In June 2025, Julia Annas (Arizona, emerita) joined us in Sydney to deliver two papers: “Virtuous Right Action” and “Did Plato Ever Hold ‘Socratic Intellectualism?’”. Alyssa Meli (current MPhil, Sydney) caught up with Julia recently to discuss these papers. What follows is a rich discussion of the position of ethical naturalism in virtue ethics; the propensity for advocates of other theories of ethics to “talk past” the virtue ethicist; the range of ways we have – and can!—read Plato; and what kind of intellectualism ought to be ascribed to Socrates.
A revised version of “Virtuous Right Action” is expected to be published in a forthcoming special edition of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, co-edited by Kathryn MacKay (Sydney Health Ethics) and myself. Huge thanks to Kate (who co-organized the June workshops with me), Julia, and Alyssa, as well as all participants in the workshops in June.–Emily Hulme
Virtue ethics is a topic you have explored multiple times in your career. What keeps you revisiting it? And how has your understanding and approach to virtue ethics adapted over time?
I keep revisiting virtue ethics, I suppose, because I think it is the best way to think about ethics. I’ve been convinced for a long time that other ethical theories (or accounts of what ethics is, as some people dislike thinking of virtue ethics as a theory) just don’t answer to the way we think about important issues in our lives, where our ordinary mundane ways of thinking about practical things aren’t enough. For example, how to bring up our children, or whether to take part actively in politics. Now a lot of philosophers hold that it’s a mistake to be concerned about whether thinking in terms of virtue answers to the way we already think and talk about ethics; they point out that historically many ethical ways of thinking were horribly mistaken, and that we should aim to reform, or even replace, the ethical ways of thinking that we already have. I agree that when we look back on history we find constant improvement in the way we treat one another and the way we think about one another, and there is no reason to think that we have now achieved the most that we can. But where are we to start from, if not from here, from the way we think now? Well, we could start from some initial principles, as some ethical theories do. Or we could start from a theory which has the formal merits of a scientific theory, such as being parsimonious in its initial terms. But these approaches are likely to have limited success when we discuss matters with people who don’t share those initial principles, or don’t think that ethics is best discussed in the terms of theories that answer to scientific requirements. With virtue ethics we start talking in terms that most people are comfortable with, and we can then move on in ways that enlarge the subject and take us beyond what most of us find obvious.
I began by thinking of virtue ethics very much in terms of an Aristotelian approach. This isn’t surprising, because the movement in ethics which started a revival of virtue ethics was in the main a revival also of an Aristotelian approach towards thinking of ethics in terms of flourishing, and this in turn was thought of in a naturalistic way. This latter was an understandable reaction against the ethical theories current in the mid-twentieth century, which assumed that ethical statements were some version of our expressions of preference (sometimes very sophisticated versions). So virtue ethics has been associated with ethical naturalism, in particular the idea that a flourishing life is a particular form of human life that we can directly study. Since then there have been other forms of virtue ethics, notably Christine Swanton’s target-centred virtue ethics and Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist version. I’ve not been persuaded by any of these, and I remain convinced that ethics is about something real outside ourselves, not a matter of our expressions or projections or desires. But I’ve become more detached from the position that virtue ethics must be part of a larger theory which also supports what’s now called Aristotelian naturalism. I’ve come to think that virtue ethics needs to be developed as an ethical theory first, and we need to worry about the meta-ethics of it afterwards. I’m fortified in this by the fact that virtue ethics doesn’t fit into any of the meta-ethical frameworks that have been developed since ‘meta-ethics’ became an inquiry separate from ethics in the twentieth century.
It seems at times virtue ethicists and their deontological or consequentialist counterparts are often prone to talk past one another, particularly when discussing the concept of ‘right action’. In these discussions do you think that people often fail to meet the virtue ethicist on their own terms? How can this kind of misunderstanding be avoided?
