Virtue Ethics: Egalitarian Elitism
Defending Julia Annas's virtue ethics from Julia Driver's elitism objection.
Julia Driver regards Julia Annas’s skill analogy of virtue as elitist. In this paper, I will explore if Driver’s objection is a fair one. I will give reasons to deny Driver’s objection to Annas’s brand of virtue ethics. Not only will I deny Driver’s explicit objection to Annas, i.e., that the latter’s ethical theory is an inaccessible one, but I will object to her implicit contention; I don’t believe that a virtue ethical theory—or any ethical theory, for that matter—is rendered null and void because it is difficult to practice. I will go a step further and argue that ethical theories ought to identify superlative qualities as ideals. In other words, I will argue two points: first, Annas’s account is actually less elitist than other virtue ethical theories that give pride of place to non-intellectual virtues; second, the way in which Annas’s account is elitist is not disqualifying but desirable. We have reason to believe that ethical theories ought to be demanding, posit scarcely attainable values as ideals, and refrain from debasing themselves to the common level: that would be an ethic of vice or instead of virtue; one whose end is the miserable instead of the good life. Appropriately, the Greek word for “virtue,” arete, is synonymous with excellence.
Driver regard’s Annas’s account as elitist. She posits that “virtue must be accessible—to those who are not wise but kind; to those who had the misfortunate to grow up in repressive environments that warped their understanding, yet who are capable of showing the appropriate compassionate responses to human suffering.”[1] Annas’s response to Driver is multipronged and forceful. First, Annas raises the objection that, just as we are not all wise, neither is everyone sympathetic. Whether people simply lack a natural virtue for kindness or live “in terrible conditions of poverty and violence” such that they “fail to become virtuous because of the difficulties of their situation,”[2] this quality is no more universal than practical wisdom.[3] In her response to Driver, Annas bites the bullet of elitism by revealing how Driver’s preferred standard of moral worthiness is no more accessible. While I agree that Annas should bite the bullet, in the sense for which I will finally argue, her theory is egalitarian in a more important sense.
Annas persuasively argues for the egalitarian nature of her virtue ethics by appealing to her skill analogy. Simply put, “we can all learn to acquire skills.”[4] Although some people may have natural virtues that render them more capable of developing these virtues into intelligent ones properly directed by practical wisdom, everyone possesses the same capacity of volition: infinite. Descartes’s distinction between man’s limited intellect and perfect, infinite will is informative:
“In the same manner if I enquire into memory or imagination or any other faculties, I find them in myself Weak and Circumscribed. . . there is therefore only my Will or Freedom of Choice, which I find to be so Great, that I cannot frame to myself an Idea of One Greater, so that ’tis by this chiefly by which I Understand myself to Bear the likeness and Image of God,” [5] whom Descartes understands to cause man’s positive conception of the infinite.
In Annas’s tentative, qualified verbiage, “the drive to aspire in what we learn is more plausible something accessible to all.”[6] Driver is at great pains to argue there exists a differential of volition between agents, whom I understand as autonomous adults not suffering from neurosis.
Referring back to Driver’s challenge and Annas’s response further demonstrates the essentially egalitarian assumptions of the latter’s virtue ethics. We don’t expect beneficence[7] from those people who grow up in subsistence level poverty, war zones, or other oppressive life circumstances because they are incapable of it but because their cultivation thereof was rendered impracticable by circumstances outside their control.[8] To regard individuals from wildly disparate backgrounds, circumstances, &c. as capable of attaining the same virtues is to work within a framework of metaphysical equality that treats people as essentially thinking, willing things.
