Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions by modeling wisdom (...) on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 606-622, May 2022.

Scientists imagine for epistemic reasons, and these imaginings can be better or worse. But what does it mean for an imagining to be epistemically better or worse? There are at least three metaepistemological frameworks that present different answers to this question: epistemological consequentialism, deontic epistemology, and virtue epistemology. This paper presents empirical evidence that scientists adopt each of these different epistemic frameworks with respect to imagination, but argues that the way they do this is best explained if scientists are fundamentally (...) epistemic consequentialists about imagination. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow does practice change our behaviors such that they go from being awkward, unskilled actions to elegant, skilled performances? This is the question that I wish to explore in this paper. In the first section of the paper, I will defend the tight connection between practice and skill and then go on to make precise how we ought to construe the concept of practice. In the second section, I will suggest that practice contributes to skill by structuring and automatizing the (...) motor routines constitutive of skilled actions. I will cite how this fact about skilled action has misled many philosophers to conclude that skills are mindless or bodily. In the third section of the paper, I will challenge this common misconception about automaticity by appealing to empirical evidence of motor chunking. This evidence reveals that there are two opposing processes involved in the automaticity of skilled action: one process that is largely associative, which I will call “concatenation,” and a second which is a contro... (shrink)

According to Rosalind Hursthouse’s virtue based account of right action, an act is right if it is what a fully virtuous person would do in that situation. Robert Johnson has criticized the account on the grounds that the actions a non-virtuous person should take are often uncharacteristic of the virtuous person, and thus Hursthouse’s account of right action is too narrow. The non-virtuous need to take steps to improve themselves morally, and the fully virtuous person need not take these steps. (...) So Johnson argues that any virtue based account of right action will have to find a way to ground a moral obligation to improve oneself. This paper argues that there is an account of virtue that can offer a partial solution to Johnson’s challenge, an account where virtue is a type of practical skill and in which the virtuous person is seen as having expertise. The paper references the account of skill acquisition developed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus. Their research demonstrates that novices in a skill have to employ different strategies to act well than the strategies used by the experts, and so the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis provides support for Johnson’s claim that the actions of the non-virtuous will differ from the virtuous. On the other hand, their research suggests that there is no separating the commitment to improve yourself from the possession of expertise, and so the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis has the resources for grounding the obligation to improve oneself in an account of virtue. (shrink)

Modern philosophy recognizes two major ethical theories: deontology, which encourages adherence to rules and fulfillment of duties or obligations; and consequentialism, which evaluates morally significant actions strictly on the basis of their actual or anticipated outcomes. Both involve the systematic application of universal abstract principles, reflecting the culturally dominant paradigm of technical rationality. Professional societies promulgate codes of ethics with which engineers are expected to comply, while courts and the public generally assign liability to engineers primarily in accordance with the (...) results of their work, whether intended or unintended. A third option, prominent in ancient philosophy, has reemerged recently: virtue ethics, which recognizes that sensitivity to context and practical judgment are indispensable in particular concrete situations, and therefore rightly focuses on the person who acts, rather than the action itself. Beneficial character traits—i.e., virtues—are identified within a specific social practice in light of the internal goods that are unique to it. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for implementing virtue ethics within engineering. (shrink)

Moral psychology investigates human functioning in moral contexts, and asks how these results may impact debate in ethical theory. This work is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on both the empirical resources of the human sciences and the conceptual resources of philosophical ethics. The present article discusses several topics that illustrate this type of inquiry: thought experiments, responsibility, character, egoism v . altruism, and moral disagreement.

