The ‘framing’ goods of life, sociality and rationality constitute necessary formal conditions of all the other, namely non-formal, goods. They are also intrinsically good; indeed, without any one of them, one ceases to be a human altogether. Life has absolute priority as a framing good, and is distinct from health (since one can be living and ill). After canvassing Aquinas’s and Finnis’s justification of life as a basic good, I offer my own bipartite justification in terms of life as both a ‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’ human function. As to sociality, humans are essentially animals who live-in-relation, in the rich sense of developing various intentional relations to the world. If they fail to develop these, they become disabled (disability being a dysfunction and hence natural bad). I then detail various forms of sociality (which Aristotle calls philia, often translated ‘friendship’), along with the perfections or goods they embody. Last, I broach the framing good of rationality. This should be understood not as a virtue (either practical or theoretical), but rather as the ‘immanent character of human being and its form or mode of living-in-relation’. I explore its content in detail in Chapter 7.

I begin with the bodily good of health, which perfects our organic functioning beyond the rudimentary level required for life. I detail how such functioning operates at different bodily levels, e.g., within cells, tissues, vessels, glands etc. I then move on to bodily abilities, which (not being autonomic functions) reflect the exercise of agency or voluntary control. Such abilities can be divided into active and passive powers, these affording a wider relation to the world in virtue of their intentionality. The third topic is bodily beauty. I argue that this is not a bodily perfection, since it is beholden less to our bodily powers or their configuration than to judgements of character and the social context in which our bodies operate. Finally, I explore body alteration. This constitutes a spectrum, from (perfective) medical intervention to (imperfective) mutilation, with what I call mere body ‘modification’ in the middle. I conclude with two cases that are difficult to place on this spectrum: namely male circumcision and cosmetic ‘surgery’. I argue that the former is likely a bodily imperfection or bad and the latter likely bound up with further imperfections.

In order to develop my own theories of goodness and goods, I investigate ten modern analytic theories, which fall into five types. (1) The first type is represented by G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross, who characterise goodness as a simple, non-natural, indefinable property. This leaves them, I argue, with an apodictic and incomplete list of goods. (2) John Finnis and David Brink build on this non-naturalism, maintaining that goods are discovered properly by (practical) reason. But the mode of this discovery is too a prioristic or rationalistic. (3) Derek Parfit and Sophie Grace Chappell offer what I call ‘under-theorised’ theories of goods. Parfit’s ‘objective list’ theory is highly stipulative, while Chappell’s theory relies on claims about what happens to motivate people. (4) James Griffin and Richard Kraut propose welfarist theories. This reduction of goods to goods-for misconstrues human flourishing as a substantive, observable, phenomenon and fails to deal with what I call ‘refractory’ desires. (5) Last, I look at two ‘quasi-Aristotelian’ theories, those of Hurka and Nussbaum. These both go wrong by rejecting Aristotle’s teleological naturalism, and Nussbaum’s theory is too narrowly political.

The Introduction summarises my book’s contents and highlights its key themes. I will argue that there is a human nature, from which flow a raft of ‘pre-moral’ (or ‘ultimate intrinsic’) goods. My Aristotelian (teleological and essentialist) theory of ‘natural perfectionism’ is, I will argue, compatible with Darwinism and subsequent evolutionary biology. It is not an account of normativity across the board, however. Specifically, it does not tackle the manifold quandaries that arise in the domain of practical reason; it does not treat supernatural goods (supposing these to exist); and it does not examine natural perfections in plants or the lower (non-human) animals. Two cautionary notes: first, my book treats perfectionism in the philosophical, not the colloquial, psychological, sense; more specifically, it elaborates a perfectionism of powers or faculties. Second, by focusing on powers or faculties, it avoids the pseudo-essentialisms of class, race, nation, sex etc. Last, I tackle three values that are absent from my book: namely, autonomy, pleasure and wellbeing. These cannot be natural perfections, I argue, because they fall short of being ultimate intrinsic goods.