This is a very interesting question. In general, deontology and consequentialism have established the parameters of debate between theories, so that people with quite opposed views on what it’s right to do, still agree on the ways we should argue about what it’s right to do. So a broad range of philosophers agree with Roger Crisp, in his article ‘A Third Way in Ethics?’, where he argues that virtue ethics is not a distinct ‘third way’ in ethics, alongside consequentialism and deontology, but just a version of deontology. You would think that readers, even readers with no sympathy for virtue ethics, would find this an outrageous claim. Crisp, though, appeals to principles that he hopes are shared by his readers. One is that what shows us that one ethical theory is different from another is their giving different answers, in given cases, to what is the right action. Crisp then makes another assumption he expects his readers to share, namely that theories that are different will also offer different reasons for the right action’s being the right action. Deontological and consequentialist theories duly offer different reasons for the right action’s being the right action. So does virtue ethics, the virtue ethicist says – the right action is the virtuous action. Ah, says Crisp, but virtue ethics doesn’t successfully show that it’s virtue that makes the virtuous action the right action. And here is where virtue ethicists part company with Crisp and those of his readers that agree with him. Here Crisp fails to accept the virtue ethicist’s own account of what it is that makes the virtuous action the right action, and he is no longer arguing on common ground with them. This is what I find the most striking case I know where discussion fails because the virtue ethicist isn’t being met on common ground. I’ve tried (in my paper, “Virtuous Right Action”) to show what’s wrong with Crisp’s assumption, but it would have been better if defenders of other theories had been willing to be more accommodating and allowed that what Crisp shows is actually that virtue ethics gives right action a different place in the theory, rather than claiming that he’s shown that virtue ethics fails to do what other theories do. I don’t know what concretely to suggest to improve the situation, except perhaps to recommend that we look at what each theory sets out to do, rather than assume that one or more theories sets the standard, and others fail as theories if they don’t meet that standard. Why not pay attention to the way virtue ethics describes itself, rather than redescribing it in other terms?
In your paper (“Virtuous Right Action”) you suggest that shifting our thinking away from asking if something is the right action or the right thing to do, and instead focusing on what virtues an act would express would ultimately be a more fruitful and effective approach for individual deliberation. Can you expand on this idea? Do you think that this shift in perspective could also improve discussions between individuals, potentially by encouraging the interlocutors to speak with more specificity and sensitivity?
I think that the last part of your question points in exactly the right direction. In my view, thinking primarily in terms of what is or is not the right action, or the right thing to do, is unhelpful until we enrich our thinking by using the virtue terms. (Actually, I’ve been reminded recently that Rosalind Hursthouse (in On Virtue Ethics, pp 41-2) points out that our virtue terms are fewer than our terms for vices. ‘Much invaluable action guidance comes from avoiding courses of action that are irresponsible, feckless, lazy, inconsiderate, uncooperative, harsh, intolerant, indiscreet, incautious, unenterprising, pusillanimous, feeble, hypocritical, self-indulgent, materialistic, grasping, short-sighted…..and on and on.’ As often with Hursthouse, this is a brilliant insight.) Making claims about right action and then backing and defending these by reference to rules and principles (or straightforwardly to the idea of morality, as with the idea that a right action is one that expresses a ‘moral ought’) leads to ways of theoretical thinking which, as has often been held, pass right over the terms that lead us to the agent’s character and the context of the action, pointing instead to more abstract and theoretical entities such as rules, whose explanation and justification goes upwards in the theory towards greater abstraction, without taking account of the considerations that most of us find to be the most relevant when we explain and justify why something was the right thing to do.
In your work you reference the fact that Socrates is often depicted as a midwife of ideas and suggest that this approach could benefit both the interlocutor and the reader. Can you expand on this idea? How should this shape the way we interact with Socratic dialogues and our understanding of their aims?
Sometimes Plato’s works are read as though the most essential question is whether ‘Socrates’ gives us the views of the historical Socrates or of Plato. This approach is going out of fashion, but it still has some appeal to many people. We expect a philosopher to tell us what he or she thinks is true. If Plato isn’t doing that, what is he doing? Many readers assume that Plato’s Socrates (especially in the Republic, the work most people read to introduce them to Plato) is Plato’s mouthpiece, putting forward energetically positions that Plato held. This assumption is harder to hold the more dialogues you read, because you soon find that Plato’s Socrates differs radically from dialogue to dialogue, in a way that doesn’t allow us to unify him between dialogues. He also isn’t always the chief speaker, and isn’t even a character in the longest dialogue (the Laws). And there is the central fact that Plato never appears in person in his dialogues. He is always, as the writer, distanced from the figure of Socrates, whom he portrays in a variety of different roles. He annoys self-important people; he talks about courage, love, the ideal city, virtue and a range of other things. Rather than try to unify all this, it gets us nearer to what Plato finds important if we cease to see Plato’s Socrates as his mouthpiece, and find what Plato is using him to do.
