Julia Annas

Some years ago I started to write a book on virtue ethics, in which I tried to meet early criticisms of what was then a new way of doing ethics. The book continued to be unsatisfactory, and I finally abandoned it, realizing that I needed to get clear about virtue before producing a defence of virtue ethics. This need should have been obvious, especially since I frequently teach Platonic dialogues where Socrates gets people to see that they are doing what I was doing, namely developing ideas about something without first examining what it is. The need became even more obvious as the field rapidly expanded with the production of Humean, Nietschean, Kantian and consequentialist kinds of virtue ethics. Within the field of neo-Aristotelian ethics itself it became clear that different aspects can be stressed: the importance of practical wisdom can be developed, for example, without defending a naturalistic account of the relation of virtue to happiness.I finally wrote a book to explore and d ..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Julia Annas ACTION AND CHARACTER IN DOSTOYEVSKY'S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND Notes from Underground was written with a specific purpose in mind: to answer Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?1 And many features of Dostoyevsky's work can only be understood when we bear in mind its specifically Russian setting. The narrator is a romantic idealist of the forties transformed into something rather different by 1864, and no doubt we lose much if we do not bear in mind that Dostoyevsky is looking back across the gulf of imprisonment and suffering at his own idealistic youth.2 But the intense and radically peculiar nature of Dostoyevsky's writing takes us to a level of the work which is accessible to those without knowledge of the local conditions of the work's production. As Mochulsky says, "the author steadily emerges beyond the confines of the Russian intellectual... the underground man's paradoxes are not the whims of some half-mad eccentric, but a new revelation of man about man." The book is "the philosophical preface to the cycle of the great novels" (p. 245). Even though Dostoyevsky's passionate and extreme temperament made him quite incapable of constructing a piece of precise philosophical argument, there is much of genuine philosophical interest in part I. It is not just a particular moral and political theory, like Chernyshevsky's, which is to be discredited, but something deeper, the presuppositions of a whole type of moral theory. In this article I shall examine the implications of what Dostoyevsky says for the philosophy of action and thence for ethics. I shall argue that he challenges a very basic model of human action, which is both intuitively plausible and basic to many moral theories. I shall also argue that as the work stands, there is a lack of continuity between parts I and II on the philosophical as well as on the literary level. In concentrating on the consequences for moral theory, I shall be ignoring the social and political aspects of the work. It may well be urged that such a division of the moral from the political is unrealistic in treating 257 258Philosophy and Literature a Russian writer. In defense I can only say that this narrowing of focus brings out in a sharper and more tractable way the philosophical issue which is my main concern. I Tell me, who was it who first declared, proclaiming it to the whole world, that a man does evil only because he does not know his real interests, and if he is enlightened and has his eyes opened to his own best and normal interests, man will cease to do evil and at once become virtuous and noble, because when he is enlightened and understands what will really benefit him he will see his own best interest in virtue, and since it is well known that no man can knowingly act against his best interests, consequently he will inevitably, so to speak, begin to do good. Oh, what a baby! Oh, what a pure innocent child! (part I section 7; all quotations are from the translation by Jessie Coulson [London: Penguin, 1972]). What exactly is the target here of the Underground Man?3 Every moral theory presupposes some theory of human action, although this may not be explicit; since moral philosophy is concerned with human actions, it must presuppose some account of what it is for a human action to be performed. One very influential tradition thinks of the paradigm of action as essentially aimed at some good: "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good" is the opening sentence of Aristotle's Ethics.4 What is it for every action to aim at some good? We have the assumption here that every action is purposive and rational; purposive in that there is some goal which the agent sees as a good and rational in that performing the action is believed by the agent to be an appropriate means or way of bringing about the desired goal. This model of action is developed very fully in Aristotle, but it is not conceptually linked to...

There are problems with egoism as a theory, but what matters here is the point that intuitively ethics is thought to be about the good of others, so that focusing on your own good seems wrong from the start. Virtues are not just character traits, however, since forgetfulness or stubbornness are not virtues. Virtues are character traits which are in some way desirable. Criticism is generally renewed at this point on the grounds that claims about flourishing are now including claims about virtue, and are thus no longer common ground to the defender and the critic of virtue ethics. But virtue ethics has never held that they are, so this is not a problem. It is only to be expected that the virtuous will differ from the nonvirtuous in their assessments of flourishing, because we are dealing here with virtue in the context of a formally characterized conception of flourishing.

The two most important and central concepts in ancient ethical theory are those of virtue and happiness. This is well-known by now, as is the way that many scholars and philosophers have in recent years investigated the structure of ancient ethical theories, at least partly in the hope that this would help us in our modern ethical thinking by introducing us to developed theories which escape the problems that have led to so much frustration with deontological and consequentialist approaches. And there has indeed been considerable interest in developing modern forms of ethics which draw inspiration, to a greater or lesser extent, from the ancient theories. However, there is an asymmetry here. Modern theories which take their inspiration from Aristotle and other ancient theorists are standardly called virtue ethics, not happiness ethics. We have rediscovered the appeal of aretē, but eudaimonia is still, it appears, problematic for us. This has an important consequence for us, for in ancient theories virtue is not discussed in isolation; it is seen as part of a larger structure in which the overarching concept is happiness. If we focus on virtue alone and ignore its relation to happiness, we are missing a large part of the interest that study of the ancient theories can offer

From the Hellenistic period we have two extensive texts of great interest which draw on Aristotle’s ethical works. One is Antiochus’ system of ethics in Cicero’s De Finibus V; the other is the long account of “the ethics of Aristotle and the other Peripatetics” in Stobaeus’ Eclogae II, 116-152, plausibly ascribed to Arius Didymus. Antiochus’ ethics is consciously “eclectic” in the sense that he is using a variety of ethical material and approaches, Aristotelian and other, to create something of his own. Arius, however, professes to be telling us what Aristotelian ethics is, and scholars have been disconcerted to find something so different from any idea we have of Aristotelian ethics. We find a text in which material clearly taken from the ethical works and the Politics has been not just summarized but recast in terms that are clearly Stoic. Most strikingly, before we get to what we recognize as Aristotelian material we find a long section developing in an Aristotelian context what seems clearly to be the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis. Either Arius, or more likely the Peripatetic source he is following, has presented Aristotle’s ethics in a very changed form. Since we have no hope of pinpointing a particular Peripatetic source for the passage, I shall for convenience refer to “Arius” or “the Arius passage,” but the person or people with whom we are concerned are more likely to be, in fact, Arius’ source or sources.

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 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