IntroductionRecent work in virtue theory has breathed new life into the analogy between virtue and skill.See, for example, Annas ; Bloomfield ; Stichter ; Swartwood . There is good reason to think that this analogy is worth pursuing since it may help us understand the distinctive nexus of reasoning, knowledge, and practical ability that is found in virtue by pointing to a similar nexus found outside moral contexts in skill. In some ways, there is more than an analogy between skill (...) and virtue. Clearly, both are what might be called ‘practical states,’ that is, conditions of agents with regard to action. For some virtue theorists, the analogy is superseded in favor of a claim to identity. As Paul Bloomfield puts it:… adopting the thesis that virtues are skills hands us a viable moral epistemology by reducing the problem of moral epistemology to the analysis of the epistemology of diagnosis and problem solving employed by doctors, navigators, and .. (shrink)

A virtuous person has a distinctive grasp of what is important in the light of which she chooses what to do. In what does this grasp consist? According to the intellectual tradition, moral virtue requires you always to be able to have an explicit, conscious grasp of the reasons why your action is right. Recently, this view has been defended by Julia Annas. I do not think that her argument establishes her conclusion, and I provide further defense of intellectualism, finishing (...) with some conclusions about the importance of moral philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What’s the good of getting angry with a person? Some would argue that angry emotions like indignation or resentment are intrinsically good when they are an apt response. But many think this answer is not fully satisfactory. An increasing number of philosophers add that accusatory anger has value because of what it communicates to the blamee, and because of its downstream cultivating effects on the blamee. Mediators and conflict resolution strategists share an interest with philosophers in the value of (...) reactive attitudes for interpersonal communication, but prominent thinkers from those fields arrive at rather different verdicts about the effects of accusatory anger. On a more therapeutic approach to interpersonal conflict, angry accusation is commonly understood to obfuscate mutual understanding and to have bad downstream effects on the blamee. Below, I discuss how the compassionate communication approach casts doubt on the purported valuable effects of angry accusation, and I provide empirical support for this worry. I argue that philosophers should reconsider their empirical assumptions about the human psychology of discord, and hypothesize that accusatory anger is unlikely to have the communicative and cultivating effects that it is purported to have. I conclude by highlighting further empirical and ethical questions this hypothesis generates. (shrink)

Anti-intellectualists in epistemology argue for the thesis that knowing-how is not a species of knowing-that, and most of them tend to avoid any use of the notion “knowing-that” in their explanation of intelligent action on pain of inconsistency. Intellectualists tend to disprove anti-intellectualism by showing that the residues of knowing-that remain in the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action. Outside the field of epistemology, some philosophers who try to highlight the nature of their explanation of intelligent action in certain fields, such (...) as ethics, tend to classify themselves as intellectualist simply because they appeal to the notion of knowing-that in their explanation. In a word, the idea of knowing-that is harmful to the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action, whether from an insider or outsider perspective. In this paper, I argue that these tendencies are unjustified because they are based on an unclear conception of anti-intellectualism. I shall use Gilbert Ryle’s anti-intellectualism as a paradigm with which to describe anti-intellectualism and to illustrate why the notion of knowing-that is not harmful to but is, on the contrary, beneficial to the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action. If my explication of Ryle’s anti-intellectualism is correct, then most anti-intellectualists in the literature blindly worry about the notion of knowing-that, most intellectualists fire into the wrong flock, and some philosophers outside epistemology mischaracterize their own position. (shrink)

Virtue ethicists often appeal to practical skill as a way of understanding the nature of virtue. An important commitment of a skill account of virtue is that virtue is learned through practice and not through study, memorization, or reflection alone. In what follows, I will argue that virtue ethicists have only given us half the story. In particular, in focusing on outputs, or on the right actions or responses to moral situations, virtue ethicists have overlooked a crucial facet of virtue: (...) namely, that through practice, virtuous agents develop a cache of perceptual skills that allow them to attend to, detect, and identify the relevant features of a perceptual array, the selection of which is central to recognizing and categorizing a situation as a moral situation of a particular type. In order to support this claim, I will appeal to empirical studies of motor expertise, which show that an expert's capacity to attend to and recognize relevant perceptual inputs differs in important respects from the layperson's. Specifically, I will argue that performing the right action in the right circumstances improves an agent's ability to attend to and identify the morally relevant features of a moral situation. (shrink)

