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This ignores the lived life, the development over time of the disposition to make right judgements, and the habituation of such dispositions. This is what is required to 'have a virtue,' and will constitute phronesis a term that connotes not only the reliable regularity of virtuous judgements but the unity of the virtues as well. She concludes that 'there is no one favoured paradigm for moral reasoning' although the schools are united in stressing qualitative differences between the novice and practiced moral reasoner.
An agent will be one or the other, and the ethically mature agent will better grasp the point of why he acts virtuously.
The scope of ancient ethics is larger than that of modern ethics. The reader is reminded that Aristotle includes as virtues many things that strike us as peculiar and unrelated to virtue. Yet these virtues emanate from the whole fabric of ancient social life which is the necessary context for an agent's understanding of his final end.
The Morality of Happiness [Julia Annas] on giuliettasprint.konfer.eu *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Ancient ethical theories, based on the notions of virtue and. The Morality of Happiness. Julia Annas. Abstract. The book examines the major traditions of ancient ethical theory, showing that they share a common.
Annas rejects the suggestion that such inclusiveness is not relevant to our moral life, for to bring 'the whole of our lives into reflective focus' cannot be done in isolation. This additionally answers the claim that an ethics of virtue must be egoistic, devoid of concern for others: since the virtues as a whole have to be developed, and these include justice, courage, and the like, the good of others is immediately implicated. Annas allows that 'An ethics of virtue is at most formally self-centered or egoistic; its content can be as fully other-regarding as that of other systems of ethics.
Annas concludes this section confident in the truth of her intuition that ancient theories of virtue will prove to be also theories of morality. Having secured ancient ethical judgement within the framework of a final end Annas turns in Part II to a question critical for any ethical system, namely how ethical judgements are to be grounded or justified.
Ancient philosophers regularly sought justification in nature. They did not however look for it in the constricted notion of what modern ethical naturalists might consider 'brute' nature but sought it in the realities of human nature, a realm with a distinct normative value. Annas traces the appeal to nature starting with Aristotle and proceeding through the various philosophical schools which succeeded him. Her intention in this part of the book is to show that though 'the appeal to nature takes different forms in different theories it forms a common element in ancient eudaimonistic ethical theories.
The Stoics, for all their determinist talk of 'the nature of things,' do not see nature as an independent foundation of ethical judgements. Annas relies on Cicero for evidence of the interdependence between nature and virtue, and concludes that 'Virtue and [human] nature both function as parts of a theory which is built up as a whole; neither has priority.
Her view is that nature in ancient ethics has been misunderstood. Rather than a pattern to which humans should conform, nature has a limiting role: negatively, it sets parameters on what is possible; positively, it endows human rationality with developmental schemata leading to ethical behavior. Finally, nature functions as an ethical ideal attainable by the agent possessing the necessary skills in practical decision making. She separates the agent's final good from simple self-interest by relying on two facts.
One is that acting virtuously is the way to successful attainment of the final good, the other that the virtues are dispositions to do what is right as established independently of the agent's interests. Therefore even though ancient ethical theories formally are agent-centered, they are not necessarily self-centered in respect to content and if so, not egoistic. She might strengthen the grounds for this approach by noting that one's own good and the good of others are construed differently by moderns than by the ancients.
In ancient societies a person's moral identity is far intricately embedded in the social context than is the case for moderns who only begrudgingly turn their post-Kantian eyes away from the ideal of the morally autonomous individual. An ethical system based on the perspective of a whole life would be hard pressed to remove social inter-relations as an area of primary concern.
In fact, only one group of ancient thinkers did not think one's life as a whole was important for a person's ethical choices. They were the Cyrenaics, whose hedonistic philosophy valued the interests of others only as they were useful to the agent's own interests. But as Annas notes, they were the exception that makes the rule. She uses them to make the point that crude hedonism does not fit well with the assumptions that ethical theory starts from reflection on one's whole life and needs to include some concern for others.
Even Epicurus is rehabilitated to fit Annas' requirements, since he stipulates in K. Aristotle first raises the question of whether limits should be put on the concern for others, and concludes that the ethical importance of philia does not entail unlimited concern for such, in Aristotle's words, as 'the furthest Mysian. Such an inclusive doctrine extends concern for those close to us, as family, indefinitely outwards.
There is no way ethically or rationally to break off the commitment at any point, and this fact becomes the basis of Stoic ideas about justice and community life. After this, things were never the same, and the Aristotelians were forced to accommodate ethical impartiality into their systems. An issue related to impartiality is justice, the virtue most obviously other directed.
It is complicated by its application to societies and institutions as well as to individuals, and in a survey of the topic Annas makes note of the difficulty of giving a definitive account of justice as it is related to eudaimonism. Part III concludes that charges of ethical egoism against the ancient theories are not valid. Annas determines 'that there are no structural barriers in a eudaimonist theory against the acceptance even of demands for impartiality' towards others , and for the most part morality is necessary for happiness.
