Virtue Ethics

5

VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES

Michael Slote

V irtue ethics has recently been rousing itself from a long slumber.* Although twentiethcentury hthical theoryhas been primarily concerned with right and wrong action, we have lately seen a revival of interest in (the) virtue(s) as supplementing or even grounding our understanding of right action, and Aristotle and (to a lesser extent) Plato have had the greatest influence on these developments. Over the last few years, virtue ethicists have largely focused on the individual moral life rather than on issues of social justice, and to the extent virtue ethics is content merely to supplement other views, there may be nothing at all problematic about such an omission or de-emphasis. But most philosophers who call themselves virtue ethicists believe that (the) virtue(s) should play a foundational role in a free-standing total approach to ethics that can take its place, e. g., alongside (utilitarian) consequentialism and Kantian ethics; and they will want (one or another form of) virtue ethics to develop its own distinctive account of social morality and of social justice in particular.

Yet anyone who has such a hope will, presumably, recognize the considerable obstacles that lie in its path. Virtue ethics has a proven record of siding with anti-democratic social/political ideals, and when one considers that neither Aristotle nor Plato favored democratic forms of government, one may well wonder whether ancient models can provide any sort of plausible contemporary basis for political philosophy or for ethics as a whole. Even if individualistic virtue ethics is not incompatible with current-day democratic values, the Aristotelian virtue ethicist may have to draw upon other traditions in order to give any sort of account of such values; and in that case she will face an intellectually unpleasant choice. If she declines to develop any sort of political philosophy, virtue ethics simply gives up on any attempt to develop a full-scale ethical alternative to currently dominant views, like utilitarianism/consequentialism and Kantianism, that are clearly capable of generating accounts of both individual and social values. (It is interesting that Rawls’s contractarianismmakes no claim to account for the full range of individual morality.)’ However, if virtue ethics has to borrow from Kantian ethics or consequentialism in order to generate a plausible political philosophy, then it acknowledges their strength and superiority in one major sphere JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 24 No. 2, Fall 1993 5-37 Q 1993 Journal of Social Philosophy

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of ethics, and that gives us at least some reason to prefer one or the other of these general approaches.

Of course, in saying all this, I am assuming that as ethicists we cannot be satisfied with anything less than an account and justification of democratic and liberal values. But this is an assumption that many Aristotelian ethicists even today seem unwilling to make, and, of course, the unwillingness plays into the suspicion that virtue ethics is an anachronistic irrelevancy in the current climate of political thought. Thus Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose lustice? Which advances a basically Aristotelian ethics while taking an openly critical stance toward liberal democracy. And in Justice and the Human Good, William Galston conspicuously declines to defend the superiority of democratic ideals and institutions over some of their traditional alternatives, in the course of advocating a neo-Aristotelian conception of social ju~tice.~

These contemporary examples make one all the more skeptical of the relevance of Aristotelian virtue ethics to contemporary political philosophy: and, of course, Plato’s philosophy is an even less likely source of sustenance for liberaldemocratic values. But I still believe that ancient virtue ethics is capable of helping us to understand and justify modem-day political ideals, and the main burden of the present essay will be to develop a plausible virtue-ethical alternative to utilitarian/consequentialist and Kantian accounts of liberal democracy. In order to do so I shall appeal to a tradition of ancient ethics in which interest is currently reviving, but which has recently had far less influence than either Platonism or Aristotelianism, namely, Stoicism.

1. The Ethics of Self-Sufficiency

TheStoicsdidnot advancemodernviewsabout the rights of citizens, but they were the first philosophers in the ancient world to advocate the ideas of the brotherhood of all men and of the divine spark or element in all human being^.^ AndsuchideasnotonlyseemfarfromPlatoand Aristotle, but move us in the direction of modem democratic/egalitarian/liberal views of social justice. However, I believe that we need to appeal to another, quite fundamental Stoic notion, if we want to be in a position fully to defend such views.

The Stoics espoused an ideal of aufarkeia, or self-sufficiency, according to which one should be free of all attachment to worldly pleasures and privileges and care only about what was assumed to be within one’s own control, namely, one’s own virtue and rationality. But we need not take self- sufficiency to such an extreme to recognize it as an attractive human ideal. For example, when we praise people for being moderate in their desires or

VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 7

needs, we are not thinking of them as having to curb certain strong desires in order to insure their long-run well-being-exercising what we can call instrumental moderation. Rather we imagine them as simply not desiring (or not so strongly desiring) certain things many of us do want, as capable of being entirely satisfied or content with what would not be enough to satisfy other people. Those who are not so easily satisfied-especially those whose desires in certain directions are insatiabl-eem needy and even greedy by comparison with someone whose desires are moderate, and such moderation represents a kind of self-sufficiency, as opposed to neediness and dependency, that most of us think well of. Even if the extreme degree of self-sufficiency recommended by the Stoics is beyond human capacities, we can recognize self-sufficiency as an ideal or admirable trait which, taken (as it were) in moderation, has an appropriate and honored place in our lives. And the defense of egalitarian and liberal democratic values and indeed the entire virtue-ethical conception of social justice to be offered in the present essay will take its primary inspiration from Stoic ideas about self-sufficiency.6

However, the Stoics deployed the ideal of self-sufficiency within (what is standardly regarded as) a fundamentally egoistic view of ethics, and one may well at this point wonder how fairness between individuals and any kind of egalitarianism can be grounded in such a seemingly self-centered virtue. But the virtue is less self-centered than it may have seemed to the Stoics and than it may initially appear to us, and, for all his self-proclaimed egoism, it is, ironically, Nietzsche who shows us how to use the ideal of self- sufficiency as a justification for certain forms of altruism.

In Beyond Good and Evil (section 2601, he writes:

The noble type of man ... honours whatever he recognizes in himself: such morality is self-glorification. In the foreground is the feeling of pleni- tude, of power, which seeks to overflow ... the consciousness of a wealth which would fain give and bestow:-the noble man also helps the unfortu- nate, but not-orscarcely-out of pity, but ratherfromanimpulsegenerated by the super-abundance of power.

What Nietzsche is pointing out here is that an individual who feels entirely satisfied with what she has will not only seek nothing more for herself, but, in the natural course of events, also feel she has enough to spare for others. Thus the person who is self-sufficient in the way we have spoken of can exhibit or express or exude that (sense of) self-sufficiency in acts of generosity toward others. Consider, for example, a person who stands everyone in a barroom to a drink when he wins the lottery or daily double.

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Such an action comes from and exhibits a momentary sense of superabundance, but that precisely doesn’t mean that it is motivated by the desire to gain something for himself. To be sure, if he acts as he does because he fears the envy of those around him, his generosity is self-interested and instrumental. But if the generosity stems from a sense of having more than enough, it derives from his feelings about his own well-being but doesn’t aim to enhance that well-being. Quite the contrary, the man gives something away that he might use-the money that pays for the drinks-because he feels he hasenoughtaspare for others,andinacting thusheexhibitsamomentaryself- sufficiency and a momentary non-instrumental generosity that would be lacking, for example, in any winner of the lottery who begrudged the drinks to others and wanted to keep all his new-gained money for himself. (Nor need the generous winner beaiming at his own glorification, or admirability, though he in fact does act more admirabIy than a lottery winner who begrudges drinks to others.)’

Of course, the justdescribed example is one that would hardly please Nietzsche, since it illustrates a kind of generosity that can occur in the everyday life of “the herd,” and Nietzsche speaks of superabundant generosity only in connection with the extraordinary noble few. But if what is admirable or noble in Nietzschean terms occurs in hornier and moregregarious circumstances than Nietzsche suggests, perhaps such considerations can, contra Nietzsche, beused to support democratic and egalitarian ideals of social justice. We shall have to see. But let us now consider a further variation on our homey example.

The person who stands everyone to drinks may not give very much of his newly acquired wealth away and may make no move toward any form of longer-term giving. But what if someone wins a large sum in the lottery and decides to finance his poor but very deserving niece’s way through college and medical school? Given the way things are, such generosity may repre- sentasubstantialportion of what the person has just gained, andinany event it has a long-term aspect absent in the case of buying drinks for everyone. It represents, in effect, a large commitment to the niece over a long period of time, and as such it exhibits greater self-sufficiency than is seen in the act of standing everyone in the house to a drink.

Let me be clearer. The person who stands everyone to drinks may be just as self-sufficient (or free from neediness or greed) as the person who finances his niece (indeed, they may be one and the same person), but their respective acts/gestures don’t exhibit the same amount or degree of self-sufficiency. The standing to drinks bespeaks a sense of (at least) momentary flushness or superabundance or sufficiency, but not a sense of having (more than) enough for the indefinite future. The latter counts as greater self-sufficiency,


and the generosity to the niece, which exhibits it, is thus, in the ethical terms we have been exploring, more admirable than the momentary buying of drinks. So we can see how it is possible to explain and justify substantial and long-range generosity-of a sort characteristic of friendship and other relationships involving commitment to others-in terms of the ideal of self- sufficiency.

It is worth noting, however, that I am not assuming that a sense of superabundance will automatically or necessarily lead to short-term or long-term beneficence. We can imagine someone so giddy or dizzy with his own good fortune that he can’t spare a thought for anything else and so ends up giving nothing to others. But superabundance may-and often does- naturally and understandably express itself in thoughts like “I have enough to spare for others” and in generous actions; and our account can explain why a person who thinks and acts thus is more admirable than someone, e. g., who wins thelotterybutdoesn’tforamomentfeelsatisfied, thansomeone who begrudges drinks to those around him at the time he wins the lottery.

