Agreed, and I'd like to add that there's a reason why a few thousand years after Aristotle (and the rest) we still don't know a good recipe for a happy/whatever life.
On the contrary, we know so many recipes, and some have proven much better than others, while some have become obsolete. Its like asking for "the" (singular) recipe for cooking food.
What the philosophers are good at, is helping the reader come up with a logical method for making value judgments about those recipes. Its (mostly) not "here's a great piece of source code" its mostly more like "and this is why OO design is better (or not)".
