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The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Julia Annas
Julia Annas
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Columbia University
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Extract

It is well-known that in recent years, alongside the familiar forms of modern ethical theory, such as consequentialism, deontology, and rights theory, there has been a resurgence of interest in what goes by the name of “virtue ethics” — forms of ethical theory which give a prominent status to the virtues, and to the idea that an agent has a “final end” which the virtues enable her to achieve. With this has come an increase of theoretical (as opposed to antiquarian) interest in ancient ethical theories, particularly Aristotle's, an interest which has made a marked difference in the way ethics is pursued in the Anglo-Saxon and European intellectual worlds.

In this essay, I shall not be discussing modern virtue ethics, which is notably protean in form and difficult to pin down. I shall be focusing on ancient eudaimonistic ethical theories, for in their case we can achieve a clearer discussion of the problem I wish to discuss (a problem which arises also for modern versions of virtue ethics which hark back to the ancient theories in their form).

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 1992 , pp. 133 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1992

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References

1 Apart from the influence of books such as Macintyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981)Google Scholar and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1988), the following have been influential: Foot, Philippa, Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978)Google Scholar; Wallace, James, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Dent, N. J. H., The Moral Psychology of the Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Kruschwitz, Robert B. and Roberts, Robert C., eds., The Virtues (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1987)Google Scholar; French, P., Uehling, T., and Wettstein, H., eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIII: Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Philosophia, vol. 20, nos. 1 and 2, (1990).

2 Interest in “neo-Aristotelian” theories of ethics and practical reasoning has been particularly strong in Germany and Italy. See Schnädelbach, Herbert, “Was ist Neoaristotelismus?” in Moralität und Sittlichkeit, ed. W., Kuhlmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 38–63Google Scholar; and Berti, Enrico, “La philosophie pratique d'Aristote et sa ‘réhabilitation’ récente”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 95 (1990), pp. 244–66.Google Scholar

3 There is little agreement as to what kind of theory virtue ethics is. Sometimes it is taken to be a theory in which independently established premises about virtue are used to derive conclusions about action (unsurprisingly, this produces absurdities). Sometimes virtue ethics is held to bring with it a radical stance about ethical theory as such, one which rejects, as silly or unfeasible, most of the tasks which modern ethical theories set themselves, or even the very idea of ethical theory. See Louden, Robert, “Virtue Ethics and Anti-Theory”, Philosophia, vol. 20 (1990), pp. 93–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Clarke, S. and Simpson, E., eds., Anti-theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).Google Scholar Comparatively little attention has been paid to the formal possibilities of virtue ethics as a kind of theory.

4 Recently there have been some attempts to avoid “happiness” as a translation for eudaimonia, and to use instead “human flourishing” or the like. However, “happiness” remains the best and most convenient translation, provided we make an effort to distance ourselves from inappropriate associations of pleasant feeling and satisfaction imported into modern discussions of happiness by utilitarianism.

5 Stoic and Epicurean theories are notably more revisionary here than Aristotle's; when it is assumed that ancient theories are conservative rather than revisionary, this usually comes from over-concentration on Aristotle. The major debate in ancient ethics, as we can see from a work like Cicero's de Finibus, was over the question of how much ethical theory should revise one's priorities, how far in one's life the demands of morality should reach.

6 In my book The Morality of Happiness, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

7 I do not have the scope in this essay to defend the assumption that egoist theories cannot fulfill the role of ethical theories. I take it that this is a widely shared assumption; it is at any rate widely enough shared to form the basis of frequent criticisms of eudaimonist theories, and in this essay I am meeting this criticism, leaving for others the task of discussing whether eudaimonist theories would be defensible even if they were egoistic.

8 Ancient forms of hedonism all work from the assumption that what is sought is the agent's pleasure; it does not occur to anyone in the ancient world that one might reasonably seek pleasure, regardless of whose it is. This is because of a more general assumption which is examined in the next paragraph.

9 “Bodily and external goods are called productive of happiness by contributing towards it when present; but those who think that they fulfill (i.e., make up) happiness do not know that happiness is life, and life is the fulfillment of action. No bodily or external good is in itself an action or in general an activity”. Arius Didymus, ap Stobaeus, Eclogae, II 126.20–127.2. See Stobaeus, ed. C. Wachsmuth (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884).

10 See ibid., 46.13–22, where Epicurus is criticized on these grounds, although he in fact tries hard to argue that the pleasure which is our final end is not just an experience.

11 But couldn't I try to make you happy in an indirect way, namely by bringing about conditions in which it is more rather than less likely that you can act in the appropriate way? In ancient theories, this kind of consideration comes in under political or social philosophy, usually in the form of theories about the ideal form of social organization.

12 In the case of theories which make virtue sufficient for or a prominent part of happiness, there is the further point, analogous to one stressed by Kant: nobody else can make me moral — only I can make myself moral. Thus, there is a specific as well as a general reason why nobody else can bring about my eudaimonia for me if my eudaimonia consists of my virtuous activity.

13 For the sake of simplicity I shall use the expression (intuitive in both ancient and modern theories) of “parts” of one's own good or happiness. The reader should be warned, however, that in ancient theories this mode of expression is only acceptable at the intuitive level, and that certain theoretical implications of it are denied. One's own good does not contain others' good, or indeed anything, in a way which allows of quantitative measurement of the different goods' contributions. This is basically because (on the ancients' view) our final good is not a state of affairs but activity, as indicated above. Further, items which one's overall good intuitively “contains” or which are intuitively “parts” of it cannot be added, since most theories recognize fundamental differences of kind between different sorts of good. As the Stoics most uncompromisingly hold, we cannot add health or wealth to virtue to make a better life, since goods like health and wealth have value in a life only insofar as virtue makes proper use of them. Generally, the kind of value that a good may have in a life cannot be simplistically assessed without regard for the place it has in that life and the agent's scheme of priorities.

