Prudence and Morality in Ancient and Modern Ethics

Author(s): Julia Annas

Source: Ethics , Jan., 1995, Vol. 105, No. 2 (Jan., 1995), pp. 241-257
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2382344

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 SYMPOSIUM ON ANCIENT ETHICS

Prudence and Morality in Ancient

and Modern Ethics*

Julia Annas

In ancient ethical theories, the entry point for ethical reflection is the
agent's reflection on her life as a whole, and the ordering of her
priorities. Although ancient moral philosophers do not neglect cases
of ethical conflict as much as is often thought, they do not regard
ethical theory primarily as a mechanism for solving ethical conflict.
Rather, the assumption is that each of us has a vague and unarticulated
idea of an overall or final goal in our life, and the task of ethical theory
is to give each person a clear, articulated, and correct account of this
overall goal and how to achieve it. The different theories of course
disagree as to what the correct account is, but whether the right answer
is the life of pleasure or the life of virtue, it is the attainment of a
clear and definite conception of his final end which enables the agent
to get a clear grasp of his priorities and a principled grasp of how to
act. Since our final end can be specified at the intuitive level, prior to
theoretical reflection, as eudaimonia or happiness, ancient theories are
frequently called eudaemonist.'
This structural point about ancient ethical theories, that their task
is that of articulating the agent's overall goal, has led to constant
accusations that they are egoistic. This can be seen to be a mistake

* I am grateful for very helpful discussion to Jean Hampton, whose comments

have greatly improved this article. I am also grateful for comments from Nicholas White
and Terence Irwin, my fellow symposiasts at the Pacific Division American Philosophical
Association meeting in San Francisco, March 1993; to members of the Philosophy
Department at Georgetown University, particularly Nancy Sherman and Alfonso Go-
mez-Lobo; and to Scott Berman and Terry Price for written comments.
1. These very general remarks rely on my book The Morality of Happiness (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993) for the claim that ancient ethical theories are eudaemo-
nist in form. The book argues the case for theories like Stoicism and Epicureanism,
where the eudaemonist structure is not so obvious.

Ethics 105 (January 1995): 241-257

? 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/95/0502-2001$01.00

241

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242 Ethics January 1995

when we examine the actual content of the theories. For the theories
make two demands. They require that a correct conception of my final
end give weight to the interests of others in a way that does not reduce
to giving them weight insofar as they further my own aims. They also
demand that I have the virtues, which are (at the least) dispositions to
act rightly, where this is specified in nonegoistic ways (requiring, for
example, in the case of justice, respect for the rights of others)3. How
strong these demands are varies across theories, but with one exception
ancient theories make demands impossible for any form of egoism.3
It is true nonetheless that there are some major structural differ-
ences between ancient eudaemonist theories and modern theories.
Examining these is of interest both for our interpretation of the an-
cient theories, and for our understanding of our own options. In this
article I shall be looking atjust one of these: in ancient theories rational
reflection on one's life as a whole leads the agent to reason morally,
and no distinct competing role is left, within the theory, for pruden-
tial reasoning.
What is meant by this becomes clearer by contrast with modern
types of theory. In many modern theories it is taken for granted that
the agent will, as a matter of prudence, aim at his own self-regarding
good; he is urged to reflect rationally in order to do this as a matter
of rational prudence. The agent when reasoning prudentially employs
reasoning in order to achieve results which he regards as valuable for
him. The reasoning-typically working out means to a desired end-is
valued for the results it brings; it is itself thus valued only for its
instrumental role. (This is, of course, a highly informal account of
prudential reasoning but will turn out to have the merit of not begging
important questions between ancient and modern theories. We shall
see later why it would be a bad idea to begin by defining prudence in
terms of reasoning which furthers the agent's interests.) It is a quite
distinct question, however, why the agent should take account of mo-
rality, and hence it is a distinct question why rational reflection should
show it to be rational to take account of morality. It is often taken for
granted that there is a problem in showing that it is rational for the
agent to take the moral point of view, in a way in which there is no
problem in showing that it is rational for the agent to take the pruden-

2. In Nicholas White's terminology, I understand ancient theories to be inclusionist,

though I reject what he calls fusionism.
3. Compare my book and my essay, "The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others,"
in The Good Life and the Human Good, ed. E. F. Paul, F. D. Miller, andJ. Paul (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 133-48. The exception is the Cyrenaic school,
who reject the eudaemonist assumption that one's life as a whole is of concern. I also
argue that Epicurus is not committed to egoism, although there are elements in his
theory which make it difficult for him to avoid it.

