ABSTRACT
The notion of virtue to which a Stoic is driven is perforce a notion determined by happiness’ being conditional-f: if happiness may fail, then something else, again, must be found that will not fail: virtue is always available, and it is immanently ineluctable. Professor W. R. Matthews presents with an interesting example of a confusion into which a surprising number of people fall: he makes virtue, and virtue defined as moral striving rather than as arete or right functioning, the central and all-important notion. Classical eudaemonism, and the particular second-order moral problem that the failure of the eudaimonia of the just man presents, are susceptible of a solution, if only of a transcendental and other-worldly one. Clearly St. Augustine understands happiness in the ordinary man’s sense. Christian interestedness or humanist disinterestedness come to the same in practice, in so far as the immediate point of each is moral, personalistic conduct.
