Julia Annas

Julia Annas presents a much-needed examination of virtue that takes us away from the infighting between rival moral theories and ethical theorists and returns us to the phenomena. A virtue, she argues, is an active disposition that is persisting, reliable, and characteristic. It is best thought of as very much like a practical skill such as playing the piano. And as such, anyone acquiring a virtue proceeds along a developmental path from early beginner, modelling one’s behaviour on that of show more one’s teachers, through iterations of reflection and adjustment as one becomes more fully cognizant of all the aspects of the virtue in question and the reasons one might have for pursuing it, continuing thereafter to aspire towards an ideal of virtuosity, if you will, that is typified by spontaneous access to the appropriate virtuous action in the right way at the right time which is apparently unreflective (you do not need to think about performing the action and then perform it) but which on questioning retains the full wealth of reasons and justifications that one earlier appealed to as one progressed along the developmental path. It is in this sense that virtue is intelligent, no mere repetitive action learned by rote. It is an appealing basis on which to begin one’s thinking about virtue, goodness, and eudaimonism.

This is not an attempt to present an ethical theory. Indeed, Annas explicitly warns us that her examination of virtue is intended to clear up confusion over the common understanding of virtue in order to allow debates between moral philosophers to proceed on a more solid footing. And certainly in the first half of the book she sticks closely to this aim. It is here that she patiently draws out the various ways in which the practical skills analogy for virtue works.

Of course once that base has been laid, there is a natural progression to the unity of virtue, the relationship between virtue and goodness, and on a parallel tack, the relationship between virtue and happiness (allowing that “happiness” is currently a term unfortunately linked to pleasure and desire-satisfaction, which is not what eudaimonism amounts to). By the end, Annas has given us a full range of resources with which to make our own assessment of competing moral theories, their own accounts of virtue, and more especially some of the recently aggressive (though I think mistaken) attacks on the very possibility of virtue as a disposition (e.g. Gilbert Harman) which draw upon startling results from experimental psychology. By emphasising the developmental nature of a virtue as a practical skill, Annas believes, and I agree, that her account avoids the extreme criticism, which might yet apply to accounts of virtue emerging from consequentialist or deontological moral theories.

Intelligent Virtue is a significant achievement that may help refocus the study of virtue and eventually set virtue ethics on a more solid footing. Highly recommended. show less

A shorter very short introduction, with some glaring flaws and questionable uses of limited page count. First off the book makes it clear getting at Plato's thoughts is difficult because there's no treatise of positive argumentation that establish them. That hasn't stopped people from trying.

Trying to separate Socratic thought from Platonic thought is a problem with long history as well, with an ongoing debate on where to draw the line between dialogues representing Socrates, versus the show more ones where Plato is (potentially) smuggling in his own thinking. This is not covered in depth.

One of seven chapters is devoted to gender issues, which is very much of this era, but could have been better spent. show less

Happiness in a eudaimonist account is what I come to when I start asking about my life, how it is going and how I can achieve better. Happiness is my happiness, the way I live my life; only I can achieve my happiness, because only I can live my life, and happiness won't result from some plan imposed on me from outside my own reflections.

Annas provides are very readable and helpful account of virtue ethics, largely relying on an analogy with practical skills like learning a language or show more instrument. This analogy is illuminating and easy to grasp. She builds her largely Aristotelian account from the ground up, but her account is largely a matter of application with very little in the way of metaethical theory. While there is something that is always both alluring and slippery about virtue ethics that Intelligent Virtue didn't exactly clear up, I think Annas's book is still a great point of entry for anyone curious about virtue ethics. show less

A good overview of Plato's works, stressing that Plato was trying to inculcate a method or approach rather than to establish dogmas and thus we shouldn't let the inconsistencies between one dialogue and another bother us too much.