The forms of generosity we have described above represent, however, only part of the ethical account of self-sufficiency we need to draw upon in framing a conception of socia1 justice that is adequate to present-day ideals and traditions. The kind of self-sufficiency we have so far been speaking of is an admirable inner state or disposition, and it is a distinctive (or at least an ideal-typic) feature of virtue ethics that it should base its moral and even its political ideals on facts about character and the inner life, rather than on (rational or moral) rules or goals of action. Self-sufficiency as we have so far described it certainly conforms to this idea of what virtue ethics is or ought to be and is quite relevant to a virtue-ethical account of egalitarian and liberal democratic values. But the familiar idea of self-sufficiency has another facet less stressed by the Stoics, but perhaps more central to the account of social justice to be offered here.

Self-sufficiency can be exhibited in moderation and, as Nietzsche may have to teach us, in generosity-and such self-sufficiency is a lack of neediness or greediness in regard to, a kind of independence from, the good things of this world. But there is also self-sufficiency, or independence, in regard to other people, the self-sufficiency a child attains in learning to do (and to want to do) things for herself rather than relying on her parents or others to do them for her. Learning work skills and developing the capacity to live on one’s own and make one’s own way in the world represent accomplish- ments in self-sufficiency, and this form of self-sufficiency is naturally regarded as a kind of self-reliance. However, self-reliance is also demonstrated in learning to think and decide matters for oneself, and if we add these further dimensions of self-sufficiency to our virtueethical picture, I believe

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we have in hand the main elements we need in order to justify liberal democratic ideals of social justice.s

The idea that the acquisition of work skills and habits represents a form of heightened or enhanced self-sufficiency is relatively obvious, and if anyone speaks of the need to learn or develop self-sufficiency in life, one is much more likely to think of learning to work and live on one’s own than to think of the self-sufficiency involved in moderation (much less of the connection Nietzsche points out and we have elaborated between being satisfied with things and generosity). But not everyone wants or at least develops the sort of self-reliant self-sufficiency we have just been speaking about, and some individuals-typically the extreme cases of those most pampered and those least well provided for in early lif-eek somehow either to preserve the cocoon of childhood or to make up for the lack of such by getting others to provide for them throughout the course of their lives.9 Moreover, people born to wealth typically lack the practical necessity of providing for themselves through work or a profession. And one may ask whether such people have any reason to cultivate the self-reliant self- sufficiency-the capacity for and actuality of work and taking care of oneself-that most people need. Why, for instance, should a rich person concern him- or herself with work and the capacity for work isn’t the whole notion of leisure and of a leisure class completely antithetical to the idea of work, or a career, as a universal human ideal or aspiration?

Our current exaltation of work and career seems to be a fairly recent historical development and one arguably influenced by Protestant religious thought and practice. Indeed, in earlier stages of Western history and in other cultures as well, work has been seen as an obstacle to human dignity and moral development, rather than as a source of dignity and moral development, as nowadays it is so typically considered to be. But I think that the latter view can be defended and undergirded, without appeal to any specifically religious traditions or ideas, by reference to the considerable value we place on (thedevelopment of) self-sufficiency. As we haveseen, the ideal of self-sufficiency (and the value it places on certain kinds of personal strength and independence) is of venerable philosophical origin and has a perennial appeal, and on that basis I would like to defend the value and validity of work and making one’s own way in the world along lines similar to those we used just above in defending (non-self-interested) generosity and moderation.

Perhaps the Zocus classicus of the historically emerging idealization of work is the discussion of master and slave (“Lordship and Bondage”) in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel says that a master who relies on slaves is in a certain measure the slave of his slaves. He depends on them in a way


they don’t depend on him for sustenance and survival. And given that the slaves show a mastery of life’s problems and of their environment that the master lacks, Hegel also holds that slaves are in some measure masters in relation to their master. But we need not dwell on such paradoxes/meta- phors or rely on any special ”dialectical logic” in order to make the relevant point here about the connection among work and self-sufficiency and human dignity.

Hegel connects the master-slave or master-servant relationship to the idea of work and demonstrates a high opinion of (the capacity for) work. Though the idea of self-sufficiency (or of human dignity) is not explicitly mentioned, the whole master-slave discussion seems predicated on the positive value, the admirability, of independence, self-reliance, and/or self- sufficiency. What Hegel doesn’t mention or even imply, however, is the obvious connection that can be drawn between the master-servant relation and the way children relate to their parents.

A master may be or become dependent on slaves or servants in the way children are originally dependent on their parents, and if it makes sense for children to envy, admire, and/or emulate the self-sufficiency, self-reliance, or independence of their parents or other adults, then there may also be reason to feel shame, inferiority, or regret if, through reliance on slaves or servants, one never learns to do things for oneself, if one remains parasitically dependent on others. (Note that the charge of parasitism isn’t mitigated, perhaps it applies with greater force, if one has the ability to make one’s own way in the world but doesn’t in fact do so.) To be sure, it is tempting, if only one can somehow manage it, to rely on the work or devotion of others and go through life being taken care of in the way parents care for children or servants/slaves care for masters and mistresses. Such a life seems, or is, comfortable, easy, pleasurable. But that is compatible with regarding such a life as less admirable than the more difficult and possibly less secure life of someone who has learned, or had to learn, how to work and/or take care of herself.

However, the self-sufficiency that can be achieved through work is no moreabsolute and unqualified than what is associated with moderation and generosity toward others. The Stoics seem to overestimate the human capacity for indifference to pleasure and pain and to the presence or absence of love or companionship, and our capacity for self-sufficiency in regard to the so-called good things in life may, therefore, be somewhat limited. But by the same token, it is pretty much impossible, and certainly inadvisable, nowadays to achieve or aim for total self-reliance in one’s work. There exists a division of labor, and we all have a general debt to the technology, knowledge, and material infrastructure that have sedimented down to us

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from previous generations, so even the present-day recluse in a log cabin in the wilderness will not be entirely self-reliant. Rather, the self-sufficiency that can be achieved or aimed for in this area is (roughly) a righting of the balance as between self and other.

Where there is a division of labor, those who work (inside or outside the home) provide for others and are in turn provided for by others in their society or community, but for such people and unlike young children and the leisure classes, the dependence is two-way and thus is no form of parasitism. The degree of admirable self-sufficiency is thus greater than anything attributable to young children or the leisured rich or powerful. And even if it is very far from absolute, we should remember that such self- reliance constitutes a life-accomplishment that it takes time and effort to achieve.

Work was not idealized or valued in the ancient world in the way it has typically been in recent times, but, properly understood, Hegel’s discussion of master and slave can help us to see that work and the capacity/preference for work exemplify a virtue that the ancient world in fact highly esteemed, the virtue of self-sufficiency. It is at the very least ironic, then, that in speaking of the self-sufficiency of the truly good or happy human life, Aristotle should have ignored the ways such alife as he advocated lacks self- sufficiency through its assumed dependence on the services of slaves.lo The fact that Stoicism was a philosophy for slaves, and not just for the idle or leisured, helps it elude the main brunt of this particular irony. But I have seen no evidence that the Stoics ever emphasized or exalted work as an essential ingredient in auturkeiu or as always necessary to playing one’s proper role in life, and there may be a different irony lurking in the fact, if it is one, that the grinding tedium and/or sheer horror of slavery may have blinded even the Stoics to the admirability of work and the deplorability of leisured parasitism.

So far we have been speaking of a kind of self-reliance that consists in making one’s own way in the world and not being parasitically dependent on other people. Such self-reliance represents an admirable form of (relative) self-sufficiency that can be set alongside the (relative) self-sufficiency involved in moderation. But as subsumable under the larger category of self- sufficiency, the virtue of self-reliance has some other facets we have not yet focused on, and in order to complete the (admittedly partial) picture of individual virtue that we need in order to launch a virtue-ethical account of social justice, we now need to consider self-reIiance informing opinions and in making decisions.

Kant in the essays “What is Enlightenment?” and ’What is Orientation in Thinking?’’ (and elsewhere) articulates perhaps better than anyone else


has what is at stake in regard to the issues of thinking for oneself and (though there is less emphasis on this) choosing or deciding for oneself.” Having a mind and will of one’s own are essential to one’s fullest humanity, and, according to Kant, to allow someone else to dictate to one what one should do or to take one’s opinions wholesale from some other person or some institution is a deplorable violation or betrayal of one’s own human dignity. Kant is thus advocating self-reliance in thought and choice that represents the very opposite of intellectual or volitional parasitism, of not thinking for oneself and of being themere instrument of anotheis will or another person’s creature or lapdog.

The varied language in which we find it natural to speak of this topic gives ample evidence of the importance we place on intellectual and volitional self-reliance, and clearly intellectual and volitional, especially volitional, self-reliance are related to the kind of self-reliance that is exhibited in making one’s own way in the world, e. g., by having a job and supporting oneself. But it does seem possible for someone to accomplish the latter while taking all her opinions and choices from, say, her parents-being told, e. g., what job she should take and where she should live, etc. Such a person, we might say, is less than fully adult: although she may have in some degree a life on her own, it is not a life of her own on her own. From the standpoint of our virtue-ethical vocabulary, we can say that such a person or her conduct is deplorable or criticizable for the parasitism she or it demonstrates, and the fact that the same opposition of parasitism vs. self-reliance is naturally applied to the issue of making one’s own economic way in the world and to the issue of where one gets one’s opinions and choices gives us reason to think that all the forms of self-reliance I have mentioned are related or similar.*2

We may be further convinced when we consider what is involved in forming an adult identity of one’s own-the sort of identity that is supposed to be forged, if one is lucky, after what Erik Erikson (in Childhood and-Sociefy, Identity and theLife CycZe,and elsewhere) calls a youthful “identity crisis.” For such an identity seems to require both making one’s own way in the world (a life on one’s own) and choosing a distinctive way of one’s own for doing so (a life of one’s own), and in the absence of either, therefore, an agent-based virtue ethics that stresses (among other things) self-sufficiency will want to say, and be in a position to say, that a person is less than (fully) admirable.

