Abstract
That only those who have mastered language can be virtuous is something that may strike us as an obvious truism. It would seem to follow naturally from, indeed simply restate, a view that is far more commonly held and expressed by philosophers of the virtues, namely that only those who can reason can be virtuous properly said. My aim in this paper is to draw attention to this truism and argue its importance. In doing so, I will take the starting point for my reflections from a couple of concrete occasions in which the desire to offer a foothold to the language of the virtues encounters an obstacle that might be described as a recalcitrance of language: certain intuitions that seem decidedly linguistic get in the way to suggest that this vocabulary is out of place or out of order. Taking my cue from the discomfort of our linguistic intuitions, what I will be suggesting is that certain difficulties do indeed attend our use of the vocabulary of the virtues, and that there is a particular way of understanding their inevitability, one which is closely connected to the context of moral education. My hope is that reflecting on these difficulties and on the task of moral education with which they are associated can help us illuminate and recover the insight that a mastery of language may be indispensable for a mastery of virtue.
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Notes
There are other ways, of course, which need not be spelled out in terms of qualities of character or virtues, and are instead formulated in terms of actions. The formula ‘you should be—’ already excludes these kinds of possibilities. But as my purpose in this essay is not to undertake a broad-flanked defence of the claims of virtue, I bracket these alternatives.
But it would still be a substantive debate whether in a given case, after all the relevant information had been taken into account, the right course of action was to pursue one’s goals single-mindedly instead of being side-tracked by other appeals. To call someone who opts for single-minded pursuit ‘rigid’ as against ‘persevering’ already involves taking sides in the debate.
The same could not, though, be said for being stoic or philosophical, where what is prized (and this virtue-command evokes), is not the ability to put a concern with others’ well-being ahead of one’s narrower interests, but a broader and more principled concern with the acceptance of unwelcome circumstances than the one expressed by the term ‘flexibility’ or ‘adaptability’. What is discouraged is the desire to shape the world to one’s will and control things that should rather be accepted, and an inability to be at peace with the ways of contingency and fortune. This small scenario might be taken as an expression, and testing ground, for a deeper attitude such as this one.
Cf. White (1991): 217: “It would be just as ridiculous to order someone to be virtuous as it would be to order them to love us”.
When taken as a question concerning the expression of character, the intuition has a noble pedigree. In the words of Plutarch, in the introduction to his Life of Alexander: “the most brilliant exploits often tell us nothing of the virtues or vices of the men who performed them, while on the other hand a chance remark or a joke may reveal far more of a man’s character than the mere feat of winning battles in which thousands fall, or of marshalling great armies, or laying siege to cities.” (Plutarch 1973: 252).
‘Modern’, in a sense that would be encompassed by Warren Susman’s account of the decline of character and the rise of personality in the last century. See Susman (1984, Chap. 14).
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4, 1128b10-35, respectively trans. (Irwin 1985), and trans. (Thomson 2004). Interestingly, Aristotle opens the discussion by framing it as a question about whether aidos is to be considered a virtue. This must no doubt be linked with the fact that he first considers its appropriateness for youth; for adults, as the following passages make clear, aidos is hardly commendable.
This is supported by both intuition and literary example. When, in Pride and Prejudice, Georgiana Darcy behaves with an “embarrassment which, though proceeding from shyness and the fear of doing wrong, would easily give to those who felt themselves inferior, the belief of her being proud and reserved,” her sensitive observers react with pity (Austen 2001:173).
That this is the force of our virtue terms seems to be the starting point for those who go on to raise deeper questions about the responsibility one bears for one’s own character and about whether ascriptions of virtue or vice terms are compatible with a belief that people’s characters lie out of their control. A good port of call for considering such questions is Trianosky (1990). See also Kupperman (1991, Chapt. 3).
For the Kantian distinction between standpoints, see Korsgaard (1989, esp. pp. 119–120).
