This material is drawn from the paper by Daniel C. Russell, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, which was published in “Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology and Psychology” edited by Nancy E. Snow, Oxford University Press, 2015.
According to Russell we can summarize Aristotle’s approach to virtues as follows:
• Moral development consists of acquiring certain long-term attributes (hexeis), called virtues.
• The virtues are acquired through practice and training that must ultimately be focused and directed. In other words, the virtues are like skills in how we go about acquiring them.
• The virtues combine the pursuit of certain kinds of goals with practical reasoning that is effective in making and executing plans for realizing those goals. In other words, the virtues are also like skills in their cognitive structure.
Russell looks to the questions of what Aristotle viewed as the character, meaning and acquisition of virtues. He discusses the virtues themselves only by way of using specific examples, such as courage, to illustrate his other points.
Russell’s analysis is primarily of the character of virtue and the process of virtue acquisition.
Regarding Aristotle’s view of the character of virtue, he finds that “a virtue is an “excellence”, which is a kind of quality that answers questions of the form “what is it like?”
In being a kind of excellence, a virtue is distinguished from a kind of knowledge. Knowledge is gained by study but a virtue is acquired by practice. This is a critical distinction.
Given that a virtue is a category of excellence that is acquired through practice and training, it is not something that man is born with.
Russell says that Aristotle “offers no special theory of acquiring the virtues because he thinks that there is no special problem involved in understanding how virtues are acquired. On the contrary, Aristotle thinks of that process as a particular instance of something people do all the time: getting better at something through practice and training.” And “The central contention of Aristotle’s approach, then, is that the study of the nature of virtue is best begun with a study of how skills are acquired.”
Unlike the idea of virtue as a quality of character higher than or at least different from others, Russell finds Aristotle’s view of virtue as “mundane” that is: it is like “any other thoroughly ordinary and familiar types of being good at doing things … Aristotle also thinks that (virtue) acquisition…is like other processes by which people become good at doing things … And … the competencies that a virtuous person has are of the same sort as those of people with practical skills.”
“The virtues are different from knowledge because of how we acquire them: it takes repeated, focused practice, just as in the case of skill. The virtues are different from skill also because of our aim in acquiring them, namely to be good at certain sorts of choosing and doing rather than at certain sorts of making. What is conspicuous by its absence here is any prior moral ideal or principle that marks the virtues as different from everything else in the world.”
Critically, it is the same process, for Aristotle, that develops both the virtues and practical intelligence.
Russell notes: “Twice in a short span Aristotle makes the point that with virtue, it is action that precedes the capacity, and not vice versa.”
Aristotle makes “a distinction between doing something in a beginner’s way and doing it in an accomplished way; so, in the case of virtues like fairness and temperance, one acquires the capacity to do fair or temperate things in an accomplished way through doing the same kind of things in a beginner’s way.”
And Russell notes: “cultivating virtue is like those other kinds of getting better in that, in those cases too, it takes focused effort and practice on the part of the learner to acquire the capacity.”
The idea of “cultivating virtue” suggests that it is the conscious intention of the person practicing temperate acts to cultivate the virtue of temperance. But it seems also possible that the acquisition of a virtue might arise or at least be aided by actions that are not specifically taken for that purpose. So, I might aid in cultivating temperance in taking temperate actions even if my intent in acting was not to cultivate temperance.
According to Russell: “Aristotle says that there is an excellence that arrives at a decision, and that that excellence is practical intelligence … the idea seems to be that before one can decide just how to achieve what one has decided to do, one must first decide what to do, here and now, in a concrete way, given all the particulars.”
The decision on what a person is to do in a given situation is made, then, through the activity of practical intelligence.
If it is practical intelligence that determines action and action that cultivates virtue, then the development of practical intelligence seems to be the key.
Russell concludes with three key points
“Now for the question: when it comes to understanding the cultivation of virtue, what has Aristotle left us—a codified theory or a research program? … I think Aristotle would have preferred to leave a program, rather than a pronouncement, as his philosophical legacy.”
A program rather than a pronouncement. That is key and it underlines the decision of Russell to avoid spending time in efforts such as listing the virtues. The important thing is the program, the system, the mechanism that explains how this process of virtue development and expression works.
That leads to the second point:
“So, virtue is messy. In fact, one of the most valuable lessons we might learn from studying skills is just how unavoidably messy virtue is…”
“All that Aristotle’s approach can offer is one picture of what ‘getting better’ might look like for creatures like us. It offers nothing more. And it offers nothing less.”
In Russell’s reading of Aristotle, then, we do not begin with virtue and proceed through situational analysis, decision and action. We start with analysis and deliberation, we act, we assess the results of action and that process provides information and cultivates virtue.
Now, virtue, as it is cultivated and becomes a stronger “excellence” will presumably inform our analysis and decision making to an increasing extent. But it seems that the “program” that Aristotle leaves us for the cultivation and exercise of virtue must still depend on critical steps found between virtue and action.
Is virtue, then, prior to action or action prior to virtue? For Aristotle it seems clear that the latter is the case.
©Charles R. Lightner