Abstract
In his recent book on skill and virtue, Matt Stichter provides an account based on work in empirical psychology, specifically on self-regulation. In this paper I wish to argue that while this account is novel and well informed, it falls short. I present several examples that I believe Stichter’s view cannot explain and I try to identify the reasons for that. I argue that while trying to avoid the completely anti-intellectualist account of skill especially when it comes to virtue, Stichter may have inadvertently presented an account that is too intellectualist. To clarify my claims, I start with a brief explanation of Stichter’s account of skill as self-regulation, a quick discussion of how he sees this as applying to virtue and then I turn to objections. I present cases in which the skill one acquires was never set as a goal to be achieved as Stichter’s picture would suggest, but simply comes as a byproduct of either aiming at developing a different skill or behaving in ways that don’t involve any goals at all (or any goals relevant to skill acquisition). To this end, I discuss cases with no set goal (or at least not relevant to skills) and cases of transferable skills both in the moral and non-moral domains. I conclude that by defining virtue as self-regulation with a specific moral standard, Stichter may have violated one of the original motivations for the return to virtue ethics, namely that other views tend to over-intellectualize our moral behavior.
Notes
Anscombe (1958)
Artistotle (349 BC/2005)
Stichter (2018)
I have argued for this in Bashour (2020)
Stichter (2018) p. 10
Ibid p. 12
Ibid p. 13
Ibid p. 16
Ibid p. 23
Ibid p. 60
Ibid p. 125
Ibid p. 60
Ibid p. 127
Ibid p. 127
Ibid p. 128
p. 23–24
Note that this has been used to mount the situationist critique of virtue ethics more generally by people such as Doris (2005), but I do not intend to go that route. Situationists believe that circumstances often shape behavior in a way that virtue ethicists do not (and perhaps cannot) account for. They use this to undermine the possibility of developing stable character traits necessary for virtue. However, one can present an account of virtue that is sensitive to work in empirical psychology, including the kinds of studies mentioned by Doris and others. I believe that thinking of virtue as a skill is one way to do that, a line both Stichter and I follow.
E.g. Nisbett and Wilson (1977)
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Bashour, B. How Did She Get So Good? On Virtue and Skill. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 563–575 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10148-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10148-2