1 - Introduction: virtue and morality

Summary

No branch of philosophy has been more influenced by serious consideration of ancient writings in the past quarter of a century than has moral philosophy – or ‘ethics’, as it is often now called (a change in nomenclature which is itself a sign of that influence). This has made it more difficult to delineate helpful contrasts between ancient and modern moral philosophy. Had one set out to write an overview of ancient ethics some twenty years ago, it would have been relatively easy to contrast the sorts of issue which concerned ancient writers with those to be found in contemporary discussion. Whereas modern moral philosophers were still largely wrestling with the competing merits of utilitarian and ‘deontological’ accounts of moral action, the key notions in ancient ethics were rather those of virtue and eudaimonia – and although ‘eudaimonia’ has standardly been translated by ‘happiness’, it plays a very different role in ancient ethics from that given to happiness by utilitarians. For the ancients, to give an account of eudaimonia was to specify what made a life valuable – and, at least generally, the accounts they offered were far removed from the sort of reductive theories offered by utilitarians in terms of pleasure and pain or the satisfaction of people's desires. More generally, whilst modern moral philosophers focused on the question of how to determine the right action in any given circumstance, the ancients were primarily concerned with issues of character and the evaluation of a person's life considered as a whole.