Julia Annas: Virtue Ethics

I bought the Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory way back in my sophomore year of college, I think. I saw it in a local Borders and didn’t buy it, but thought about it for weeks afterwards. Finally I made the trek back out, and came back with a much heavier backpack. I’ve only read bits and pieces of it, but I did a little bit of thinking about Aristotle’s ethics in the last few terms, so I’m dipping back into it.

My (quite appropriate) starting point was Julia Annas’s piece on virtue ethics, which focuses on classical virtue ethics. A virtue is a disposition to act, and to act for reasons, which sets it apart from habit: when a virtuous person acts in a way that demonstrates her virtue, she’s choosing to act in accordance with the disposition rather than reacting according to some conditioning. Moral education requires the agent to ask what the virtues are and what makes them valuable, which leads her to a deeper grasp of the virtues. We may not be able to express this deeper grasp in rules, but it will help us to act better: we’ll become more sensitive to the demands of the virtues, and to way that more and more particular and specific aspects of situations influence those demands. This is where practical reason comes in: it allows us to see a situation properly, and, upon seeing it in that way, to respond appropriately and to understand why our response is appropriate. (It’s not a matter of having specific ends and coming up with the means to achieve them; instead, practical reason helps us tell what our action in a given circumstance should be.) This stuff about the role of practical reason will, I think, come up a lot in this blog. I bought Sarah Broadie’s Ethics with Aristotle recently, and she has a very different (and philosophically interesting) view about Aristotle, which I’m still trying to come to terms with. I’m also interested in thinking about ethical particularism in general, and how (whether) it links up to this business about practical wisdom. Stay tuned.

Anyway. Annas makes an interesting point later on, about the common charge that eudaimonism leaves the virtuous person unacceptably egoistic. Here she says: “The person who aims at living a flourishing life by living in a fair, generous, and brave way is not aiming at her good, as opposed to the good of others. Still less is she aiming at some state of herself. Living in a flourishing way is an activity, the ongoing activity of a life, and living in a brave, generous, and so on way is a specification of what that is.” (522). The idea seems to be that the virtuous person isn’t directed towards anything other than virtuous action: all it is to live in a flourishing way is to live in a virtuous way, and living in a virtuous way involves a correct apprehension of the demands of the circumstances upon us, etc. etc., that doesn’t take our self-interest into account. Presumably the idea is that this apprehension has motivating force – we do this because we see it as just, not because we see it as just and think that behaving justly is the way to our own best happiness. There’s just no room for self-interested motivation in this picture.

This way of seeing the virtuous person’s action seems in some tension with the idea that the virtuous person has one final end of action, and that it’s eudaimonia. One way to get away from that might be to pick up the idea that eudaimonia is pretty strongly characterized by the virtues – that it’s contentless without them, and that it doesn’t make sense to say that someone could aim at eudaimonia in the way that we think we could aim at some ordinary end (making money, or whatever). Annas does earlier suggest something like this. She says that someone who endorses a sort of classical virtue ethics is endorsing the claim that the life in accordance with the virtues is the best specification of the eudaimon life, without necessarily knowing what either is: we take the virtuous life to be the flourishing life, and then try to figure out what that means by engaging in the sort of moral education that develops the virtues. (We notably don’t start with a set of criteria for the eudaimon life and then identify the virtuous life as that life.)

I’m on board with the idea that the virtuous person develops the virtues in some way that lacks essential reference to herself. And we might also think that this means that she doesn’t need any external motivation to become a virtuous person: it’s just part of the way she is, already, that she takes virtue to be important, or, better, that she is rationally inclined to respond as a virtuous person would. But there’s more to the story in Aristotle, at least – it looks like we’re supposed to take contemplation to be a good on par with (or dominant over) practical reason/the exercise of the virtues, and that we’re supposed to do so in recognition of its status as an excellence of the highest part of us. If that’s so, then we might think that the real reason the virtues are significant is that practical reason is an excellence of a part of our soul. So maybe the development and exercise of the virtues doesn’t involve any egoism, because we become virtuous without egoism. But if what gives value to the virtues is something like their connection with practical reason, and if what gives value to practical reason is essentially egoistic, that might make us worry a little bit (especially if we don’t think that Aristotle saw the virtues as ‘responses to intrinsic value in the world’, but rather thought that the virtues were valuable because, say, our ability to hit the mean required the exercise of, and dominance of, practical reason.) So even if the virtuous person isn’t required to invoke her own good in her justifications for specific actions, it’ll come in as the (final, reflective) justification of living as she does – the ultimate reason that living virtuously counts as a specification of the good life.

That might be too fast – I’ll have to think about this more – but it seems like something to be worried about.

[Note: I put some words into Annas' mouth at the beginning, because the piece is pretty short and encyclopedic - I hope they're words that get her right, rather than importations of Richard Kraut in some places and John McDowell in others. In any case, don't take my word for it that this is what she thinks!]

Further reading: Annas 2001, “Moral Knowledge as Practical Knowledge” (on the difference between classical and instrumental views of practical reason)

Doris 2002, Lack of Character; Harman 1999, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error”

Sreenivasan 2002, “Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution”