Intelligent Virtue
By Julia Annas
2011
First Published
3.80
Average Rating
194
Number of Pages
Intelligent Virtue presents a distinctive new account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. Annas argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of a kind which can illuminatingly be compared to the kind of reasoning we find in someone exercising a practical skill. Rather than asking at the start how virtues relate to rules, principles, maximizing, or a final end, we should look at the way in which the acquisition and exercise of virtue can be seen to be in many ways like the acquisition and exercise of more mundane activities, such as farming, building or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent's happiness or flourishing, and as constituting (wholly, or in part) that happiness. We are offered a better understanding of the relation between virtue as an ideal and virtue in everyday life, and the relation between being virtuous and doing the right thing.
Avg Rating
3.80
Number of Ratings
140
5 STARS
24%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
24%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
4%
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Author
Julia Annas
Author · 8 books
Julia Annas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona and author of several books for Oxford University Press, including An Introduction to Plato's Republic and The Morality of Happiness. She is also series editor for the Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy.
