Aristotelian Necessities

Abstract

The opening of Aristotle's Politics depicts the self-organization of human beings into households, villages, and polises or city-states as “natural.” Each of these institutions is portrayed as (properly) consensual and mutually beneficial for all participants, and these conditions are reflected in the theory of constitutions elaborated later in Book III. A polis is properly a partnership in achieving the “highest good” or best life for its members,1 and in the typology of Book III the “true,” just, and legitimate forms of constitution aim at the common good or good of all citizens and are governed through consent rather than force.2 The naturalness of living together in city-states that are true to their nature seems to have three aspects: people are sociable or inclined to live together and pained when they cannot, they need to live together in city-states in order to live well, and they are equipped with language that enables them to cooperate in living well together.3 The second of these aspects of the naturalness of membership in a proper polis exhibits the second of four forms of necessity identified by Aristotle in Metaphysics:4 such membership is necessary for human beings in the sense that it is required for the achievement of a good, namely the good of eudaimonia or living well.5Aristotle thus regards membership in a proper polis as something “which is necessary because and in so far as good hangs on it,” or in modern terms an “Aristotelian necessity.”6 I shall adopt Philippa Foot's more specific use of this term to refer to necessities that must be fulfilled in order for a member of a species “to be as they should be, and to do that which they should do” in order to live well or flourish—to exhibit and experience goods achievable by members of the species, by fulfilling well potentialities characteristic of the life-form.7 In Aristotle's scheme of things, to be as one must be in order to live well is to have developed in such a way that one possesses the moral and intellectual virtues necessary for living well. This requires suitable upbringing, habituation, and teaching, in a polis or political community whose laws and ethos are conducive to virtue.8 To do that which one should do in order to live well requires suitably equipped and frequent opportunities to exercise the right virtues or excellences in suitable activities. Societies and their institutions might fall short with respect to the nature and frequency of the resources and opportunities they afford.9 Clearly, the specific Aristotelian necessities a proper polis would provide pertain to qualities of both persons and the circumstances in which persons live and act. The qualities of persons and circumstances mediate the fulfillment (or lack of fulfillment) of human potentialities in excellences and excellent activity constitutive of living well. The relevant qualities of circumstances pertain to the contextual regulation of both the development of personal qualities and the expression of personal qualities in activity.Aristotle is in many ways clear about the import of his general conception of the natural aim of a polis for the design of institutions and judgments about the relative justice and injustice of various institutional arrangements. The Nicomachean Ethics opens with the identification of politics or political science as the master art aiming at the highest good for human beings – eudaimonia or living well – noting that the ends of subordinate arts are pursued for the sake of the end of the master art.10 The first argument Aristotle gives for thinking that politics is the most authoritative, true master art, is that “it is [politics] that [properly] ordains which of the sciences should be studied”.11 The argument seems to be that it follows from this (normative) claim about the nature of the art of politics, and the tacit premise that education is essential to achieving the highest good for human beings, that politics must be the true master art, the art whose aim is the highest good for human beings. This makes sense only on the further assumption that an art having this aim would properly express itself in the shaping of institutions and civic ethos, so as to provide circumstances of life favorable to acquiring and expressing the virtues essential to living well. The identification of education as what the legislator should direct his attention to “above all”12 is the obvious prime illustration of the responsibilities of justice associated with the natural aim of a polis, but there are many other examples of arrangements to facilitate access to goods of fortune important to the exercise of virtue, to restrict inequality in the interest of virtue and civic friendship, and in other ways to promote partnership in living well.13 Aristotle unequivocally insists that correct constitutions impartially promote the good of all citizens,14 including those who cannot live truly flourishing lives, explaining that the wish of political societies with correct constitutions is “to be composed of those who are equal and alike”.15 It is also clear throughout the middle books of the Politics that Aristotle's understanding of justice makes degrees of justice relevant across the spectrum of less than ideal constitutions.16Attempts to extract a serviceable theory of justice from Aristotle's texts face some challenges, however. One challenge is to identify and ground an attractive fundamental principle of justice, without doing interpretive violence to passages that countenance exclusion from citizenship of those who provide societies with everything but leadership, learning, and military service.17 A second challenge is to liberalize Aristotle's conception of living well or flourishing so that it is not hopelessly elitist and restrictive, yet remains recognizably and serviceably eudaimonistic. A third challenge is to do justice to the fact that eudaimonistic conceptions of living well rest on a hypothesis