The Structure of Virtue (2)

The Structure of Virtue (1) was posted on 21/09/2009

Aristotle rejects the idea that virtue is a skill. (Virtue here is moral virtue, as indeed is standardly assumed in ancient ethical discussion; we shall get to intellectual virtue shortly.) This may strike us as unsurprising, indeed mere common-sense. But it is significant that Aristotle is a lone standout here. The ancient virtue ethics tradition followed Plato and the Stoics in holding that virtue is a skill. That is, it is a kind of skill, there being other kinds as well; virtue is, as the Stoics put it, the skill of living. The claim that we should follow the ancient tradition rather than Aristotle may at first sound rather academic, but this issue of whether virtue is or is not a skill is not of merely historical interest: it raises philosophically crucial issues about the intellectual structure of virtue.

Aristotle says that there are many points of difference between a virtue and a skill. This is obvious enough, and modern writers have developed and modified the list of differences which he sets out. For example, skill involves a mere capacity, can be forgotten and is less precise than virtue is. However, we can reasonably ask how much such differences matter: the thesis that virtue is a skill is a claim that virtue is one kind of skill, and thus that the idea of skill is central in helping us to understand what virtue is. Against this claim, pointing out obvious differences between virtues and skills is ineffective.

How can virtue be a kind of skill? It has the intellectual structure of a practical skill. Even Aristotle recognizes this; it enters right at the start of his account of virtue, where he compares learning to be just with learning to be a builder. You have a role-model, and first you copy what he or she does, then come to understand for yourself what the point is of doing what that person does. Increase of understanding goes with increased autonomy of reflection and action. This is why, for both skill and virtue, you need a teacher to begin with, but then become able to act on your own independently.

Underlying this simple fact is a connected set of epistemologically interesting points about skill. Firstly, a skill or expertise is teachable. There is some intellectual content to be conveyed, not just picked up by external mimicking. Where there are teachers and learners, we have something which at least in principle is an expertise, not just a matter of an empirical ‘knack’ to be picked up. Secondly, the expert is someone who has an understanding of her subject-matter as a whole. This is a demanding condition. Someone learning, say, a language, will pick up bits of the subject here and there - the future tense, vocabulary and so on. The expert in the language will have mastery of all that is needed to understand the language, and, moreover, will see how it is all unified. Similarly, someone learning a practical skill like building will pick up bits of know-how and technique here and there; the expert, however, will have mastery of everything relevant to that kind of building, and will have unified that mastery so as to be able to understand his own and others’ successes and mistakes, and to be able to apply his skill in new situations without further learning being required. And thirdly, an expert is able to articulate her understanding of her subject, able to ‘give an account’ of it, logon didonai, in the ancient way of looking at it. She is able not only to unify the various judgements she makes within her field, and the actions she does, but to explain them and, if necessary, justify them, in terms of whatever general principles are needed to express understanding of the subject.


These conditions are not independent of one another, since a teacher can scarcely teach if she is completely inarticulate about her subject, and what is taught must be a unified body of practical knowledge rather than a bunch of unconnected practical tips, if it is an expertise that we have.

How is virtue a skill? It shares the intellectual structure of a skill in these three ways. This is visible in the account Aristotle gives of the acquisition of virtue, but it can be seen most lucidly in the Socratic dialogues of Plato. There, Socrates challenges people who appear to be experts about some virtue, such as courage, but fail to unite their isolated beliefs and to offer any articulate unified understanding of the matter; this shows that they lack understanding of the virtue in question. Laches, in the dialogue named after him, can give examples of courage by pointing to men fighting in battle. But at first he can provide no account at all of what this kind of action might have in common with other kinds of brave behaviour - coping bravely with illness or poverty, for example - and when he does, his suggestion is obviously hopeless at explaining how and why all the very diverse kinds of brave action are brave. Laches, who is supposed to be an expert in bravery, has failed to convey any articulate understanding of bravery; clearly he is, despite appearances, no expert in it. The same undermining of claims to expertise in moral matters occurs in other dialogues, and Plato scholarship has for some time now recognized that the kind of knowledge or understanding which is required and found lacking is the kind of knowledge that an expert possesses. Indeed, Socrates is always appealing to practical skills such as those of the navigator, doctor or farmer to illustrate the kind of practical understanding that he seeks in moral matters. Nor is this concern peculiar to Plato. The Stoics take over the thesis that virtue is a skill and develop it explicitly and at length, for the same reasons which appear in the Socratic dialogues. It became so standard in ancient ethical theory that it could be taken for granted in any serious debate between ethical theories.

