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If virtue ethics says ‘do what the virtuous person would do’, how does a beginner use that?

Gerrit Venter Fellow
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Virtue & characterAnalyticChineseGreek & RomanAristotelianismConfucianismVirtue ethics (modern)AristotleElizabeth AnscombeMenciusXunzi#action-guidance#habituation#moral-education#virtue-ethics
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Reading Aristotle slowly, with a pencil, I have hit something that bothers me. I suspect it is a beginner's worry, so forgive me.

The summaries I have read say virtue ethics tells you to act as a virtuous person would act in your situation. Fine. But the people who most need guidance are exactly the people who are not virtuous yet, and who may not know anyone who is. If I already knew what the brave and fair person would do, I would not need the theory. And if I don't know, the theory seems to send me round in a circle: right action is what the virtuous person does, and the virtuous person is the one who does right actions.

On the pitch I never told a fourteen-year-old "tackle like a good flanker would". I showed him, made him do it fifty times, and corrected his feet. Is that the answer, and if so, is it really an answer to the philosophical worry or just a change of subject?

Plain explanations welcome. I am happy to be told I have misunderstood the whole thing.

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5 answers

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  1. Giulia Ferrante

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    You haven't misunderstood, Gerrit, and your coaching is closer to Aristotle's answer than most textbook summaries. In Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics he says we become just by doing just acts and brave by doing brave acts, the way people become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre. The virtue is not a piece of knowledge you consult before acting. It is a trained disposition, and the training comes first.

    The circle dissolves once you notice he distinguishes two things. A beginner can do what a just person does, usually because a parent, a teacher or the law tells him to. The just person does it as a just person does: knowing what he is doing, choosing it for its own sake, and from a settled character. The first is how you get to the second. So the formula "do what the virtuous person would do" is less a decision procedure for the beginner than a description of where the practice is heading.

    That means the beginner's guidance comes from outside him for a long time: exemplars, rules of thumb, correction. Your fifty tackles and the adjusted feet are exactly that. It is not a change of subject; it is the theory's claim that ethics is learned the way skills are learned.

    1. Gerrit Venter

      Fellow

      So the honest version is: the formula is for the finished article, and the rest of us need a coach. My next worry is the obvious one. What if your coaches are bad? I had boys whose fathers taught them that winning by cheating was clever. Their "habituation" was thorough.

      Helpful · 2

Other answers

  1. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    Two Chinese thinkers had the same argument and it might help to see both sides. Mencius thought we already have "sprouts" of goodness. His famous case is anyone who suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well: they feel alarm and concern before any calculation. Moral education is extending that sprout to cases where it doesn't fire on its own.

    Xunzi thought that was far too optimistic. For him goodness is the product of deliberate effort, like warped wood that has to be steamed and pressed against a frame before it is straight. Ritual and teachers are the frame.

    In my classroom in Seoul I find both are partly right, depending on the student. But notice that neither of them thinks the beginner starts by asking "what would a sage do?" They start with practice.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    Two pieces of help on the action-guidance problem itself. Rosalind Hursthouse, in On Virtue Ethics, points out that the virtue and vice words already give quite a lot of guidance: do what is honest, kind and just; don't do what is cruel, cowardly or mean. You don't need to picture an ideal person to know that lying to cover your laziness is dishonest.

    And Anscombe, in "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958), suggested we would think more clearly if we stopped asking whether something is "morally wrong" in the abstract and asked instead whether it is unjust, or cowardly. I taught ethics to teenagers for years and the thicker words worked far better with them than the thin ones.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Hessa Al Mazrouei

    Fellow

    On your worry about bad coaches, Gerrit: Aristotle saw it coming. At the end of the Ethics, Book X, he says that because most people are not moved by argument, and because parents vary, the city has to take an interest in upbringing through its laws. That is the bridge from the Ethics to the Politics.

    It is not a full answer, since laws can be bad too. But it shows he didn't think character formation was a private family matter. It is also why I think philosophy of education belongs inside ethics, not next to it.