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 Annas Ancient and Modern Ethics 243

tial point of view. Even if it is allowed that both are rational, it is often
taken for granted that prudential and moral reasoning are distinct
functions of rationality. Sometimes it is argued that they can come
into conflict, the most dramatic form of this being Sidgwick's demon-
stration of the "dualism of practical reason." Sometimes we find
lengthy discussion as to whether moral reasoning can or cannot be
reduced to a complex form of prudential reasoning.
When we turn to the ancient theories, we do not find the assump-
tion that prudential and moral reasoning are distinct forms of rational-
ity. Hence, we do not find any analogue to the modern discussions
just mentioned. What is initially most surprising, however, is that the
missing element seems to be prudential reasoning, where this is under-
stood on the theoretical level as a competitor to moral reasoning.
Ancient ethical theories all put great store by the fact that rationality
is characteristic of us as human beings, and that rational reflection, as
opposed to reliance on experience and what we pick up from our
surroundings, is what distinguishes a human approach to moral mat-
ters. Rational reflection is thus a demand that all theories make of the
moral agent.4 The idea that seems to be lacking in the theories is that
of purely self-regarding, prudential rationality taken to be distinct
from moral rationality and forming a competitor to it.
We are bound to find this somewhat baffling. Prudential rationality
is supposed to be the easy, obvious idea, and yet we find centuries of
ethical debate which seems not to grant this but, rather, to take for
granted what is supposed to be the problematic idea, namely, the rational-
ity of moral reasoning. And there is indeed something of a tradition of
interpreting ancient theories in a way which deals with this bafflement
by maintaining that, contrary to first appearances, there is no problem,
since prudential reasoning is just what we find there.
Ancient ethical theory, as I noted, has its entry point in the agent's
reflections about her life as a whole. And some interpreters have simply
identified this with a type of prudential reasoning, arguing that ancient
ethics, in assuming that the agent is pursuing her final good, is assum-
ing that she is pursuing a self-regarding good; the virtues, for example,
are understood as morally neutral kinds of "excellence." Sometimes
ancient ethics, so understood, is berated as egoistic. Sometimes it is
hailed as a welcome change from modern theories obsessed with duty
and the claims of others.
Both reactions, however, are misguided, since this is a misunder-
standing of the ancient theories. For they are theories that require the

4. I cannot argue fully here for the claim that the role of habituation, and the
importance of direct or non-rule-governed insight in ancient ethics, have been some-
what exaggerated in many recent discussions. I argue this in a forthcoming paper,
"Virtue as a Skill."

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244 Ethics January 1995

agent to acquire and internalize the virtues in order to achieve her

final goal;5 and, given the nature of virtue in ancient theories, this
excludes the claim that an egoistic explanation of the agent's reason
could be the correct one. Moreover, it does not take much scrutiny of
the ancient conception of the virtues to see that they are not disposi-
tions to achieve "excellence" in a variety of morally neutral ways: they
are the moral virtues, and what theyrdemand are the demands of
morality-to be just, brave, and so on; and, given the extremely de-
manding nature of virtue in ancient theories, this involves the require-
ment of being a person who reasons morally, and not in terms of her
own interest. If ancient ethical reflection is understood prudentially,
we end up simply falsifying the content of much of ancient ethics.6
It will be retorted that this is much too quick; given the content
of ancient ethical reflection, it is not prudential in a narrow sense of
prudence, in which the self-regarding good which the agent seeks is
understood in a very restrictive way, but surely it is prudential in a
wider sense, in which prudence guides the agent to what is required
for happiness?7 Indeed, the more we insist on the eudaemonistic struc-
ture of ancient ethics, the more we may be attracted to the view that
the function of ancient ethical theory is to expand the agent's view of
what prudence requires. In the Republic, for example, does Socrates
not start from a narrowly conceived notion of what is good for the
agent, and thus will produce his happiness, and proceed by getting
the agent to expand his idea of what it is that is good for him, and
thus what it is that his happiness consists in?
The traditional view of Greek ethics-or at least a very en-
trenched traditional view-regards it as having a prudential structure
for this kind of reason. Prudence can be seen as a correct view of what
is in the agent's interests, and ethical theory guides the agent from an
intuitive, restrictive view of what is in her interests (money, power) to
a more expanded and elevated view (the virtues). The agent's view of
what her interests are is enlarged and modified in a way which tracks
the enlargement and modification of her view of what her happiness
really consists of; but there is no change in the type of reasoning
employed from beginning to end-it is simply prudence. On this view,
the only reason for denying that ancient ethics employs prudential
reasoning is an overly narrow view of what prudence must be, and
dissolves once we realize the scope for expansion of the agent's view

5. Again, except for the Cyrenaics; and Epicurus's theory contains some tensions
in this respect.
6. This is argued in the book, and in my "Ancient Ethics and Modern Morality,"
in Philosophical Perspectives, ed. J. E. Tomberlin, vol. 6, Ethics, 1992 (Atascadero, Calif.:
Ridgeview, 1992), pp. 119-136.
7. This point has been made to me by Terence Irwin and by Alfonso Gomez-Lobo.

