There is a fairly standard way of cataloguing the difference between modern ethical theories and those that came before. According to this story, from the time of Plato and Aristotle until the late seventeenth century, moral theory concerned itself with the overall well-being of the human person. In light of his nature, the human being has certain capacities and dispositions that, when functioning as they are intended to function, enable him to reach his end, i.e., to be perfected or completed as the kind of thing that he is. What is this end? Generally, most moral philosophers envisioned this end for persons as happiness, whether happiness as such denoted pleasure, or perhaps agreement with the rest of nature, or even a supernatural vision of the divine. But how to gain this end, this happiness, how to perfect oneself as a rational being? Here, the moral philosopher focuses on those specific goods that, he argues, will lead to our attainment of our goal—either external goods such as wealth or friendship or health, or internal goods that enhance the disposition of the rational agent, such as the virtues of wisdom and courage. Regardless, the endeavor to happiness encapsulated what it means to live life well, to flourish as a being of a rational kind. It was, then, what a human person ought to be that most concerned the moral philosopher.