ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Harry Frankfurt’s, Bernard Williams’, and Susan Wolf’s respective contentions that the disciplinary parameters of modern moral philosophy need expanding in order for it to explain fundamentally important aspects of the flourishing life. I begin by examining these thinkers’ proposal that we should return to what they call the Socratic question of ‘how one should live’, arguing that this question cannot be settled by determining the normative weight of moral and prudential considerations alone. Following this, I explore what each thinker considers moral philosophers to currently neglect: examining Frankfurt’s ‘reasons of love’ (1.2), Williams’ notion of a ‘ground project’ (1.3), and Wolf’s account of ‘meaningfulness’ (1.4). To provide a complete resolution to the Socratic question, I follow these thinkers in arguing that we must acknowledge a third set of entities – what I term ‘passionate attachments’ – which are a crucial source of action-guiding considerations. Passionate attachments, I argue, allow us to identify with entities other than ourselves, experience our lives as meaningful, and so are an integral part of human flourishing. The chapter ends by showing how the accounts that Frankfurt, Williams, and Wolf propose can bolster one another when scrutinised side-by-side, as well as how their direct engagements with one another reveal significant and theoretically rich overlappings which illuminate each of their arguments. This enables me to build a composite account explaining what passionate attachments are, and why they are indispensable to the flourishing life (1.5).
