Faking Courage & Uneven Trainability

AVI posted what I take to be a response to the post about teaching virtue, laying out some principles for his view of things. I'll let his words stand on their own, but I do want to circle back on two of the points that he raises.

The first one is that courage (and other virtues) can be faked by applying pressures that end up compelling people to behave as they would if they had been brave. Aristotle describes this as an aspect of justice, which uses laws to compel people to behave as if they were virtuous even if they are not.

Now, the laws prescribe about all manner of things, aiming at the common interest of all, or of the best men, or of those who are supreme in the state (position in the state being determined by reference to personal excellence, or to some other such standard); and so in one sense we apply the term just to whatever tends to produce and preserve the happiness of the community, and the several elements of that. The law bids us display courage (as not to leave our ranks, or run, or throw away our arms), and temperance (as not to commit adultery or outrage), and gentleness (as not to strike or revile our neighbours), and so on with all the other virtues and vices, enjoining acts and forbidding them, rightly when it is a good law, not so rightly when it is a hastily improvised one.

Aristotle goes on to say something about this that I think is easy to misunderstand.

Justice, then, in this sense of the word, is complete virtue, with the addition that it is displayed towards others. On this account it is often spoken of as the chief of the virtues, and such that “neither evening nor morning star is so lovely;” and the saying has become proverbial, “Justice sums up all virtues in itself.”

It is complete virtue, first of all, because it is the exhibition of complete virtue: it is also complete because he that has it is able to exhibit virtue in dealing with his neighbours, and not merely in his private affairs; for there are many who can be virtuous enough at home, but fail in dealing with their neighbours.... While then the worst man is he who displays vice both in his own affairs and in his dealings with his friends, the best man is not he who displays virtue in his own affairs merely, but he who displays virtue towards others; for this is the hard thing to do.

Justice, then, in this sense of the word, is not a part of virtue, but the whole of it; and the injustice which is opposed to it is not a part of vice, but the whole of it.

That could easily be read to say that fake virtue is just as good as real virtue; and that a state that manages to compel everyone to do the right thing is just as good as a state in which people chose to do the right thing without compulsion. A thorough reading of the Nicomachean Ethics shows that Aristotle cannot possibly mean that. The whole of the work is built around developing one's character so that one is a fit judge of what is right and wrong, and the kind of person who will do the right thing.

The need to compel people to act in the right way is made necessary, rather than desirable, because of the acknowledgement of the second point from AVI's essay that I want to bring around: not all people respond to the training well. Every Marine goes through training designed in part to help them habituate courage; many respond well to it, partly because they are self-selected for wanting to become brave warriors. But not everyone does, not even in the Marine Corps. There remains additional selection processes for particularly dangerous duty (not just in the USMC; Airborne school in the Army is more about habituating courage than about actually conducting offensive operations). Some wash out; others find that the experience of being forced to do brave things eventually does make them brave. Others were brave when they got there, and only refine the quality through training.

AVI puts it this way (the 30,000 foot language is perhaps why I thought of Airborne school):

The people discussing Aristotle and virtues this late in the day wondering whether such things can be taught and reflecting over their own experience, are simply not a representative sample. Aristotle and Aquinas and others writing about virtue, discipline, and courage may have had every intention of writing for and about humankind in general. However hard they try to stand aloof and view the human condition from 30,000', they can't.

Both Aristotle (and therefore Aquinas) and Plato are aware of this problem, however. In fact, it is part of Protagoras' response to Socrates' challenge about the children of great men not always being very good themselves, in spite of having good parents and careful training:

Suppose that there could be no state unless we were all flute-players, in such sort as each was able, and suppose that everyone were giving his neighbor both private and public lessons in the art, and rebuked him too, if he failed to do it well, without grudging him the trouble—even as no one now thinks of grudging or reserving his skill in what is just and lawful as he does in other expert knowledge; for our neighbors' justice and virtue, I take it, is to our advantage, and consequently we all tell and teach one another what is just and lawful—well, if we made the same zealous and ungrudging efforts to instruct each other in flute-playing, do you think, Socrates, that the good flute-players would be more likely than the bad to have sons who were good flute-players? I do not think they would: no, wherever the son had happened to be born with a nature most apt for flute-playing, he would be found to have advanced to distinction, and where unapt, to obscurity. Often the son of a good player would turn out a bad one, and often of a bad, a good. But, at any rate, all would be capable players as compared with ordinary persons who had no inkling of the art. Likewise in the present case you must regard any man who appears to you the most unjust person ever reared among human laws and society as a just man and a craftsman of justice, if he had to stand comparison with people who lacked education and law courts and laws and any constant compulsion to the pursuit of virtue, but were a kind of wild folk such as Pherecrates the poet brought on the scene at last year's Lenaeum....

So now, Socrates, I have shown you by both fable and argument that virtue is teachable and is so deemed by the Athenians, and that it is no wonder that bad sons are born of good fathers and good of bad, since even the sons of Polycleitus, companions of Paralus and Xanthippus here, are not to be compared with their father, and the same is the case in other craftsmen's families.

Protagoras makes some good points here. He acknowledges that some are naturally more fitted than others for the art he wants to teach, and that thus it is only to be expected that results are uneven even with the sons of good men. He is not on very solid ground in assuming that flute playing is a good analogy. Flute playing is a techne, the kind of knowledge that most obviously can be taught. The question actually is whether virtue represents a kind of knowledge that can be taught, or something else. Protagoras attempts to strengthen his position with the talk of untrained 'wild folk,' who stand in the analogy like people who have never handled a flute. Won't ordinary Athenians be more just than wild people, since they have all been trained in the art of justice (i.e., forced to live by laws that make them act as if they were virtuous)?

The answer may well be "No." Protagoras isn't referring to any actual 'wild folk,' but only to a poet's representation of such. In fact it is certain that any folk will have standards of justice that they train their youth to respect, even barbarians (a word the Greeks gave us because the Semites they encountered spoken a way that sounded to them like 'bar bar bar'; thus 'barbar-ians'). Herodotus made much of the training of the Persian youth, which was apparently excellent, as were other of their customs.

Next to prowess in arms, it is regarded as the greatest proof of manly excellence to be the father of many sons. Every year the king sends rich gifts to the man who can show the largest number: for they hold that number is strength. Their sons are carefully instructed from their fifth to their twentieth year, in three things alone---to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth....

They hold it unlawful to talk of anything which it is unlawful to do. The most disgraceful thing in the world, they think, is to tell a lie; the next worst, to owe a debt: because, among other reasons, the debtor is obliged to tell lies. If a Persian has the leprosy he is not allowed to enter into a city, or to have any dealings with the other Persians; he must, they say, have sinned against the sun. Foreigners attacked by this disorder, are forced to leave the country: even white pigeons are often driven away, as guilty of the same offence. They never defile a river with the secretions of their bodies, nor even wash their hands in one; nor will they allow others to do so, as they have a great reverence for rivers.

In spite of this, the Persians were notoriously tyrannical, cruel, and wicked by our own moral standards.

I shall stop again, as this is once more a good spot to allow those of you interested in the discussion to pause and consider, and express your own thoughts.