Human excellences such as intelligence, morality, and consciousness are investigated by philosophers as well as artificial intelligence researchers. One excellence that has not been widely discussed by AI researchers is practical wisdom, the highest human excellence, or the highest, seventh, stage in Dreyfus’s model of skill acquisition. In this paper, I explain why artificial wisdom matters and how artificial wisdom is possible (in principle and in practice) by responding to two philosophical challenges to building artificial wisdom systems. The result is (...) a conceptual framework that guides future research on creating artificial wisdom. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

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)

A recent skeptical challenge denies deliberation is essential to virtuous agency: what looks like genuine deliberation is just a post hoc rationalization of a decision already made by automatic mechanisms (Haidt 2001; Doris 2015). Annas’s account of virtue seems well-equipped to respond: by modeling virtue on skills, she can agree that virtuous actions are deliberation-free while insisting that their development requires significant thought. But Annas’s proposal is flawed: it over-intellectualizes deliberation’s developmental role and under-intellectualizes its significance once virtue is acquired. (...) Doing better requires paying attention to a distinctive form of anxiety—one that functions to engage deliberation in the face of decisions that automatic mechanisms alone cannot resolve. (shrink)

This paper argues for a reinterpretation of the skill analogy in virtue ethics. It argues that the skill analogy should not be understood as proposing that being virtuous is analogous to possessing a practical skill but, rather, as proposing that being virtuous is analogous to being a good occupant of a skill-involving role. The paper argues for this by engaging with various standard objections to the analogy, two recent defences of it, and Aristotle’s treatment of it in developing his account (...) of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics. It aims to show that neither virtue nor the skill analogy is correctly understood without recourse to the notion of a role and that once we have recourse to that notion, many objections to the analogy are met. (shrink)

This paper aims to shed light on an underexplored aspect of Gilbert Ryle’s interest in the notion of “knowing-how”. It is argued that in addition to his motive of discounting a certain theory of mind, his interest in the notion also stemmed (and perhaps stemmed more deeply) from two ethical interests: one concerning his own life as a philosopher and whether the philosopher has any meaningful task, and one concerning the ancient issue of whether virtue is a kind of knowledge. (...) It is argued that Ryle saw know-how as crucial in both respects and, also, that he continued to be interested in these ethical issues throughout his career. (shrink)