. Aristotle presents human beings as inherently social and defines virtues—such as generosity, magnanimity, and justice—as traits expressed in habitual action and observed within social contexts. Justice, in particular, emerges as a “complete” virtue, operative only within the framework of law and reciprocity. Aristotle also articulates the importance of friendship (philia), distinguishing between lesser forms based on utility or pleasure and the highest form—friendship grounded in shared virtue. Intellectual virtues are treated alongside moral ones, with phronêsis (prudence or practical wisdom) guiding right action. Ultimately, Aristotle identifies contemplation as the highest human activity, likening it to divine activity. Though only attainable by few, contemplation fulfills the intellect’s potential and brings human beings closest to the divine. The chapter concludes by reflecting on Aristotle’s conception of divinity, the nature of blessedness, and how these inform a hierarchical vision of reality in which the contemplative life represents the fullest expression of human excellence.

Kant and the Stoics both rely on a momentous argument, set out in Plato’s dialogues, for the conclusion that nothing is unconditionally good but wisdom, yet they differ on how to interpret it. The Stoics identify this wisdom with the perfection of technical or productive knowledge of nature, and they regard it as the sole good. Kant identifies this wisdom with the perfection of practical knowledge of the good, and, analyzing this knowledge along the hylomorphic lines implicitly suggested in Plato’s argument, he locates wisdom’s unconditional goodness – its morality, or moral goodness – in its agreement not with the object it produces but with its form, morality’s principle. Two contrasting accounts of morality’s relation to perfection thus emerge. The Stoics see perfection in the knowledge of nature as entailing moral goodness, whereas Kant argues that moral goodness is the condition of all other goodness, including that of perfection.

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.