Haybron's Stoicising, a Stoicising reply to Haybron on happiness, Wellbeing, & the Good Life

Matthew Sharpe (Australian Catholic University)

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Abstract: This paper wants to take seriously the prominence of expressly Stoic or “Stoicising” ideas in Haybron’s phenomenology of happiness,as an emotional state of attuned, engaged, life-endorsement which mirrors Stoic claims about the eupatheiai (good passions) of the sage (1).  We'll contend that Haybron misconstrues the relationship between happiness and well-being, and the place of the virtues in the flourishing life.  Our contention, developed with recourse to core Stoic ideas, is that (a) contra Haybron, cultivating well-being through the virtues, led by Socratic-Stoic phronêsis, is a necessary precondition for genuine Haybron-happiness, which underlies those “sources” Haybron nominates in Happiness; and (b) that, contra Haybron’s criticism of the putative “externalism” and “perfectionism” of ancient eudaimonisms, the virtues have prudential value, such that Haybron’s strong separation of the good life from the life of flourishing cannot stand as he frames it.