Moreover, the kind of self-reliance we have just been describing is subject, for us humans, to the same limitations we earlier saw attach to economic self-reliance and self-sufficient moderation. We cannot be fully self-reliant in economic terms because of the division of labor and the historical accumulation of technological infrastructure and knowledge-we

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can only counterbalance our dependence on others and early-life parasitism by independent work. But given the difficulties involved for us in achieving even this limited or moderate self-reliance, there is no reason to deny that the effortful achievement of such self-reliance is admirable (in us). Similarly, we are not likely to be entirely indifferent to comfort, money, security, reputa- tion, physical pleasure, and companionship, but if we are not greedy with respect to such things, which is by no means easy for us humans, and are consequently generous to others, then we are admirable (as humans).

All these points also apply to self-reliant thought and decision-making (choice). Even someone who displayssuchvirtues has to rely toa largeextent on what others have thought and on habits of action and a sense of what counts as a live option that may largely be inherited from or influenced by other people. But the self-reliant individual forges from what she has learned from others opinions of her own (at least on certain important topics) and chooses a distinctive path in life, distinctive ways of living, even though her freedom here will be limited by what others expect of her or have over the years expected of her. Still, by comparison with those who are or let themselves be overwhelmed, in their choices or opinions, by the decisions or opinions of others, such a person counts as admirable. The limited self- reliant thought and/or choice that sheachieves is difficult to achieve and not all that widespread-people, especially parents during one’s childhood, are always trying to influence one with overt or lurking bribes or threats, so such limited volitional and intellectual self-reliance really is something admirable.13

In addition, dignity attaches to these kinds of self-reliance in much the way it attaches to the economic self-reliance of work. Being a parasite of any kind seems ethically deplorable and contrary to human dignity. Someone who takes his opinions and decisions from others lacks a certain dignity that others possess,14 and, of course, thesamecan be said as between the parasitic master and the slave/servant/worker. Indeed, a similar distinction also seems applicable to the self-sufficiency that connects with moderation vs. greed and insatiability. Someone who is not difficult to satisfy with respect to pleasure, power, money, or fame is naturally regarded as being more dignified with respect to these things (Julius Moravcsikcalls this ”a touch of class”) than someone who is very eager for and strives to get more and more of these worldly things (the image of “grubbing after things” has force with respect to more than money).

Notice that the familiar notion of (human) dignity at stake here is a variable one: one can have or lack dignity, gain or lose one’s dignity. Given the roots of this notion, as here explicated, in Stoic doctrines, this result should be anything but surprising. For according to (at least some of) the


Stoics, human dignity consists in being virtuous, rational, and wise-all three being equivalent for them-and, according to the Stoics and common sense, people vary enormously with regard to these traits. The idea of human dignity has its source in Stoic thought, and indeed the distinction Kant so greatly emphasized between having dignity and having a price seems to have been taken by him from Stoic sources (Seneca's Epi~tles).'~ But Kant's notion of dignity applies in two ways (at least): to the actually good moral will and to people insofar as they possess such a will, on the one hand, and, on the other, to people generally in virtue of their capacity, however evil they may be, for morally good choice. The first application allows for human dignity to be variable, but the second applies to humans by virtue of their essential freedom and rationality and is thus not variable between individuals or at different times within the same individual (I ignore the problem of what to say about idiots or people who go insane).

The invariable notion of human dignity comes, as I have indicated, from Seneca via the notion that all humans have dignity rather than (merely) price, and I earlier noted that the idea that all men are brothers and the idea that we all have a divine spark in us both also come from Stoicism. So it would seem that Stoicism was capable of generating or inspiring two different notions of (human) dignity, one variable, one not, but it is only the variable notion that has entered into our account here of what is admirable about self-reliance and self-sufficiency in general.I6 Kant's invariant conception of dignity, with its Stoic roots, has an important role in grounding Kant's political and individualistic ethical ideals, and we shall return to it later in our discussion of social justice. But what I hope to show you now is that wedo not need that notion in order to ground an adequate contemporary conception of social justice. We can provide for liberal and egalitarian democratic ideals through a variable notion of dignity that is based in ideas about variable human self- sufficiency andself-reliance that also have theirStoicroots. Ourgoal,in other words, will be to ground democratic values in human dignity as an ideal to be emu2ated rather than as a universally posited metaphysical reality.

2. Self-sufficiency, Social Parasitism, and Democracy

Most moral theories treat the assessment of actions as primary and evaluatecharacter or inner states favorably or unfavorably depending on the actions they lead to or are directed toward; or else, in the manner of direct utilitarianism, separately assess both actions and motives/character in terms of their consequences. By contrast, a truly "agent-based" virtue ethics evaluates actions by reference to independent (and thus prior) evaluations of the inner states of the individuals who perform them, and a Stoic-inspired

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ethics that highlights self-sufficiency is (to that extent) agent-based in this sense because it regards certain motivations as inherently admirable or deplorable and evaluates human actions in terms of whether they express, exhibit, and/or give realization to such motivations.’’ Thus greediness in one’s appetites and a parasitic desire to let others do everything for one exemplify the very opposite of self-sufficiency, and actions serving or exhibiting such motivations can be regarded as derivatively deplorable or criticizable, given the kind of theory I have been defending. The present essay makes no pretense, however, of giving a general account of human virtue or morality; its claim, rather, is to have uncovered a multifaceted individual virtue-self-sufficiency-that can serve as the basis for a defense of egalitarian and liberal democratic values. Other virtues and values have an important role in any total virtue ethics, but since they don’t enter into the present account of justice, we can leave them aside for another occasion.

Thus for the limited purposes of the present essay, self-sufficiency is the fundamental intuitive value in terms of which acts, motives, customs, and institutions are ethically to be assessed, and although we have so far been discussing ethical issues concerning parasitism vs. self-reliance and greed vs. moderation on an individualistic basis, much of that discussion can now be extended to questions about the ethical admirability or criticizability, and in particular about the justice and injustice, of larger and smaller social units.18 The main idea will be that a society is just to the extent its people exemplify all the forms of self-sufficiency we have been discussing. And we might say that the schematism of our account-what enables us to move from ethical evaluations of individuals to claims about the justice of a society as a whole-is the fact that social groups and even entire societies can naturally be characterized in terms of the same notions of self-sufficiency and dependency (and consequent dignity or lack of dignity) that we have applied to individuals. If an individual can be parasitic or dependent on particular parents or slaves/servants, receiving a great deal, but doing little or nothing in return, so too can we speak significantly of an individual’s being a social parasite and of a social class or group’s being parasitic on other classes or groups and on society as a whole. Although the issue of parasitism can be raised about those who are (perpetually) on welfareand that topic will be of concern to us later in this essay, when we talk about egalitarianism, I want to begin our discussion of social justice by focusing on the parasitism of the rich and powerful-what we might call (social or economic) parasit- ismfrom aboveand the connections of the latter to issues of social justice.

Throughout history there have been dominant social groups/classes in societies, and that dominance has typically expressed itself in terms of some sort of social/economic parasitism. Dominant groups have certainly pro-


vided leadership and to that extent have fulfilled a social function, though when the leadership consists in starting wars and other projects that simply glorify or aggrandize the leaders, it is hardly clear that the leadership isn’t parasitism (and/or greed) masquerading as other things. But at least in larger civilized societies dominant classes are also leisure classes, and leisure classes are socially parasitic.

To be sure, some members, many members, of dominant leisured classes will hold office or otherwise work. However, typically such individuals will not have to work (to a large extent this will be true even of hereditary monarchs, who can almost always find people willing to take decisions and governing off and out of their hands). And in any event their working allows a typically larger group of other members of the dominant group to be free from any need to work ruling classes are thus also leisure classes. And a leisure class is by and large parasitic on the work and contributions of others, taking, not giving.Ig

We earlier characterized parasitic dependency as the opposite of admirable in individual cases, and basically the same considerations can be invoked in connection with the parasitism of classes, where, again, there will be large numbers of individuals (though not too large, since we are talking about an elite) who are content to be dependent on others, not self-reliant, in the conduct of their lives. (Remember that this is always a matter of degree, given the division of labor and the sedimenting of social benefits from the labor and inventions of previous generations.)

Such (willing or intentional) dependency is deplorable, according to an individualistic ethic derived in the above manner from Stoic aufarkeia, and where a society is characterized by such dependency, it is the very opposite of ethically admirable and we can call it unjust. Moreover, the features of social and individual life in such a society that express, exhibit, and give realization to this parasitism will also, on an agent-based view, be character- izable as deplorable or unjust, and of course dominating elites tend to support, insist upon, work through institutions that preserve their prerogatives. In traditional monarchies, ordinary people will, for example, have no vote or any real say in the running of the government or of other institutions, and to the extent these features of the society reflect and serve the motives of an elite bent on and capable of allowing no inroads on, no erosion of, its leisured prerogatives, they thus count as unjust and ethically deplorable on the present view.