I think that here it’s useful to think of the major role of Plato’s Socrates as being that of the midwife of ideas, as he presents himself in the dialogue Theaetetus. I began to think of this when I started to study the way that Plato’s own school, the Academy, turned to scepticism in the 3rd century BCE. They took Plato to be using the figure of Socrates to turn philosophers from making confident claims about the world, ethics and everything to examining such claims, and probing hard into the reasons supporting them. Plato’s Socrates does this in some of the shorter (and more entertaining) dialogues by challenging the claims of people who confidently claim knowledge about a variety of topics. In dialogues like the Republic he presents positions with apparent confidence – but always in dialogue with someone else, never from a position of authority. In presenting Socrates as a figure in dialogue with others, thus rejecting the option of writing philosophy in his own person, Plato gets us to see the philosopher as someone whose dialectical position is always provisional, however confidently it is presented. This carries over to dialogues where Socrates is not the main speaker, since Plato never abandons the dialogue form; he never writes books of philosophy that put forward his own view on his own authority.
Many readers of Plato have understood him in this way in the ancient world, but it had little influence over readers in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. In my philosophical lifetime there has been a change. It used to be that only the ‘literary’ readers of Plato would take the dialogue form seriously, while the philosophical readers would ignore it and its implications. Nowadays nearly all philosophical readers realize that it’s important not to read Plato in the flatly literal way that turns Socrates into Plato’s mouthpiece (or the mouthpiece of the historical Socrates) and finds the only or main point of reading Plato to be that of discovering doctrine. As a result, work on Plato has become much more varied and far richer than was the case when I was young. I find this an unalloyed improvement. Plato is a very varied writer and a philosopher with a wide range of interests. In the ancient Platonic tradition he was regarded as having ‘many voices’. Recognizing this doesn’t determine whether you think that he puts forward differing positions in different dialogues, or holds some views consistently, varying the ways he presents them in different contexts (and perhaps for different audiences). This leaves us with more work to do as we engage with more of the dialogues, and, in my view, makes reading Plato much more interesting!
What is the main difference between Socratic intellectualism and your view of intellectualism in Plato’s philosophy?
I take it that Socratic intellectualism is a term for a position which has often been found in a group of dialogues which are often regarded as written early (though there is no independent evidence for that). This is that knowing that an action is virtuous (brave, generous and so) is enough to motivate you to do it. (There are more complex developments of this basic idea.) What I see as intellectualism in Plato is not this specific idea, but the more general points, clear (I think) from more than a few dialogues, that in ethics some views are correct and others wrong, and that we can show this in arguing about them. And what we can argue about are other people’s views and positions, rather than just the way they have been brought up. Claiming that your opponent has been badly brought up doesn’t show anything effectively; in fact it shuts argument down. Discussion about ethics has then to focus on what others say they know or believe about the goodness of their decisions and what they appeal to in support of them. Plato doesn’t have Socrates argue with anyone to show them that they, and other Athenians, are badly brought up; rather, he shows us what he thinks of average Athenian education in the figure of Anytus in the Meno, a self-satisfied and narrow-minded citizen (who is going to be one of Socrates’ accusers at his trial.)
This is a very simple point, but it took me many years to come to realize it. It’s just the normal way we discuss ethics. If in the middle of a discussion someone says, of course you think that because your parents brought you up badly, or because you went to a bad school, that amounts to walking out of the discussion; there’s nothing more to be said that will further the discussion.
This sort of ‘intellectualism’ doesn’t in the least imply that there is nothing more to be said about the way our emotions and desires come into our ethical beliefs and actions. Far from thinking this, Plato, in both the Republic and the Laws, gives long accounts of education which make the ethical development of character through habituation prominent, and insists that it is useless or harmful for people to develop their abilities to think abstractly without this previous ethical habituation. So this account of ‘intellectualism’ makes Plato come out rather Aristotelian (and you raise this point below.)