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 Annas Ancient and Modern Ethics 245

of what her interests are. (The result is, of course, a controversial view
of the relation of prudence to morality; one might reasonably doubt
that the moral virtues could be reached in this way. But this is not the
issue I am presently concerned with.)
Although this widespread view has initial plausibility, it is, I be-
lieve, mistaken. It is, of course, possible to develop an expansive ac-
count of prudence on these lines, but my claim is that this is not in
fact what we find in ancient ethical theories. Rather, we find, in differ-
ent forms, a quite different view of the relation of prudential to moral
thinking. I shall return to this issue when the ancient view is more
fully set out.
If we turn to ancient ethics without the above type of assumption,
we find that moral reasoning is not simply prudential reasoning, and
that the relation of moral reasoning to the prudential use of reasoning
is not what we might expect. For the agent to have determined cor-
rectly what her final end is, how best to achieve happiness, is for her
already to have determined what morality demands. She cannot work
out in determinate detail what her own happiness is to consist of and
then, quite separately, work out how much morality demands. The
second task has already been accomplished by the time the first one
has been completed.
We are now, however, back to the point that this is bound to strike
us as baffling. Another way out may recommend itself at this point,
namely, the assumption that for the ancients prudence and morality
tended to coincide more easily than they do for us, because the ancients
did not tend to distinguish their own individual good from social or
collective good to the extent that we do. This is the view which Nicholas
White terms 'fusionism'. Sometimes this thesis is given a historical
form: at some point in the past, collective solidarity crumbled and
people started to think of themselves as isolated, self-sufficient individ-
uals, essentially in competition with one another. When this is dated
depends on when the golden age of collective consensus is supposed
to have been the case, but usually the ancients form part of the pre-
lapsarian condition. On this view, it was simply natural and easy for
the ancients to identify their own, individual good with the collective
good; indeed, on some versions, they were not aware of any other
type of option.
Such a view of the ancients is deeply marked by nostalgia: now
we are atomic competitive individuals, but there was a time when
people unforcedly identified their own individual good with the com-
mon good. But of course such a golden age is always a projection
from the point of view of present dissatisfaction. Why the Greeks in
particular have served so often as a model for identification of individ-
ual and social good is something requiring explanation. The polis or
city-state, and in particular Athens, was in fact the scene of more

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246 Ethics January 1995
conflict, litigation, and civil strife than most forms of political associa-
tion, and it is strange that it should serve as a picture of harmonious
cooperation.8
Reading Thucydides, or indeed much of ancient Greek literature,
should be enough to disabuse one of the idea that ancient people
could readily or naturally assume an identification of individual and
social good.9 People in ancient history, drama, and oratory pose practi-
cal conflicts and problems in terms of their own self-interest as opposed
to the demands of virtue and the interests of others. Thrasymachus
in book 1 of the Republic memorably claims that justice is "another's
good" as opposed to "one's own good" and praises as strong and clever
the person who furthers his own good at the expense of justice. And
Aristotle in the Rhetoric makes it plain that most people tended to see
virtuous behavior as being associated with acting in the interests of
others, as opposed to their own.10 The idea that individuals will ten
to be in a state of conflict, particularly over things like money and
power, and that when I think of my good I am likely to oppose it to
yours and think of us as being in competition (rather than to sink
our apparent competition in the joint achievement of some larger
good), was obviously as prominent in the ancient world as it is nowa-
days. So the baffling fact about ancient ethical theory, namely, that it
seems to have no distinct role for prudential rationality, once more
returns; we cannot simply banish it by the claim that the ancients
had a different conception from ours of the relation of prudence
to morality.
This very point brings out, however, how striking it is that ancient
ethical theories do not, in the way that modern ones tend to do, take
the competition between individuals at the intuitive level to determine
a structurally important fact about ethics. Although they were con-
ceived in a society in which (perhaps more than in most) self-interest
and morality seemed at the intuitive level to point in quite different
directions, ancient ethical theories do not follow Sidgwick's route of
taking egoism and morality to be, at the theoretical level, equally ratio-
nal. Nor do they try to show that morality is really a complicated form
of prudence. Rather, they work within an ethical framework which
absorbs a major role of prudential reasoning into moral reasoning,
instead of regarding them as competitors.

8. See Nicholas White's forthcoming book for discussion of the Hegelian back-
ground to idealization of the polls.
9. Nicholas White and I are in firm agreement on this point, although our conclu-
sions about the relation of individual good and wider good in Greek ethics differ widely.
10. Rhetoric 1.9, esp. 1366b36-1367a6. Aristotle is here giving us generally ac-
cepted assumptions on the matter (which do not fit particularly well with his own
analysis in the ethical works).

