Abstract
Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue provides an original and contemporary discussion of virtue-acquisition from an interdisciplinary standpoint. By equating virtues to skills, he offers an empirically informed progression towards virtue expertise. With the focus on gaining proficiency, there is little room to analyse the status of the virtue-novice, who is equated to a novice in any other skill: an agent consciously following simple rules, gaining experience in order to respond to normatively-laden situations with more automaticity in the following stages of skill-acquisition. This paper argues for a disanalogy between the virtue novice and novices in other skills, resulting from the understanding that follows from learning virtue words such as ‘kindness’ and ‘honesty’. Our brains are structured to find and subsequently use patterns to skilfully move around in our environment. These patterns can be represented in what Stichter calls ‘schemas’ or mental models of categorisations. Virtue words refer to patterns that would be difficult to categorise without linguistic labels, as instances of these categories are highly divergent. Virtue words are thus learned through examples of virtuous behaviour. Moreover, as virtue words are thick ethical concepts, they contain a normative load. I argue that due to these characteristics, novices who use virtue vocabulary are in a more advanced position than novices in other skills. So, a kindness novice who understands the word ‘kind’ has a better idea of how to act kindly than the chess novice has an idea of how to play chess by understanding the word ‘chess’.
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Notes
While Julia Annas also defines virtues as skills, Stichter clearly separates his views from hers.
Given the limited space of this article I take no stance on the inseparability of the evaluative and descriptive element of thick ethical concepts. I am however aware that both the descriptive and evaluative element are less straightforward as I have put them here. Critiques of a clear-cut descriptive element lead to “shapelessness” discussions, where thick concepts are seen as irreducibly evaluative (e.g. Roberts 2011), and critiques of the evaluative aspect has led to semantic (e.g. Dancy 1995) and pragmatic views of thick concepts (e.g. Väyrynen 2013), where the evaluative element is not fixed. For the purposes of this paper, however, all we need is that it is generally true that thick concepts such as kindness both describe and positively evaluate a situation or action.
Theoretically, the categorising role of linguistic labels could also be fulfilled by e.g. a clap or dance move. Additionally and perhaps obviously, sign language is a language; virtue words need not be spoken, merely communicated. Moreover, note that I make no claims on the necessity of virtue words for categorising moral behaviour in general – it seems plausible that agents can perceive acts as wrong or right without needing to categorise them as unjust or courageous. However, it has also been argued that certain virtue-related judgements are innate, only further refined through culture and interactions with others (e.g. Bloom 2013; Haidt and Joseph 2008). Yet, as argued by e.g. Dahl and Killen (2018), the empirical work this research is based on is difficult to interpret – testing the moral intuitions of toddlers or even pre-linguistic infants is difficult. Whether they are actually testing the infant’s sense of justice or ability to perceive kindness, instead of a general sense of right and wrong in paradigmatic cases, cannot be determined by the research done so far. This paper concerns itself with the specific virtues: kindness, honesty, courage, justice, generosity, etc. and whether these virtues can be actively practised without words to categorise such acts.
In regular use, virtue words can be used to describe agents, systems, corporations, events, etc. A process can be just, a business can have an honest policy, weather can be called generous. We recognise elements of the virtues in these things, without them having the feelings and intentions necessary for truly virtuous acts and people. More on this in the final section of this paper.
After all, Stichter describes virtue-learning as acquiring individual virtues such as kindness, rather than becoming more virtuous in general. Otherwise “be kind” might be more akin to “play as a team” in football.
Note that these are not the simple rules a novice could follow on the Dreyfus model, as the features relevant to the situation cannot be captured within such rules. Recognising whether the mouse is too injured to get better, whether a stranger is hungry, and when the family member becomes ill enough to require help is comparable to the advanced beginner recognising when the engine becomes loud enough to change gear in the Dreyfus example mentioned in section 1.
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Neijzen, M. The Linguistically Informed Virtue-Novice as Precocious: a Reply to Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 587–597 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10177-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10177-5