Assuming that people want to be happy, can we show that they cannot be happy without being ethical, and that all rational people therefore should be able to see that it is in their own best interest to be ethical? Is it irrational to reject ethics? Aristotle thought so, claims Anna Lännström; but, she adds, he also thought that there was no way to prove it to a skeptic or an immoral person.

Lännström probes Aristotle's view that desire is crucial to decision making and to the formation of moral habits, pinpointing the "love of the fine" as the starting point of any argument for...