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52 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi52 and id is 1 raw text is: J Value Inquiry (2018) 52:1-16 cmssMark https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-017-9598-5 Morality and Prudence: A Case for Substantial Overlap and Limited Conflict Roe Fremstedall Published online: 7 June 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 1 Topic and Approach It is virtually impossible to say anything substantial about how morality and prudence relate to one another unless we make assumptions about their content. In what follows, I will make use of a minimal definition, according to which prudence concerns the rational pursuit of personal interest and happiness. In this connection, I use happiness as an evaluative term, as something desirable that makes life as a whole good, better or successful.1 However, the nature of happiness is only discussed insofar as it is directly relevant for understanding how prudence relates to morality. As far as possible, I want to be neutral about how happiness, self-interest, and morality are to be defined, since defining these terms is beyond the scope of this article and any definition can favor certain theories while excluding others, which would make the discussion unnecessarily narrow in scope.2 Nevertheless, I Julia Annas claims that we have recovered the thought that happiness is an important ethical notion, although there is little agreement on what happiness is (Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 120). Daniel Haybron writes: it is questionable whether any major school of philosophical thought denies outright the importance of happiness, at least on one of the plausible accounts of the matter. Daniel Haybron, Happiness, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2011 Edition, Edward Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fa112011/entries/happiness/, Part 4.3. 2 For accounts of happiness, see Nicholas White, A Brief History of Happiness (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Annas, Intelligent Virtue, Ch. 8; Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). ® Roe Fremstedal roe.fremstedal@uit.no Department of Philosophy, University of Tromss - The Arctic University of Norway, 9037 Tromss, Norway I Springer

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