Part III treats systematic challenges to natural perfectionism, and opens with the so-called fact/value dichotomy. This challenge can be parsed in four main ways. First, the metaphysical challenge, which has historical roots in Hobbes and Hume. This holds that the ‘natural’ cannot accommodate the normative: a claim I argue is question-begging, depriving norms, furthermore, of any proper grounds. Second, the inferential challenge, which maintains that one cannot move validly from ‘is’-type propositions to ‘ought’-type ones. This Humean challenge fails, I argue, since natural perfectionism rests its claims on natural facts that are already inextricably inflected with value. Third, G. E. Moore’s semantic challenge. Moore claims that any naturalistic definition of ‘good’ both commits the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and falls foul of the ‘open question argument’. I argue that the former is a pseudo-fallacy and that the latter conflates not seeming ‘closed’ with being ‘open’. Fourth, the conceptual challenge attacks ‘thick’ concepts, these being purportedly inextricable amalgams of ‘fact’ and ‘value’. I argue that thick concepts are defensible, for pragmatic, grounding and moral reasons.

I begin by explaining why ‘goodness as natural perfection’ is a metaphysical rather than linguistic or conceptual thesis (even J. J. Thomson’s sophisticated version of the latter). I then unpack what I call the ‘Aristotelian functionalist schema’, which informs my view of how human faculties or powers are teleologically ordered to various natural perfections or ultimate intrinsic goods. This schema embodies a ‘bottom-up’ movement, which culminates in our governing, rational, function; and also a ‘top-down’ movement, which reveals how rationality conditions our subordinate (vegetative, perceptual, productive, locomotive) functions. I then go on to look at two post-Darwinian analyses of function, that of Cummins and that sponsored by the ‘standard evolutionary conception’. I argue that the first is relativistic and the second hyper-reductive – so neither gives us reason to abandon the Aristotelian functionalist schema. Finally, I explore the theory of ‘natural goodness’ elaborated by Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson. I maintain that it improperly reduces natural goodness to moral goodness, and, moreover, ends up being more Kantian than Aristotelian – rendering its form of ‘naturalism’ highly etiolated.

Chapter 7 begins with Kornblith’s attempt to resurrect a teleology of the mind or intellect. I countenance his semantic, desire and pragmatic arguments, maintaining that none of them shows truth or true belief to be an objective good. By contrast, Aristotle’s idea that the intellect is constitutively directed at truth does show this (in virtue of the Aristotelian functionalist schema: i.e. all functions are correlated with perfections or goods). And Aristotle’s idea is corroborated not only by ‘folk’ and theoretical psychology, but also by cognitive science. For the latter is wedded to the notion that the brain is a cognitive system, functionally directed at cognition (viz. true belief). I go on to address three critiques of this intellectual teleology – those put forward by William James, evolutionary biology and global scepticism respectively – and argue that none of them is cogent. Next, I unpack two alternative accounts of the relation between truth and goodness – those of Ayer and Davidson – and maintain that they, too, fall short. Last, I tackle intellectual goods beyond true belief – such as knowledge and understanding – asking whether they or their objects form discernible hierarchies.

I open Chapter 1 by outlining ‘agathic pluralism’, namely the view that (ultimate intrinsic) goodness is univocally definable yet also irreducibly plural at the metaphysical level. This is my view, but I do not embark immediately on its defence. Rather, Chapter 1 clears the way for such a view by showing how none of the ‘big three’ ethical theories – namely consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics – manages to capture goodness as I understand it. Consequentialism tries, yet fails, to reduce goodness to a single property; deontology tries to sideline or do without goodness altogether; and virtue ethics substantially mislocates goodness, finding it in our moral dispositions. In order to argue for this, I tackle (first) consequentialism’s failed proxies for goodness, namely pleasure and desire- or preference-satisfaction; and I canvas J. J. Thomson’s a priori semantic argument for the incoherence of consequentialism. Second, I look at deontologists’ paradigm examples of promising, lying and retributive punishment. And third, I look at the Stoics’ and Michael Slote’s strong over-estimation of virtue as the only, or at least primary, good.