that is partly empirical: the hypothesis that there is a substantial convergence between what is humanly admirable and what is pleasant or satisfying over the course of a life. It is one thing to defend government policies that enable people to live well, on the basis of sufficient evidence of a convergence between what is admirable and what is satisfying over the course of a life, and quite another to defend policies that shape people toward more admirable lives, however burdensome the experience of such lives may be.The aim of this paper is to show how these challenges can be met. I shall begin by discussing them in connection with Martha Nussbaum's work on Aristotelian justice and capabilities. This will set the stage for a sketch of my alternative approach, which is focused not on capabilities per se but on the idea of Aristotelian necessities for living well. It offers a bridge from Aristotle's commitment to impartial justice for citizens to comprehensively just terms of cooperation in the life of a political society, in the form of an Aristotelian contractualism inspired by suggestions of mutual advantage in Politics I and elsewhere. This contractualist form of neo-Aristotelianism has a number of virtues. It finds a middle way between the singularly best life Aristotle identifies as the proper object of political cooperation in circumstances that permit its realization and Nussbaum's capability approach specification of minimal conditions for a “truly human” life or life of human “dignity.”18 It defends the admissibility behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance of well-established findings of eudaimonistic psychology, and thereby provides a basis for securing the empirical presupposition underlying a eudaimonic conception of living well and doing so without violating liberal neutrality with respect to diverse, reasonable conceptions of the good. In doing this, it adopts a “midfare” conception of the metric of justice that is similar to the capability approach in that it is concerned with the bases of living well that stand between goods and welfare, but wider; it treats capabilities as one of three forms of person-regarding Aristotelian necessities that are salient for understanding how institutions may facilitate activity constitutive of living well.19The first challenge is to find an attractive fundamental principle of justice in Aristotle's works. Nussbaum attributes to Aristotle a “distributive conception” of justice, according to which: The aim of political planning is the distribution to the city's individual people of the conditions in which a good human life can be chosen and lived. This distributive task aims at producing capabilities.20 She goes on to argue that the goal of political arrangements is “not to necessitate actual good functioning, but to … [open] a field of choice.”21 This distributional focus on capability instead of actual functioning is central to Nussbaum's attempt to find in Aristotle's works a form of liberal respect for freedom and legitimate diversity of conceptions of a good life. The definition of capabilities internal to persons, or I-capabilities, identifies them as capacities of choice and is said to be “based” on Aristotle's definition of virtues or excellences, although when the latter says that virtue “is a state concerned with choice”,22 he means by “state” not a capacity but a disposition.23E-capabilities are said to pertain to the opportunities external circumstances provide for functioning in desired ways. B-capabilities or basic capabilities to function in various ways, given suitable training and other necessary conditions, are identified as necessary and sufficient “for being a subject of the lawgiver's concern.”24 The claim is that Aristotle's position, despite his inconsistencies and reluctance to fully embrace the radical implications of his distributive conception, is that capability in this sense is what entitles persons to just distributions.25On the matter of which functionings “are constitutive of good living,” Nussbaum offers a naturalistic account of the forms of good functioning, or human excellence, as pertaining to trans-culturally universal aspects, spheres, or “problem areas” of human existence.26 What she says unifies the plurality of good forms of human functioning is the activity of practical reason. She reads the ergon or function argument of Nicomachean Ethics I.7 as asserting that the “truly human life” is one in which diverse functionings are organized by practical reasoning, or “all one's natural activities” are “infused by human choice and rationality.”27 The task of just distribution will be to give every person with B-capabilities—every person constituted so as to be able to live well: The conditions of fully human living—living in which the essential functionings according to reason will be available…. Make it possible for people to use their bodies and their senses in a truly human way. And don't make all this available in a minimal way: make it possible to do these things well.28Much of what Nussbaum says about these and related matters is true and important, and her insistence on reading Aristotle in the spirit of his understanding of the “philosopher, qua worker for the human good,” should be welcomed.29 There are, nevertheless, some difficulties in her account associated with the three challenges noted above. Regarding Nussbaum's distributive conception of Aristotelian justice, and the suggestion that basic capabilities are sufficient “for being a subject of the lawgiver's concern,” we could agree that this would be an Aristotelian or neo-Aristotelian view, but doubt that it is Aristotle's own view, at least with regard to entitlements of justice. I have argued elsewhere that the principles Aristotle endorses demand basic forms of ethical respect for persons of ordinary rational capacity, and “would make it ideal for all the inhabitants of a city who have a share in virtue to be citizens and … entitled