The importance of a decision in moving away from the theoretical standpoint is one of the insights that I take Richard Moran to have articulated in Moran (2001). This, I should emphasise, is not to advocate the blanket use of a moralistic approach to emotional difficulties; as with any insight, there are wise and unwise ways of applying this one, and it is not my intention here to circumscribe these with precision.
Much of my language here is indebted to Ben Spiecker’s essay: see Spiecker (1999, esp. pp. 217–219). See also, in this connection, the interesting discussion of “habituation as mimesis” in Fossheim (2006), which, as the title of his essay suggests, proposes an Aristotelian account of the motivation to become virtuous among children and young people. Fossheim takes Aristotle’s view that we become by doing to involve the idea that “a person can in important respects be said to perform a virtuous action before the person has herself become virtuous in any fully fledged sense” (p. 113)—yet another application of the as-if or anticipatory character of moral language. This “as-if” application of the language of the virtues is, after all, a proposal one can read back into Aristotle’s distinction, in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics (1105b4-8), between the predication of virtue terms of persons, and of actions, which seems to offer a way out of the circularity of saying that people become virtuous by doing virtuous acts, but that virtuous acts can only be done by virtuous persons. One thus becomes a just person by doing just acts—or, differently put, by acting as if one were.
And in discussing availability, I am also thinking of the availability of an understanding of philosophy as ‘practical’ in the sense in which Pierre Hadot has described it—because what is at issue is not merely the formal inclusion of philosophy in school or university curricula, but a particular way of approaching philosophy, as a claim over our way of life. See Hadot (1995, 2001).
Yet this is a view that has admitted different interpretations, each of which would bear a different relationship to the present line of argument. On one view, the specification of the virtues would require reference to an exemplar or, in Alderman’s words, a ‘paradigmatic individual’, whom Alderman understands as an actual, historical individual; drawing on Karl Jaspers, his list includes the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Socrates and Confucius. What counts as imitation or emulation is a problem such a theory will naturally have to confront in bridging the distance between a historical exemplar and particular situations requiring response in the here-and-now, and part of Alderman’s answer would seem to designate stories as the principal medium through which this distance is bridged. The decision procedure through which a moral decision would be taken, on these terms, would involve what he refers to as a ‘Gedanken experiment’ in which one would try to imagine what the paradigmatic individual would do, having saturated oneself with knowledge of his character through stories (see Alderman 1997, last reference to p. 160; the focus on stories and narrative is of course also a major component of MacIntyre’s account of the virtues, though it is articulated at a rather different level). In his introduction to the same volume, Statman seems happier to speak of an imaginary ideal—thus, “to find out what is required by friendship, for example, in some specific situation, would be to imagine an ideal friend and try to figure out how this friend would behave” (Statman 1997: 10). This formulation now looks much closer to a rather different specification of moral exemplarity which I take Hursthouse to have formulated. Responding to the criticism that the virtue ethicist has no practical guidance to give—save refer the teenager who is contemplating an abortion to the thought of how Socrates may have acted in her place—she states that “every virtue generates a positive instruction (act justly, kindly, courageously, honestly, etc.) and every vice a prohibition (do not act unjustly, cruelly…)”. The agent contemplating an action would thus ask themselves: would such an action be unkind or dishonest, courageous or unfair? Thus, while Hursthouse uses the notion of the virtuous agent to define right action (right action is the action that would be chosen by the virtuous agent), virtue terms confront actions directly rather than via imagining how a hypothetical exemplar would act (see Hursthouse 1997, esp. pp. 220–221). It is this view to which I take myself to be closest.
