Julia Annas on What is Virtue Ethics For?

This is Philosophy Bytes with me Nigel Warbaton and me David Edmonds. Philosophy Bytes is unfunded. Please help us keep it going by subscribing or donating at www.philosophybytes.com or you can become a patron at Patreon. Philosophers often divide mole theories into three categories. The consequentialist says an action is to be judged purely by its consequences, whether it maximises happiness, for example. The deontologist disagrees. The justification or otherwise of torture cannot merely be assessed by whether or not it produces the best state of affairs. Aside from consequentialism and deontology, there's a third category of mole theory, virtue theory. Virtue theory emphasises character. Its origins go back to Aristotle, and it finds an advocate in University of Arizona professor Julia Annas. Julia Annas, welcome to Philosophy Bytes. Thank you for inviting me. The topic we're going to discuss is what is virtue ethics for? Just before we get onto the point of virtue ethics, maybe you could just give a little sketch of what virtue ethics is. Virtue ethics is an ethical theory where the central concepts are those of virtue and of very generally happiness or eudaimonia, not happiness in a sense of feeling good or having a great time, but in the sense of living a good life with which you feel satisfied. A virtue is a disposition that you acquire, a disposition to learn from experience and deal intelligently with experience so that you learn to act and act for reasons of a certain sort, and your feelings become educated and formed so that you go along with those reasons. The emphasis is on living a good life rather than on particular moral judgments. It's about developing character traits. Could you give an example of a virtue? Well, let's start with courage. Courage is the virtue that you acquire as you learn to deal with situations of danger or difficulty in certain ways. You learn that certain things are worth standing up for or enduring for and certain things are not. And you acquire the ability to do that. That doesn't mean you don't feel fear or don't feel problems that things being difficult, but you acquire the ability to deal with those in the best way. You stand up for somebody who's being bullied, you deal bravely with getting vaccinated when you're a child and so on. Virtue theory is a very popular theory, but some skeptics say, look, you're talking about dispositions to behave in certain sorts of ways, but how do you judge which things are virtues? If virtue theory can't tell you really how to behave and all it does is idealise the local virtues that the particular community you're in, there's really no way that it practically changes your behaviour. It just reinforces your prejudices. Right. That's a very common objection and it comes from not understanding what a virtue is. So I have to back up a little bit. When you learn to be courageous, you learn how to behave well in certain circumstances, certain situations, and you see people behaving well in those situations. Now you say, how did you learn this? You see somebody standing up when somebody's bullied. You see somebody behaving bravely when they have cancer. You see somebody standing up for an unpopular position in a boring meeting. How did you recognise that those were all cases of courage? There's nothing in common to the situations. You certainly don't learn what courage is by remembering what situations you've seen people act in when you were told that they were brave because the situations have nothing in common. So what you're picking up on is very generally, the way this person is dealing with the situations. Now that sounds very vague in general and it is, but what we're doing all the time and we have no difficulty in it is we're picking up on the reasons for which people are acting in certain ways. So what we're picking up on is not just situations that have been labelled as brave, we're learning how to evaluate what's worth standing up for or enduring for and what isn't. Aristotle says, in general he says people act for the good and not just what their parents did. To acquire a virtue is to acquire a critical view on what it is to do what you were told was brave or generous. There's a critical aspect to virtue right from the start and it's linked to the fact that virtue is aspirational. We want to do better. Now the best way to understand that rather abstract view is to think of what it is to acquire a practical skill because virtue is in some ways like a practical skill. Picking up a practical skill isn't picking up the prejudices of what people do who have that skill. It's not picking up exactly the way they do it, it's picking up the way they do it and the reasons for which they do it and it's the reasons that matter and not just what they do. You don't learn to be a great pianist, you need a teacher but you don't learn to be a great pianist by picking up just what the teacher does. There's something you have to pick up which is what the teacher does and do that for yourself and so from the start the notion of a virtue is something that's applicable in different situations and so we can pick up on virtues in other cultures very readily. We can see Samurai are brave and we can see Quakers are brave although they couldn't act in more different ways and that's a very important fact and it's a fact. We don't have any difficulty in doing this and so from the start virtue is not trapped in its cultural context the way some people believe. So in answer to the question what is virtue theory for would you say it's to explain what we're doing when we're making ethical judgments? It involves that, it doesn't exclude that but virtue theory, virtue ethics is for learning to live better. I think one sign of that is that certainly in the United States it's trickled down or at least gushed down, more than trickled down to the level of popular self-help books which talk about virtue all the time. There's the general idea that you pick up one of these books because you feel you'd like to live better. I think while we might think the idea of living better sounds a bit over-erroneous we're all familiar with feeling dissatisfied with the way we're living. We're all trying to live better people are buying millions of self-help books and so on so the phenomenon is perfectly familiar that we would like to live better than the way we're living and people cast around for all sorts of ways of doing it and as in the ancient world people are as inclined to turn to philosophy as to religion in these days for a way to do it. So virtue ethics is a kind of self-help within philosophy, it does actually involve practical differences in our lives. Yes and I don't think it's an insult to say it's self-help certainly for Aristotle it's practical philosophy it's supposed to have a point and in that respect it's different from other sorts of philosophy like metaphysics where there's no requirement that it make a difference in your life how good you are at metaphysics. So that sounds like a complete contrast with Plato who famously talked about the abstract form of goodness for Aristotle it sounds like you don't just have this ideal in the distance but actually change your life practically at the individual day to day level. Yes and Aristotle criticises Plato's form of the good for just that reason he says it's not practicable it doesn't make any difference in your life and that doesn't mean he despises Plato's metaphysics he doesn't he just thinks it's different from ethics. That's very appealing but when you give reasons for your actions and reflect on those reasons aren't you just as much in the grip of prejudices and