However, it is possible for the absence of civil liberties and powers/ rights of political participation not to be an expression of self-interested parasitism on the part of some dominant class or group. This can occur for a limited period, for example, when a national vote is postponed or certain

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liberties are suspended as part of an effort of national self-defense against an invading army or widespread flooding. But more importantly the absence of the sorts of democratic institutions we cherish might to a large extent reflect the attitudes of the ruled rather than that of rulers. In Making Sense of Man, Jon Elster reviews a large body of literature devoted to this topic and points out, among other things, that in traditional monarchies the politically powerless classes may actually not want to vote or otherwise participate in the political process (or have the civil liberties we now insist upon).20 By faulty intellectual reasonings that Ekter describes in interesting detail, such people may persuade themselves that any more democratic system couldn’t work. Or the learning or beautiful manners of their social superiors may make them willing to defer to them politically and in other ways as their evident superiors. Finally, those who are dominated may say they are not yet ready for political responsibility and a “sour grapes” adjustment to the harshness of their lot in life may in any event make them cease to want anything better.

To the extent the absence of democratic political institutions and civil liberties expresses the preferences or wishes of people outside the parasitical ruling elite, it is not an expression of economic parasitism (at least on the part of the rulers, but let me simplify) and cannot be considered unjust according to our conception. Willing (or chosen or intentional) parasitism on the part of the elite or anyone else is always unjust, but on the present view, and not implausibly, it is unjust only to deny civil and political powers to those who seek them; there is no injustice merely in the fact that people lack civil liberties and political powers they don’t want.*I (Nevertheless, there is at least an empirical connection between the absence of certain powers and intellectual/volitional parasitism, and we will shortly have to consider how this bears upon issues of social justice.)

However, for an agent-based account, the idea of social justice seems to involve more than the idea of the (relative) economic non-parasitism of social groups and/or individuals. For even if it is humanly impossible and a mere myth, Plato’s ideal republic seems far from ethically ideal or just in contemporary terms; yet it is precisely a society where thedominant class or ruling elite does not govern in its own leisured interests. Although the philosopher-rulers in his republic are politically in total charge, Plato imag- ines most economic wealth and benefits to accrue to the merchant or artisan class, and the rulers, far from being a leisure class, are one and all to be involved in the hard work of governing. Their main privileges, if these are privileges, are privileges of education and political effectiveness or influence, not of enjoyment or comfort, and since Plato characterizes his just republic as a place where everyone does his or her job, the charge of social/


economic parasitism presumably cannot be brought. So if there is anything ethically wrong with such a society, we must go beyond the ideas of parasitism, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency or, better, we must recognize a further dimension to these notions.

This is precisely what we did above in describing the different (though related) aspects of admirable individual self-sufficiency and self-reliance. Kant and Rousseau (among others) insist upon the ethical value and significance of thinking and doing for oneself, and yet this is a value that is largely absent from Plato’s republic. The philosopher-rulers may or may not think for themselves, depending on how one conceives the guidance/influence of the Form of the Good and of their particularly rigorous and rigid form of education. Arguably, though not obviously, they learn to think for themselves, and are not (merely) indoctrinated. But even if we are led, under certain interpretations of what Plato (must have) had in mind, to regard the rulers as having minds and wills of their own-as being more than mere instrumentsnot,in thiscase, of themvine Will, but of theFormof theGood- we clearly cannot make this statement about anyone else in the republic Plato depicts. The lower orders are intellectual and volitional parasites, taking direction in all major matters from the philosophers, and indeed they are supposed to imbibe false opinions, nobles lies, from the elite in the interests of social harmony.

We nowadays find the position of the lower orders in such an imagined society degrading or degraded, and that judgment stems not from any imagined facts of economic parasitism, but from the parasitism of opinion and action that characterizes everyone other than the philosophical elite. Thus earlier we spoke of the dignity inherent in making one’s own way in the world, and that dignity is to a substantial extent absent among a parasitic leisured elite. Where it is, that absence of dignity redounds morally badly to the society that contains and is governed by such an elite. For in the present agent-based virtue ethics, judgments about the justice or admirability of a social unit depend on ethical judgments about the groups or individuals it contains.

But where, as in Plato’s ideal republic, there is no social/economic parasitism, there are no privileges of leisure, we cannot speak (so readily) of the lack of human dignity among the dominant or ruling elite; the lack of dignity, the degradation, if you will, is to be found among those who are dominated and take their lives and opinions ready-made from their rulers. The dialectic of master and slave imputes ethical failure to the master, and one side of our understanding of social justice and the human dignity and self-sufficiency it requires stresses the ethical disvalue of the privileges of a leisured elite. But if we want to say what is wrong with or unjust about

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Plato’s republic, we must refer to the lack of human dignity in the lower classes, and the basis of the indignity is a failure of self-reliance and self- sufficiency that is not particularly economic in character. The lower classes don’t think for themselves and are willing to let others bear all the burdens of political thought and activity, and this clearly represents a kind of political-cumcognitive parasitism that we might wish to condemn as unfair and unjust.”

Thus (at least) two aspects of human dignity and self-reliance/self- sufficiency seem relevant to a virtue-ethical conception of social justice that is firmly based in an account of what makes individuals ethically admirable or criticizable (we are not talking about evaluating people as artists, scien- tists, or wits). As a result, our evaluation of social institutions or circumstances may allow virtue-ethical considerations a foothold, as it were, from twodifferentdirections. Andlet meat this point expandalittleon this theme.

The political powers and civil liberties possessed by the citizenry in a democracy are largely absent in autocratic or non-democratic forms of government, and I have said that in the latter, the absence of democratic political prerogatives and liberties can reflect the power-cum-motivation of some larger or smaller leisured elite. Thus where freedom to criticize the government openly or, for that matter, the freedom to organize unions is not permitted, the denial of what we nowadays think of as rights functions to preserve the hegemony and privileges of an elite, and although such an elite may really believe in the justifications it offers (or offered in its behalf) of why, e.g., unions shouldn’t be allowed, it, or its most sagacious members, may surely in some way recognize and act upon the fact that various democratic institutions or liberties would endanger its economic position or way of life. Indeed, given what we know, it doesn’t require any controversial social theory, it just seems common-sensical, to make such an attribution.23

But if the denial of democratic liberties and prerogatives is in given instances criticizable as the expression of the parasitic motivations of an elite (and I have simplified because there may be class or other forms of stratifi- cation even within such an elite), then the presence of such liberties and prerogatives can be said in some measure to counteract the parasitic tendencies of an actual or potential elite. That does not make such democratic institutions or circumstances insfrumentally admirable (i.e., admirable because of their consequences): agent-based ethics has no room for such a notion. But it does mean, first, that democratic institutions constitute the (ethically acceptable) absence of certain conditions which, because or to the extent they serve and express deplorable parasitism, are themselves deplorable and unjust according to our Stoic-inspired virtue ethics. Thus for such cases ”just (democraticinstitution)” operateslikea trousers word in Austin’s


sense, and it is the idea, so to speak, of positive injustice that wears the trousers according to our conception. (In other instances, as we shall see later, liberal democratic institutions can exhibit positively admirable motives like group generosity.)

Secondly, and here again there is an interesting contrast with utilitarianism, democratic prerogatives and liberties, to the extent they counteract the accumulation of parasitic privileges by an elite, are instrumental in preventing the lack of human dignity that accrues to an elite as a result of its ability to provide many or most of its members with full-time leisure.24 Utilitarian authors like Mill regard democratic institutions as counteracting the self-interest of the ruler(s), where the latter is thought to run counter to the larger good of society, or the people in it.” So democracy has, for Mill, a role to play in the advancement of social good or utility, whereas according to the present account of virtue ethics, democratic institutions are means to greater human dignify on the part of those who rule or would rule.

But as I mentioned earlier, the idea of human dignity gets a foothold from a second direction, from the consideration not of the dignity of those who rule, but of those who are ruled or are worse off. Having the voteand/or the freedom to organize a union will more frequently (we hope) lead people in socio-economically worse-off groups to think for themselves about political or economic matters, rather than taking their opinions cut-and-dried from their ”betters.” Mill in ”Representative Government” stresses precisely this advantage of universal suffrage and/or representative government, but misses the significance such an advantage has under an agent-based virtue ethics of the present sort.26 For Mill, again, the instrumental value of universal suffrage lies in the fact that if everyone has a vote and everyone thinks about politics, then society will be better off on the whole. (For one thing, according to Mill, people do better on their own behalf than others can do for them.) But for the present virtue ethics, everyone’s thinking for himself or herself is admirable in itself, because it constitutes a form of admirable self-reliance and dignity. So if everyone’s having a vote helps to make people who are worse off (or everyone generally) think more for themselves, its instrumental value lies in its being a means to virtue and human dignity, rather than (merely) to utilitarian ends like pleasure, happiness or similar benefits. The main stress is on human dignity and self- sufficiency and admirability even as regards instrumentali ties, but, of course, in the present instance, the dignity at stake is not that of actual or potential ruling classes, but most particularly that of those individuals potentially or actually not of the elite who would lose in dignity if, through not having a vote, etc., they were or became demoralized and thought less for themselves. (Remember I am not yet talking of welfare dependency.)

