Virtues in Action

New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics

M. Austin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137280282
• eBook ISBN: 9781137280299
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

In recent decades, many philosophers have considered the strengths and weaknesses of a virtue-centered approach to moral theory. Much less attention has been given to how such an approach bears on issues in applied ethics. The essays in this volume apply a virtue-centered perspective to a variety of contemporary moral issues, and in so doing offer a fresh and illuminating perspective. Some of the essays focus on a particular virtue and its application to one or more realms of applied ethics, such as temperance and sex or humility and environmental ethics. Other chapters focus on an issue in applied ethics and bring several virtues into a discussion of that issue or realm of life, such as sport, education, and business. Finally, several of the chapters engage relevant psychological research as well as current neuroscience, which enhances the strength of the philosophical arguments.

Part I

Professional Virtue

1

Virtue-Centered Approaches to Education: Prospects and Pitfalls

Gregory Bassham

In recent years, virtue ethics has been applied to a wide range of contemporary issues and disciplines (politics, the environment, professional ethics, animal rights, bioethics, war, sports, to name a few). In this chapter I explore the pros and cons of applying virtue ethics (broadly understood) to education. What are the advantages of a virtue-centered approach to education? What forms might such theories take? What problems or objections must a virtue-centered approach overcome?

The attractions of a virtue-centered approach to education

Virtue ethics is an approach to normative ethics “that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach which emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that which emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism).”¹ As a theory of normative ethics, virtue ethics cannot be straightforwardly applied to education, since education is concerned with many things other than “ethics.” It is possible, however, to develop a virtue-centered approach to education that takes inspiration from virtue ethics and shares many similarities. By a “virtue-centered approach to education,” I mean a normative theory of education that emphasizes the development of moral and intellectual virtues, as opposed to, say, content mastery, vocational education, or skills development.² For a proponent of virtue-centered education, the central aim of education is to nurture personal growth, to help students develop the excellences of mind and character that are constitutive of human flourishing or the good life. On a virtue-centered approach, the central questions of education are not “What things should students know by Grade X?” or “What academic competencies should students possess by the time they graduate?” These are important and legitimate questions, but for virtue theorists they are less central than questions of character. What qualities of heart, mind, and character would we ideally like our students to value, choose, and possess? What moral and intellectual excellences should we seek to cultivate in our students? How can we best nurture students’ emotional, ethical, and intellectual growth? How can we provide a rich learning environment that will help students discover and maximize their potential for living happy, fulfilled lives of excellence, purpose, and achievement? Virtue-centered approaches to education are best seen as a family of theories that regard these as the focal challenges of education. What advantages does such an approach have?

First, until relatively recently, virtue-centered theories dominated educational thought in Western civilization. Educational giants such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Dewey all endorsed versions of virtue-centered education.³ In American education, virtue-centered approaches prevailed until the early decades of the twentieth century, when they declined for a variety of reasons, including the rise of various forms of moral skepticism and a growing emphasis on career training.⁴ While appeals to authority and tradition are generally among the weakest forms of rational persuasion, their weight in this case is substantial. How confident can we be that virtue-centered approaches should be abandoned when, until recently, they were nearly universally accepted?

Second, a glance at educational institutions’ mission statements indicates that, whatever their actual pedagogical practices, schools do strongly aspire to foster their students’ intellectual and moral growth. For example, Ithaca College asserts in its mission statement: “To provide a foundation for a lifetime of learning, Ithaca College is dedicated to fostering intellectual growth, aesthetic appreciation, and character development in our students.” Elon University, in its mission statement, proclaims that “we foster respect for human differences, passion for a life of learning, personal integrity, and an ethic of work and service.” Haverford College’s mission statement avers: “We seek to foster the pursuit of excellence and a sense of individual and collective responsibility throughout the entire environment. Haverford strives to be a college in which integrity, honesty, and concern for others are dominant forces.” Proclamations of this sort are typical at both the collegiate and pre-collegiate levels of American education. This suggests that when schools pause to reflect seriously on their core aims and aspirations, they naturally revert to a language of virtue and character.

Third, just as parents naturally desire to have a deep and positive impact on their children, colleges, given their institutional roles in society and social development, naturally do too. This invites a focus on enduring character traits, as opposed to, say, skills, abilities, or short-term memorization. Strongly rooted intellectual habits such as openmindedness, intellectual perseverance, and intellectual curiosity are gifts that keep giving long after a student has left school (ideally for a lifetime). The same is true of moral virtues such as courage, responsibility, and self-discipline. By contrast, academic skills, abilities, and content-mastery often are short-term. In many cases they are also value neutral. As Dumbledore reminded Harry Potter, “it is our choices ... that show us what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”⁵ Intellectual and moral virtues, by definition, are good qualities that enable us to be both good and smart. Skills like mathematical calculation and factual knowledge such as a grasp of the basic principles of physics are morally neutral qualities that, as Richard Paul notes, “can be used either for good or ill, to enlighten or to propagandize, to gain narrow, self-serving ends, or to further the general and public good.”⁶ No doubt many leading Nazis were top students with impressive academic skills and knowledge. What they lacked were wisdom and virtue.

