Can Virtue be Taught?

AVI responded to yesterday's short essay with a post of his own, questioning whether habituation is in fact how one develops virtues like courage.

Thinking about that, I think it is only partly true. It is not the mere experience of danger and risk that teaches, even to those who are alert and seeking to draw lessons. An example: early in my career at the hospital it was common to be working an understaffed unit. Just before I arrived, they had finally made it policy that no one was to work a unit alone. Not all psychiatric patients are dangerous, but enough of them are that they required physical intervention to restrain them. They can be assaultive, out-of-control, or so intensely self harming that they attempt to run into wall, cut themselves with whatever is handy. When you are alone in facing this and you know that you can get hurt badly, but your job is to keep everyone safe, it is frightening. Yes, you are still alone, because someone has to get to the phone, or is on break. Especially tough on night shift when there aren't even that many people in the building to help out. You were left with the intervention far more often if you were male, also. The adrenaline rises, clouding your judgement, and memories of past injuries, especially from this same patient, rise as well.

This was part of my job for seven years, and then an occasional part for ten years after that. I experienced that fear many times and worked to contain it. Yet even though I was paying attention and trying to draw lessons from the experience, or trying to emulate those who seemed to be doing better, I don't think I improved much. Not until about year five, when a new type of training come in, did I feel I was making progress. It was not mere habituation, but specific training that mattered. I imagine Aristotle might partly agree if I explained it to him.

This is one of the most consequential questions with which the Greeks wrestled. The issue makes up the core of several of Plato's dialogues. In fact it is the heart of Socrates' conflict with the Sophists, who claimed that they could and did teach virtue.

The first issue is whether virtue is a sort of knowledge, or something else. If virtue is knowledge, then it should be teachable. Plato enjoyed irony, so in the Protagoras he has Protagoras argue that he teaches a kind of virtue that is not knowledge; he has Socrates argue that virtue is a kind of knowledge, but can't be taught. Socrates makes clear the irony that they're arguing two impossible positions in the ending of the dialogue.

There are several good reasons to think that virtue is not a kind of knowledge, however. One of them is brought out in the Laches, which is specifically about trying to teach courage by practicing the martial arts, with teachers who went about Greece showing students techniques they had developed. The techniques can definitely be taught; in fact the word 'technique' is rooted in the Greek word techne, which is a species of knowledge-as-art that can definitely be taught. This word is also the root of our word "technology," and Socrates' favorite example of it is shoemakers. They definitely know something because they can not only make a shoe, they can also explain exactly how they do it, exactly why each step makes sense, and they can teach it to others. Teaching the martial arts is like that too.

Teaching courage, though: well, Socrates says, if it is like that we should be able to say exactly what it is we are wanting to teach. Can you define courage in an unassailable way? None of the participants in the discussion could, even though they were all men who had displayed courage on the battlefield (including Socrates, who was a war veteran famous for his conduct in a rear guard action during his youth). All possessed courage, but none could define it. That suggests that the virtue is not knowledge, at least not techne, and calls into question whether it is teachable.

What else might it be? It might be an inherited quality. The Greeks didn't know about genetics, but they knew that sons resemble their fathers in many ways. But (as is brought out in the Protagoras) the sons of good men often aren't as good as their fathers. Socrates points out that successful fathers who have displayed virtue not only often produce inferior sons, they do so even though they spend a lot of money and effort on trying to educate their sons. If virtue were inheritable, wouldn't it be the case that the sons of virtuous men were reliably better than others? If virtue were teachable, wouldn't these efforts bear fruit given that they are practiced on the most promising stock, i.e., the sons of the best men?

Aristotle's answer is that virtue is not a form of knowledge exactly, but a state of character. The way one develops that character is by practice, so that it become habituated. (This is not quite the same thing as a "habit" in the English sense, as this essay examines.) One changes one's character by practicing the right thing until one does it without having to think about what the right thing is. The argument that one reverts to one's training, then, isn't just an argument that Aristotle would accept; it is in fact his position.

This only partly solves the problem, of course, since we have to figure out what 'the right thing' is in order to train ourselves to do it. That still seems like needing a form of knowledge, not just practice and training: someone has to know. If there is someone who does know, then virtue is at least rooted in a sort of knowledge that can be taught. Even if that is true, knowing what virtue entails in this way does not satisfy the condition for having virtue; one still has to practice until doing the right thing is habituated. This is Aristotle's explanation for a problem that bothered Socrates: if virtue is a form of knowledge, then knowing what is right should entail always doing what is right. Yet people often know what is right but do something else.

The idea that virtue is any sort of teachable knowledge is a problem for the reasons given above, and for other reasons Plato explores. It's a very sticky question, and a highly consequential one. I will stop here to let you all consider this, and express your own thoughts.