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However, the above picture somewhat simplifies the phenomena by assuming that the parasitism of elites is chiefly economic and that it is primarily those who are ruled or disadvantaged who are in danger of displaying intellectual or cognitive parasitism about the larger social and political issues that bear upon their lives. But in totalitarian states (as well as in many primitive societies), certain basic views are held dogmatically, and the absence of permission to dissent and of certain other freedoms may result from self-protective ideological rigidity rather than from specifically economic motivations. To be sure, dogma or a party line may be enforced from above, but it is still possible that the elite (together perhaps with almost everyone else) in a given society should fall under its spell and be unwilling to think for themselves, and the absence of certain civil liberties in such circumstances may, according to the present virtue ethics (and barring certain forms of total economic determinism), be deplorable and unjust for exhibiting/serving (the elite’s) intellectual, rather than any sort of economic, parasitism. We see, then, that the absence of human dignity and self- sufficiency allows of a wide variety of social patterns and causes, but the fact that agent-based virtue ethics can make a common charge against all (or at least all seemingly unjust) anti-democratic social orders clearly supports the contemporary relevance and plausibility of a Stoic-inspired approach.

It is worth noting that even though the present virtue ethics gives the notion of humandignityamorecentral position than doesutilitarianism, the latter cannot be said entirely to lacka notion of dignity, and since, moreover, Kantian ethics and political philosophy accord a place to human dignity just as great as, though in many ways different from, that accorded it by our Stoic-inspired virtue ethics, it might be quite helpful at this point to say something comparatively about the place of the idea of dignity in utilitarianism, kantianism, and our virtue theory.

To begin with, utilitarianism does make use of something like a notion of human dignity insofar as it insists, with respect to the calculations of consequences that determine the rightness or admirability of any given action, that the well-being or pleasure or preferences of each individual counts equally with that of any other (”each person to count for one”). As Dworkin points out in Taking Rights Seriously, both utilitarianism and his own form of liberalism embody an ideal of according equal respect to every individual-they just differ in their conceptions or theories of (what it is to accord) equal re~pect.2~ Utilitarianism’s ideal of equal respect is to be found in the way it sums up consequences. An aristocratic system of morals might give greater weight to the happiness of a duke or a king than to that of commoners, but utilitarianism insists that everyonemust count equally in its calculations, and this represents equal respect for everyone in a way that


weightings in favor of the aristocracy or king do not. A similar point can be made in regard to the idea of human dignity.

Utilitarianism, we can say, respects the dignity of each human by treating no human as more important in its calculations than any other. However, in one respect utilitarianism is very inadequate as a means of expressing either the ideal of equal respect for every person or the ideal of human dignity. Most forms of utilitarianism treat the pleasure or pain of animals as just as relevant to their calculations as that of humans, so if utilitarianism accords equal respect, it seems to be equal respect to all sentient creatures; and if it gives expression to an ideal of dignity, the dignity it honors is such as to be shared by all sentient creatures, rather than constituting any sort of ideal of (distinctively) human dignity.

By contrast, the present virtue ethics embodies ideals of dignity that as a whole serve to distinguish humans from animals. To be sure, the fable about the fox, nearly starving but free, who prefers such an existence to the chained but comfortable existence of a dog can be thought to show that the distinction between motivational parasitism and the dignity of self-reliance can be made, anthropomorphically, within the animal kingdom. But the dignity of thinking for oneself and autonomously making one’s own decisions has little or no foothold with regard to animals. By and large, the dignity we have been speaking of in articulating the present conception of justice is, considered as a whole, a dignity that many humans lack and that othersshare only withother humans (or other rational beings wedon’t know about). What is more interesting, at this point, would be briefly to compare and contrast the dignity at stake in our virtue-ethical account of social justice with Kant’s powerful alternative conception of human dignity as it applies to the political sphere.

The Kantian idea of a dignity or worth that is beyond price derives from Stoic ideas, but makes its own distinctive reference to the noumenal character of human moral freedom and rationality. The good will, making the morally right conscientious choice, has dignity, but dignity and worth also attaches to human beings in virtue of their capacity for such choice. Accord- ing to Kant, both moralIy good choice and the capacity for it must be seen in the light of our noumenal status, and our dignity consists in our being, as moral persons, above nature.**

By contrast, of course, our virtue-ethical view of human dignity makes no such demands. It holds that dignity can vary from person to person, depending, for example, on whether the person is a parasite or has a life of and on her own. But Kant too allows variation in how morally good people are and thus in the dignity or worth that is displayed or exemplified in morally good choice. However, he also places great weight on our capacity

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for moral choice as a basis of dignity relevant to political values, and although our account here of social justice can certainly allow that even people who have let themselves become economic or intellectual parasites may well retain a distinctively human (though not noumenal) capacity for self-reliance, it is actual self-reliance or self-sufficiency that plays the crucial role in its account of how democratic ideals and social justice are and can be realized. (However, there may be some minimal degree of actual self- reliance in letting someone dictate to one.)

For Kant, it is because people have the capacity for choosing morally that we cannot rightly treat them as mere means. Even morally bad individuals must be treated in the light of their capacity for moral goodness, and if the denial of democratic liberties and powers involves treating people as means, then that, according to the "End in Itself" (or "Formula of Humanity") version of the Categorical Imperative, is what is wrong with and unjust about traditional monarchies and the like. But this form of political argument, this way of approaching social justice, rests on a picture of human nature that relies on the idea of the noumenal, an idea that most of us would beintellectuallyuncomfortable with. And without reference to thenoumenal, it is not clear how a distinctively Kantian approach can or should proceed.

One can still say that where there is the capacity for rationality and morality, there is also dignity and a right not to be treated as a mere means, but if we are thinking of things more empirically, we run into problems about morons, psychopaths, and others who seem to lack one or both of these capacities. When one thinks of political values under the aegis of the "End in Itself" formulation of the Categorical Imperative, it is natural to think of the dignity Kant ascribes to all humans as giving rise'to a right not to be treated as a mere means and then, derivatively, to certain particular familiar democratic rights. Then, if one ties dignity to certain empirical human characteristics, one avoids the noumenal, certainly, but there is the risk that one will assign rights to too narrow or too broad a group of individuals or sentient beings. However, that is a risk many political philosophers have been willing to take.

Notice that Kant's view, whose fundamental ethical category is often said to be the notion of duty, seems to be able to accommodate the idea of human or political rights. But no less is this possible for our agent-based account of political morality. To begin with, and as Allen Buchanan has pointed out, the language of social justice and of political rights are by and large intertran~latable.~~ One has a right to something if and only if one possessesitasa matter of justice,and what we earliercharacterizedasunjust, e.g., on the part of an elite can also readily be viewed as a violation of rights, according to our agent-based view. Where ruling elites defend their leisure

VIRTUE ETHICS AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES 2s

and power by preventing or repressing freedom to criticize or to organize unions or to have a say in who governs, we have seen that they act unjustly and that the institutions that exist are unjust. But we can just as easily tie the notion of rights to self-sufficiency and non-parasitism and say that one has a right not to be treated in a certain way (e.g., denied freedom of speech) if such treatment exhibits parasitism and thus the opposite of self-sufficiency on the part of an elite or if full self-sufficiency can be exemplified only if institutions are set up for the prevention of such treatment. (Note that in the light of what was said earlier, one may in some circumstances have no right to unionize beyond the right not to be prevented from unionizing if one so chooses.)

But now we have another whole side of social justice to attend to. We have so far ignored issues of equality and rights connected with issues of equality, and although, once a virtue-ethical account of egalitarian values has been offered, we can say about rights to (greater or lesser) equality what we have just been saying about civil and political rights, it is high time we spelled out the account itself.

3. Virtue-Ethical Egalitarianism

In order to treat relations between justice and equality in agent-based terms, it is necessary to bring in another aspect of self-sufficiency, one familiar from our earlier discussion but largely dormant, so far, in our discussion of social justice/admirability.

We earlier said that there was something admirable or virtuous in the self-sufficiency that is exhibited in an attitude of satisfaction with, and desire for no more than, what one has already had or enjoyed and in a generosity that gives out of a sense of having enough or more than enough, a superabundance, of what one wants. We also saw that a larger or longer-term commitment of generosity can be the sign of an even greater, more secure sense of sufficiency or superabundance, and we must now draw on such considerations in order to give a virtue-ethical characterizationof egalitarian ideals and the role they play in a proper theory of social justice.

The issue of equality in connection with social justice arises most force- fully and relevantly for societies where conditions of moderate scarcity obtain, societies like those in the West nowadays where there is an economic surplus beyond what is necessary for people’s survival and the issue can arise of how fairly that surplus is distributed within the given society. In some measure, I think the (instrumental and in some circumstances consti- tutive) conditions of social justice already set out in this essay have a substantial equalizing tendency, because the democratic institutions or

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powers and liberties that we have defended-. g., universal suffrage, free speech, organization into unions-operate as a brake on any ruling class or elite's penchant for running things entirely to its own economic and political advantage. But the existence of such institutions is nonetheless arguably compatible with society's operating on a meritocratic or libertarian basis, with thoseleft behind in the race for good jobs and economic rewards largely dependent on the charity of the more successful for anything that takes them beyond, or even to, a subsistence level-consider the possibility, for example, of widespread unemployment and no welfare or unemployment insurance to mitigate that condition.

