This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
For example: Darcia Narvaez, “Integrative Ethical Education,” chapter 26 in Handbook of Moral Development, New York, NY, Routledge, 2006; Narvaez, D., and D. K. Lapsley, “Teaching Moral Character: Two Alternatives for Teacher Education.” The Teacher Educator 43 (2), 2008, 156–172; and many articles since then.
Ellen Fridland’s work has been very helpful, especially “They’ve lost control: reflections on skill,” Synthese, August 2014, 2729-2750; “Automatically Minded,” Synthese, November 2017, 4337-4363; and “Motor Skill and Moral Virtue,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 80, 2017, 139-170.
For example, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson, “Knowing how,” Journal of Philosophy 98, 2001, 411-444; Jason Stanley in Know How, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011.
In particular, proponents of virtue who are influenced by Aristotle generally avoid concepts like that of the ‘will’, which are totally obscure until explained in terms of a theory, and have no place in a more empirically recognizable account of our moral psychology.
Peter Railton, “The Affective Dog and its Rational Tale: intuition and attunement,” Ethics 124, 2014, 813-859.
I have just noticed the article written jointly by Stichter and Fridland, ‘“It just feels right,”: an account of expert intuition,’ Synthese 2020.
Matthew Stichter, The Skillfulness of Virtue: improving our moral and epistemic lives, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
I disagree, though, with Bozkaya’s expansive interpretation of Aristotle’s first, knowledge, condition on virtue; rather than appealing at this point to the highest good, it is more likely that Aristotle simply means that the virtuous person must know what they are doing, in the mundane sense of not being misinformed about the situation in which the virtuous action is required of them.
And not just local and independent responses to the demands of the world, as Bozkaya notes, citing Christine Swanton’s non-eudaimonistic virtue ethics, which, in my view at least, gives us only weak reasons to consider virtue ethics a discrete and independent theory of ethics.
I am not concerned here whether the roles of euboulia, empeiria and gnome in this paper go beyond what we find in Aristotle.
This is a reason to doubt the claim that skill is unlike virtue in being a ‘two way’ disposition, something that can be used equally well for a good or a bad end. The doctor using her skill to murder is not just switching her skill instrumentally from a good to a bad end – she is misdirecting the skill itself away from its proper end. (I have written more on this in ‘Virtue, Skill and Vice’.)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Annas, J. Reply to: Amichai Amit, Ikbal Bozkaya, S. Stewart Braun, Kristina Gehrman, Richard Hamilton, Matthew Sharpe, Will Small, Matthew Stichter, Denise Vigani, Tiger Zheng. J Value Inquiry 55, 387–395 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09822-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09822-0