Julia Annas had written most of a book about virtue ethics when, she says, “it became clear… that I was writing the wrong book.” So she scrapped it in order “to start further back and get clear about virtue.” The book that resulted from this second attempt is Intelligent Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Intelligent Virtue clears up a lot of the fog around questions like “which characteristics are virtues, and why?” and “what is eudaimonia and what role is it meant to play in virtue-oriented ethics theories?” It is a clear and well-organized account of the foundations of virtue ethics models.
Today I’ll try to summarize what stood out to me in Annas’s account of virtue:
What Is a Virtue?
According to Annas, a virtue is a feature or tendency or disposition of a person (not, that is, of an act or a non-person actor) that is:
- persisting, reliable, and characteristic
- active; developing in response to circumstances (not merely a passive disposition)
- deep; central to who that person is
Virtues prompt virtuous actions, and those actions help to fortify that virtue, in a mutually-supporting way.
A virtue doesn’t give you a “decision procedure” or instruction manual for deciding what to do. If you are skilled at a virtue, you will be able to perform that virtue well and to give an account for why you did it the way you did. But this is different from having memorized a rulebook ahead of time and applying its directives to the situation.
Virtues tend to “cluster” in groups that mutually-support each other. Annas gives the example of generosity, which requires a number of other virtues to do well. You can’t just give willy-nilly, but you need to give in the right way to the right people, which requires other virtues (such as empathy, tact, benevolence, modesty).
One virtue that underlies all the others is phronesis (practical wisdom). It supports the virtues in two ways: 1) each virtue requires phronesis in order to master it, and 2) if you have phronesis you will understand the importance of the virtues and how to develop them.
The aim of virtue is “to live well, to live a good life.”
Virtue and “Goodness”
All of the virtues support something we can call “goodness” — though Annas tries to remain agnostic as to what goodness consists of (she says that her account of the virtues is compatible with a variety of theories of goodness, from the hedonistic to the Platonic to the Christian). Virtue is a sort of “commitment to goodness” while vice is (outside of fictional villains) not so much a commitment to badness as a failure to commit to goodness. This reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s observation that the worst of evil is not done by wicked or evil people, but “by people who never made up their mind to be either bad or good.” In support of this, Annas considers the vice of the coward: Unlike the brave person looking back at her brave acts, the coward “cannot look back on his action in satisfaction, thinking that his cowardly act helped him in his overall aim to become a better coward.” (But what about a cruel person, I wonder. Are there no cruel people who come home from work thinking with satisfaction, “boy howdy, I thought I’d gotten about as cruel as I could get down at the prison, but I really turned things up a notch today!”)
Annas is skeptical that dispositions like “wittiness, tidiness, and affability” can be true virtues, since they seem to be things that are disconnected from goodness (you could be witty, tidy, or affable either as part of a commitment to goodness or without any such commitment); such things “can be exercised just as well viciously as virtuously.”
If all virtues aim toward “goodness” (however defined), you might wonder if maybe virtues derive from goodness and that we really should be looking at goodness as the foundational concept and… reinventing consequentialism instead. Annas says that the way virtues connect to goodness does not lend itself to consequentialism. “[W]hat makes a disposition a virtue is not the results it produces [emphasis mine] but, broadly speaking, the attitude of the person who has the virtue.” Or, in another formulation: “exercising virtue is a commitment on the part of the virtuous person to goodness because it is goodness: goodness is not just an outcome.”
“Virtues are dispositions which are not only admirable but which we find inspiring and take as ideals to aspire to, precisely because of the commitment to goodness which they embody.”
Goodness and Eudaimonia
Annas says that it is a mistake to think of eudaimonia, as it is used in ancient ethical theories like Aristotle’s, as a precise, well-defined thing. It’s more of a description of a thing. Annas says that our aims in life tend to “nest”. When we explain why we do something (brush our teeth) we do so by appealing to certain aims (to keep our teeth in good working order, to have pleasant breath, to avoid complications at the dentist), and we can then categorize those under broader aims (to be healthy, to be socially successful), and so on. Annas thinks eudaimonia is a label for the outermost nesting; for the place we can stop explaining because it serves as the ultimate rational explanation for our behavior. Why do I brush my teeth? Ultimately, for eudaimonia. We can try to better understand or specify eudaimonia, but we don’t need to start with a precise definition: we know it’s there, even if we don’t understand it all that well.
Eudaimonia is related to our telos; we aim for eudaimonia, and that determines our chosen telos. The human telos, then, is not preexisting, but is something we discover or determine through examining the aims we choose. By critiquing our aims and bringing them into alignment (and in alignment with our idea of what goodness consists of), we give ourselves an appropriate telos. “The final end, then, is the indeterminate notion of what I am aiming at in my life as a whole. And the role of ethical thinking is to get us to think more determinately about it, to do a better and more intelligently ordered job of what we are already doing anyway.”
