ABSTRACT
A key aim of education is to help students to lead personally fulfilling lives. The moral aims of education also have personal well-being at their core. This chapter focuses on the former – on education insofar as it aims to help those being educated to lead flourishing lives. Education plays a vital role in developing the specific human capacities involved in such pursuits. It ‘increases the well-being of the agent since it widens her powers to realise significant goods and achievements’. O’Neill’s position faces several difficulties. In his 1998 book O’Neill modifies his position on human well-being. He still holds on to an objectivist account dependent on Aristotle, but denies that ‘the objective standards of the good are ahistorical and fixed’.
