Julia Annas

An introduction to Plato's Republic

This interpretive introduction provides unique insight into Platos Republic. Stressing Platos desire to stimulate philosophical thinking in his readers, Julia Annas here demonstrates the coherence of his main moral argument on the nature of justice, and expounds related concepts of education, human motivation, knowledge and understanding. In a clear systematic fashion, this book shows that modern moral philosophy still has much to learn from Platos attempt to move the focus from questions of what acts the just person ought to perform to the more profound questions of what sort of person the just person ought to be.

Happiness as achievement

Daedalus Spring 2004 Ten years ago, shortly after publishing a book called The Morality of Happiness about the structure of ancient ethical theory, I received an email informing me that I had been added to a bibliography of “happiness researchers” on a website called the World Database of Happiness. I explored this site with interest, only to 1⁄2nd that this was not a research program that I felt myself to be part of. The website assumes, without discussion, that happiness is “subjective,” that it is enjoyment or pleasure, and that it should be studied “empirically.” Philosophy is then derided for failing to “operationalize” happiness and to produce “measures” of it. (Philosophy has a meager 88 entries in the bibliography, compared to 2,927 for the social sciences.) Empirical studies are lauded for their measures of happiness, while the website claims that “preliminary questions about conceptualization and measurement are now fairly well solved.” The website, however, gives off a definite air of disappointment. No sound body of knowledge on happiness, it admits, has yet been achieved. In the present state of research, we can claim only that “there are obviously several universal requirements for a happy life (such as food and possibly meaning).” Philosophers (and some psychologists, too) will 1⁄2nd it unsurprising that if you rush to look for empirical measures of an unanalyzed ‘subjective’ phenomenon, the result will be confusion and banality.1 After all, what is it that the social scientists on the World Database of Happiness are actually measuring? Here is the heart of the problem. Is happiness really something subjective? Is it simply a matter of pleasure, a positive feeling? We can at least hope that it is not, and that we can come to conclusions better than the claim that what anyone needs to be happy is food and possibly meaning. Julia Annas

Virtue as a skill

Abstract The article argues that a consideration of the idea, common in ancient ethical theory, that virtue is a skill or craft, reveals that some common construals of it are mistaken. The analogy between virtue and skill is not meant to suggest that virtue is an unreflective habit of practised action. Rather what interests ancient ethical theorists is the intellectual structure of a skill, one demanding grasp of the principles defining the field and an ability to reflect on the justification of particular actions. This is brought out with reference particularly to the discussion of virtue as analogous with skill in Platos early Socratic dialogues. The demands made of the virtuous agent by philosophers who regard virtue as analogous to skill are akin to the demands made by more recent theories of morality which demand that the moral agent be able to reflect on her practices, extract the principles that these depend on, and produce justification when needed. This point about ancient ethical theories enabl...

Plato's Republic and Feminism

Not many philosophers have dealt seriously with the problems of womens rights and status, and those that have, have unfortunately often been on the wrong side. In fact Plato and Mill are the only great philosophers who can plausibly be called feminists. But there has been surprisingly little serious effort made to analyse their arguments; perhaps because it has seemed like going over ground already won.

Moral Knowledge as Practical Knowledge

In the area of moral epistemology, there is an interesting problem facing the person in my area, ancient philosophy, who hopes to write a historical paper which will engage with our current philosophical concerns. Not only are ancient ethical theories very different in structure and concerns from modern ones (though with the rapid growth of virtue ethics this is becoming less true), but the concerns and emphases of ancient epistemology are very different from those of modern theories of knowledge. Some may think that they are so different that they are useful to our own discussions only by way of contrast. I am more sanguine, but I am quite aware that this essays contribution to modern debates does not fall within the established modern traditions of discussing moral epistemology.

Mill and the Subjection of Women

When Mills The Subjection of Women was published in 1869 it was ahead of its time in boldly championing feminism. It failed to inaugurate a respectable intellectual debate. Feminist writers have tended to refer to it with respect but without any serious attempt to come to grips with Mills actual arguments. Kate Milletts chapter in Sexual Politics is the only sustained discussion of Mill in the feminist literature that I am aware of, but it is not from a philosophical viewpoint, and deals with Mill only in the service of an extended comparison with Ruskin. Philosophical books on Mill give the essay short measure. Alan Ryan in J. S. Mill heads one chapter ‘Liberty and The Subjection of Women’, but the former work gets twenty-six pages and the latter only four. Ryan says that ‘it is almost entirely concerned with the legal disabilities of women in Victorian England’. H. J. McCloskey, injfohn Stuart Mill: A Critical Study, gives the essay one and a half pages, commenting that it reads ‘like a series of truisms’ and seems so unimportant today because equality of the sexes has been achieved!

Virtue and Eudaimonism

The two most important and central concepts in ancient ethical theory are those of virtue ( aretē ) and happiness ( eudaimonia ). 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.

Plato and Common Morality

In the Republic , Socrates undertakes to defend justice as being in itself a benefit to its possessor. Does he do this, or does he change the subject? In a well-known article, David Sachs pointed out that there seems to be a shift in what Plato is defending. The challenge to Socrates is put by Thrasymachus, who admires the successful unjust man, and by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who do not, but are worried that justice has no adequate defence against Thrasymachus. In all these passages justice is discussed in terms of the non-performance of actions which are regarded as unjust according to common morality; Sachs calls this common concept of ordinary justice ‘vulgar justice’.

The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others

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 Aristotles, 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).

Should Virtue Make You Happy

In ancient ethics the two central notions are those of virtue (arete) and happiness (eudaimonia); much of ancient ethical debate centres on the question of what the relation is of virtue to happiness. Happiness is the more general defining concept and ancient ethical theories are standardly called eudaimonist, because of this central place of the concept of happiness. The idea of virtue has been re-established in a serious way, both in academic ethical discussion and on a more everyday level. But we have more trouble with the notion of happiness. In this paper I shall look at the kind of problem this raises for us, both in understanding ancient ethical theories and in rethinking modem ethical ideas in the light of them. The serious use of virtue in modem moral philosophy is recent. Until a few years ago moral theories were typically driven by a perceived need for ways of telling us, in a given situation, what is the right thing to do; hence theories tended to focus on difficult moral problems and hard cases. The virtues were treated as morally trivial, seen merely as dispositions to do the right thing reliably, and as such of minor importance. Moreover, often virtues were redefined in terms of doing the right thing in terms of the theory in question, and this could produce strange results. Bentham, for example, the founder of Utilitarianism, can see no place for virtue except as a disposition to perform those actions which do the right thing in utilitarian terms and thus produce the greatest overall happiness, and there would be no need for virtue if we were not naturally