This paper extends an ongoing discussion about establishing a sharper way to conduct ethical investigations into managerial virtue. It does so by relying on Alasdair MacIntyre's moral philosophy in place of those more dominant approaches taken by scholars who make up the field of positive social science. A connection is drawn herein between a MacIntyrean “narrative approach” to investigating managerial virtue and the idea of “work as a calling.” Specifically, it will be argued that the MacIntyrean‐influenced idea of “work as (...) a calling” provides a substantive moral vision that supports an understanding of how virtuous managers ought to narrate their primary workplace motivations. Ultimately, virtuous managers fulfill a “political calling” to support and sustain (a) good work, (b) the good of individual lives, and (c) the common good of communities that their organization reaches. To do this, they must rely on the “shepherd virtue” of practical wisdom (phronesis). Practical wisdom aids virtuous managers’ thinking about achieving the ends of their “calling” as well as any necessary course‐corrections that ought to be made toward the better achievement of those good and worthy ends. (shrink)

This essay explores the interrelation of skills and virtues. I first trace one line of analysis from Aristotle to Alasdair MacIntyre, which argues that there is a categorical difference between skills and virtues, in their ends and intrinsic character. This familiar distinction is fine in certain respects but still importantly misleading. Virtue in general, and also some particular virtues such as ritual propriety and practical wisdom, are not just exercised in practical contexts, but are in fact partially constituted by the (...) mastery of certain skills. This has implications for moral psychology, specifically how we might understand the acquisition of virtue, as well as its very nature. To try to make this claim plausible I analyze two case studies from early Confucianism: treatment of ritual propriety as a cardinal virtue, and Mencius's less carefully integrated treatment of excellence at moral discernment. I conclude by revisiting the question of the relations between skill and virtue, and exploring a few of the difficulties implied by my account of early Confucian ethics. (shrink)

During the course of life, it is common to make some decisions that prove to be correct. Some of these choices are made without a specific reason, but only out of habit or intuitively, while others are based on judgments and motivations. However, when we claim that a decision is “right”, what kind of judgment are we referring to? On the one hand, the term “right” (or “wrong”) often refers to abstract norms. Usually, truth and falsehood serve as criteria in (...) these cases. In such situations, judgments about what is “right” or “wrong” depend strictly on an accurate rational evaluation, which is instrumental in guiding individuals to undertake or avoid certain actions. On the other hand, there is a sense of justice that concerns ethics and values. In these circumstances, a decision is generally considered “right” if it is based on a criterion of judgment that allows individuals to make a decision freely, without being bound by an abstract norm, but rather by elaborating the choice as the realization of what they consider good and just. In this paper will examine and redefine the concept of “right choice”, acknowledging the above mentioned dual nature of its meaning. It will be argued there is a link between what abstract norms dictate to do, in order to reach a formally correct decision, and what, instead, depends on merely reasons and attitudes. This connection is indeed ensured by wise decisions. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to critique the primary arguments given by Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz against empathy, and to argue instead that empathy is best understood as a virtue that plays an important but complicated role in the moral life. That it is a virtue does not mean that it always functions well, and empathy sometimes contributes to behavior that is partial and unfair. In some of their writings, both Bloom and Prinz endorse the view that empathy (...) is a fixed trait, but there is little reason to think this, and the studies that they cite do not support this view. Further, a number of recent studies suggest the opposite: our empathic reactions are malleable and subject to environmental effects and learning. Although our capacities for cognitive and emotional empathy are clearly not sufficient for being moral, I argue that they are functionally necessary traits that, like other virtues, must be cultivated correctly. (shrink)

Recently virtue ethicists, such as Julia Annas and Matt Stichter, in order to explain what a moral virtue is and how it is acquired, suggest modeling virtue on practical expertise. However, a challenging issue arises when considering the nature of practical expertise especially about whether expertise requires articulacy, that is, whether an expert in a skill is required to possess an ability to articulate the principles underlying the skill. With regard to this issue, Annas advocates the articulacy requirement, while Stichter (...) denies. Stichter raises two objections to Annas’s requirement: first, Annas provides no argument for the requirement; second, there exist counterexamples in which there are experts who cannot articulate what and why they did in skilled performance. In this paper I shall show that Annas did provide an argument and can respond to the counterexamples; however, her argument and response are not convincing. Instead, I construct a new argument for the articulacy requirement by which I call the argument from success-conduciveness. The main idea involved in this new argument, i.e., articulacy is success-conducive, supports further that ethical expertise requires articulacy due to the seriousness of morality. (shrink)

