In his paper on the “Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics” which we discussed in a recent post, Professor Slingerland, in his conclusion, makes the following statement:
“…the early Confucian form of virtue ethics seems as if it could survive even the strongest and most plausible form of the situationist critique, which means that proclamations of the death of virtue ethics are rather premature. We can frame this a bit more strongly by observing that our current understanding of human cognition suggests that rationalist, cognitive-control–based models of ethics, such as deontology or utilitarianism, appear profoundly psychologically unrealistic. This, in turn, suggests that some form of virtue ethics is our best hope—if, that is, empirical plausibility is deemed a desirable feature when it comes to ethics.”
Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology (Page 158). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
His assertion that non-virtue systems are “profoundly psychologically unrealistic” is harsh, uncompromising and surprising. And, I think, inappropriate.
Slingerland clearly understands the Confucian and Aristotelian virtue systems as sharing the view that virtue is acquired or learned or cultivated through practice, in one form or another. While humans might have inherent, some would argue genetic, tendencies toward certain virtues, those virtues do not appear fully developed at birth. They much be cultivated and perfected over time through study and practice and reflection.
But the essence of practice and cultivation is the use of some sort of system to guide the behavior from an inherent sort of “seed” condition, through a process of increased understanding, trial and error behavior, and improvement over time until it can be said that the virtue is cultivated.
That process will necessarily follow a pattern.
Using a metaphor of archery, for instance, there will in each instance of practice be:
a confirmation of the target location;
an assessment of distance, aim and direction from archer to target;
an assessment of environmental factors that will affect the flight of the arrow;
an assessment of the mental, physical and emotional states of the archer that will affect his ability to precisely launch the arrow toward the target accounting for all of the present conditions;
an assessment of the accuracy of the shot once the arrow has ended its flight;
an analysis of the actual flight versus the desired flight;
an assessment of the reasons for any variance between actual and desired outcome; and,
an assessment of the changes needed to eliminate any variance.
And, each of those will have a further set of processes or procedures that will guide it.
These elements, or this kind of process, will more or less apply to throwing a baseball, or playing a musical instrument, or selling a vacuum cleaner, or making a friend, or maintaining control over one’s drinking, or telling the truth.
Cultivating a virtue, like learning a language, requires a procedure that is rules-based, or pattern-dependent or, at the very least, pattern-sensitive. Planning, action, assessment, feedback, adjustment — repeat.
Are those not the sort of rules we find in deontological moral systems? Don’t we cultivate ontological attributes through attention to deontological rules, or at least patterns that express a rule-based sytem?
Maybe not. Or maybe I’m not stating this as clearly as I might after further study. And maybe I’m misusing some of this terminology. That might be.
But the idea that I am suggesting, terminology aside, is that cultivation of a skill in anything is accomplished through a learning process that has a pattern that is at least implicitly, and often explicitly, rules-based. And so, Slingerland’s dismissal of the deontological systems seems to me to miss a crucial component of cultivation.
©Charles R. Lightner