Susan Wolf Quotes on Virtue

Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010) gave contemporary moral philosophy one of its most influential analyses of meaningfulness as a category irreducible to either morality (in the strict sense of the right) or self-interest (in the strict sense of the prudentially good for the agent). Meaning, on Wolf's account, arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness — that is, when the agent is positively engaged in a project that is also genuinely worth doing — and the recognition of meaningfulness as an ineliminable third category alongside morality and self-interest reorganizes the philosophical analysis of what it is for a human life to go well. The earlier Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility supplied the influential analysis of moral responsibility on which Wolf's broader normative position rests.