Intelligent Virtue

by Julia Annas

Skilled dispositions are not static conditions; they are always developing, being sustained or weakened.

Virtues, which are states of character, are states that enable us to respond in creative and imaginative ways to new challenges. No routine could enable us to do this.

Where the aspiration to improve fails, we lapse into simple repetition and routine. This is a very demanding feature of a skill.3

a virtue is not just a habit of copying what others do but a disposition to act which involves understanding what you do, self- directedness, and a drive to improve.

Here we need a distinction which turns out to be important for much that follows. It is the distinction between the circumstances of a life and the living of a life. The circumstances of your life are the factors whose existence in your life are not under your control.

The living of your life is the way you deal with the circumstances of your life. You can't bring it about that you have a different genetic disposition from the one you do, but it's up to you how you respond to this, either refusing to think about it or working with it.

You can't do anything about having been brought up in a particular culture, but it's up to you what you make of this, and what attitude you take to your culture and others.

skill can be exercised on a wide variety of materials, and the same materials can be put to s...

The virtues are part of the way we live our lives, whatever the circumstances are; we don't discover the virtues in our lives, since we have to bring it about that they are there.

Since there are, obviously, many different ways of life, there will be many ways of living these ways of life virtuously, and no reason to think that there is any single recipe in ternis of which virtues will always be needed, or any single hierarchy of which virtues will be most important. A

central. The ancient `cardinal' virtues are courage, justice, 'temperance', and wisdom; a contemporary account would add at least benevolence, and would be more inclined to talk in terms of a larger group of more specific virtues, such as patience, generosity, fairness, and so on.

In general, it is a good indication that a character trait is not a virtue if it neither implies nor is implied by central virtues, such as courage, but could be exercised in ways which are either courageous or cowardly, virtuous or vicious.

Virtues which are distinct when we start to learn them turn out to be related, because they all involve the same practical intelligence, which operates over life as a whole, not in different ways in separate compartments of life.

Broadly, virtue is a successful commitment to goodness, vice a failure to commit to goodness, and dispositions which are neither, are neither virtues nor vices but just traits we have.

Virtue is committed to goodness because it is good;

goodness attracts them in a way that the vicious are not attracted, and the mediocre are attracted only weakly.

A reason that wittiness, tidiness, and affability do not integrate with the virtues is because they do not express or indicate a commitment to goodness. This illuminates why they can be exercised just as well viciously as virtuously.

Virtues are dispositions which are not only admirable but which we find inspiring and take as ideals to aspire to, precisely because of the commitment to goodness which they embody. I take it that this is a point which can be appreciated at an everyday level. We encourage children in schools, by means of posters, lessons, and books, to admire and aspire to be like some people and not others, and these are people whose characters are admirable and inspiring because of their commitment to goodness, regardless of whether in worldly terms they succeeded or failed, or were useful and/or agreeable to themselves or to other people.

But it is anyway clear that any consequentialist account of virtue fails to account for the important point about a virtue which we are exploring here, namely that it involves a commitment to goodness because it is goodness. This is what marks virtues off from neutral dispositions and vices, and shows that what makes a disposition a virtue is not the results it produces but, broadly speaking, the attitude of the person who has the virtue. This

A happy life is one in which you deal well with these things that you have-and cope well with illness, poverty, and loss of status, if these things happen to you.

They are telling us that, whatever our circumstances, whether we are healthy or unhealthy, rich or poor, educated or uneducated, we should think about our lives and try to live them well, rather than just continuing on with the way we have hitherto been coping with the circumstances of our lives.

These are contrasting views of what we need to do in order to live happily, but none of them force any particular way of life on us (getting married, becoming a churchgoer, etc.) since they are talking about happiness as living your life, not giving us advice about the circumstances of your life.

Julian Barnes, in a brilliant piece of writing, brings this point out. In one of his works he describes a man who finds himself in heaven, or rather in `New Heaven', an up-to-date version of heaven which is nonjudgemental, and where you get everything you want, effortlessly and without any adverse consequences.

A life of having all your desires fulfilled without the problems created by human neediness leaves humans with nothing to live for, nothing to propel them onwards.23

What we can conclude is that people's opinions about their happiness vary over time and according to the factors that are important to them at the time. But this is not news. It

Studies of flourishing and languishing indicate how important it is for us that we take seriously our overall assessment of how well we are functioning in life, in whatever our cultural and social context is, and not just how we feel about our life.

Aiming at pleasure, understood as a way of living my life, will come, on this view, to nothing more than manipulating other circumstances so that I get as many of these episodes as I can.

Eudaimonist accounts, then, will not have some people trying to live others' lives by imposing values and priorities on them.