parental and environmental social influences as when you simply unreflectively act? No because that's what reflection is about people don't go through life mindlessly living according to the prejudices of their parent they always think about how to live and they do so well or badly and it's better for them to do so in the light of thinking about philosophy than in the light of some other source of which there are all too many in our culture that simply encourage them to do it in a fairly easy and relatively unreflective way. So accepting that reflecting on what we do might make us less prone to prejudices how would an individual go about behaving better according to virtue ethics? Well we aren't usually faced with the idea of behaving better in general but we encounter situations where we realise we could have done better I could have been braver I could have been more generous and that's how we try to improve we realise that we didn't do as well as we could and we try to improve and I think if you think concretely in your own life everybody finds we're constantly facing situations of that sort. So when I do that I reflect on my behaviour and match it up against some kind of ideal the virtue that I would have liked to have acted upon so what role does that ideal play when I have these character flaws does it somehow draw me towards behaving better? Well it draws me towards behaving better but it also and I think this is important it demands that I behave better that's the reason I feel uncomfortable you know I give a check to a good cause and I feel really good about myself but then I reflect and I think well that wasn't really very generous because I didn't have to buy this and that for myself I could easily have given more I can't now because I've spent the money but I feel bad why do I feel bad? It's not because I think well I would have been a nicer person if I'd done that because it's very easy to avoid that thought and I should have done more. Generosity demands that I help those in need courage demands that I help people who are suffering from some threat virtues demanding as well as being aspirational. Now you mentioned you have this feeling emotions and feeling are very important in virtue ethics and they're actually given a far more central role than they are in most other ethical theories. Yes that's true I think all ethical theories need to account for the emotions and virtue ethics does so better than most I think and it's partly because by the time you think about any ethical theory you already have one because you're already an adult and children don't think about ethical theories so you've already got material that you need to work on you already have certain views about what's good and bad right and wrong but you also have a developed character of a certain sort and we all know that we can't just read a book on ethics and wake up next morning and be transformed that's not how it happens you have to work on yourself and yourself includes all sorts of emotional reactions and deep-set emotions and so on and those need to be worked on because they're part of you. So what does it mean to work on one's emotions because it's pretty difficult to change your emotional character? Well here's an analogy suppose you decided for ethical reasons to become a vegetarian well by the time you decide to become a vegetarian let's say you've grown up eating meat so you realize you not only have to change your particular views about eating meat you have to change the way you feel about meat and so for a long time it's probably difficult for you to give up eating meat you have to reach a point when you're aware of the temptations of meat and you're aware of the way that advertising shoves meat eating at you all the time and nonetheless you're not moved from your resolve to be vegetarian and we can all understand the way that involves an emotional shift you come to find your views about vegetarian food changing your views about meat changing when you go out to dinner with friends it's difficult if you're a vegetarian and there are no options on the menu you have to stick to what you believe and put up with social difficulties and so on and it's like that with trying to become more generous you don't tell people the truth about how much money you could give to the worthy cause and so on and you have to stop yourself doing things like that and eventually we can understand how we change. Now we're talking about what virtue ethics is for it's to live better some people would argue that focusing on one's individual virtues deflects us away from the really important issues which are social and political ones so an inward looking ethics neglects the importance of social changes which have far more dramatic impact than an individual person having the right kind of emotions and acting generously and bravely in a certain sorts of situations. Yes that's a very common objection to virtue ethics and it comes in effect that for some time about 200 years we've had a concept of ethics or morality which pretty much defines it in terms of egoism thinking about yourself versus thinking about others and so people often think morality is a matter of thinking about others and not thinking about yourself and that just doesn't fit virtue ethics. Virtue ethics isn't about yourself it's about being virtuous and virtue is about other people as well as yourself so what are the virtues? The virtues include and I've stressed generosity but they also include justice it's essential to being virtuous that you have the right attitude to others and that means caring about social and political conditions so virtue ethics doesn't at all encourage you to focus on yourself the virtuous person focuses on what should be done what should be done for other people because virtue more often will be relevant in situations that involve other people than involving yourself so for example a virtuous parent isn't worried about am I a virtuous parent am I the most virtuous parent on the block a virtuous parent worries about their children and that's the model for virtue it's outward looking not inward looking and that is difficult for us to formulate now because we've got so used to the idea that morality must essentially be about other people and so when virtue ethics is about virtue and you have the virtues it sounds as though you're being selfish but you have to cultivate the virtues because they're your virtues because it's your life it doesn't mean you're focused on yourself it's interesting how difficult it is to formulate that in a way that satisfies people that think in terms of modern morality being about other people. Does that mean that virtue ethics is a kind of consequentialism because what is good about virtue ethics is it brings about good consequences no because I take it consequentialism is about bringing about good states of affairs and hence the foundation of all the familiar problems that if it's about good states of affairs there's a problem about what the relation is of you to those good states of affairs and how much you matter in relation to those good states of affairs so virtue ethics leaves the focus on what you can do from your point of view and not on the goodness of a state of affairs that you might be just one person bringing about. Just to get clear what you were saying there are you suggesting that consequentialism focuses on the end result no matter how it was achieved and virtue ethics puts a stress on the relation between the individual and the effects. Yes, pretty much. Julia Annas, thank you very much. Thank you. For more Philosophy Bites go to www.philosophybites.com you can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.