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I am grateful to Stewart Goetz for his thoughtful engagement of my short article ("The Pursuit of Happiness: C. S. Lewis' Eudaimonistic Understanding of Ethics," hereafter, "Pursuit") within this wide-ranging and insightful account of C. S. Lewis' ethics. I also thank the editors of this journal for the opportunity to respond, in order, hopefully, to clarify some matters and to advance the discussion. I will, first, clarify several confusions in Goetz's article about my account of ethical eudaimonism (hereafter, EE) and Lewis's relation to it; second, raise some critical questions concerning Goetz's own reading of Lewis on "happiness"1 and pleasure; and, finally, commend Goetz's emphasis on an important aspect of Lewis' ethics that I leave obscure in "Pursuit." I limit my discussion of Lewis' writings to those passages cited by Goetz.2
I. Clarification
Several confusions distort Goetz's critique of my account of EE and, I believe, compromise his own reading of Lewis. Given the obscurity of EE these days, misunderstanding is nearly inevitable, even apart from the deficiencies of my brief presentation. Although EE was the singular approach to ethics in the ancient and medieval world, it is now virtually unknown - which is why I wrote the article.3
I address three confusions here. First, Goetz misunderstands my central account of EE and how it relates to Lewis. Consider the following passage:
In making his case that Lewis was a eudaemonist, Horner says that "All too often, the pursuit of happiness represents to us something actually immoral: because I want to be happy' is probably the most common reason we hear - or give - for justifying morally wrong behavior.... But Lewis disagrees."
But Lewis does not disagree. Indeed, it is evident from the just-completed survey of his thought about pleasure and happiness that he believed the desire for pleasure and happiness is what leads people to act immorally. People are cruel because they want to experience the intrinsic goodness of pleasure and cannot achieve their goal through permissible means. No one, Lewis said, acts badly for the sake of acting badly. They act badly to get the good that they desire.4
But Lewis does disagree, and explicitly so - although not at all as Goetz portrays the discussion. (The centrality of this confusion requires...