There are common objections at this point from modern philosophers. Kinds of practical expertise have ends which are fixed; it is clear and uncontroversial what counts as success in a skill like navigation, or car repair. And these ends are conditional in their hold on our motivation; our interest in exercising them depends on our concern to obtain their ends. Can it then be reasonable to think of virtue as having the structure of a practical expertise, given that the end that virtue aims to achieve - a well-lived life - is one which is neither clear nor uncontroversial, and also one from which we cannot similarly become motivationally detached?

The answer to this in the ancient virtue ethics tradition is clear, and best put by the Stoics (though it can also be found in Plato). Virtue is ‘the skill in living’, and living your life is an end which everybody has, and which, short of suicide, is non-detachable. By the time you start to reflect about your life and the best way to live it, you already, as we put it, have a life. You already have a family context, for example, and a socio-economic context, with some kind of employment and income. You already are the production of some kind of education, including moral education, and have certain values and priorities. For the ancient virtue tradition, all this is your raw materials, on which you get to work as you develop virtue, aiming to make your life a product of understanding rather than conformity, something unified around pursuit of good values rather than driven by isolated desires or run by the values of others. Virtue, then, is a global expertise in your life, and will always differ from local kinds of expertise in just these two ways, namely that the end we seek in becoming virtuous is not antecedently fixed in the way that the end of car repair is, and also that living our life is not an end that we can cease to care about, as we can cease to care about having the car fixed. We can choose, of course, to live our lives in a thoughtless and random way rather than to live them in a way which tries to improve them in the light of unifying understanding; but this does not make the end of virtue detachable in the way the end of local skills are.

Moral virtue, then, is a skill in the ancient virtue tradition; it is an expertise, a kind of practical knowledge. Local, mundane skills serve as examples of the kind of unified practical understanding which, if we become virtuous, will order our lives in a unified way based on understanding.


How, then, does moral virtue relate to intellectual virtue? The right answer has been elegantly stated recently by Paul Bloomfield. Moral virtue is one kind of skill, intellectual virtue is another. Moral virtue, as explained, is a kind of practical knowledge which is illuminated by practical kinds of expertise.

Intellectual virtue is another kind of skill. Neither should be seen as a sub-kind of the other - although of course any realistic account of the moral life will find many complex connections between them.

It is only to be expected that intellectual virtues should have a strong intellectual structure unified by understanding. Must an intellectual virtue, however, have the same intellectual structure as the moral virtues that we have seen sharing the structure of practical skills? If expertise is marked by the three conditions discussed above, of teachability, unified understanding of the field as a whole and articulate ability to give an account of what is understood, then intellectual and moral virtues will share this structure. Intellectual virtues, however, appear to be more various in their structure than moral virtues are, in a way that doubtless owes something to the fact that theoretical skills are more various in their structure than practical skills are. Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in Nicomachean Ethics VI are highly diverse. The virtue aiming for demonstrative knowledge, for example, is different in structure from the virtue aiming for non-demonstrative knowledge. The same goes for the Stoic sub-divisions of wisdom, and for Plato’s collection of intellectual virtues. The structure of an intellectual virtue will naturally depend on the scope and type of the relevant intellectual skill; it would seem that we might have several differently structured intellectual virtues which all met the conditions for expertise.