Dreyfus’s work is widely known for its critique of artificial intelligence and still stands as an example of how to do excellent philosophical work that is at the same time relevant to contemporary technological and scientific developments. But for philosophers of technology, especially for those sympathetic to using Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein as sources of inspiration, it has much more to offer. This paper outlines Dreyfus’s account of skillful coping and critically evaluates its potential for thinking about technology. First, it (...) is argued that his account of skillful coping can be developed into a general view about handling technology which gives due attention to know-how/implicit knowledge and embodiment. Then a number of outstanding challenges are identified that are difficult to cope with if one remains entirely within the world of Dreyfus’s writings. They concern questions regarding other conceptualizations of technology and human–technology relations, issues concerning how to conceptualize the social and the relation between skill, meaning, and practices, and the question about the ethical and political implications of his view, including how virtue and skill are related. Acknowledging some known discussions about Dreyfus’s work, but also drawing on other material and on the author’s previous writings, the paper suggests that to address these challenges and develop the account of skillful coping into a wider scoped, Dreyfus-inspired philosophy of technology, it could take more distance from Heidegger’s conceptions of technology and benefit from engagement with work in postphenomenology, pragmatism, the later Wittgenstein, and virtue ethics. (shrink)

In contemporary virtue ethics, virtues are often assimilated to skills. This assimilation suggests that the moral knowledge of virtuous individuals parallels the practical knowledge of experts in a particular skill. According to Julia Annas (2011a, 2011b), virtues function as skills requiring the ability to articulate reasons for one’s actions. These skills are developed through habitual practice over time. For example, a pianist who internalizes piano techniques possesses practical expertise akin to someone who understands their actions, even when performed automatically. Annas (...) argues that to cultivate ethical virtue, we should emulate musical action, viewing it as a habit rather than mere repetition. This analogy aids in understanding virtue acquisition as practical skill-building. Expanding on Annas’s insights, this article contends that musical practice offers profound ethical implications for musicians as potential moral agents. Supported by important neurological and psychological studies on musical expertise, as well as the dynamics of classical music interpretation and professional career development, this argument sheds light on the ethical dimensions of musical agency. These insights into musical expertise could enhance our understanding of ethical expertise overall. (shrink)

Robots and other smart machines are increasingly interwoven into the social fabric of our society, with the area and scope of their application continuing to expand. As we become accustomed to interacting through and with robots, we also begin to supplement or replace existing human–human interactions with human–machine interactions. This article aims to discuss the impacts of the shift from human–human interactions to human–machine interactions in one facet of our self-constitution, i.e., morality. More specifically, it sets out to explore whether (...) and how the shift to human–machine interactions can affect our moral cultivation. I shall structure the article around what Shannon Vallor calls technology-driven moral deskilling, i.e., the phenomenon of technology negatively affecting individual moral cultivation, and shall also attempt to offer a Confucian response to the problem. I first elaborate in detail Vallor’s idea of technology-driven moral deskilling. Next, I discuss three paradigms of virtue acquisition identified by Nancy E. Snow, i.e., the “folk” paradigm, the skill-and-expertise paradigm, and the Confucian paradigm, and show how the Confucian paradigm can help us to respond to technology-driven moral deskilling. Finally, I introduce the idea of Confucian rituals (li) and argue for the ritualizing of machines as an answer to technology-driven moral deskilling. (shrink)

This paper examines the nature of the specific grasp involved in moral understanding. After discussing Hills's ability account of that central component of moral understanding in light of problematic cases, I argue that moral grasp is best conceived of as a type of knowledge that is grounded in a subject's moral appreciation. I then show how and why the relevant notion of moral appreciation is connected to moral virtues and to one's affective and motivational engagement with moral reasons. Finally, I (...) discuss the connection between moral appreciation and a subject's ability to offer moral explanations in relation to the debate between pessimists and optimists about moral understanding's testimonial transmission. (shrink)

How can we acquire understanding? Linda Zagzebski has long claimed that understanding is acquired through, or arises from, mastering a particular practical technê. In this paper, I explicate Zagzebski’s claim and argue that the claim is problematic. Based on a critical examination of Zagzebski’s claim, I propose, in conclusion and in brief, a new claim regarding the acquisition of understanding.