Annas’s relegation of natural virtue to merely neutral dispositions that, without practical wisdom, can be used for ill as easily as good is yet more evidence of the egalitarianism of her account. Citing Aristotle, Annas describes those with “a natural predisposition to be bold or sympathetic or the like” as “powerful but blind people who stumble and fall over.”[9] In this way, Annas’s account of virtue nicely sidesteps the problem of constitutive moral luck.[10] If Annas instead regarded natural virtues as genuine virtues instead of mere dispositions, her account would lend itself to dangerous conclusions of natural inferiority and superiority, slavishness and masterliness.[11] But she does not. Annas’s distinction between techne and empeiria—skill (intelligent virtue) and knack (natural virtue)—on the basis of an explanatory account, which the former possesses and the latter lacks, is yet more evidence of her rejection of natural hierarchies of virtue (and vice).[12]
Annas’s theory is egalitarian not only insofar as the cultivation of the virtues is predicated on exercising the will to learn but in its implications for the attainability of happiness qua eudaimonia. Happiness is not a matter of the circumstances of your life, i.e., “the stuff you have, or whether you are beautiful, healthy, powerful, or rich,” but “one in which you deal well with these things that you have—and cope well with illness, poverty, and loss of status.”[13] An account that reserved happiness—at least one of the most important ends of our living[14]—for those fortunate enough to have great material wealth, comfort, regard, and other extrinsic goods would reasonably be called elitist. Again, Annas’s theory explicitly rebels against such elitism: happiness “is a matter of. . . how you live your life in whatever circumstances you find yourself” (emphasis added).[15]
Evidence of Annas’s commitment to egalitarianism runs throughout Intelligent Virtue but, for the sake of brevity, I will limit myself to one more example. In specifying how one comes to acquire virtues, Annas does not restrict moral education to first-hand experience or pedagogy from ethical exemplars, both of which preferentially afforded to those who have the privilege of circumstantial luck.[16] Instead, Annas acknowledges that the role models who provide the basis for children’s cultivation of virtue can come in the form of “heroes in books or movies.”[17] Though Annas relegates this point to a parenthetical aside, the importance of its implication cannot be understated: even those children unfortunate enough to be born without natural virtue, surrounded by vicious role models, in uncongenial circumstances can learn virtue by emulating characters accessible to (nearly) everybody: Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, Peter Parker from Spider-Man, Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings, Socrates (as described in Plato’s Apology), and, perhaps the most inspirational (and accessible) moral exemplar the world over, Jesus Christ. In another nod to Martha Nussbaum’s work on the connection between fiction narrative and moral education,[18] Annas reiterates the importance of “books, movies, and the like as well as more intellectual fare” to how she thinks about herself, i.e., how she conceives of virtue, vice, and her own character.
Thus far, I have reviewed how Annas’s ethical theory is egalitarian insofar as the virtues are accessible to all individuals,[19] are not granted by birth but must be learned, understood, and practiced, whose cultivation is possible even in inhospitable circumstances,[20] and render happiness[21] accessible to all. In another sense, Annas’s theory is undeniably elitist: her unified conception of intelligent virtue demands the achievement of phronesis—practical wisdom—and the ceaseless practice of virtue, which culminates in a highly continent person instead of the paragon of complete virtue who provides an unattainable exemplar to be striven toward. This kind of elitism does not serve to disqualify an ethical theory but is a desideratum thereof: ethics was traditionally the philosophical enterprise of discovering what constitutes the good life; mere abstinence injustice[22] or begrudging maximization of others’ happiness[23] does not eudaimonia produce. No, the good life lived by the (wo)man of good character demands a positive conception of the good life. The fact that Annas’s account strikes Driver as elitist is evidence of its veracity: it is hard to become a good person leading a sustaining, fulfilling life. Luckily, we have philosophy.
Bibliography:
Annas, Julia. “Chapter 3: Skilled and Virtuous Action.” Intelligent Virtue. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2011.
Descartes, Rene. “Meditation IV: Of Truth and Falsehood.” Meditations on First Philosophy.
Driver, Julia. Uneasy Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Nagel, Thomas. “Chapter 3: Moral Luck.” Mortal Questions. Cambridge [England]; Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Nussbaum, Martha Craven. “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy.” New Literary History 15, no. 1 (1983): 25–50.
[1] Julia Annas. “Chapter 3: Skilled and Virtuous Action.” Intelligent Virtue. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2011. 30.
[2] Annas, 31.
[3] “Moral knowledge—unlike mathematical knowledge—cannot be acquired merely by attending lectures and is not characteristically to be found in people too young to have had much experience of life. There are youthful mathematical geniuses, but rarely, if ever, youthful moral geniuses, and this tells us something significant about the sort of knowledge that moral knowledge is.” Moral knowledge, the kind provided by phronesis, i.e., practical wisdom, is accessible to all through intense focus, observation, and introspection; there is no IQ requirement. Rosalind Hursthouse. “Virtue Theory and Abortion.” Philosophy & public affairs 20, no. 3 (1991): 231.
[4] Annas, 30.
[5] Rene Descartes. “Meditation IV: Of Truth and Falsehood.” Meditations on First Philosophy. 61-62.
[6] Annas, 30.
[7] I use “sympathy,” “kindness,” and “beneficence” interchangeably throughout this essay for the sake of variety. Please ignore whatever subtle distinctions exist between each of the three for the sake of my argument.
[8] Annas, 31.
[9] Annas, 26.
[10] Thomas Nagel. “Chapter 3: Moral Luck.” Mortal Questions. Cambridge [England]; Cambridge University Press, 1979.
[11] Please pardon the neologism; I could not divine the antonym of “slavishness.”
[12] Annas, 20.
[13] Annas, 129.
[14] Maximally understood by Aristotle to be the only end that aims at no other, i.e., one’s telos.
[15] Annas, 130.
[16] Nagel.
[17] Annas, 23.
[18] Martha Craven Nussbaum. “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy.” New Literary History 15, no. 1 (1983): 25–50.
[19] As qualified by equal volition.
[20] Namely, by emulating fictional role models from literature.
[21] As understood in the sense of eudaimonia.
[22] Understood in the deontological sense of rights-violating behavior.
[23] As demanded by utilitarian theories of varying degrees of sophistication and honesty.