Talk of grammar, and of learning virtue as a mastery of words, is indebted to the kind of attention we have acquired from Ludwig Wittgenstein, but the analogy between virtuous action and grammatical speech is not a new one. Aristotle had already struck it in the Nicomachean Ethics, II.4. Compare Daniel Russell (2009: 84): “In this respect, the notion of ‘just action’ is like the notion of ‘grammatical utterance’: in each case, what one does conforms to standards of appropriateness relevant to the state or ability, and one can do things conforming to those standards—do something just or say something grammatical—without having the full-fledged state or ability already.” As may be obvious, this account of moral learning bears a connection to a prominent analysis of virtue as a practical know-how or skill, which transposes to moral learning the idea that skills are often first acquired with the mediation of rules that become redundant with practice. See Jacobson (2005, esp. 390–391), and compare also Annas (2008). Although Annas stresses the importance of exemplars in the acquisition of skills and thus also of virtues, her account suggests that this process must also include the learning of rules or the presence of occurrent thoughts about one’s praxis (“grammar”) which fall away or become “self-effacing” with experience (see esp. 22–24).
I say ‘hard’, but I do not mean ‘impossible’. The view I have been formulating should not be understood as a dogmatic account of how the learning of virtue must go. It is simple one way it may have to.
It is instructive, in this context, to consider the ‘virtues project’ pursued by Linda K. Popov over the last few years, of which an important expression is found in her book The Family Virtues Guide (Popov 1997). This is a project with a predominantly practical aim: to provide parents with practical tools and strategies for educating children in the virtues. What is interesting is that the practice of naming the virtues occupies a central place among these tools—a key educational strategy consists of learning to recognise what Popov calls ‘teachable moments’, occasions which ‘invite’ the use of virtue terms—and the project as a whole is pervaded by a belief in the transformative power of the language of virtue. It is interesting to ask in this context: how does the language that results from such efforts ring to the ear? (How truly ‘inviting’ are these occasions?) And here, too, I think that the charge of artificiality could hardly fail to arise: (1) To a young child holding a rock in its hand to throw at a sibling: “Stop! This is dangerous. You are not being peaceful.” And later: “How can you make up to your friend for forgetting to be peaceful?” (p. 17; peacefulness is a virtue term in Popov’s scheme.) (2) Addressing a young child, presumably on its way to school: “I honour you for your courage to go to the bus by yourself.” (p. 24) (3) Seeking to correct a child’s behaviour: “What virtue do you need to call on right now?”(p. 23). Talk about bookishness! The second example in particular is a perfect case of a big virtue word crashing down on a mundane occasion; the third, an unabashed reference to lists. (Of course, one might say apropos the second example that much of language has to be extraordinary falling on children—the point made above about ‘creative’ or ‘anticipatory’ language. And then we would be resuming the point that the adult learner must become an un-childlike child.) In this educational project, then, one finds embodied both aspects of the view I have outlined—the view of moral (specifically virtue) learning as a process of linguistic mastery, and the view of this linguistic mastery as one that involves the use of ‘extraordinary’ language. Encountered in such a context, though, the extraordinariness or ‘bookishness’ of this language also points to something larger: it is also a reflection of the fact, which here appears as one, that the language of the virtues is not one that we are habituated to use and hear. Popov points out that the vague and unhelpful terms ‘bad’ and ‘good’ do service for us all too often in labelling children’s actions (‘bad girl’, ‘good boy’). The language of the virtues is one that will need to be learnt as much by parents as by children. In fact, learning to recognise what Popov calls ‘teachable moments’ (moments in which the language of the virtues can be used) seems very similar in nature to the task I have described as forming part of the moral self-education of adults, and involves the same deliberate and reflective effort at confronting each unfolding situation with the repertory of one’s new language. On Popov’s project, see also Hursthouse’s brief remarks in Hursthouse (2006: 112–114). The project’s premise that educating children to the virtues is at least in part a matter of linguistic learning is one which, as I indicated above in n15, is at home with Hursthouse’s larger view of the direct confrontation of actions with virtue terms.
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Vasalou, S. Educating Virtue as a Mastery of Language. J Ethics 16, 67–87 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-011-9111-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-011-9111-5