In Aristotelian virtue theories, phronesis is foundational to being good, but to date accounts of how this particularly important virtue can emerge are sketchy. This article plumbs recent thinking in Aristotelian virtue ethics and developmental theorizing to explore how far its emergence can be understood developmentally, i.e., in terms of the growth in ordinary conditions of underlying psychological capacities, dispositions, and the like. The purpose is not to explicate Aristotle, nor to assimilate Aristotelian ideas to cognitive developmental moral theorizing, but (...) to draw on both to build an independently plausible theory of practical intelligence and its development. It is argued that one fruitful direction attends to the psychology of virtues Aristotle associates with practical intelligence, including comprehension, understanding, sense, and cleverness, instead of Aristotle’s remarks distinguishing fully virtuous persons from the continent, incontinent and the many. (shrink)

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply “wisdom”) is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live and conduct herself. Because wisdom is such an important and high-level achievement, we should wonder: what is the nature of wisdom? What kinds of skills, habits and capacities does it involve? Can real people actually develop it? If so, how? I argue that we can answer these questions by modeling wisdom on expert decision-making skill in complex areas (...) like firefighting. I develop this expert skill model of wisdom using philosophical argument informed by relevant empirical research. I begin in Chapter 1 by examining the historical roots of analogies between wisdom and practical skills in order to motivate the expert skill model. In Chapter 2, I provide the core argument for the expert skill model. I then use the remaining chapters to pull out the implications of the expert skill model. In Chapter 3, I show that the expert skill model yields practical guidance about how to develop wisdom. In Chapter 4, I address the objection, due to Daniel Jacobson, that wisdom is not a skill that humans could actually develop, since skill development requires a kind of feedback in practice that is not available for all-things-considered decisions about how to live. Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply the expert skill model to the question, much discussed by virtue ethicists, of whether a wise person deliberates using a comprehensive and systematic conception of the good life. (shrink)

In this essay I consider whether the political perspective of third wave science studies – ‘elective modernism’ – offers a suitable framework for understanding the policy-making contributions that (bio)ethical experts might make. The question arises as a consequence of the fact that I have taken inspiration from the third wave in order to develop an account of (bio)ethical expertise. I offer a précis of this work and a brief summary of elective modernism before considering their relation. The view I set (...) out suggests that elective modernism is a political philosophy and that although its use in relation to the use of scientific expertise in political and policy-making process has implications for the role of (bio)ethical expertise it does not, in the final analysis, provide an account that is appropriate for this latter form of specialist expertise. Nevertheless, it is an informative perspective, and one that can help us make sense of the political uses of (bio)ethical expertise. (shrink)

In domains as disparate as playing Go and predicting the structure of proteins, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have begun to perform at levels beyond which any humans can achieve. Does this fact represent something lamentable? Does superhuman AI performance somehow undermine the value of human achievements in these areas? Go grandmaster Lee Sedol suggested as much when he announced his retirement from professional Go, blaming the advances of Go-playing programs like AlphaGo for sapping his will to play the game at (...) a high level. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of Sedol’s lament. I consider a number of ways that the existence of superhuman-performing AI technologies could undermine the value of human achievements. I argue there is very little in the nature of the technology itself that warrants such despair. (Compare: does the existence of a fighter jet undermine the value of being the fastest human sprinter?) But I also argue there are several more localized domains where these technologies threaten to displace human beings from being able to achieve valuable things at all. This is a particular worry for those in unequal societies, I argue, given the difficulty of many achievements and the corresponding amount of resources needed to achieve great things. (shrink)