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 Annas Ancient and Modern Ethics 247

This points up something interesting about ancient ethical reflec-

tion. It is not notably concerned to answer to commonsense ways of
thinking and is not afraid of revising and reinterpreting commonsense
beliefs. We tend not to notice this fact about ancient ethical theory in
general if we concentrate our attention too much on Aristotle, who is
more inclined to give weight to common sense than some other theo-
ries (although even in his case the extent to which he does this has
been exaggerated).11
The Stoics are the most illuminating for us in the present connec-
tion, for a number of reasons. Their theory is arguably the most
revisionary about the notion of happiness; they hold, for a start, that
virtue is sufficient for happiness, and that makes it clear that the
content of happiness has to be considerably revised from what we
intuitively take it to be. And they give us what is arguably the clearest
and most developed account of the agent's rational progress toward
the moral point of view, one which makes it most patent that there is
no space left for a separate, potentially conflicting role for rational
prudence and why this is so. The two points are fairly closely con-
nected. For it turns out that when I have reached the moral point of
view, the thought that I can seek my happiness by doing others down
is a mistake-a mistake about what happiness really consists in. Suc-
cessful grasp of the moral point of view involves quite a lot of revision
about what happiness is. A theory with this feature must find it espe-
cially urgent to show why it does not face a serious challenge, within
the theory, from the point of view of prudence.
The account relies on one of the most prominent theses in Sto-
icism, namely, that virtue is a skill technoi). Virtue is, of course, a
developed and trained disposition to do the right thing for the right
kind of reason, and in calling it a skill the Stoics are identifying this
disposition with the intellectual ability at its basis. A skill is, however,
essentially a practical kind of understanding; taking virtue to be a skill
is not in itself to adopt an "intellectualist" view of virtue.12 Rather,
virtue is taken to have the intellectual structure of a skill, a point

11. Aristotle does not in general in the ethical works rely on the "endoxic method"
discussed in Nicomachean Ethics 7.3; it is more characteristic of the treatment of puzzles
in the Physics, and in the Nicomachean Ethics is confined to the relatively self-contained
puzzle of akrasia. Aristotle's general ethical theses are not presented as the result of
working through puzzles that arise from common views.
12. The only point at which the Stoics could be accused of having an intellectualist
view of virtue is in their theory of the emotions; for any theory of virtue requires an
account of the emotions which are involved in the various dispositions to do the right
thing for the right kind of reason, and the Stoic theory is in various ways uncompromis-
ing about these-although even so, I think that when fully spelled out the theory is
not as intellectualist as is often thought.

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248 Ethics January 1995

accepted even by Aristotle, who has reservations about the idea that
virtue is like a skill.'3
A skill is not just any form of understanding; it has a definite
structure. A skill involves a unified grasp of its subject matter, not a
mere collection of bits of knowledge of matters of fact. Further, the
person with a skill grasps the general principles which define its subject
matter and can explain and, if need be, jUstify his particularjudgments
in terms of the general principles. In ethical theories in which virtue
is said to be a skill, this is assumed to be a requirement of articulacy
(in contrast to some actual skills); the excellent potter may not be able
to sayjust why he makes the decisions he does, but the virtuous person
must have his principles available if required to justify his particular
decisions. In Stoic ethics, the principles that the virtuous person grasps
are called thedrgmata, which seems to imply a fairly high degree of
structure in what the virtuous person grasps, although it does not
imply that it has a mathematical type of structure."4 The Stoics g
more scope than Aristotelian theories do to the role of moral rules in
the agent's life, and general principles are required in order to ensure
that the agent who follows moral rules understands how they cohere
together and are justified, rather than forming a random set of
directives.
Clearly the idea that virtue is a skill represents it as a complex
intellectual kind of understanding, one that requires continued reflec-
tion and practice. Further, virtue is, for the Stoics, a global skill, one
displayed by the agent in her life as a whole, in contrast to the particu-
lar skills, which can be exercised in a compartmentalized way, indepen-
dently of one's level of understanding in other areas of one's life. The
virtuous person, then, is someone who in her life as a whole exercises,
and lives by, a unified grasp of the principles of right behavior. She
is virtuous, because she follows moral rules with understanding into
their basis, and in all her actions she displays this unified grasp that
grounds her decisions and actions. Developed moral reasoning is a
requirement of virtue.
It begins, however, from something simpler. The Stoics give a
genetic account of the development of human rationality. From birth,
they say, a human being feels an attachment to itself, and an impulse
to preserve itself, and antipathy to what tends to destroy it.15 This is
indicated by the way that infants go, without instruction, for the things

13. This and the following points about skill are developed at greater length in
"Virtue as a Skill" and the relevant parts of The Morality of Happiness.
14. A passage from the Academic Philo (Arius Didymus ap. Stobaeus, Eclogia
2.40.1-41.25) uses the word in a quite untechnical discussion of the role of principles
in one's life.
15. The following account, traditionally called "personal oikeidsis (familiarization),"