The ancient theories differ among themselves in the attention allotted the interests of others, ranging from the anomalous Cyrenaics who assign these interests only instrumental value to Stoic demand for impartiality between these interests and one's own. Nonetheless nothing structural in eudaimonistic theories separates morality and self-interest. In the ancient theories only 'superficial' philosophical tensions exist between my own interests and the interests of others. At this point, the reader may ask whether Annas has reconstructed happiness to the extent that it no longer fits our intuitive understanding.
Modern interpreters have had perhaps equal difficulty as the ancients in defining 'eudaimonia. The success of ancient theories, she claims, was that they were all 'more or less revisionary. It turns out on Annas' reading that the ancient debate about virtue and happiness is a debate, with various outcomes, over what parts of our intuitions regarding happiness should be retained and what parts abandoned.
It is the success, not the failure, of ancient ethical theory that it leads away from an intuitive understanding of happiness. This approach is applied to the subjects of Annas' study in separate chapters. Epicurus is shown to have a surprisingly subtle view, making ataraxia dependent upon careful reflection and monitoring of desires, with the resultant internalization of the final end and indifference towards external goods.
The Sceptics likewise are after ataraxia , for whom happiness comes by realizing the futility of holding anything, external or internal, good in itself; to do so only creates anxiety. Based on Aristotle's inability to provide a coherent account of the relation of external goods to happiness, Annas finds in him a deep tension between the relation of virtue to happiness.
This unresolved tension presented a problem for his Peripatetic successors and for the Stoics. The latter found that external goods were not required for happiness, and that hence virtue was sufficient for happiness. Aristotle, giving considerable credence to common endoxai that valued worldly goods and success, holds that while virtue may be necessary for happiness it is not sufficient.
Theoretically the Stoic position is neater, but Annas grants that Aristotle's position on this may indicate 'the limits of ethical theory, at least of theory that aims to stand in a realistic relation to people's ethical views. These debates, in Annas' view, are really about the role morality has in happiness, which can be seen as the role morality has in the good life.
The choice between Aristotle's insistence that virtue was necessary for happiness and the good life, or Stoic arguments for the sufficiency of virtue even when one is on the rack for happiness can not be decisively made. Like the utilitarian, the philosopher will be unlikely to commit murder or assault, but not because this will result in a net loss of happiness for the people in his moral circle, but because the philosopher preoccupied with the transcendent cares little for those things for which murder is usually committed: material gain, vengeance, or worst of all idle amusement.
It is usually Aristotle that is credited with being the father of what is now called eudaimonism, the concept of eudaimomia having been formalized in the doctrine of his Nicomachean Ethics. To be sure, in that span of time eudaimonism is expressed in a variety of ways, some religious, some not, some that claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness, some that deny that claim.
But the common thread throughout all these centuries of philosophizing is that moral norms derive their prescriptive force and relevance from the degree to which they direct us toward our ultimate end: eudaimonia. To a Plato, an Aristotle, an Augustine, or an Aquinas, they may even seem obvious. But to those, like us, living in an age where eudaimonism has been long displaced and defended only by minority voices, they are, perhaps, where one needs to begin.
As Kant would argue, even if it could be demonstrated that all human beings pursue happiness and that human happiness consisted, as Aristotle suggests, in some identifiable activity or way of life, that would still not be sufficient to give us any direction of how we ought to act in any meaningful moral sense.
Moral oughts or imperatives, as opposed to hypothetical oughts or imperatives, do not direct us in how to act so as to be happy, but in how to act so as to fulfill our duties and obligations to ourselves and others. Without a doubt, Kant had it right that, for eudaimonism, all imperatives are, in his words, hypothetical.
Happiness is not chosen for the sake of anything else a25—b5. He says that such an assumption: [41]. General Books LLC, p. Those who overreach for these goods gratify their appetites and in general their feelings and the non-rational part of the soul; and this is the character of the many. Capacities are, for example, the simple capacity to have these feelings. Utilitarianism's assertion that well-being is the only thing with intrinsic moral value has been attacked by various critics.
And yet one should not conclude that the eudaimonist must also believe that all imperatives are merely optional. In a very insightful forthcoming study of this very issue as it applies to the natural law tradition, Steven Jensen observes [11] that a broadly Aristotelian and Thomistic eudaimonism is able to distinguish quite easily between moral oughts and non-moral oughts. Non-moral oughts derive from our desire for things upon which our happiness simply does not depend.
I may want to learn about the Franco-Prussian war. In Thomistic moral psychology, this desire of the will or intention immediately sets my intellect to thinking about the means necessary to fulfill that desire what is called council or deliberation. I then discover that reading about the Franco-Prussian war is necessary for obtaining my goal and doing that reading becomes a kind of imperative.