What is the appropriate role for the political philosopher in a democratic society? One possible answer to this question is that she should use her expertise to provide normative guidance for her community. My aim in this article is to cast significant doubt on this view. I begin by endorsing a ‘qualitative continuity’ thesis about the nature of political philosophy, which posits an essential crossover between the activities of professional philosophers and ordinary citizens. I then offer a contextual account of (...) scholarly expertise, which views it as a status that is dependent on institutional recognition – rather than knowledge – and involves relational role obligations. I move on to argue that the authority implied by scholarly expertise cannot properly be extended to the normative political domain of a community. I then reject some potential grounds upon which such an extension might be defended, before briefly considering what a rejection of normative expertise might mean for the professional political theorist in a democratic community. (shrink)

The expertise defense is the best-known response by armchair philosophers to the challenge posed by experimental philosophers regarding the trustworthiness of intuitions. In a series of recent experiments, Experimental philosophers have recently focused on professional philosophers, claiming that, contrary to what the expertise defense assumes, philosophers’ intuitions are no less susceptible to the influence of irrelevant factors (the direct strategy). Additionally, drawing from literature on expertise, they contend that, unlike other domains of expertise, practice does not improve philosophers’ intuitions (the (...) indirect strategy). In this paper, adopting a skill-based perspective on expertise, my primary objective is to defend the expertise defense against both direct and indirect strategies. Based on the skill-based account, I present three arguments against the direct strategy by challenging its power, scope and methodology. Furthermore, borrowing empirical findings from recent literature on expertise, I argue against the indirect strategy that four skills that constitute philosophical expertise regarding thought experiments can be improved through various forms of practice, including deliberate practice. However, my moderate defense departs from typical versions of the expertise defense since I argue that while recent experiments by experimental philosophers cannot undermine the expertise defense, they provide valuable insights into philosophical expertise. (shrink)

An influential version of intellectualism about knowledge how holds that acquiring facts is necessary and sufficient for learning how to do things. I argue that such a view is incompatible with learning to do things through effort and practice, which suggests that intellectualists don’t have a coherent way to explain the role of work in our acquisition of knowledge how. By way of an alternative, I argue that work serves to establish patterns of thinking that coordinate propositional truths with powers (...) of action. (shrink)

Children learn and come to know things about the world at a very young age through the testimony of their caregivers. The challenge comes in explaining how children acquire such knowledge. Since children indiscriminately receive testimony, their testimony-based beliefs seem unreliable, and, consequently, should fail to qualify as knowledge. In this paper I discuss some attempted explanations by Sandy Goldberg and John Greco and argue that they fail. I go on to suggest that what generates the problem is a hidden (...) assumption that the standards for testimonial knowledge are invariant between children and cognitively mature adults. I propose that in order to adequately explain how children acquire testimonial knowledge we should reject this hidden assumption. I then argue that understanding knowledge in terms of intellectual skills gives us a plausible framework to do so. (shrink)

This paper defends a neo-Aristotelian conception of practical wisdom as a virtue that enables human agents to reflect on and direct their lives toward virtuous ends over time. This view is sometimes assumed to require a commitment to an intellectualist Grand End or blueprint view. On that view, practical wisdom would require philosophical insight and an implausibly well worked out set of weighted preferences. In this paper, I aim to show that particularists can and should take on much of what (...) was thought to belong to the Grand End view. I argue for a conception of practical wisdom as a virtue of extended action that accounts for overarching ends without the need to appeal to an unrealistic, intellectualized blueprint for life. Further, on the view advocated here, as in Aristotle, practical wisdom is a virtue of substantial rationality and a different capacity from instrumental rationality in that it requires reflection on what constitutes a good human life. This is not high-minded philosophical reflection and is, in fact, something rather mundane that draws on the same rational capacities we deploy to assess the goodness of actions. (shrink)

Using research in social psychology, philosophers such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that human beings do not have – and cannot acquire – character traits such as virtues. Along with defenders of virtue ethics such as Julia Annas and Rachana Kamtekar, they assume that this constitutes a dangerous attack on virtue ethics. I argue that even if virtues and vices did not exist and everyone accepted that truth, (1) we would continue to make attributions of character traits in (...) our ordinary practices and institutions and (2) it would still be useful to strategically harness – rather than suppress or ignore – our virtue (and vice) attributions. (shrink)