In a libertarian meritocracy, then, there will tend to be vast differences of economic benefits or well-being unless there is an extraordinary amount of charity donated individually or through corporations or other organizations (the Church), yet the spirit of competition seems likely to foster a "devil take the hindmost" attitude toward those who lose out in the struggle for prestigious jobs, high pay, and even steady wages. (I am aware that many will not see themselves as engaged in such a struggle.) Such a society is far more likely to display a kind of unconstrained greed and an obsession with upward mobility that are by and large incompatible with the kind of charitable giving that would lessen the tendency to large socio-economic differences in any significant way.

When a meritocratic society is greedy, its upper echelons obsessed with and seemingly insatiable with regard to their own power, prestige, and wealth, it lacks the moderation and generosity characteristic of those who are not, so to speak, slaves of the enjoyment or possession of the good things of this world, those whose desires for such things are limited and who at a certain point are satisfied with what they have (had) and feel they have enough to spare for others. So our earlier discussion of the ideal of self- sufficiency, as it relates not so much to making one's own way in the world, to self-reliance, as to the self-sufficiency of not feeling the need or desire to have or enjoy more and more, gives us a basis for ethical criticism of typical meritocracy. The better-off members of such a society will display a lack of self-sufficiency, a greediness and lack of generosity, that makes them ethically unadmirable or deplorable, and our Stoic-inspired virtue ethics, which bases its evaluations of societies and groups on the evaluation of their members, can then say that such a society is very far from being ethically admirable or just. (By the same transpositions we saw operating earlier, it can also say that such a society denies some people their rights.)

But couldn't there be a libertarian meritocracy where greed was not the rule and where charity largely took of the edge of distinctions of success and salary?I really doubt it-don't you?But weneednotbasewhat wearesaying


on such an assumption. A society where such charity really became the (statistical) norm would arguably be far more just than the society described above,and our virtue ethicscan characterize that difference in its own terms, obviously, because the charitable meritocracy and its meritocrats would precisely be less subject to the accusation of greed and ungenerosity. Given moderate scarcity, those who have the better jobs in a meritocracy really will be displaying immoderateness if they seek to keep everything they have for themselves and wish to gain further power and wealth. But if they don’t, then the claim that the meritocratic class or the better-off members of the meritocratic society display a deplorable lack of self-sufficiency and/or act unjustly is substantially mitigated and so too is the accusation that the society itself is, froma virtue-ethical standpoint,unjust (or, given the earlier- mentioned transpositions, that it denies the worse-off their rights).

But we need at this point to make a further distinction regarding self- sufficiency in order to see that there is also something unjust and rights- denying and less than fully admirable about any libertarian meritocracy, if such a thing is possible, where everyone well off is always very charitable toward the less successful and less fortunate. Notice that as we have described it, such a society contains no institutions that take the giving of such charity out of the hands of the usual donors. They give, but, as with the lady of the manor who brings soup to sick or indigent families, the giving is entirely at their discretion. But, you say, if everyone gives, there may be social pressure to give and this undercuts the idea of total discretion. Yes, perhaps it does, but if we bring in the hope or assumption of such social pressure, that may well be because we feel that there is something less generous about a society where charity is given that doesn’t tie its own hands and those of its members with regard to such giving. It is somehow less generous if one gives to others but entirely reserves to oneself the right or decision to stop giving at any future moment one pleases. For as Imentioned earlier, there seems to be something especially generous about a long-term commitment to giving, as opposed to momentary acts of generosity; and the distinction can be well be accounted for in terms of the notion of self- sufficiency. If one feels not only enough for the present, but in secure possession of enough, or indeed of a superabundance, in regard to a more or less indefinite stretch of the future, one displays a greater (sense of) self- sufficiency than if one merely thinks one has enough or more than enough for the moment, and the kind of longer-term commitment to giving that we find, for example, in love and friendship is thus more admirable than mere momentary giving, because it evinces greater and more admirable self- sufficiency. (Of course, someone more securely self-sufficient may also display momentary generosity, but the latter doesn’t exhibif the greater self-

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sufficiency that lies behind it and isn’t, according to the theory, as admirable as what does.)

But institutions or laws that take charitable giving out of the hands of members of a given society-not absolutely, but at least for the foreseeable future-are another instance of the kind of long-term commitment to giving that evinces more admirable self-sufficiency than momentary acts of generosity or a succession of such. Laws that provide for social welfare payments, progressive taxation, and the like are precisely of this kind, and thus any society with such laws and institutions that back them up will, other things being equal, count as more just, than a libertarian meritocracy whose members retain the discretion to give or not to give charitably.

Moreover, even where there is strong social pressure to give substantially to charity, what the worse-off receive is still chanty and seen as such, whereas in a society with laws providing for progressive taxation and social welfare, those who receive such benefits can regard what they receive as a matter of legal right and, far from being beholden to particular individuals, can see themselves as benefiting from decisions and arrangements that, assuming suffrage and majority rule, they themselves have had a part in making. This seems psychologically far more compatible with individual self-respect on the part of those worse-off individuals who receive relevant benefits, and so on grounds ofgenerosify ifself and in the terms to which our agent-based conception of justice wishes to appeal, there is reason to prefer to see the differences that arise from economic competition reduced via the long-term commitment of laws rather than through the similarly long-term inertia of social custom and pressure, and thus to see the institution of liberal democratic social arrangements in place of a libertarian meritocracy, however benign.

This accords well with what many of us are antecedently inclined to believe about what kind of society is ethically preferable or most just, and it has further implications that should briefly be noted, If, for example, there is to be progressive taxation that expresses the sense of having enough on the part of the better-off members of a society, then there need to be effective laws that make them secure in what they do have, in what remains to them, laws against stealing that apply equally to all members of the society. (Where, as often occurs,such laws effectively apply only to the worse-off, we have yet another expression of greed rather than generosity on the part off those who are better-off.) Furthermore, the possibility cannot be ruled out that a virtue-ethically just society might have laws that prohibited forms of behavior that at least on certain occasions would not count as individualis- tically criticizable or wrong according to the same virtue ethics. But the possibility of such cases is hardly limited to virtue ethics and has long been


familiar from discussions of the connection between law and morality: e.g., intuitively speaking, there is nothing morally criticizable in exceeding the justly instituted legal speed limit in order to get someone to the hospital in a medical emergency.

It is also interesting, at this point, to compare what has just been said against meritocracy with Rawls’s criticisms in A Theory offustice. Rawls says that meritocracy fails to conform to the dictates of his ”difference principle’’ and as such fails to embody an ideal of fraternity that the latter can be seen as giving expression to. He thinks fraternity can be understood in terms of the generous spirit of sharing that one expects or hopes to find in families, a feeling natural to family life and not imposed by larger legal/social institutions, to the effect that one wants to benefit only if other members of one’s family also benefit (though perhaps to a lesser degree).30 Rawls’s wording in this passage taken by itself suggests something a bit weaker than the difference principle: his description of fraternity doesn’t tie it to a desire to benefit only to the extent that other family members reach the highest level that is possible through one’s own good fortune. And it is not at all clear that family spirit and real fraternity require such a stronger spirit of sharing.

What does seem obvious is that Rawls’s fraternity and the legal enactments to which it gives rise can also be viewed as a kind of generosity on the part of society and/or its better-off members (to the extent the latter by and large accept and support those enactments rather than trying to undermine them-if they do seek to undermine them, then on our account, the society is lacking in admirability and justice, and, given the power of money, neither will it be well-ordered or conform to Rawls’s overall social ideal.) And just as Rawls’s view does not require absolute equality, but has strongly egalitarian implications, the present account of social justice is strongly egalitarian for reasons we have mentioned, and indeed there may be reason to suspect that it will recommend a degree of equality fairly close to, possibly even greater than, anything that follows from Rawls’s understanding of frater- n i t ~ . ~ l

One reason for suspecting this is the way in which Rawls’s employment of the idea of fraternity undergirds or reinforces the contractually arrived at difference principle with an argument from (something like Humean) natural feeling and natural virtue. Our account of social justice also appeals to something that can without impropriety be called natural virtue, for although many people are not generous or generous-spirited, still when people are generous from self-sufficiency and a sense of superabundance, they need not be consulting conscience, convention, or ethical principles, and in that sense their virtue comes naturally. Of course, it may be rarer to find people willing to share with poor people outside their own families than

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with worse-off family members, but it doesn’t follow that there is anything less natural or less than natural about it, and Rawls must certainly be aware that some families don’t exhibit his kind of fraternity, not just some societies. But the point is that for Rawls this natural or familiar family spirit and generosity is the proper basis for larger social arrangements, and our virtue- ethical conception of justice can likewise say that the self-sufficiency and sense of having more than enough-enough to spare-that helps to launch or at least preserve the love and friendship that in turn underpins family life can also serve as a standard for the evaluation and criticism of larger social groups and social arrangements. As I have indicated, it seem that such considerations can be brought to bear in defense of liberal egalitarism in much the way that Rawls’s defense of the difference principle can be seen to do.J2

However, one doubt will now perhaps seem particularly pressing in the light of what we said earlier about the institutionalization, through law or even through force of custom, of anything amounting to social welfare. If people willingly live on chanty or on the legally instituted dole, they are (what we might call) economic parasites from below, and if parasitism in the well-off is to be condemned on grounds having to do with the ideal of self- sufficiency, it must be condemned in the welfare poor. Do I then want to say that social welfare is unjust or ethically deplorable, but that if the rich refuse to allow it, that too might be unjust or deplorable?