In addition, as John Locke noted long ago, an education focused on the development of intellectual and moral virtues has a built-in advantage over one focused on the acquisition of academic skills and content-mastery. A student with “virtue and a well-tempered soul,” Locke wrote, “though all the rest [of his or her education] should be neglected, would in due time produce all the rest.”⁷ Locke’s point is overstated. Some academic subjects and skills must be mastered in a certain timeframe on pain of flunking out, failing to get into a good college, or other unfortunate consequences. Locke is right, however, that there is an asymmetry between virtues and knowledge/skills that favors the former. An adolescent who, for one reason or another, is not a strong student may still grow up to be a wise and learned adult if at some point he or she develops virtues such as a love of learning, intellectual perseverance, self-control, industriousness, and a commitment to self-improvement. Given time and opportunity, these virtues will ensure that most important educational gaps will be filled. Factual knowledge and skills are usually not self-correcting in this way.

Further, a focus on intellectual and moral virtues allows for a stronger sense of involvement by an entire educational community – administration, staff, and students as well as faculty. When the primary focus of a school is on students’ mastery of knowledge and skills, the whole job of “education” is seen to be faculty’s responsibility. By contrast, when the focus is broadened to include virtues such as responsibility, respect for differences, honesty, integrity, civility, public spiritedness, and a passion for excellence, the entire school can feel that they are part of the school’s educational mission. This contributes to a sense of community and underscores the common observation – trite but profoundly true – that many of the most important things learned in school are not learned in the classroom.

Finally, careful reflection on the broad purposes of education lends support to a virtue-centered approach. Although no neat separation is possible, educational aims are of two sorts: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic educational aims are those that are valued and pursued as means to other ends. Two widely acknowledged extrinsic educational ends of basic schooling are preparing students for work and preparing them for the duties of democratic citizenship.⁸ Work- and citizenship-related skills and dispositions are not usually valued for their own sakes, but rather as means to other desired ends, such as a productive economy, a desired lifestyle, and a well-functioning political system. Some purposes of education, however, are rightly seen as intrinsic. These include, most notably, personal development: the cultivation of an individual’s powers and capacities along lines of excellence, or what Jacques Maritain calls “the fulfillment of man as a human person.”⁹ As Plato notes in the Republic, while excellences of character certainly contribute to valuable social ends, they are also valued for their own sakes as intrinsic goods.¹⁰ For this reason, it makes sense to accord priority to character development, as virtue-centered theories do.¹¹

Varieties of virtue-centered approaches to education

Just as virtue ethics comes in a wide variety of forms (neo-Aristotelian, Stoic, Thomistic, Humean, Nietzschean, pluralistic, and so forth), so do virtue-centered approaches to education. Let me indicate briefly – with no pretense of completeness – some of the major possibilities of development.

A virtue-centered approach must first indicate whether it applies to all forms of education or only to some. Some virtue theorists, such as Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, insist that all education at all levels should focus primarily on the development of moral and intellectual virtues (particularly the latter). This is so, Adler claims, because all humans share the same nature as rational animals, all have the same powers and capacities to be developed, and the “basic education of a rational animal is the discipline of his rational powers and the cultivation of his intellect.”¹² Adler’s Aristotelian premises are certainly debatable, but even if we grant them, the conclusion does not follow. There may be forms of education (technical, vocational, athletic, artistic, early childhood, special education, etc.) where the central focus isn’t on moral or intellectual development, but rather on other educational objectives, such as acquiring certain skills, psychosocial health, or mastering a specific body of information. Moreover, teaching strategies that may be effective at one level of education may not be suitable at others. For example, attempts to foster the higher-order virtues of intellectual autonomy and open-mindedness may be more appropriate at higher levels of education than, say, in pre-school. A fully developed virtue-centered approach would need to address such complexities.

In addition, a virtue theorist must choose between what I call a “thick” and a “thin” conception of character development. A thick conception is one that spells out fully (or in considerable detail) a certain ideal of moral and intellectual excellence (or more generally optimal or well-developed char...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Professional Virtue
• Part II Social Virtue
• Part III Environmental Virtue
• Part IV Intellectual Virtue
• Bibliography
• Index