The current study proposes a moderated mediation model to explain the relationship between humble leadership and team innovation. Our hypothesis integrates social information processing theory with the existing literature on humble leadership. As a result, we theorize that when a humble individual leads a team, the team members are more likely to reconsider strategies, review events with self-awareness, share diverse information, and adapt to new ideas, which in turn promotes innovative team activities. Moreover, consistent with the research that emphasizes the (...) inclusion of team culture in exploring leader–innovation relationships, we investigate the moderating role of a team’s expertise diversity in the above positive, indirect relationship. We test our model by using both archival and survey data collected from 135 teams within 18 medium-to-large internet technology firms in China. The findings largely support our theoretical assertions, suggesting that humble leadership has important implications for team processes and innovation. (shrink)

The paper calls for a re-evaluation of physical education’s cognitive value claims, as this issue is fundamental to many of the conceptual difficulties the subject faces. Current epistemological challenges are reviewed before analysing the structural connections between intelligent practice and intelligent virtues, and the possibilities for physical education to better articulate its’ intrinsic and instrumental values claims. The paper evaluates arguments made on this basis and reviews revised curriculum planning and pedagogical practices, which could support an enhanced focus on learners’ (...) wider aspirations and achievements; factors crucial for a virtuous life. While applauding enquiry into the possibilities for considering physical education as a moral endeavor, the paper raises concerns about conceptual clarity in intellectual and empirical accounts of virtue. The paper concludes by advocating further research on the interrelationship between intellectual and empirical accounts of skill, evaluation of learners’ decision-making and the aims of physical education and school sport programmes. (shrink)

The calling orientation to work represents the seed that has germinated into the exponentially growing ‘work as a calling’ literature. It was first articulated by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton within Habits of the Heart in the 1980s. The following critical analysis of the ‘work as a calling’ literature, and of the moral foundation of the calling orientation more specifically, is intended for two particular audiences. The first audience broadly includes an interdisciplinary group of (...) scholars working within business ethics, management, organizational psychology, and vocational psychology, among other fields of study. Amidst these scholars’ exponentially increasing interest in the idea of ‘work as a calling,’ the anatomical structure of their research remains remarkably similar. Their notions of ‘work as a calling’ stress that work should provide individuals with a deep sense of personal fulfillment. In particular, they suggest that work should be a therapeutic source of individual meaning. To secure this meaning, they exhibit an apparent centeredness on the self and an emphasis on the unconstrained pursuit of personal preferences. In most cases, scholars within the ‘work as a calling’ literature tend to proffer notions of ‘meaningful work’ that are divorced from moral considerations about ‘good work.’ While this broad group of scholars copiously references the calling orientation within their research on ‘work as a calling,’ a deep-seated misunderstanding pervades the literature to the extent that notions of ‘meaningful work’ have been divorced from notions of ‘good work.’ To this broader audience, I demonstrate herein that they do not realize how antithetical their scholarly literature on ‘work as a calling’ is to the moral foundation of Bellah et al.’s calling orientation. Namely, I argue that the construal of calling as an orientation to work would not exist within the literature if Bellah et al. had not first articulated the calling orientation as a buffer against the unregulated pursuit of personal preferences. Therefore, I claim that this broader group of scholars either needs to abandon the notion of ‘work as a calling’ or engage with the appropriate virtue framework that undergirds the calling orientation. I suspect, however, that several of these scholars will be hesitant to take up the virtue framework that is inextricably linked to the calling orientation. For this reason, much of the work following chapter 2 is devoted to a narrower audience of MacIntyrean business ethicists. It is also dedicated to a few scholars from the broader ‘work as a calling’ group whom I trust will not wish to remain accidental contributors to the language of individualism that pervades the literature once I have unmasked it. Perhaps, in time, they will even become MacIntyrean business ethicists. Indeed, the appropriate moral framework that undergirds the ‘work as a calling’ literature is actively being worked out by a narrower group of MacIntyrean business ethicists, all of whom represent my primary audience for the research herein. To the MacIntyrean community, I hope not only to provide a complete list of tendencies within the ‘work as a calling’ literature that must be resisted, but also a picture of all of the ways that Bellah et al.’s calling orientation is wholly bound up with MacIntyre’s moral philosophy – particularly his theory of the virtues and the common goods that the virtues sustain. Bellah et al.’s calling orientation rests upon a vision of ‘good work,’ and this vision of ‘good work’ hinges on a MacIntyrean account of the virtues that is directed toward the achievement of three distinct types of common goods: the good and worthy ends of workplace practices, the goods of an individual life, and the goods of communities – or, more broadly, the interests of a good society. Furthermore, it will be shown to the MacIntyrean community that visions of ‘good work,’ which are sustained by the calling orientation, are accompanied by a nuanced vision of pluralistic collaboration that MacIntyre and Bellah et al. share.. Bellah et al. as well as MacIntyre’s vision of pluralism matters for research on the calling orientation because these figures demonstrate that individuals within the late modern workplace are informed by a plurality of religious and humanistic traditions, all of which account for ultimate meaning and goodness in different ways that ought to be recognized. Distinctive religious and humanistic visions of ultimate meaning indeed impact the perceived goodness of one’s calling. Hence, we must attend to the polysemic and multivocal nature of accounting for the goodness of any one particular calling. Still, however, Bellah et al. and MacIntyre’s account entails a hopefulness in the possibility of pluralistic, striving for the achievement of common goods that are practical enough to agree upon. (shrink)