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 Annas Ancient and Modern Ethics 249

that they naturally need. It is thus self-love that provides our first
impulse to action. We are guided by nature-the needs of our human
nature-toward some things and away from others, which are said to
have value and disvalue accordingly. We come to recognize certain
general duties'6 (kathikonta) of self-preservation and of seeking what
is naturally good for us and avoiding what is naturally bad. Once we
discover how to select these things, we develop our habits of per-
forming these duties of selecting what is good for us and avoiding the
bad; then we learn how to do this in a progressively more consistent
and reliable way.
So far, interestingly, this sounds like a classical example of the
development of prudential reasoning. We start by going after what we
seek by instinct, and as we develop as rational creatures, we gradually
come to do this in an ever more organized way, following general
rules and finally coming to plan our behavior as a consistent whole. But
then we get something new. For at a certain point of our developing
rationality, the Stoics claim that something becomes clear to a normally
rational human, namely, that our employment of reason has itself a
distinct kind of value, different from the value of the results that
we employ it to achieve, and which we value from a self-regarding
viewpoint. We should note that what is happening here is not that the
agent first values reason for its instrumental and means-end function-
ing, and later goes on to value it for something else, perhaps another
kind of functioning. For these former functions of reason carry on
into its moral functioning. Rather, what is recognized is a distinct
kind of end that reason can achieve. Initially we value reason and its
development because of its ability to deliver the goods-health, wealth,
and other goods that are valued from a self-regarding standpoint; but
we become able to appreciate it for its ability to achieve a different,
non-self-regarding kind of good. In the Stoics' own image,'7 I can
start by valuing a friend -Joe -and value Joe's friends as Joe's friends
in a straightforward way; but then I may come to value one of Joe's
friends for herself, and value her much more than I valued her as
Joe's friend. I needed to get to know her as Joe's friend in order to
get to know her for herself, but I end up with a new and distinctly
different attitude to her when I know her in her own right and not
merely as one of Joe's friends.
The Stoics say little here-about the exact form of reasoning that
they are concerned with."8 And as for a general argument that this is

16. Translators often avoid the word 'duty', since they associate this with moral
duty, and kathikon extends far beyond the realm of the moral. However, I take it that
it is quite natural to speak of duties that are not moral duties.
17. Cicero Definibus 3.23.
18. Many interpreters assume that what is meant is appreciation of the order and
consistency of cosmic reasoning in the world. There is no handle for this in the Cicero

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250 Ethics January 1995

what happens, the Stoics merely point to the fact that rationality is
part of human nature, and so it is part of normal human development
to recognize our human rationality for what it is, namely, something
whose value transcends its self-regarding employment and goes on to
achieve its own ends. Nor is there, in the Stoics, any developed argu-
ment to show that reason's non-self-regarding function is essentially
connected to morality; like Kant, the Stoics find the connection here
obvious. Assuming that there is a moral point of view, they argue that
it is reason, rather than experience, that puts us in touch with it.
The step of recognizing the special, prudence-transcending value of
reasoning is, for them, the same as the step of recognizing the special
value of virtue (moral value, as we would put it), different in kind
from that of other things that naturally have value for us from a self-
regarding point of view, like health and wealth.
Nothing in this story requires downgrading or elimination of the
instrumental uses of reason to achieve the agent's own good. The
Stoics (in a way analogous to Kant again) are often taken to hold that
once we recognize the distinctive value of virtuous activity, and the
rationality that aims at it, then other things somehow cease to matter
to us. But this is false. For it remains true that reason has an instrumen-
tal use in getting goods like health and wealth, and this is entirely
reasonable; it is natural for us to seek goods like this, and there would
be something deeply wrong with a human who was indifferent to them,
and therefore indifferent to the uses of reason that are instrumental in
getting them. Nevertheless, the switch of concern described above
makes a profound difference.
One way in which this difference shows up is that the goods which
it is the business of prudential reason to obtain-health, wealth, and
so on-cease to have a status competitive with that of virtuous activity,
and now come to be regarded as merely the "material" of virtue. When
the agent performs a virtuous action, this will in fact be an action
which tries to achieve some ordinary good, such as health or wealth.
What makes it a virtuous action, if it is one, is not that the agent does
not really value health, but that he aims to achieve health in a virtuous
way. Virtue lies in the reasons for which one acts rather than in the
type of action one performs. This ieans that the assessment of a
virtuous action becomes complex. Normally such an action will in fact
result in achieving the nonmoral good in question; temperance will
normally produce health, for example. But health is not the proper
aim of the virtuous person, since if he reasons virtuously and acts

passage, however, where the order and consistency are plainly those of ordinary rational
thinking. In my book I argue for the view that cosmic reason does not play a structural
role in Stoic ethics, but only in the metaphysical background to ethics. Actual ethical
debate certainly proceeds without it.