to participate in rule,” but that Aristotle “seems to regard the qualifications for citizenship as changeable in light of various problems that may arise, rather than fully determined by fundamental rights”.30 The kind of basic ethical respect owed to rational beings would make anyone with Nussbaum's B-capabilities a proper “subject of the lawgiver's concern,” as she says, but such concern would not necessarily demand a just distribution to everyone of what is owed to citizens. Something like Nussbaum's distributive conception is clearly endorsed by Aristotle with regard to citizens, but it is not entirely clear how to frame and justify an acceptable version of it.The second challenge is to liberalize Aristotle's conception of living well or flourishing so that it is not hopelessly elitist and restrictive, yet remains recognizably and serviceably Aristotelian. Nussbaum's rendering of Aristotle's account of living well or flourishing cannot be accused of being elitist or too restrictive, but it sidesteps the challenge by ignoring Aristotle's references to the natural aim of politics being the best life for human beings and relying on a similarly flawed interpretation of the ergon or function argument. It does violence to the role of virtues in Aristotelian flourishing by ignoring references, in the context of that argument and elsewhere, to the highest virtue, and by failing to acknowledge salient aspects of Aristotle's accounts of the virtues and their cultivation. The intellectual virtues play a central role in Aristotle's official view of the “best” life, and he understands the cultivation of moral virtues to establish dispositions of desire, emotion, perception, and belief about what is good, which will determine choice and action in a way that is straightforwardly causal. A state of character is the intrinsic essential cause (“source and cause”) of actions for which a person is responsible.31 Capacities of rational choice are supremely important, but it does violence to Aristotle's understanding of public responsibility for character formation to assign choice the role it seems to play in Nussbaum's capability approach. The aim of law is to communicate moral truths and make people good, and “the laws address all matters,” Aristotle says.32 There is no pretending that this will enable people to live better lives by shaping their beliefs, desires, and perceptions, yet not substantially shape the choices they make. The significance of such substantial shaping of character is obscured by Nussbaum's dichotomy between necessitating “actual good functioning” and “open[ing] a field of choice.”33 Justifying political decisions about how people will be shaped requires reasons to believe that the shaping that occurs really is conducive to them living better lives and that it leaves room for a robust diversity of good lives, even as it steers people away from life courses no one could reasonably or prudently choose.Nussbaum's reading of Aristotle makes “all … natural activities” equally important to a “truly human life,” so long as they are guided by practical reason, but Aristotle's conception of what is sufficient for a flourishing life is predicated on the idea that only the most admirable and satisfying activities suffice for flourishing, happiness, or living well. He suggests the “best” and most admirable pleasures can be experienced only by the “best man,” in the context of holding that there are “branches of learning” we should value “for their own sake” and “study merely with a view to leisure (scholê) spent in intellectual activity”.34 He identifies the best and happiest life with the life devoted to the exercise of theoretical wisdom or sophia, the “best and most complete” virtue, in theoria or contemplation of the best (presumably divine) objects of knowledge.35 He counts only one other life as flourishing, the life devoted to the most admirable exercise of the second best and most complete virtue, namely the exercise of phronêsis or practical wisdom in political leadership, but the activity of leadership cannot qualify as a highest end for Aristotle, because it aims at something beyond itself. Like other fourth-century B.C.E. writers, Aristotle treated what is illiberal or not free in the realm of occupations, arts, and studies as synonymous with what is “banausic,” where this implied subservient catering to others through commercial exchanges and so a kind of dependence or lack of freedom.36The challenge is to acknowledge that this is Aristotle's view of flourishing, and inquire what might be preserved of it in an acceptably capacious conception of living well. It would be essential to such a conception that it be constructed around the idea of fulfilling human potentialities well, and an account of needs or Aristotelian necessities foundational to such fulfillment. It is not clear that the capability approach has identified an Aristotelian list of potentialities whose fulfillment is constitutive of living well, or that all Aristotelian necessities can be construed as capabilities, without distortion or misplacement of emphasis.The third challenge is to do justice to the fact that Aristotle's conception of living well rests on the hypothesis that there is a substantial convergence between what is humanly admirable and what is pleasant or satisfying over the course of a life – a convergence between admirable fulfillment of the potentialities and experiencing one's life as going well. Nussbaum makes a promising start toward addressing this through her naturalistic account of the virtues as forms of good functioning. Persons who successfully negotiate problem areas of human existence will presumably recognize their success and experience some satisfaction in it, but the wedding of philosophy and public policy that Nussbaum commends should rest on more than presumption—it is best predicated on a compelling body of evidence.A viable contemporary eudaimonism would be more expansive than Aristotle's