Conventional wisdom among philosophers has long held that Aristotelian teleological essentialism is incompatible with Darwinian evolutionary biology. I argue that the appearance of incompatibility here is ill-founded. For a start, Darwinism has no need of the extrinsicist, relational, conception of species sponsored by cladism. Indeed, it requires what Devitt calls intrinsic biological essentialism. The latter, for its part, has no need of eternal, unchanging, species, notwithstanding Aristotle’s own view. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with the claim that species evolve from one another and go extinct. (Those who deny this conflate species with species essences.) As to natural teleology, many philosophers assume that nature cannot contain final ends or goods – but this consensus is open to challenge. As functional biology demonstrates, biologists have never extruded final causation from nature at the local level; indeed, they rely on it, pervasively, in their explanations and descriptions of natural processes. This points, once again, to the compatibility between Aristotelian teleological essentialism and evolutionary biology, and to their deep mutual relevance.

In Chapter 4, I (a) explore three alternative perfectionist theories and show where they fall short. I then (b) move on to three critiques of perfectionism, arguing that they all fail. (a) Tom Hurka’s perfectionist theory jettisons teleological essentialism, yet tacitly relies on it. It advocates an ‘intuitive’ and ‘explanatory’ elucidation of the human essence, though these are not demonstratively superior to Aristotle’s rival method. George Sher’s ‘poor man’s Aristotelianism’ proves similarly unconvincing, yielding (by his own admission) an incomplete roster of perfections. Richard Boyd’s ‘homeostatic cluster’ theory, for its part, also falls short, relying on an intuitionistic and question-begging notion of ‘human need’. (b) Dale Dorsey’s critique of perfectionism fails to grasp the teleological nature of Aristotelian essentialism and relies on a defeasible set of counter-examples. Philip Kitcher’s critique centres on a ‘reductivist challenge’, which assumes (wrongly, I argue) that human nature must be characterisable in a wholly ‘value-free’ way. Last, I tackle the ‘analytic existentialist’ critique, which relies too heavily (I argue) on metaphor and normative abstraction.

I open by charting by the well-worn philosophical distinction between intellection and perception, and unpack the debate over whether (or to what degree) the latter is separable from the former. I conclude that the ‘cognitivist’ position is correct: that human perception is properly infused with conceptual content, this marking us out as the species we are (viz. rational animals). With all this in place, I ask whether there is a cognitive hierarchy among the senses. Aristotle and recent researchers like Viberg answer ‘yes’, vision being at the top, smell at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I argue that this depends on an undue privileging of cognitive extent and precision. I then investigate the imagination and the alleged threat it poses to cognitivism. I argue that the imagination – when functional, and not reducible to fantasy – is in fact a profound aid to cognition (since it enhances it and lends it more ‘colour’). I end by looking at aesthetic perfection, where the role of the imagination is of peculiar importance – though I express scepticism about the traditional hyper-valuation of aesthetic over everyday perceptual experience.

Human enhancement aims to make people ‘better than well’ by interventions in the human genome. I canvas four moral arguments against this – from (1) autonomy, (2) dignity, (3) inequality and (4) mastery – concluding that none is probative. Argument (1) overestimates the cost to autonomy of genetic technologies and underestimates the degree to which ordinary moral training is heteronomous. Argument (2) drives too sharp a wedge between the natural and the artefactual and thereby ignores the extent to which we already treat the body as a site of ameliorative intervention. Argument (3) invokes the spectre of a ‘genetic underclass’ that is ‘gene-poor’, but I argue that this can be guarded against by education and government policy. Argument (4) tends to rest on persuasive description and on consequentialist claims that are empirically weakly supported. I end by mounting my own, formal, argument against human enhancement. This holds that it collapses into transhumanism, this being an ultimately incoherent project, one that abandons the idea of human nature and with it any criteria for determining what it is to be ‘better than well’. Finally, I corroborate this argument from incoherence by unpacking a paper by Groll and Lott.