Julia Annas, “Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing”

Posted: Wed, Oct 15, 2025

Warm-up activity: How do we go about cultivating our virtues?

Motivating virtue ethics

The “technical manual model” of normative ethics: Just as we refer to a computer manual for how to use a computer, we rely on a theory of right action for how to live a moral life. (Annas often talks in terms of “decision procedure”; this can be misunderstood so I’ll avoid it for our purposes.)

  • The clever teenager: “it would follow that there could (and predictably would) be clever teenagers who had mastered the relevant theory of right action, and thus would be, since the technical manual model is a model of moral theory, reliable and sound sources of moral advice and direction. But of course as soon as we pose this suggestion we can see how absurd it is. We do not go to clever teenagers for advice on what to do or how to live, because we realize that the technical cleverness they often do have may, because of their comparative lack of experience, be accompanied by naivete and credulity, rendering their advice shaky at best.”
  • The loathsome advisor: “I could in principle go to someone for moral advice, and take it, regardless of the fact that her character was marked by, for example, great cruelty. . . . Indeed, I might be intrigued by the interesting complexity of her character. ‘I hate the way you torture kittens,’ I might say, ‘but I appreciate the excellence of your theory of right action.’”
  • Annas’ own worry: “Do we really want a moral theory to tell us what to do? Aren’t we losing an important sense in which we should be making our own decisions? Suppose I later come to think that what I did was actually the wrong thing to do. In a technical case I think that either I got the manual wrong, or the manual was wrong. And this is unproblematic; there is no soul-searching to be done as to why I made the wrong decision. But in the moral case there is surely something problematic in the thought that either I got the theory wrong or the theory was wrong, but there is no worry as to my making the wrong decision.”
    • “Suppose (unrealistically!) someone always does what his mother tells him to do. He always follows her orders; if he fails to do so he feels guilt, regret, and so on. We take this to be immature, a case of arrested development; at his age, we say, he should be making his own decisions. Now, why should this picture become all right when we replace Mom by a” technical manual of right action?
    • Internalization is not a good response: “whether the theory is pictured as outside me, like a manual, or inside me, like a set of directions as to how to think, it is still telling me what to do.”

Annas: Virtue ethics rejects “this anxious and obsessive picture of the moral life” that focuses solely on doing the right thing.

  • Also important are “issues of the best life to live, a good person to be and a good character to have.”
  • Living a moral life isn’t the same thing as understanding or even coming up with the correct moral theory.

Defending virtue ethics

But remember action guidance and explanatory power! Can virtue ethics offer a theory of right action not on the technical manual model?

The standard translation of virtue ethics: An action is morally right/wrong because it is/is not what a virtuous person would (reliably, characteristically) do.

The standard worry: Who is the virtuous person?

  • Option 1: The virtuous person is whoever does the right thing.
    • Worry: Either viciously circular or unhelpful.
  • Option 2: The virtuous person can be identified by some independent criteria.
    • Annas: This undermines the very motivation for virtue ethics. “Instead of trying to produce a theory of right action with the form of a technical manual, we have called up the figure of the technical expert—as when one has a computer problem and calls in tech support. . . . [W]e are still, on this model, using the expert to tell us what to do, in exactly the way we used the manual, namely, to tell us what to do.”

Annas’ solution: A “developmental” account on which “the fully virtuous person is the ideal that the beginner in virtue is aspiring to be.”

  • For the beginner, the right thing to do can be specified independently.
  • For the fully virtuous person, it cannot be.
  • But this is not a problem because it is the beginner who learns to be more and more fully virtuous.
  • Still, even the beginner can do the right thing, so it’s not the case that the right action is defined solely in reference to the fully virtuous person.

Being moral is a practical skill which involves learning.

  • Example: You don’t learn to write poems by reading a technical manual. Scene from Dead Poets Society (1989).
    • You pick a role model and copy what they do.
    • You start to develop your understanding.
    • You no longer simply mimic what the role model does.
    • Rinse and repeat.
  • The moral case is analogous.
    • “We all start with some conventional grasp of virtue that we pick up as we grow up from parents, teachers, and so on.”
    • But “becoming more fully virtuous requires each of us to think for ourselves, hard and critically, about the moral concepts, especially those of the virtues, that we have picked up from our surroundings.”
    • “When the completely virtuous [say] brave person does the right thing it is not because it is required of him by the conventional account of bravery, but as a result of his own reflective understanding of bravery and its requirements, and his development of the appropriate disposition.”

Annas: Any technical manual model of ethics “would be stuck at the level of the learner, helpless to deal with our ethical aspirations.”

  • We can make unwise decisions as to whom to emulate, and how to emulate them.
  • Virtue ethics does not tell us what to do. “This result will be disappointing only to those who think that acting well can be reduced to the results of a formula applied across the board with no further moral effort. Virtue ethics does better, I have suggested, because it has a built-in recognition of the point that the moral life is not static; it is always developing. When it comes to working out the right thing to do, we cannot shift the work to a theory, however excellent, because we, unlike the theories, are always learning, and so we are always aspiring to do better.”