and it would offer empirically adequate support for its assertion of a convergence between virtue and happiness, or the admirable and the satisfying—a convergence essential to the idea of flourishing. It would also be consistent with respect for the diverse reasonable conceptions of good lives present in liberal democracies, and offer guidance for policy in present circumstances. I shall outline a form of neo-Aristotelian eudaimonism that satisfies these conditions, focusing—as Aristotle does—on education. I begin by noting his references in Politics Book I to mutual advantage, as well as his concession in Book VII.8 (1328a35–37) that the producing and trading classes who are excluded from citizenship are, nevertheless, necessary to a political society. The question to ask is whether the terms of engagement or cooperation Aristotle envisions could be impartially justified. He seems to affirm mutual advantage as a condition of justice, but to regard natural justice as permitting the exclusion from citizenship of classes whose participation in the life a society is necessary to its functionality. Why could we not predicate an attractive neo-Aristotelianism on a kind of contractualism that puts to an impartiality test the justice of excluding rationally competent necessary participants from citizenship? Why not put it to the test of a quasi-Rawlsian Original Position thought experiment?Recall that Rawls's framework begins with the idea of a society as a “fair system of social cooperation over time from one generation to the next,” the idea of citizens as “free and equal persons” who are open to finding and agreeing to fair terms of social cooperation, and the idea of principles of justice as a specification of those fair terms of cooperation.37 To be capable of social cooperation, persons are regarded as having two “moral powers,” a “capacity for a sense of justice” and “the capacity to have, to revise, and to rationally pursue a conception of the good.”38 Let us dispense with the fiction of natural slaves and assume that these Rawlsian conditions for cooperation will be generally fulfilled by those who play needed roles in the society.39Let us suppose further that, as in Rawls's Original Position, representatives are to know the general truths of human nature and society, including “the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology,” but they do not know particular facts about themselves, their place in society, or those they represent.40 From behind this “veil of ignorance” they will have no basis for denying citizenship and its attendant rights to any occupational classes prepared to cooperate on fair terms, and they will regard the design of institutions as fundamental objects of constitutional interest, no less than distributions of rights, opportunities, and so on. The plausible Aristotelian conjecture is that these representatives would agree that the arrangements and institutions of a society would exist to enable all its citizens to live well—to live in ways that are good and that they experience as good. Recognizing that there are Aristotelian necessities for living well that people cannot provide themselves, they would agree that these basic institutions should include educational ones, whose basic function is to promote forms of development conducive to living well, and that the arrangements and institutions of society should in general facilitate both the acquisition of personal qualities essential to living well and the expression of those qualities in activity constitutive of living well, in leisure, work, and any other contexts of activity that might be usefully distinguished.The representatives in this Aristotelian contractualist thought experiment would then ask what these Aristotelian necessities are, with a view to defining a set of essential goods—goods that are not just prerequisites for living well, as Nussbaum's seem to be, but sufficient for living well in ways that are recognizably eudaimonic yet compatible with a reasonable plurality of conceptions of a good life.It is basic to Aristotle's eudaimonistic perspective that living well revolves around fulfilling potentialities in activity that exhibits virtues, is concerned with non-instrumental goods, and is experienced as pleasant and satisfying. However this is specified, it will require the acquisition and exercise of virtues, development and use of powers or capabilities, and possessing and acting from understanding of the context of action. The Aristotelian necessities embodied in persons will consequently take the form of virtues of character and intellect, capabilities, and understanding. The Aristotelian necessities pertaining to the qualities of circumstances will consist of institutional and other environmental conditions that facilitate the acquisition of salient virtues, capabilities, and understanding, and the expression of these personal assets in activity that pursues and achieves goods sufficient for a flourishing life.This identification of virtues, capabilities, and understanding as the salient forms of Aristotelian necessities pertaining to persons can be grounded in Aristotle's conception of the fundamental dimensions of agency. It is clear that no life can qualify as eudaimonic or well lived unless it is successful in relevant respects. Success will require that a person be well-equipped and disposed with respect to all of the fundamental dimensions of agency. There are three kinds of potentialities fundamental to action—intellectual, social, and productive—and all three must be fulfilled substantially in order for a person to have and experience success as an agent. Acts bring the three together.