Abstract: The book examines the indispensable role enjoyment plays in a good life. The key to it is the development of a style of life that combines an attitude and a manner of living and acting that jointly express one's deepest concerns. Since such styles vary with characters and circumstances, understanding them requires attending to the particular and concrete details of individual lives. The first half of the book explains and illustrates these components of enjoyable lives. The second half is a detailed examination of enjoyable lives of integrity, reflectiveness, and self-direction, and miserable lives of morbid romanticism, moralism, and exuberance, and explains why these styles of life are admirable or deplorable. Reflection on works of literature is a better guide to this kind of explanation than the search for general theories and principles that preoccupies much of contemporary deontological, consequentialist, and contractarian moral thought. The argument proceeds by detailed reflection on particular cases, and shows how this kind of reflection can be reasonably conducted and how the quest for universality and impartiality is misguided in this context. Central to the argument is a practical, particular, pluralistic, and yet objective conception of reason that rejects the pervasive contemporary tendency to regard reasons as good only if they are binding on all who aspire to live reasonably and morally. Reasons for living and acting in particular ways are often individually variable and none the worse for that.

Keywords: morality, good life, pluralism, moral importance of literature, reason, individuality, particularity, personal evaluation, projects