Not quite. The term “self-reliance” has both a motivational sense and an achievement or success sense, and from the standpoint of an agent-based account but also more generally, the term ”parasite” applies with greatest force only in connection with the motivational sense. So if someone really does desire to be self-reliant (success sense) but has, in fact, no other way to keep alive than by accepting charity or welfare, we may not consider her a parasite, and in any event our agent-based view will treat her motivation, rather than her success, as the basis for moral evaluation. Such a person will presumably prefer workfare to welfare, but if there really are possible economic conditions of moderate scarcity under which the worst-off cannot be provided for in any way other than by charity or passive (non-workfare) forms of welfare, then it will be ungenerous andunjust if the better-off don’t provide such help (through relevant institutions).

The same point applies to the problem of individual handicapwhal- lenges. We are learning more and more about how handicapped people and the legally insane can be helped to useful, productive lives, and there may be something to criticize in earlier social attitudes that, one might say, ungenerously, condemned the challenged to total uselessness by not even trying to devise ways in which they could be useful. But where someone


really is incapable of doing any useful work or performing any useful services, this may not involve any parasitism or failure of self-reliance in the motivational sense relevant to the present theory of justice. (If an irrerusably helpless person feels temble about her total dependency, that may involve a realistic sense that she lacks one of life's goods, but from the standpoint of our theory it can be said that such a person is mistaken, if she feels guilty about not being able to do more, and her moral illusion is itself, ironically, evidence of and perhaps even constitutes admirable motivation in this area, thereby freeing her from any justifiable moral or ethical criticism.)

Our agent-based theory of justice thussays that where there is deliberate or willing parasitism (and this doesn't require the parasite to recognize that she is a parasite; she need only prefer to act in a way that obviously counts as parasitical, but that is compatible with not wanting to face the fact that she is a parasite), people and therefore society are to that degree less admirable. Thus welfare cheating and the leisured existence of the rich are chosen as such and constitute injustices according to our view,% but this doesn't mean that those who really prefer to be independent but cannot manage to accomplish this (and this may include some children and adolescents) are criticizable in its terms,and that, I believe, is a desirable or at least a plausible result.

It also follows from the present view that if the worst-off in a given just society came (gradually) to prefer passive welfare to workfare and/or if the well-off in that society eventually became restive under progressive taxation, then the society would no longer be just, even if the institutions of workfare and/or progressive taxation-the husk or shell of justicewere somehow to remain in place for a while. One thing that seems attractive about an agent-based approach to social justice is the way it conceives the justice of any society as dependent on the "(ethical) soul" of that society as embodied/realized in the persons who make up the society. But that precisely means that the justice of a given society cannot simply be "read off" from the way institutions are at a given time (from the fact that institutions are as they would be if the society were just)."

Let me, then, by way of conclusion say a little more, briefly, about the overall structureof theaccount of justicedefended in these pages. The theory we have offered begins with a view of how ethically to evaluate individuals and their actions and uses this as the basis for its larger-scale social evaluations. That stands in marked contrast with Rawls's ethical views, where a theory of the justice of the basic structure of society is supposed to precede any account of individualistic moral norms. It also is the opposite at least of Plato's procedure in the Republic, where justice "writ large" in society or the state is treated as a heuristic for a correct understanding of justice in the

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individual. To that extent Plato is working (to use John McDowell’s conve- nient phrase)from oufside in. Yet when one focuses not on the analogy; with the state, but simply on what Plato says about individual justice itself, it is apparent that he understands right or just action as derivative (in the order of being, not necessarily in the order of knowing) from an inner state of justice, and, under that aspect or to that extent, Plato is clearly working from inside out.

By contrast, the present defense of liberaldemocratic values moves consistently from inside out. It bases its evaluations of actions on or in evaluations of the inner life of the individual, and it also derives its evaluation of any given institution or society from its ethical judgments about the individuals in it.% And this is a reason for regarding the present view of justice as more purely agent-based than Plato’s ethical views. However, our view is not the only treatment of social justice to base the evaluation of social justice on the evaluation of individuals and/or individual behavior. Nozick‘s libertarian conception of justice is essentially of this kind; and certain recent and very interesting attempts by Kantians/kantians to deal with questions of social justice in terms that have their original home in Kant’s account of individualistic morality-onora O”ei1l’s view, for example, that capitalis- tic institutions can be criticized for treating workers as mere means-also work from inside out in this way.% And I think there is no reason, before we begin to work out one or another conception of social justice, to assume that we have to base individual justice/morality on larger scale evaluations rather than vice versa. The test of our account of justice depends, rather, on its theoretical and intuitive merits as compared with other conceptions of justice. And I might just mention at this point that the agent-based account we have offered of justice wifhin given societies seems naturally extensible to issues of international justice as well-though there is no space to discuss the matter further here.

Having now seen that a virtue ethics seeking relevance to contemporary thinking has no need to borrow a political philosophy from outside its own traditions, virtue ethicists must nonetheless eventually consider how to integrate a virtue-ethical political philosophy into an endogenous general account of ethical phenomena. But whether we should at this point combine an Aristotelian virtue ethics of the individual (perhaps along lines developed in From Morality to Virtue, but highlighting the considerations of self- sufficiency that that book only occasionally discusses) with a Stoic-inspired account of social justice or whether we should prefer a consistently Stoic or Stoic-inspired approach overall to such an internal hybrid is a question best left to a future occasion.37 Under either eventuality, virtue ethics will have shown its capacity to function as a total ethical view that is far from


anachronistic or irrelevant to currentday ethical theory. If any plausible total ethics needs to be able to account for democratic and liberal ideals and values, then virtue ethics is a worthy alternative to the Kantian and utilitarian/consequentialist views that have for so long dominated the scene in moral and political philosophy.

Notes

*I want to thank Bill Galston and Jerry Schneewind for helpful suggestions. 'See A Theory of Justice, Harvard, 1971, p. 512. *University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. 3University of Chicago Press, 1980. In his recent Liberal Purposes (Cambridge U. Press, 19911,

Galston defends liberalism, but not in a distinctively Aristotelian way. 'Of course, it is possible that a distinctively Aristotelian justification for liberal democracy

may someday be successfully formulated, but in the light of history this seems highly unlikely. Recently, Martha Nussbaum in "Aristotelian Social Democracf' (in R. B. huglass, G. Mara, and H. S. Richardson, eds., Liberalism and the Good, Routledge, 1990) argues that Aristotle advocated a relatively egalitarian social democracy among citizens of the state. But since Aristotle thinks that in the best state only those with non-manual occupations, leisure, and virtue are qualified to be citizens, the social democracy is far narrower in extent than what we normally think of under that title. Nussbaum clearly believes that this defense of social democracy can be extended via Aristotelian considerations to all the people of (permanently living in) a given society, but she doesn't make it clear how she proposes to do this. (See, esp., pp. 239f. of her article.)

Ssee John Rist, Human Value: A Study of Ancient Philosophical Ethics, Leiden: Brill, 1982. Lof course, both Plato and Aristotle appealed to ideas about self-sufficiency in a number of

ways and their views had a great influence upon Stoic doctrines, but neither made self- sufficiency as central to individual virtue as the Stoics did, and the view to be offered here grounds its account of social justice on self-sufficiency as a virtue of individuals.

'One certainly shouldn't say: the man in the bar is satisfying his own desire to be generous and is possibly gaining pleasure from acting generously, so he is not giving anything up and his motivation is hardly altruistic. As Bishop Butler taught us, such arguments prove too much.

T h e term "autonomy" is naturallyused both in connection with earning one's ownliving and with thinking for oneself/making one's own decisions, but the term has so many other uses in ethical theory that I think it best largely to avoid it in favor of the term "self- reliance."

91n his Italian Journey, Goethe mentions visiting the houses of some rich Italian noblewomen who were so pampered that they had practically lost the use of their legs and had to be carried up and down stairs.

'OFor interesting criticisms of Aristotle's depreciation of (manual) work, see Terence Irwin's Aristotle's First Principles, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, sects. 221-22. But Irwin makes no connectionbetween leisureand the lackof self-sufficiency. Sucha connection is mentioned or at least hinted at by Sarah Broadie in Ethics With Aristotle (Oxford, 1991, pp. 424f.); but she doesn't try to draw out its implications in anything like the direction taken in the present essay.

I might just add at this point that the idealization of work that has developed recently in Western culture and that I am calling upon here need not preclude a Marxian (type of) critique of the deadening or dehumanizing quality of much repetitive labor. But such

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critiques often ignore or downplay the fact that even purely repetitive labor has an asped of nobility or admirability to the extent it represents a self-reliant adult making his or her own way in the world. (For simplicity, I won't now try to make sense of child labor in the present virtueethical terms.)

l1See also Rousseau's Emile. I2In A Theory ofFredom, Cambridge Univiversity Press, 1988, p. 213, Stanley Benn explicitly

uses the term "parasite" to describe intellectual/volitional non-self-reliance. I3F0r discussion of how those who are volitional parasites can be said to allow themselves to

operate as the ',mere instruments" of others and of how pressure is put on people to become volitionally/intelletually non-self-reliant, see Benn, op. cit., esp. p. 194.

"For example, in "Democratic Individuality and the Claims of Politics" (Political Theory 12, 1984, p. 343), George Kateb says: "One'sdignity resides in being, to some important degree, a person of one's own creating, making, choosing.. . .,,

'This point ismadeby H. J. PatoninTheCategoricaZImperutive, fifthedition,Hutchinson,l965, p. 189.

