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Aristotle and Expertise: Ideas on the Skillfulness of Virtue

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Abstract

Many philosophers working on virtue theory have resisted the idea that the virtues are practical skills, apparently following Aristotle’s resistance to that idea. Bucking the trend, Matt Stichter defends a strong version of this idea in The Skillfulness of Virtue by marshaling a wide range of conceptual and empirical arguments to argue that the moral virtues are robust skills involving the cognitive-conative unification of Aristotelian phronêsis (‘practical intelligence’). Here I argue that Aristotle overlooks a more delimited kind of practical intelligence, strongly analogous to his own account of phronêsis, that unifies complex forms of expertise such as medicine or even high-level sports. Insofar as the skill model of virtue is compelling, it must draw on a robust conception of practical expertise (technê) like the one developed here rather than the ordinary, anemic conception of practical skills.

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Notes

  1. The arguments presented here are identical in substance to the arguments I presented in 2014 at the Kansas Philosophical Society meeting at Kansas State University in response to a paper of Stichter’s that developed into central sections of the book: Stichter 2018, chs. 3–4. The casual tone of some of my examples was appropriate on that occasion, and—although we live in more difficult times—I do not believe it impedes understanding here. In this paper I focus mainly on the ethical virtues, as Aristotle does in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) and Stichter does in the book. The extraordinarily rich literature on the technê model in ancient Greek philosophy precludes any detailed discussion here of how the technê model bears on current empirical programs on skill, personality, and character. But such a discussion remains quite valuable for virtue theory. Recent discussions of technê (plural: technai) in the ancient world can be found in Johansen (2021) and Angier and Raphals (forthcoming).

  2. Joseph Dunne (1993, 246) notes Aristotle’s partiality for medicine as an example of technê; in fact Aristotle refers to medicine more than any other technê (Angier 2010, 37).

  3. Zagzebski (1996, 106–116) helpfully discusses various objections to the skill model of virtue, a model that she herself rejects. More recently, Hacker-Wright (2015) resists the skill model for reasons similar to those I present below: viz., because of the sharp differences between the ethical virtues and non-ethical skills. The position I suggest here aims to bypass such concerns, since it relies on a robust conception of expertise (technê), not an ‘anemic’ conception of non-ethical skills. For an insightful and admirably concise discussion of the main features of technê in Aristotle, see Angier (2010, 36–41).

  4. Julia Annas also suggested, somewhat earlier, that ethical virtue might be considered a special kind of skill involving the exercise of phronêsis and practical expertise: see Annas (1993, esp. 67–73) and Annas (1995, 2011, 2012). Aristotle says that phronêsis and the ethical virtues are mutually entailing, so in this paper I am assuming something that follows from that, viz. that phronêsis is necessarily accompanied by motivational and other inner states which are partially constitutive of the ethical virtues. (It is worth noting that according to a utilitarian or otherwise very anti-Aristotelian account of the virtues, motivational and other ‘internal’ states might be taken to have no essential bearing on whether someone embodies a particular virtue. From the point of view of this paper: So much the worse for such accounts.)

  5. For this idea see e.g. Russell (2015), which includes Russell’s own reservations about it. Moral development is a major theme of Stichter’s book and other contemporary work on virtue theory that headlines its familiarity with the most recent empirical studies in psychology. For reservations about the philosophical lessons to be drawn from empirical studies in a specific recent case, see Birondo (2020b).

  6. The issues here are enormously complicated and my intention has only been to signal that they are much more complicated than Stichter’s discussion indicates: see also n. 12 below. Cf. Aristotle’s similar observations: NE 1137a14–17; Eudemian Ethics 1227a18–20 (quoted in Angier 2010, 37). Aristotle also says: “it is not the function of medicine simply to make a man quite healthy, but to put him as far as it may be on the road to health; it is possible to give excellent treatment even to those who can never enjoy sound health” (Rhetoric I.1, 1355b10–14, quoted in Dunne 1993, 266). On the corresponding ‘specificatory’ aspect of virtue with respect to eudaimonia, see Russell (2009, 79–83; 2015, §4). In both of these works Russell mentions that his discussion of this issue is indebted to McDowell (1998). Tsai (2020) and Woodcock (2020) also more recently challenge the idea that since the end to be pursued in non-ethical expertise is ‘essentially fixed,’ figuring out which ends to pursue is unnecessary.

  7. This reading of Aristotle derives from McDowell (1995). See also now Rachel Barney’s brilliant paper (2021) on technê as a model for virtue in Plato. Barney finds in Plato a philosophical position strikingly similar to the one that I am suggesting in the wake of Aristotle. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I presented an earlier version of this paper at a conference at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, with Professor Barney in attendance at my talk. On the next day she presented her own, marvelous paper (it was one of the keynote addresses), leaving me astonished.

  8. Russell (2009) claims that if phronêsis is just cleverness aimed at right goals, then, objectionably, “this would suggest that there is no real difference in the operations of phronêsis and technê” (in Stichter’s characterization of Russell’s thought: see Stichter 2018, 124). This objection already reveals an unduly anemic conception of technê, as something analogous to ‘cleverness’ aimed at right goals. For a more robust conception of technê already in Plato, see Barney (2021).

  9. See e.g. NE II.4, 1105a17–1105b4. By involving the motivational and other internal states, skill-specific practical intelligence differs from, and does not conflict with, the domain-specific deliberation that Aristotle refers to at the outset of NE VI.5: deliberating well ‘in some particular respect’ as opposed to deliberating well about ‘the good life in general’ (NE 1140a26–28). The skill-specific practical intelligence I have in mind is most clearly operative in those traditional technai and their modern analogues (e.g. medical practice, legal practice, farming, policing) whose psychological structure is most similar to, or even identical with, the psychological structure of the virtues. If it is not operative in other cases, e.g. in checkers or bricklaying, that is neither here nor there (cf. MacIntyre 1981).