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 Annas Ancient and Modern Ethics 251

temperately, he has achieved the aim of virtuous activity, even when,

because of stepmotherly circumstances, health fails to follow. Virtue
is a skill, but a special kind of skill; it is a kind of skill in which success
is achieved from its very inception and not when the results are out. 19
It is part of the virtuous person's skill that he knows how to employ
reason instrumentally in achieving goods like health and wealth; but
achievement of these is not the proper end of the skill, since the
virtuous person is aware of, and aiming to achieve, the aim of morality,
which consists in achieving these and other similar goods only in cer-
tain ways and for certain reasons.
We can now see what is wrong with the traditional view that
ancient ethical theory proceeds by expanding and modifying, in tan-
dem, the agent's conception of what her interests are and what her
happiness is, and thus by employing an expanding conception of pru-
dence. This idea simply fails to account for the distinctive change of
perspective that occurs in the agent who first employs reason pruden-
tially and then, by reflective awareness on its nature, comes to recog-
nize that it has a prudence-transcending value of its own. On the
traditional view, reason proceeds in the same way throughout, from
aiming to achieve an unreflective, restricted type of happiness and
one's interests, right through to recognition of the value of virtuous
activity. But this leaves out what is essential: the recognition that rea-
soning has its own characteristic aim, which the agent values for itself,
and is not just valued for the results it assures for the agent. This
brings a change of perspective, for the agent, on the results that
reasoning brings. On the traditional view we never get beyond valuing
Joe's friend for her relationship to Joe. Whereas what matters most,
in moral development, is coming to value her for her own sake.
It may be objected that it is only the Stoics who claim that there
is this kind of sharp break between valuing reasoning for the results
it brings one and valuing it in a distinct way. If this were the case,
then perhaps the traditional view could be held to fit other theories,
such as Aristotle's, while the Stoics would mark a new direction in
ancient ethical theory. I think that it is important that the Stoics do
not form an exception here, although of course the point would have
to be more fully argued elsewhere. While they mark the change of
perspective more sharply than other theories do, I think that other
theories also recognize the distinction between the purely prudential
value of reasoning and the stage at which moral reasoning takes over
some of the functions of prudential reasoning but is no longer valued

19. This leads to certain problems with the notion of virtue as a skill, at least in
ordinary understandings of skill. (I discuss this set of problems in the book.) They do
not affect the issues discussed in this article.

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252 Ethics January 1995

simply for its production of results wanted by the agent. It can be

argued, of course, that different ancient theories are more or less
adequate in the way that they do this, and this issue is obviously con-
nected to the initial plausibility, in some cases, of the traditional
interpretation. 20
The Stoics, we have seen, hold a rather Kantian view about the
relation of moral to nonmoral value, while at the same time not sepa-
rating the role of prudential reasoning from moral as Kant does when
he confines the first to happiness and the second to duty. For the
Stoics, the agent's reasoning is prudential insofar as the action is aimed
at securing health, security, and so on, and moral insofar as it is aimed
at virtue-done for the right kind of reason and from the right kind
of disposition. It may be, of course, that morality requires the agent
to do an action which results in loss of goods which he had previously
taken it as prudential to seek. Bravery, for example, may lead to loss
of security, or even death, rather than security. If so, the agent who
thought that morality required sacrifice, while prudence required a
quick retreat, and that both kinds of consideration were equally ratio-
nal, would be making a mistake; he would have regressed to the initial
stage where reasoning was valued only for its results, forgetting or
repressing the insight that reasoning transcends its prudential employ-
ment and enables the agent to grasp the characteristic aim of morality.
Thus the dominance of the moral point of view, once reached,
requires the agent to transform her priorities in accordance with it,
and thus to revise considerably the results previously attained by the
uncomplicatedly prudential use of reasoning. But this is not an aboli-
tion or rejection of the former role of reasoning; the virtuous agent
is still concerned to obtain health, security, and so on, only now the
pursuit of these is constrained by the requirements of morality. Moral
reasoning carries out what is generally taken to be the major function
of prudential reasoning-obtaining natural goods like health, security,
and so on, as long as the pursuit of these respects the requirements
of morality. To try to obtain these against morality is not to raise a
distinct and coordinate claim of prudence, one which is recognizable
as obviously rational and whose rationality can withstand the recogni-

20. Even in the Republic, where there is most overt appeal to the need to show
that virtue is good for the agent, and in her interests, the traditional interpretation is
not adequate; it cannot account for the change in perspective achieved by the philoso-
pher-rulers, from whose viewpoint Thrasymachus's demand is not something that can
be met in its own terms. Similarly Aristotle's stress on the fine or kalon as the peculiar
aim of the virtuous agent arguably marks a distinct moral perspective which cannot be
fully accounted for on the traditional view. The issue clearly needs to be discussed for
each theory for my thesis to be accepted as a thesis true of ancient ethical theory
generally. However, even if made out only for the Stoics, it demonstrates the untenability
of the traditional view as a thesis true of ancient ethical theory generally.

