Common views of flourishing include pleasure, wealth, and honor.

Flourishing depends on cultivating a virtuous moral character.

We acquire moral virtues through our intentional actions we do habitually.

People who flourish have security and stability within themselves that enable them to weather life’s troubles.

What is the final or highest goal in human living? What is the one thing that, if you have it, there is neither anything you need beyond it nor anything better than it? These questions have occupied philosophers for millennia and keep the rest of us busy as well.

Many people would answer, “happiness,” which leads to asking what counts as happiness. I will follow the lead of Aristotle (384-322 BCE), who argued that many common conceptions of happiness fall short of being the highest good or goal. Nearly 2,400 years later, these views of happiness persist.

Three common concepts of happiness that people tend to offer are pleasure, wealth, and honor or status. Aristotle rejects each of them:

Pleasure: We share all sorts of pleasures with other animals, and human happiness is not just different from, but higher or better than, canine happiness, for example.

Money-making: We don’t want money for its own sake but rather for what it can buy (status, influence, or acceptance as well as material goods).

Honor: We want the approval of others, but that........

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