Why do you think so much emphasis has been placed on the idea of Socratic intellectualism, and how would our understanding of and approach to Platonic texts change if we move beyond it?
I think one reason why Socratic intellectualism has had so much attention is that it fits in with a developmental account of Plato’s thought which has been very widespread until fairly recently. This is the idea that Plato’s major ideas can be seen to develop over the course of his work; this requires us to find ideas which conflict if we think Plato held them at the same time, but can be seen as stages in developing thinking where Plato changed his mind. A lot can be said about the ‘developmental paradigm,’ but here I’ll mention one support: for more than half a century, it has seemed to many philosophers that in the shorter dialogues where Socrates is the main figure he defends the view that knowing that an action is virtuous suffices to motivate you to do it. The discussion of the ‘parts’ of the soul in the Republic is clearly incompatible with such a view, and Socrates is a different dramatic figure in that dialogue from the Socrates figure in the shorter dialogues. Here we look to have a clear change of mind on Plato’s part (one compatible with differing views about Plato’s relation to Socrates in his dialogues and to the historical Socrates).
This point has encouraged a developmental approach to the dialogues, and until recently was simply a familiar part of the most widely accepted perspective on Plato (and it is still fairly influential). In my paper (“Did Plato Ever Hold ‘Socratic Intellectualism’?”), I argue (briefly, without reference to the pile of books and papers that argue about this) that both sides of this alleged change should be rethought. As already indicated, I claim that we shouldn’t be looking for doctrine in dialogues whose point is not to put forward doctrine, that the idea of a tripartite soul isn’t as relevant as many have thought and that the account of education in the Republic (and Laws) shows that Plato presumably always thought of it as involving habituation (that Aristotelian term again!) of character in ways in which reasoned understanding develops from the formation of emotions and desires. I don’t expect to overturn the orthodoxy with one paper, and the job needs to be done of meeting the positive claims of the many philosophers who do think that early ‘Socratic intellectualism’ gives way to a more complex position. But I do think that the more open ways of reading the dialogues that I’ve mentioned, and which have become more common, will help eventually to shake the orthodoxy loose.
In general, the concept of ‘habituation’ is classified as a particularly Aristotelian idea. Do you think that this could be anachronistic or exaggerated? How much of Aristotle’s concept of habituation is foreshadowed in Plato’s work?
It’s a very rewarding question to ask how much of Aristotle’s concept of habituation is foreshadowed in Plato’s work. Aristotle is (as often) more careful than Plato; he disentangles various factors involved in habituation. He focuses separately on the roles of nature, skill and pleasure in the way we are habituated to virtue, and his dense and complex discussions of the relation of the intellectual to non-intellectual factors in virtue show how bothered he was to get it right. There’s a lot of contemporary discussion of this, and this shows, I think, Aristotle’s persistence with the problem, persistence which leaves us with difficulties in trying to find what his position precisely is.
It’s interesting to me that Plato’s view of our habituation to virtue changes almost not at all between the Republic and the Laws. The sections on education in these dialogues have lots of points in common, and the two passages (Republic 401d- 402a, Laws 653b) are really similar; both say that when the child matures enough to recognize the importance of reason (logos) in the way they have developed. In the long accounts of education in both dialogues, we can see what Aristotle will describe as learning by doing the things we have to learn to do. Plato seems not to worry about children learning mathematics, or reading and writing; he takes that kind of education for granted. In both dialogues he insists that a citizen must develop good character before going on to higher mathematics and eventually inquiry about Forms and the Good (in the Republic) or mathematical astronomy (in the Laws), which seems as good an indication as we could have that ‘higher’ exercise of our intellectual faculties will not go right unless we have already developed virtues (virtues of character as well as specifically intellectual virtues) that will give those faculties the right direction. Both Plato and Aristotle, I think, take the right direction to be one that involves the good of the community, rather than the good only of the intellectual individual – another way in which their ideas about virtue and education are quite similar.
Sydney Greek Philosophy Society 