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 Annas Ancient and Modern Ethics 253

tion of the claims of morality; rather, it is to regress to a stage at which

the agent did not fully grasp the realignment of priorities that is
demanded by grasping what the claims of morality are.
Further, the Stoics hold that as one progresses in rationality, one
comes to extend one's concern outward from oneself to other people,
first to one's offspring and relatives, then to other individuals one
cares about, then to groups whose connection with one is more and
more remote, finally to all human beings.2' What enables one to do
this is a grasp of the distinctive kind of value which virtuous activity
has. For, just as understanding this put certain constraints on the kind
of importance that goods like health and security can have for the
agent, so it puts certain constraints on the importance to the agent of
the fact that it is his own health or security that is concerned, or his
wife's or father's health or security. What matters is the agent's virtuous
activity, not the fact that it benefits him or someone related or con-
nected to him.22
The successful Stoic will thus have considerably revised views
about the place in her life of the goods which are the normal object
of prudential reasoning. Although she will fully admit that they have
value, and that it is natural for us to go for them, she will realize that
the value of virtuous activity so outweighs the kind of value that they
have, that their place in her life is that of the material for virtuous
activity. Further, although we naturally care more for ourselves than
others, and for those who are personally known to us than for those
we have no knowledge of, these differences are not given importance
from the moral point of view. However, despite these considerable
revisions, it would not be right to say that the successful Stoic is some-
one who has lost interest in health and wealth, or in the difference
between his own health and wealth and those of somebody else. Al-
though the Stoics stress as firmly as Kant the utter difference between
moral and nonmoral value, they regard the result of internalizing this
difference as the retention of a morally guided and constrained pursuit
of nonmoral goods, not a fanatical rejection of them. Hence they
regard moral reasoning not as competing with prudence, but as incor-
porating the traditional tasks of prudence (rightly constrained, of
course).
I am aware that there is much in the above which strikes moderns
as underargued at best, implausible at worst. I am not, in this article,

21. This process of extending concern is traditionally called "social oikeidsis." There
are many scholarly puzzles as to its relation to personal oikeidsis, and this article does
not aim to solve these, but merely to point out one relationship that they stand in.
22. It is still, however, the agent's virtuous activity; we do not have the position
reached in some modern theories, where all that would matter would be virtuous activity,
regardless of whose it is.

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254 Ethics January 1995

trying to defend Stoic ethics, or even to present it in full, merely trying

to shed light on the issue that tends to baffle us: why prudential
reasoning does not figure in ancient ethical theory as a separate, recog-
nized source of conflict to developed moral reasoning within the the-
ory. We have seen that, in the case of the Stoics, this is because reason
operates purely prudentially only before the distinction between moral
and nonmoral value is clearly recognized. Once we recognize this cru-
cial point, we continue to reason in a way that brings prudentially
valuable results, but only in ways that respect the demands of morality,
demands that require considerable rethinking of priorities. Thus, the
person who regards both kinds of claim as equally rational, and thus
finds a conflict between prudential and moral reasoning, is someone
who has already made a mistake about what is at stake, because she
has failed fully to grasp the crucial difference between morality and
what it demands and the premoral uses of reasoning.
If one accepts that this difference is so crucial, one is accepting
a theory that is, as I have already stressed, revisionary of common
sense. Just for this reason, however, it cannot be effectively attacked
merely by repeating everyday intuitions about prudence. The Aca-
demic skeptic Carneades seems to have attacked the Stoic theory of
justice by complaining that on the Stoic theory, the pursuit of what
is natural would develop into ruthless pursuit of one's own good,
rather than into a disposition to respect the rights of others.23 Given
that the theory starts from pursuit of what is in the agent's self-interest,
Carneades complains, how can it end up with the agent having the
virtues, particularly the virtue of justice? It has been claimed that
Carneades' criticism is "devastating,"24 since it points out to the Stoics
"that the advantageous and the morally right ... ., far from coinciding
in the rational pursuit of objects of natural impulse, might actually
be opposed to one another." The Stoics have no argument to show
that justice should override self-seeking, on this view, because their
theory "introduces two potentially conflicting tendencies without at
the same time providing a method for deciding which one is to be
given precedence in cases of actual conflict."25
But can the Stoics have failed to notice this kind of objection? It
is just the sort of objection that common sense is bound to bring, since
common sense accepts that my pursuit of my own self-interest is likely

23. In his speeches "for and againstjustice" delivered in Rome in 155 B.C. We have
a fragmentary and- altered version of the debate in Cicero De Republica 3 (some of the
missing passages preserved in Lactantius).
24. By Gisela Striker, in "Greek Ethics and Moral Theory," in The Tanner Lectures
on Human Values, vol. 9, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press, 1988), pp. 183-202. See also her "Following Nature: A Study in Stoic Ethics,"
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 9 (1991): 1-74, secs. 4 and 5.
25. Striker, "Following Nature," p. 44.

