Intelligent Virtue

by Julia Annas

Why would we expect much useful action guidance merely from recognizing that something is the right thing to do? The only thing useful for guidance that it does is to direct us towards the richer virtue concepts, whose content we do have some reasonably specific understanding of.

virtuous people have their attention focused outwards on the action rather than inwards on themselves.

Aristotle points out, generosity requires taking from the right sources as well as giving to the right people in the right way.'

We often make heroes or celebrities of people for their virtues (not just their actions) in one area of their lives. Later we discover feet of clay in other areas of their lives, and we are disproportionately disillusioned. A new biography revealing hitherto unknown faults in some public figure's private life affects our view of the person as whole for the worse.' If we admire people for their virtue on the basis merely of one area of their lives, we risk being prematurely satisfied in our heroes and role models, and this will frequently lead to later disappointment, not just with the particular person but with the whole project of becoming brave, generous, or whatever.

A happy life is one you enjoy, one you find pleasant, want to continue with, find sustaining. An unhappy life is one in which you are miserable, one you avoid if you can, one in which there is little or no enjoyment. Happiness, in other words, seems to imply some connection with pleasure.

A shop flyer I saw gets something right: `Money doesn't make you does.' Stuff is irrelevant for happiness until you do something with it, even shopping.

Happiness is at least in part activity. If we fully take this on board, putting the feel-good accounts of happiness on one side, it becomes clearer why what makes us happy couldn't just be stuff sitting there in our lives, or passive states of feeling or satisfaction. To live happily we require something with as much dynamism and internal drive as happiness itself has, and the virtues provide this.

it is not a fun state that we struggle to achieve and then relax, as though we were working at an uncongenial job in order to retire and forget about the work we did to get there. Rather happiness, living happily, is always an ongoing activity. It is an ongoing project, and so very different to accounts in terns of feeling good or getting what you want or being satisfied. This is an account of happiness which emphasizes activity and engagement rather than passive experiences.