In modern times, attempts to understand the relation between virtue and self-interest or well-being have proceeded in two directions. They have either treated virtue and other “higher” values as reducible to ideas about “mere” well-being and pleasure, in the fashion of utilitarianism, or have, like Kant, been dualistic about the categories of virtue and well-being. But ancient ethics tended to understand well-being in terms of virtue, and this opposite sort of unification needn’t be as implausible as those Stoic versions that regarded well-being as nothing more than virtue.