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 Annas Ancient and Modern Ethics 255

to conflict with virtuous activity which may well demand that I restrain
myself because of the rights of others. This does not seem devastating
to the Stoic theory, since that theory is not concerned to answer to
everyday intuitions on this issue. As we have seen, the theory gives a
long account of the development of rationality which is designed to
show how self-interested rationality develops into something different.
Thus Carneades is not showing the Stoics that they have a difficulty
internal to their theory, but merely arguing against them from com-
monsense premises which they do not accept.26
There may, however, seem to be something paradoxical about a
view like this. For the theory starts, as already stressed, from considera-
tions of my life as a whole, and the first development of reasoning
focuses on exactly this. But we then find that by the time moral reason-
ing has reached its completed state, the notion of my life as a whole
has lost some of the significance that it initially had. For my pursuit of
what are normally recognized as overall goods-money, for example,
which is a means to many other goods, such as health and security-is
severely constrained by the reordering of my priorities that is imposed
by recognizing the demands of morality. And the importance to me
of my own life is undercut by the realization that from the moral point
of view my own interests, or those of my friends, should not matter
more just because of whose they are. Surely the end point of this
development has radically undermined the starting point?
This is, I think, true, but the paradox, if we are to call it that, is
one that is not confined to Stoicism in particular. Some forms of
modern utilitarianism, for example, begin by recommending pleasure
(welfare, etc.) as an aim on the grounds that it is a comprehensibly
rational aim for the individual agent. But then it turns out that examin-
ing what rationality requires leads us to the conclusion that pleasure
(welfare, etc.) should be maximized whoever has it, so that the agent's
initial rational concern for his own pleasure (welfare, etc.) comes up
against the demands of the theory. At this point we may follow Sidg-
wick in declaring the egoistic concern to be as rational as the moral
concern, with the result that there is now a division in the very notion
of rationality. Or, more commonly, we may follow those who say that
the agent's concern for his own pleasure (welfare, etc.) gives way
before the demands of morality: to insist on the importance of one's
own pleasure (welfare, etc.) as against the claims of maximizing plea-

26. This feature of Carneades' arguments is pointed out by P. A. Vander Waerdt

in his forthcoming book, The Theory of Natural Law in Antiquity. As a skeptic, Carneades
would have been aware that this fell short, since his opponents would not accept the
premises that mattered. Vander Waerdt argues that this may be a feature of the Roman
debate in particular (which Cicero has in any case altered) and that Carneades would
have argued differently to a philosophical audience.

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256 Ethics January 1995

sure (welfare, etc.) generally, is to show moral immaturity, a failure

to realize the significance of the moral point of view. Stoicism is, I
think, a theory of this type, although its final end is morality, rather
than pleasure, and its view of moral reasoning is far less crude. For
theories of this type, a challenge to moral rationality in the name of
prudential rationality is bound to be a kind of moral immaturity, a
failure to recognize that reflective awareness of the self-regarding
function of rationality leads us eventually to transcend the self-regard-
ing viewpoint.
This kind of position will almost certainly seem unsatisfactory to
us-that is, if we are used to modern moral theories, for we are used
to highly developed and well-entrenched theories of prudential ratio-
nality, which do not regard it as a relatively primitive stage of rational-
ity and do regard it as an obvious competitor, at the theoretical level,
to moral rationality. Obviously theories like the Stoic theory cannot
successfully meet this kind of challenge without meeting the argu-
ments of those who would establish prudential rationality as something
obvious in itself and capable of posing a challenge to morality. But
this is merely to say, uninterestingly, that Stoic ethics needs modern
arguments to meet modern alternatives.
There are, however, some interesting general points to be made.
Although I have only discussed the Stoic account of reasoning, I think,
as already noted, that there are good grounds for regarding the discus-
sion as relevant to ancient ethics generally. For ancient ethical theories
display, even if not in such clear and striking form, the features we
have seen. Common sense tells us of normally self-centered behavior,
and we are tempted to think of the rational pursuit of one's own self-
regarding aim as being in competition with the pursuit of morality
(even granting that the latter is rational). However, ethical theory pulls
away from common sense on this issue. The agent begins to think
ethically by thinking about her life as a whole, and how to achieve
happiness; and the initial uses of reason are aimed at the achievement
of self-regarding goods. But developed moral reasoning takes over
the instrumental and executive roles of reason, constraining them by
the attempt to achieve a moral, non-self-centered goal. It cannot have
been intuitively any easier for ancient agents than for moderns to
accept this.
There is one striking difference, however. Ancient theories did
not make the assumption that purely prudential reasoning is an obvi-
ous, well-entrenched, and unproblematic item in our moral theorizing,
and that there is a problem inherent in the very fact of our recognizing
uses of reason which transcend the interest we have in their results
for us. Regardless of ancient intuitions on the matter, there was no
constant assumption within ancient ethical theory that prudential rea-
soning is as authoritative as, or more so than, moral reasoning. If we

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 Annas Ancient and Modern Ethics 257

find ourselves making this assumption, we might ask ourselves what

kind of basis it has. What divides us from a theory like the Stoic one
is not our intuitions; ancient intuitions, as I have pointed out, were
remarkably similar to ours. Perhaps, then, it is just the unargued
assumption about the obvious authority, in moral theorizing, of pru-
dential reasoning. And, if so, we should ask ourselves whether this
assumption has more than familiarity to recommend it.

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