Abstract

Keynes’s ethics is an ethics of virtue as ancient Greeks understood it, emphasizing friendship and affiliation, moral emotions, as well as the contextual particularity of the right action. Here also lies a crucial parallel with Keynes’s notion of changing circumstances in A Treatise on Probability. For Keynes, a good life is a life worth being lived, a moral life: in his early paper on Egoism, he maintains that to be good is more important than to do good. His view of the good and happy life is really close to Aristototle’s. For Keynes, friendship and affiliation have intrinsic value as constituent parts of the good and happy life, and as such they contribute to the development and exercise of the virtues, but their value derives also from their being elements in all ends of life. If Aristotle stresses that every form of virtuous action is for and towards others, Keynes too clearly distinguishes between good as an instrument and good in itself, with a recurrent concern on how human action must face radical forms of uncertainty