14 See Cooper, John, “Aristotle on Friendship”, in Essays on Aristotle, ed. Rorty, A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 301–40.Google Scholar

15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a16–22. Translations are all mine. The word translated “familiar” is oikeios, which also means “akin to”; Aristotle uses words from this root frequently when talking about kin relationships. It is the root from which comes oikeiōsis, the word for the basic concept in Stoic theory on this subject (which I come to shortly).

16 Aristotle also has difficulty fitting other intuitive examples of philia into his own account — a mother's love for her child, for example (1159a27–1159b1).

17 At Theaetetus 209b, Socrates complains that the conditions introduced so far for distinguishing something in one's thought will not in fact distinguish Socrates' thought of Theaetetus from his thought of Theodorus, or of “the remotest Mysian”. The phrase suggests literal remoteness, and also a certain psychological distance or even contempt; John MacDowell in his translation (Oxford, 1973) translates “the remotest peasant in Asia” to convey this. (Mysia was an area in northern Asia Minor.) The Anonymous Commentator on the Theaetetus (see below, footnote 28) introduces the remotest Mysian into an ethical discussion in his comment on an earlier passage in the dialogue, and I have taken this up.

18 Stoic ethical theory is complex in structure, and I am simplifying considerably (but not, I hope misleadingly) in giving just this one aspect of it.

19 The idea sounds unnecessarily odd in English because we have no single word which answers well to oikeiōsis. The root idea is that of being akin to, and hence of being familiar or close to. (We do have a word for its opposite, “alienation” or allotriōsis.)

20 This is a very brutally abbreviated account, since what I focus on in this essay is not the first aspect of Stoic oikeiōsis but the second. To fully understand the first aspect of Stoic ethics, one would have to expand on the connection the Stoics find between rationality and virtue, and their reasons for holding that the value of virtue is not straightforwardly commensurable with the value of other kinds of things.

21 We have the instinct to love our offspring as soon as we are born, though of course it cannot come into play until much later, when we have already formed attachments of other kinds. This aspect of Stoicism attracted a certain amount of ridicule; see, for example, Plutarch, de St. repugn. 1038b.

22 Cicero, de Finibus III 63.

23 The image of th econcentric circles comes from Hierocles, a popularizing Stoic of (probably) the second century a.d., who wrote an Elements of Ethics of which we possess a long papyrus fragment, and also some passages preserved in Stobaeus. For the text of both see Hierokles: Ethische Elementarlehre, ed. von Arnim, H. and Schubart, W., Berliner Klassikertexte, vol. IV (Berlin, 1906).Google Scholar

24 It might be objected that the Stoics have shown only that impartiality is demanded by our promoting part of our nature, namely the rational part, which still leaves problems with happiness, which must satisfy all of our nature. (This is the objection of Antiochus of Ascalon; see Cicero's de Finibus IV. The objection was rediscovered independently by Shelly Kagan, one of the contributors to this volume.) But other aspects of Stoic ethics avert this conclusion. Very sketchily: for the Stoics, rationality is not a distinct part of our nature, but a way in which our nature as a whole can develop. We are led to impartiality because rationality properly developed recognizes the special nature of virtue, granting it an overriding role in our lives because of the kind of thing which it is, not because it outweighs other values. Thus, promoting the aspect of ourselves which recognizes the force of impartiality can lead to eudaimonia, because our nature as a whole is both rational and able to recognize the special force of reasons that spring from virtue.

25 Hence it is not true, as is sometimes claimed, that virtue ethics as such implies a meritocratic or inegalitarian perspective. Some versions of eudaimonism (those in the Aristotelian tradition) do have the implication that from the moral point of view some agents count more than others. But the Stoic and Stoic-influenced versions are committed to a moral egalitarianism which, although not as thorough as Kant's, is nonetheless reminiscent of it in some ways.

26 The most important “hybrid” theories are those of Antiochus in Cicero's de Finibus V, and the Aristotelian account of ethics in Arius Didymus; on these, see part 3, chapter 3, section 3, of my forthcoming book, The Morality of Happiness, and my “The Hellenistic Version of Aristotle's Ethics”, The Monist, vol. 73, no. 1 (January 1990), pp. 80–96.

27 See, in particular, Williams's, Bernard classic essay “Persons, Character, and Morality”, in The Identities of Persons, ed. Rorty, A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 197–216.Google Scholar

28 For the text, see Anonymer Kommentar zu Platons Theaetet, ed. Diels, H. and Schubart, W., Berliner Klassikertexte, vol. II (Berlin, 1905).Google Scholar The translation is mine. For arguments that the commentator belongs to the first century b.c., see Tarrant, H., “The Date of Anonymous In Theaetetum”, Classical Quarterly, vol. XXXIII (1983), pp. 161–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 The papyrus reading is uncertain at this point, but the general sense of the sentence is clear.

30 Anonymer Kommentar zu Platons Theaetet, col. 5.14–6.29.

31 Unless, as has been suggested to me, the argument is supposed to be a claim, based on inductive surveys of familiarization, to the effect that this process is not one which could lead, as the Stoics want it to lead, to equal concern for all.

32 Cicero, De Officiis III 90.

33 And, of course, hybrid theories which aim to combine features of the Aristotelian and Stoic types.

34 Of course, utilitarians make moves to defend their theory at this point.

35 This paragraph deals in a necessarily rather abrupt way with a point of great interest, which marks the greatest conceptual divide between ancient and modern theories. The point is dealt with in more detail, with reference to several ancient theories, in parts 4 and 5 of my forthcoming book (see footnote 6).