“The origin of action,” says Aristotle, “is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. This is why choice cannot exist either without intellect and thought or without a state of character”,41 a state of character being a complex of related dispositions with respect to desire, perception, emotion, belief, and responsiveness to reason. Successful action in which states of character express themselves in conduct depends not only on the “reasoning with a view to an end” referred to in this passage, but also on the accuracy of the actor's understanding of the circumstances of action.42 Beliefs about the circumstances of action are to some extent products of perceptual dispositions and the exercise of care inseparable from character, but beliefs and understanding that enter into choice can be acquired in ways that are much less a reflection of character. It is clearest, then, to think of action as arising from choices that are products of beliefs, states of character, and reasoning through which these are mediated and brought together in choice. It is through capabilities of various kinds that choices are then enacted. The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the fundamental dimensions of agency number three: states of character, beliefs, and capabilities of intellect and outward conduct. Successful acts would require that the agent be well equipped and disposed on all three of these dimensions. Granting that no life could be successful, hence well lived or flourishing, without admirable success in specific acts, living well would require being well equipped and disposed along all three of these dimensions of action.On this basis, we and the representatives in the Aristotelian contractualist Original Position can specify three related categories of essential goods without which no one lives well. These goods are associated with three kinds of potentialities that must be fulfilled reasonably well over the course of a life for it to conceivably qualify as successful or flourishing. The kinds of potentialities in question are intellectual, social, and productive (of effects in the world). Their respective goods are truth, understanding, knowledge, good judgment, and self-governance in accordance with good judgment; relationships of mutual goodwill in which virtues of character are displayed; and goods associated with diverse forms of competence or excellence in arts of performance, production, and other forms of endeavor. These essential goods are not simply enabling conditions for living well, but constitutive elements of living well and, on this liberalized form of Aristotelian eudaimonism, sufficient for living well. We abandon the idea that only the two kinds of lives said by Aristotle to be the most admirable are flourishing or well lived, but preserve the core eudaimonistic idea that living well involves admirable, self-directed fulfillment of potentialities in human endeavors occupied with goods that are valued “for their own sake” or not just instrumentally.The promotion of forms of development conducive to living well will consequently be understood to concern the acquisition of understanding, capabilities, and virtues of character and intellect. Developmental and epistemic dependence are fundamental, limiting aspects of the human condition that would be recognized as no less central to the purposes of a constitutional system than the perils of lacking systems for adjudicating conflict or regulating economic activity.43 The educational promotion of development conducive to living well could be understood to involve initiation into a variety of practices whose mastery and activities provide opportunities for fulfilling human intellectual, productive, and social potentialities in admirable and satisfying ways. Flourishing pertains to activity, and the activities through which virtues, capabilities, and understanding are acquired and expressed are shaped by the norms and structures of a society's practices, institutions, and arrangements. It is through the activities so shaped that perception, understanding, desire, attachment to goods, and capabilities develop, all in connection with acquiring vocabularies of the good, forming identities, and finding meaning and direction in life. All institutions may be considered at least potentially educational in these respects, and as mediating access to essential goods. Part of the defining function of educational institutions would be to promote forms of development conducive to living well in circumstances conducive to achieving the essential goods noted above. Initiation into practices of inquiry, evaluation, and self-examination would be essential. The habituation of desire, emotion, and perception of the good will occur one way or another, so the plausible way to protect individual self-determination is not to insist that only capabilities can be objects of constitutional intent, but to make the cultivation of virtues of critical inquiry a priority.Behind the veil of ignorance in this Original Position, representatives can know that those they represent may or may not adhere to “comprehensive” conceptions of the good grounded in “religious, philosophical, or moral doctrines,” but they cannot know which, if any, are adhered to.44 They could know that such conceptions differ on many specifics, hence cannot all be right in every respect,45 but also that there are points of convergence between diverse cultural and religious traditions on the association between common virtues and happiness.46 Most importantly, perhaps, they can know robust findings in psychology that offer confirmation, adequate for the purposes of public policy, that the Aristotelian necessities and essential goods associated with them are essential to, and predictive of, persons perceiving their lives as going well, whatever their cultural background and commitments.Although the contributions of the positive psychology movement to the study of virtue and well-being might be introduced at this juncture, those contributions are primarily focused on positive affect and the movement's conceptualization of virtue is problematic.47 More salient, from my perspective, is self-determination theory (SDT), a theory of agency and well-being and body of supporting research that