It could be argued that the moral virtues essentially involve emotions and feelings in a way not true of the intellectual virtues. Indeed, moral virtue crucially involves in its development the progressive control and finally transformation of the person’s emotive side. But it would be a mistake to hold that development of an intellectual virtue like perseverance or intellectual honesty never involves such control and transformation of recalcitrant, not purely intellectual elements of the person. Moreover, development of the intellectual virtues may straightforwardly require such transformation of the emotions and feelings by way of the development of a moral virtue. Honesty in some research, for example, requires that the person not be under the influence of greed for money; indeed, honesty seems to be the same moral virtue whether applied in handling money matters or in conducting research.

The real distinction emerges when we consider that moral virtue is essentially practical; it is the skill of living, where living, in the virtue tradition, is seen as essentially active, shaping your life so that it is ordered from within. The way you live is seen as actively reflecting and expressing your character and hence your choices. Intellectual virtue, on the other hand, is not essentially practical; it is theoretical in that it is directed at achieving aims other than good action. Particularly if we think of intellectual virtue as aimed at achieving truth, we can see that its aim is going to be distinct from that of moral virtue.

Of course, there might still be a close connection between the two kinds of virtue, and most virtue theories have thought that there is. One view frequently found attractive is that the intellectual virtues, whose aim is truth, deepen the understanding which is the basis of the moral virtues. After all, the moral virtues are aimed at doing the right thing, and this can scarcely allow indifference to the truth of your beliefs about the matter. Even if the intellectual virtues enable us to discover truths about matters which are recondite and abstract, still our increased grasp of truth will serve to broaden and deepen the understanding at the basis of the kind of practical knowledge which is moral virtue. As Zagzebski puts it, ‘If it turns out that the ultimate end of truth and the ultimate ends of the moral virtues are all components of a life of eudaimonia, then the moral and intellectual virtues do not even differ in their ultimate ultimate ends.’

What, though, if this turns out not to be the case? In the virtue tradition there are two conflicting lines of thought on this, both of which are found appealing by both Plato and Aristotle. While they think most of the time that seeking truth will form part of a life well-ordered by moral virtue, they both at some points express a contrasting thought: seeking truth can become an end indifferent to or even conflicting with the end of living according to moral virtue. The attractiveness of the intellectual search for truth, and the intrinsic appeal of its objects, can lead humans away from the aim of living a morally ordered life. It can lead them to aim to devote their energies entirely to the search for truth, to the point of wishing to transcend the boundaries of human life altogether and to try to ‘become immortal’, as Aristotle famously says in this connection. In this case the pursuit of happiness in a morally unified life will have been disrupted. Someone who seeks truth in a way which is indifferent to or conflicts with living a morally virtuous life is still, however, exercising the intellectual virtues. It is unconvincing to claim that someone whose intellectual pursuit of the truth conflicts with leading a moral life must really be lacking in intellectual virtue. (Indeed, it is likely to be the intellectually virtuous achievers, rather than the intellectually faulty, who have this problem.) The intellectual virtues can, though they need not, have a differing aim from the moral virtues, since the theoretical aim of truth can come into conflict with the aim of moral virtue, which is a practical type of knowledge.
The relation between intellectual and moral virtue that emerges from the virtue ethics tradition, at least in its developed ancient form, is that both are kinds of skill or expertise, whose aims can but need not converge. Taking virtue seriously in the epistemological framework of the intellectual virtues, then, does not give support to thinking of intellectual virtues as a subset of moral virtues, nor to taking epistemology to be properly subsumed under ethics. Taking both kinds of virtue seriously, however, may be fruitful in other ways. For one thing, taking moral virtue seriously reveals how intellectual a structure it has, and this suggests that virtue ethics might get aid from epistemology, as well as epistemology benefitting from virtue ethics. Ethics and epistemology can produce mutual benefit from mutual study.

by julia annas
http://www.u.arizona.edu/