Eudaimonia and Happiness
These days it’s common to fret about the word eudaimonia and how (or if) to translate it. Annas thinks the old-fashioned translation of “happiness” is fine, as long as we’re careful to avoid certain modern uses of the word. Happiness is not the same thing as “pleasure” and is not just the name of a certain sort of pleasant feeling. It’s not just a matter of having your desires satisfied or feeling satisfied with how things are going in your life right now. It’s neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. It has more to do with “the overall end you aim to achieve by living your life well” and as such it is both individual (it’s about your life specifically) and aspirational (you aren’t happy in a static way, but you aim at happiness). “Happiness is at least in part activity”: it is a way-of-living.
How Do We Acquire Virtue?
A virtue can be best understood by looking at how it is acquired. This “involves both the need to learn and the drive to aspire.” The acquisition of a virtue is “not a once for all achievement” but involves “coming to understand what you are doing, doing it in a self-directed way, and trying to improve” so that your character develops and your understanding grows as you confront new challenges.
People do not first decide that a particular virtue is good, then decide to become virtuous in that way, and then develop a virtuous motivation. Rather virtuous motivation develops alongside our understanding of the virtue, as “educated developments of our [preexisting] unformed motivations.”
“Becoming virtuous requires habituation and experience.” We may begin to learn virtue by emulating or copying a role model, but learning true virtue demands that we aspire to understand the virtue. This involves not just learning that you do something, but learning why you do something; this allows you to apply the virtue in novel circumstances rather than just performing a standardized routine. As you learn this, you come to be able to articulate reasons for why you do what you do the way you do.
In this way a virtue is a lot like a skill. When you begin to acquire a difficult skill (piano playing, say) you have to concentrate and you have to drill yourself on particular techniques in a pre-specified way. But when you have acquired the skill, you don’t have to concentrate so much on the skill itself, but on how you are applying it in a particular situation. Instead of struggling to do it competently, you can focus on doing it most skillfully or most beautifully or to meet certain circumstances.
As we improve our skill at a virtue in new and different contexts, we flesh-out our understanding of the virtue. For example, if we are brave in a variety of situations (not just those requiring physical bravery in the face of a certain sort of threat) then we develop a broader understanding of what bravery consists of — what is common to all those responses that makes “bravery” a good description for them. This expanded understanding in turn helps us to recognize and respond to new situations in which bravery is called for.
A virtuous person cares about being virtuous. This is one way virtue is less like a productive skill, in which the point is the product rather than the process of making the product. (Performative skills like dancing or acting are more similar to virtue in this way.) That the being-virtuous is what matters brings to mind Aristotle’s distinction between a virtuous person (who is not tempted to vice because they care for virtue) and a person who is merely continent (who resists temptations to vice although they have not internalized an overriding love for virtue). Both may do the same action in the same circumstance, but the first is virtuous while the second is merely exercising self-control.
Why Is Virtue Good for Us?
The enjoyment a virtuous person feels in exercising a virtue is analogous to the pleasant flow state of someone who is fluently practicing a skill, in which: 1) the activity is valued for itself, not just for its end-goal or product; and 2) there is a loss of self-consciousness during the activity. Other aspects of flow include being “unhindered” (this does not mean without external obstacles, which can make the activity challenging in an interesting way, but without internal obstacles like reluctance or contrasting temptations); and being harmoniously-integrated (you are of one mind in the essence of what you are doing).
This also resembles Aristotle’s description in the Nicomachean Ethics of the pleasure that accompanies unimpeded activity.
Why Do People Fall Short?
If virtue is good for you and promotes happiness, why do people stop short of developing the virtues? Annas suggests that this is in part because we love company, and there’s more of it to be found in mediocrity than in being outstanding. When you separate from the pack in some particular virtue, say, honesty, you develop a sort of solidarity with other especially honest people, but you also lose some of the tolerance you used to have for people who exhibit commonplace dishonesty. The companionship you feel towards your more abstract and dispersed community-of-the-honest is not as viscerally comforting as the more immediate community you used to feel with the people you typically encounter on a day-to-day basis. Virtue can be lonely.
A Grotesque
This is the second time in recent years when I’ve read a book published before Donald Trump’s emergence as a politician in which he was used as a throwaway example of someone of obviously low character. Here’s the quote from Intelligent Virtue:
We encourage children in schools, by means of posters, lessons, and books, to admire and aspire to be like some people and not others, and these are people whose characters are admirable and inspiring because of their commitment to goodness, regardless of whether in worldly terms they succeeded or failed, or were useful and/or agreeable to themselves or to other people. This is why it would be grotesque to have posters in elementary schools depicting Donald Trump as a hero for the young, rather than people like King, Gandhi, and Mandela.