the positive psychology movement has drawn on.48 Developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, and confirmed through studies conducted with hundreds of collaborating investigators, it posits three innate, universal psychological needs closely associated with the satisfaction of human potentials: the need for competence or efficacy; the need for autonomy or the experience of self-directedness congruent with the person's values, needs, and sense of self; and the need for relatedness or mutually affirming interpersonal relationships. The satisfaction of these needs has been investigated over the course of three decades, and one of the central findings that has been replicated trans-culturally by research teams in a variety of countries, is that the satisfaction of all three of these basic psychological needs is essential to reported well-being or happiness and to related measures of psychological well-being, such as vitality (a sense of psychological and physical energy), meaning (a sense of purpose), and the absence of stress and psychic conflict. This has been found to be true, whatever value research subjects and their cultures do or don't place on the need in question. There is thus reason to regard these needs as universal requirements of human well-being, and to regard their satisfaction and the related fulfillment of human intellectual, social, and productive potentials in accordance with norms of competence and merit as central to living well.49 These needs can be understood as felt Aristotelian necessities, associated through the related forms of potentialities with the fundamental aspects of agency, hence any successful life. The qualifier “felt” signifies that these are not only necessary conditions for living well or flourishing, but that people exhibit and experience less well-being when these conditions are not met, whether or not they are aware of having the needs or understand the connection between need-frustration and their psycho-somatic state.Aristotelian necessities for living well pertain to both persons and the circumstances of their lives. When they are all present and aligned, the fulfillment of human social, intellectual, and productive potentials in admirable activity is accompanied by satisfaction of related social, autonomy, and competence needs. Satisfaction of these needs is associated with sustained happiness over the course of time, while pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and status are not.50 This is not a definitive demonstration of the convergence between the admirable and the satisfying assumed by the idea of flourishing, but it is a good start.It might be objected, at this point, that a singular conception of the good has been smuggled behind the veil of ignorance under the guise of psychological research.51 My basic response is that the conception of the good for human beings I am advancing is thin enough to be compatible with a wide range of cultural, religious, and personal understandings of a good life, but also well-grounded as a basis for critiquing institutions and policies with which it is not compatible.52 The basic moral and intellectual virtues at stake are essential to competent self-determination and fulfillment of the need for mutually affirming relationships, and the further virtues or forms of excellence associated with specific arenas of endeavor would be matters of individual choice. What the psychological research provides is an objective, cross-culturally validated understanding of what is essential to people perceiving their lives as going well, namely substantial fulfillment of their social, intellectual, and productive potentialities and satisfaction of related psychological needs.53 In doing this, it validates a kind of eudaimonism about the good, and undercuts policies and conceptions of the good life that are focused on amusement, consumption, wealth, and status.54 We have stronger objective grounds today than even a few years ago to endorse Aristotle's rejection of limitless material accumulation and amusement as distractions from living well.Representatives in the Original Position could legitimately aim for everyone to get what we objectively know to be essential to living well. I take this to include the capabilities identified by Nussbaum, and I have sought to clarify the grounds on which we could regard equitable enablement of capabilities and their exercise as burdens of justice. I have argued that it is known with sufficient objectivity that human beings need more than capabilities in order to live well, and that there is theoretical merit in distinguishing virtues and understanding—two other classes of Aristotelian necessities—from capabilities. I have argued that virtues, capabilities, and understanding are foundational to effective agency, and living well requires the fulfillment of intellectual, social, and productive potentialities, the attainment of essential goods, and the satisfaction of related psychological needs for autonomy, mutually affirming relationships, and competence. The fundamental role of intellectual, social, and productive potentialities in human action explains why excellences pertaining to all three are Aristotelian necessities for living well, and why the three psychological needs that are pivotal in happiness are for autonomy, mutually affirming relationships, and competence.The resulting eudaimonism may be considered moderately perfectionistic, but the multiplicity of ways in which the relevant potentialities can be fulfilled, essential goods obtained, and needs satisfied, makes this a form of perfectionism that is endorsable, on the strength of the evidence, behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. It is more robustly Aristotelian than Nussbaum's capability approach, inasmuch as it preserves a capacious version of Aristotle's focus on admirable fulfillment of potentialities and his insistence on the importance of non-instrumental value to living well.