 One of the most famous claims in Characteristicks is that beauty and good are one and the same (C 2.399, 415, 422). Many commentators have criticized this claim for being obscure, confused, or incoherent (Brown 1751, 162; Martineau 1886, 498; Albee 1916, 183; Tiffany 1923, 667; Bernstein 1977, 325; Filonowicz 2008, 101–2; Crisp 2019, 83–84). But in the context of The Moralists, the claim turns out to be a straightforward statement of Shaftesbury’s view that a person will be happiest if she makes moral beauty (i.e., virtue) her highest priority. The claim that beauty and good are one and the same, in other words, is Shaftesbury’s way of expressing in the The Moralists the Inquiry’s conclusion that “Virtue is the Good, and Vice the Ill of every–one” (C 2.177). (See Gill 2021. See also Axelsson 2019, 208.)