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. To this end, I discuss cases with no set goal 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. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of the relation between Aristotle’s ethics and the crafts (or technai). My thesis is that Aristotle’s argument is at key points shaped by models proper to the crafts, this shaping being deeper than is generally acknowledged, and philosophically more problematic. Despite this, I conclude that the arguments I examine can, if revised, be upheld. The plan of the dissertation is as follows – Preface: The relation of my study to the extant secondary literature; Introduction: The (...) pre-Platonic concept of technē, as evidenced in Greek philosophical and literary sources, in particular the early Hippocratic corpus; Chapter one: The Platonic concept of technē, followed by an investigation of whether Plato affirms a virtue-technē in the Protagoras and Republic; Chapter two: Aristotle’s concept of technē, followed by scrutiny of his arguments in NE VI.5 against a virtue-technē, and of his analyses of slavery and deliberation; Chapter three: An exposition of Aristotle’s function argument, followed by a dominantist interpretation of it, and an explanation of dominantism as in part a technē-influenced doctrine; Chapter four: An examination of Aristotle’s ethical mean and its problems, with a diagnosis of these in terms of influence by the Philebus, and by paradigms derived from the crafts; Chapter five: Argument that Aristotle’s theory of habituation suffers from two significant opacities, these being a function of influence both by the Republic, and by models of craft-learning; Conclusion: Response to key objection; Aristotle’s ethics revised, defended. (shrink)

This thesis comprises a study of the ethical thought of Iris Murdoch with special emphasis, as evidenced by the title, on how morality is intimately connected to self-improvement aiming at perfection and how the study of fiction has an important role to play in our strive towards bettering ourselves within the framework set by Murdoch’s moral philosophy.

The paper argues that everyday ethical expertise requires an openness to an experience of self-doubt very different from that involved in becoming expert in other skills—namely, an experience of profound vulnerability to the Other similar to that which Emmanuel Levinas has described. Since the experience bears a striking resemblance to that of undergoing cross-examination by Socrates as depicted in Plato’s early dialogues, I illustrate it through a close reading of the Euthyphro, arguing that Euthyphro’s vaunted “expertise” conceals a reluctance to (...) submit himself to the basic process of self-redefinition that results from learning the limits of one’s knowledge. I show how the dialogue itself models the disruptive experience of selfquestioning that leads to moral maturity, providing further evidence that expertise has an important non-cognitive element, as well as casting doubt on the ethical value of seeking “definitions” of the virtues. (shrink)