  10. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1046b10–13; Angier (2010, 40; 145, n. 12); Müller (2018, 71–75). In presenting this material at conferences, I have found that there is an overwhelming tendency for people to say that expert physicians, lawyers, etc., must possess the ethical virtues, at least to a certain extent. But even if the sicarios, for instance, seem to display courage and other virtuous traits, this appearance is utterly misleading: such traits are simulacra of the genuinely virtuous traits whose excellence is indexed to the overall goodness of a human life. This is especially clear in the case of the sicarios of narco-culture whose expertise is shear, terrorizing brutality. Separating the ‘ethical’ from other skilled dimensions of a particular technê is also somewhat arbitrary, although expert physicians, lawyers, philosophers, etc., might also be good people. On the brutality of real-world narco-violence, see Sánchez (2020); see also Barney (2021) on the deontological constraints of ‘practical identities.’

  11. On this point see especially Barney (2021), Nussbaum (1995), and Annas (1988). Here the discussion intersects with my own previous work on the prospects for a philosophical validation of the virtues that appeals to an ‘external,’ but nevertheless morally determinative, conception of human nature and what the alternative ‘internal validation’ might plausibly look like: see e.g. Birondo (2015, 2017, 2020a).

  12. In drawing his own contrast between phronêsis and technê, Stichter says that an expert practitioner’s responsiveness to the distinctive demands of a practice “does not require phronêsis,” i.e., it “does not also require reflecting on the ends of the practice within an overall conception of living well” (2018, 125–126). That is true but irrelevant: The technê-specific practical intelligence that I am suggesting only requires reflecting on the ends of the practice from within the ongoing historical development of that practice (e.g. of medicine). Barney (2021) rightly says that any genuine technê must be organized around a unifying end, and so be more than “merely a grab-bag of techniques.” So any genuine technê requires reflecting on such an end at least enough for there to be such a unity, although it need not be concerned with eudaimonia more broadly (see §3 above, as well as Tsai 2020 and Woodcock 2020). But if an expert practitioner goes still further, by reflecting on the ends of her expertise within “an overall conception of living well” (eudaimonia), which is crucial for unifying her life’s projects as a whole, this would certainly not require the virtue of phronêsis, as Stichter suggests, since that would restrict such practical reflection, absurdly, only to people who possess the ethical virtues. There are many conceptions of eudaimonia.

  13. In these observations I have benefitted recently from Schlaifer (1936, 192–202). MacIntyre (2011) emphasizes the modern socio-economic conditions that can impede moral development; Reséndez (2016) helpfully documents the historical pervasiveness and enduring inheritance of slavery in North America as far as the Pacific coast (an institution traceable to European appropriations of Aristotle: see Birondo 2020a). In thinking more generally about philosophy and its history, I have benefitted especially from the recent work of Karl Ameriks on the ‘historical turn’ in post-Kantian philosophy (or ‘late modernity’) up to and including the best philosophical work of our time, by writers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, and others even more recently. See Ameriks (2021, 2020, esp. Part II); see also Piercey (2009, esp. chs. 1–4).

  14. Lobkowicz (1967, 20–23) also emphasizes the capacity that I refer to here as ‘rational freedom.’ Sarah Broadie observes that in NE II.4, 1105a17–1105b4 (1) Aristotle’s claim about the products of the technai having their goodness in themselves involves a kind of exaggeration or overstatement (Broadie 1993, 83) and that (2) the claim is anyway superfluous to the main point Aristotle insists upon in the passage, which is that doing what is grammatical (e.g.) is not sufficient for being proficient in grammar (Broadie 1993, 119, n. 17). In a similar vein Annas (1995) says that Aristotle’s chief reason for denying that ethical virtue is a skill is that “skill is concerned with making (poiêsis), while virtue is concerned with action or doing (praxis).” She writes that “this is itself an artificial distinction, which runs against Aristotle’s language elsewhere” (Annas 1995, n. 5; but cf. Angier 2010, 42–46; Müller 2018, esp. n. 34). When Russell (2015, 22) contrasts virtue and technê in Aristotle, these subtle interpretative points seem to go missing.

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Acknowledgements

Work on this paper was supported by the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, while I was a visiting scholar there in summer 2015; I am grateful to David Bronstein, my faculty host, and the KIE’s helpful library staff. After its initial conference presentation in 2014, the paper was presented at the Neglected Virtues Conference in Honour of Rosalind Hursthouse, organized by Glen Pettigrove (Auckland, 2015); the American Philosophical Association (Kansas City, 2017); the Central States Philosophical Association (St. Louis, 2017); the Conference on Virtue, Skill, and Practical Reason, organized by Tom Angier (Cape Town, 2017); and the Institute for Philosophical Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (Mexico City, 2020). Thanks are due to the participants on each of these occasions, especially the most recent audience at UNAM and Carlos Pereda for hosting my visit at the Institute; to my students Adara Corbin, Russell Greenall-Sharp, Krista Shields, and Tilette Stewart with whom I read central chapters of Stichter (2018); and to Rachel Barney for generously sending me a pre-publication draft of Barney (2021). Special thanks to the two anonymous referees for Ethical Theory and Moral Practice for their invaluable comments.

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Birondo, N. Aristotle and Expertise: Ideas on the Skillfulness of Virtue. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 24, 599–609 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10170-y

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