Wist (op. cif., pp. 1,30-32,, 41-47,70,112f., 151f.l makes it clear that the Stoics, despite their views about the "divine spark," regarded individual dignity as contingent on individual effort and variable among human beings.

"Aristotle's virtue ethics is arguably not agent-based in this sense, because of the emphasis he places on the virtuous man's perceiving what it is right or noble for him to do in various circumstances. But Plato's idea that right action is what serves or enhances the (indepen- dently specified) health, harmony, or virtue of the soul does seem to make the evaluation of inner states prior to that of actions. Perhaps the clearest example of agent-basing in recent times can be found in James Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory. For M h e r discussion of agent-basing and the differing forms of virtue ethics, see my From Morality to Virtue, New York Oxford, 1992, esp. Ch. 5.

'?%&ties can be more or less admirable for Teasons having little to do with justice: e.g., for producing great composers generation after generation or for the gracefulness of their manners. But I shall confine the discussion to considerations that, at least from a virtue- ethical standpoint, arguably bear on issues of social justice.

19According to Man, any landlord is a 'louse," a "parasite on capitalist production." (See Theo~ies of Surplus Value, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972, vol. 2, p. 328.) And he elsewhere says similar things about financiers of capital or what we call coupon clippers. But he accuses industrial capitalists not of parasitism but of exploitation. Although the Marxian notion of exploitation has interesting connections to what I am calling parasitism, I shall rely on the latter notion, which fits in better with agent-basing and is less likely to invoke Marxian views in the midst of the arguments I actually want to make.

*% Elster's Mnking Sense of Man, Cambridge University Press, 1985, esp. pp. 413,420,428, 505.

?'Elster points out that Marx frequently confuses what serves the interests of the rulers with what they consciously or unconsciously do in order to advance those interests. Ideology, for example, might benefit rulers, but be a product of faulty reasoning or sour grapes on the part of the lower orders. The present account of justice attempts to avoid such confusion. For example, I am saying that certain ideological institutions count as unjust only if the ruling classes are, consciously or subliminally, using them to advance their interests and, in particular, preserve their prerogatives of leisure.

Wnwillingness to participate in the political process may count as politically parasitic analogously with the way in which, for example, making false promises or failing to keep them is parasitic on a long accumulating and beneficial practice of promising. In that degree, requiring people to vote (as is done in some countries) may be just or a condition of justice. If those who don't want the vote, in a traditional monarchy, are expressing a


political laziness, then they may beacting unjustly by being unwilling to do their fair share, and the absence of the vote, for example, might be unjust for what it expressed about the political parasitism of the lower classes, rather than for what it showed about the economically parasitic elite.

uFor an interesting discussion of how, in particular, labor union organization, the absence of monopoly, and respecting the "rights" of minorities all help to prevent exploitation/ parasitism, see Stephen Worland, "Economics and Justice," in R. Cohen, ed.,Justice, N. Y.: Plenum Press, 1986, esp. pp. 62ff.

"Bringing baskets of food to the poor in times of sickness is a kind of sop thrown to the ideal of self-reliant non-parasitism, and to the extent upper class women and men managed to convince themselves by such occasional charitable activities that they were not living as parasites, the ethical deplorability of their basic parasitism is compounded with that of self-deception in the face of presumably unpleasant facts about themselves. This is but one exampleof how the desire for ease and comfort can contend with an aspiration most of us feel toward self-sufficiency (think of how insistent many teenagers are on making their own money and doing things for themselves, even when they might have things easier if they allowed their parents to do all the things the parents are willing to do for them).

=Mill makes this point in various places including the Logic (first edit., pp. 557f.) and "Representative Government."

%ee Chapter 3 ('The Ideally Best Polity"); also his Political Economy V, 11, sect. 6 and passim. 27See Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously, Harvard, 1978, esp. ch. 12. "If we thinkof Kant's metaphysicsof noumena as fundamentallyan "asif" metaphysics, then

we should say, instead, that as moral beings we must regard ourselves as having a status above/beyond nature and a special dignity or worth consequent upon that status. There is more to be said, but this is not the time to say it.

29see his "Justiceas Reciprocity versus SubjectCentered Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1990, pp. 227-52. Incidentally, our agent-based theory of justice and rights is not based on reciprocity in the sense criticized by Buchanan in his article.

3osee Rawls's A Theory of Justicz, Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 105f. 3'A more or less egalitarian principle like the difference principle could be put into effect

through (piecemeal) legislation or actually be enshrined in a country's constitution, though this too would require supporting legislation. (On the constitutionalizing of the difference principle or something like it, see Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers's On Democracy, N. Y.: Penguin, 1985, pp. 157ff.) In that case, the reasons Rawls gives for thinking the difference principle (among others) can function as the just basis of a well-ordered society can be harnessed to our virtue-ethical conception of justice.

However, in "Social Justice" (Journal of Social Philosophy XX, 1989, pp. 72f.), Bernard Williams says that American social philosophy has tended to ignore the problem of getting to the ideal state and concentrated, instead, on the character and institutions required to maintain social justice-and certainly we find this tendency in Rawls'semphasison well-orderedness and the very little he has to say about building the just society. The present essay is open to the very same criticism, and indeed from the standpoint of a commitment to social justice, it is unsatisfying to be able to say little or nothing about how social justice is most likely to be achieved. But that may be because theory taken by itself may be unsatisfying for someone with practical hopes and aspirations, not because the theory itself is at fault as a theory of justice. Moreover, as Cohen and Rogers point out in their Chapter 6, a theoreticallydefended picture of what a just social order would be like is practically relevant and potentially useful, because it gives us something to aim at and primes us to be alert for certain justice-building opportunities, if and when they arise. Of course theories differ among themselves, and no single justification of democracy or relative equality is likely to gain the support of the majority of moral/political theorists; but to the

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extent the theories (or most theories) converge on something like the difference principle, their foundational differences may appear less practically debilitating and aspirations to work toward social justice may become better focused through having an agreed-upon ultimate target of legislation and/or constitutional amendment. (Compare Rawls's meth- odology of overlapping consensus in "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14,1985, esp. pp. 248-50; also his remarks in A Theory oflustiw, pp. 315-20, about the ways in which various "mixed conceptions" of justice might ultimately have to appeal to the difference principle.)

=For defense of the idea that liberal democratic egalitarianism need not commit itself to absolute equality or even to something as strongly egalitarian as the difference principle see Amy Gutmann's DemocmticEducation, PrincetonUniversity Press, 1962, p. 262and also her Liberal Equality, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 149.

=In the case of most welfare dependents and "chiselers," the injustice is far less clear, because of the injustices that have been done to them. People brought up in wretched poverty and in a milieu whereeducationalopportunitieseither areunavailableor made toseem useless may despair of economic success and perhaps understandably take the course of least resistance by living on welfare and preferring not to get a job. But to the extent their own society's lack of generosity is responsible for their impoverished circumstances, any virtueethical injustice there is in their actions and life-style may be ethically mitigated. Moreover, if we think of what society has done to them or failed to do for them as blighting their human potential, asdamging them, then their welfaredependency and cheating (and who knows what else) may seem like "getting their own back" and "recouping something from life" and thus possibly more compensatory than parasitical and unjust. Here, the contrast with parasitism from above, where we find people who have been brought up with every advantage living entirely off the labor of those who have not, couldn't be starker.

MTheconnectionoftheseideas toKant'sideaofaKingdomofEndsand to thedisputebetween (e.g.1 Rawls and Nozick on the importance of actual, rather than hypothetical, consent is an interesting question, but best left to a future occasion. (I am indebted for helpful suggestions here to Larry Dobbs and Scott Gelfand.)

Tompare Brian Barry's claim (in The Liberal Theory of lustice, Oxford, 1973, p. 126) that "a liberal ... must hold that societies ought to be organized in such a way as to produce the largest possible proportion of people with an admirable type of character ...."

Incidentally, one doesn't want to say that the justice of a society depends on every member's displaying all the forms of self-sufficiency we have discussed. But the kinds of dependency/parasitism/greed we have considered are not simply a matter of individual failings hereand there-they have a structural character and certain infectious tendencies. More needs to be said on this topic, but I might just point out that the present view doesn't have the implication that absolute monarchy is juster than oligarchy because parasitism from above is less widespread in it. In an oligarchical form of government, after all, more people play a creative, determinative role in deciding political issues, and more self- reliance in thought and choice, therefore, is presumably to be found. How these opposing factors weigh against one another is a matter of fine tuning and further discussion beyond the scope and programmatic intentions of the present essay.

Jdsee Onora 0"eill's Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 122ff.

T o r a discussion of social justice that combines Aristotelian and Stoic/Kantian elements, see Martha Nussbaum's "Human Functioning and Social Justice," Political Theory 20,1992, pp. 202-46. Nussbaum's essay does not, however, focus on the problem of justifying democratic institutions.

the agent-based theory of justice presented here is, from an historical standpoint, a hybrid of


Stoic ideas and resonant borrowings from later philosophy, but as a thoretical account it is highly unified, since it is based on the single leading notion of self-sufficiency. Having this bird in hand, I have not, however, explored the possibility of giving a persuasive defense of liberal democratic ideals on a more purely Stoic basis. Given Stoicism's historical reliance on metaphysical assumptions (and arguments from naturalness) that would nowadays seem highly suspect, sucha task seems a daunting one. But in work that has just come to my attention, Julia Annas seems to be moving in something like this direction. See her 'The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others," Social Philosophy and Policy 9,1992, pp. 133-48; and The Morality of Happiness, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Virtue Ethics

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