In a card, you make ONE (1) philosophical move in reaction to the assigned reading. So, each card has a page range of 1-2. You read the article and then make ONE (1) move. What's a Move? Philosophers

How Habits Make Us Virtuous

Nancy E. Snow

Marquette University

Intelligent Virtue: Skill and Expertise Paradigms of Virtue Cultivation

Annas (2011) offers a more robust paradigm of virtue acquisition requiring more conscious deliberation on the part of those who would be virtuous. Let us examine her view, then supplement it with the expertise model offered by Narvaez and Lapsley (2005). In these skill/expertise accounts, conscious processing assumes salience in virtue acquisition, though nonconscious processing is by no means absent. We should note, too, that it is appropriate to call these accounts ‘virtue cultivation,’ since virtue is explicitly being inculcated by those who want to be virtuous and by their mentors. In the folk pathways discussed above, virtue is being developed and acquired, though not explicitly cultivated for its own sake.

Intelligent virtue is a subtle and nuanced account of virtue acquisition in which all of the elements fit together in a cohesive whole with no one feature or set of features having a foundational role. Yet two key concepts have prominence – the notion that a virtue is like a practical skill, and the notion that virtue is essentially dynamic, that is, is in a continual state of development. Taking inspiration from ancient philosophers, Annas (2011) argues that we should look to how practical skills are developed for insights into how virtue should be acquired. Virtues, like practical skills, should be deliberately cultivated.

The deliberate cultivation of practical skills and virtues is a rich and complex endeavor, requiring motivation, cognition, and affect. Consider motivation. The motivational aspects of intelligent virtue are summed up in the need to learn and the drive to aspire (Annas 2011, 16ff). These are properties needed by and ascribed to learners of practical skills and virtue. Consider the need to learn. A serious learner, say someone learning to play the piano, strives to understand what her teacher is doing, and does not settle for simply copying or mimicking, but wants to know and do more for herself. As Annas (2011, 17; italics hers) puts it, “What the learner needs to do is not only to learn from the teacher or role model how to understand what she has to do and the way to do it, but to become able to acquire for herself the skill that the teacher has, rather than acquiring it as a matter of routine, something which results in becoming a clone-like impersonator.” The need to learn, I take it, is necessary for the drive to aspire, but the drive goes beyond the need. To see this, consider someone who needs to learn to swim so that she can exercise her arthritic back, but does not aspire to learn more about swimming than what is needed to keep afloat and get exercise. If she is able to do this, surely this person can be said to know how to swim, even though she lacks the aspiration to develop her abilities. As Annas (2011) has it, learners of virtue need both to learn how to be virtuous for themselves, that is, in their own way and not as a clone-like copy of another, and should have the drive to aspire to deeper, richer, more extensive practical understandings of how to be virtuous.

Described in this way, the need to learn and especially the drive to aspire clearly incorporate cognition and practical reasoning. Practical reasoning plays many roles in Annas (2011)’s account. For example, articulacy is required to both teach and learn the virtues (Annas 2011, 19). Just as an expert in a practical skill must be able to explain to a novice what she is doing and why, so, too, a teacher of virtue must be able to explain to a learner what it is to be brave or generous and why being that way is important. Those learning a practical skill or virtue must be able to use practical reasoning in a variety of sophisticated and highly personalized ways. I cannot develop my own abilities in a practical skill or a virtue without thinking about how and why I should do it, how and why I can be genuinely kind or compassionate, for example – what that would mean for me, with my personality and in my circumstances, and what it would mean for the recipients of my intended kindness and compassion. This, I take it, is what Annas (2011, 21) means by saying that practical skills and virtues develop in embedded contexts: they are embedded in our own life histories as individuals, woven into the warp and woof of our daily lives. Virtues are, in an important sense, our virtues, and not someone else’s. They are shaped both by the features of our external environments, and by the internal factors, such as temperament and reasoning ability, that comprise our unique psychologies.

It is important that we learn to be virtuous by acting in a specific kind of way (Annas 2011, 22). Though we might repeat skilled or virtuous actions over and over in order to learn them well, virtuous responses are educated and intelligent, not rote (Annas 2011, 28-29). Virtuous dispositions, like practical skills, are acquired and cultivated through habituation that is intelligent and flexible, not mindless routine (Annas 2011, 13). Yet, the emphasis on intelligence and conscious deliberation for the development of virtue does not preclude a role for nonconscious processing in her account. Annas (2011, 28-30) seems to recognize this point when she discusses expertise. In a memorable phrase, she says that “. . . reasons for acting can efface themselves without evaporating entirely,” and “. . . conscious thoughts seem to have disappeared; they are not taking up psychological room, or we would never see learners speed up as they become experts” (Annas 2011, 29). Eventually, as one becomes expert in a virtue or practical skill, conscious deliberation about whether, when, and how to act are no longer required. Annas (2011, 30) writes, “The reasons have left their effect on the person’s disposition, so that the virtuous response is an intelligent one while also being immediate and not one which the person needs consciously to figure out.” Yet she insists on the articulacy requirement: “There are people who apparently act virtuously but prove completely unable to explain why they did so; as with skill, this makes us think that we are dealing with a natural gift which has not yet been educated to become virtue proper” (Annas 2011, 30).

Let us mark two important differences between Annas (2011) and the folk account of habituation given earlier. Consider again someone with the goal of being a good parent. She can rely on both conscious and nonconscious processing to act in ways conducive to being a good parent. Presumably, some of these actions will be virtuous, expressing virtues such as care, compassion, fidelity, justice, generosity, and so on, will be flexible and intelligent, will become habituated through repetition, and will contribute to the development of virtuous dispositions. This example falls short of Annas (2011)’s model of intelligent virtue in at least two ways, one motivational, the other, cognitive. First, the parent is not directly aiming at the development of a virtue; she does not want to be just or compassionate for the sake of the virtue. She aspires to be virtuous because she aspires to be a good parent. It isn’t clear that this falls within the scope of what Annas (2011) would count as the development of virtue as a form of expertise. So, a question for Annas (2011)’s model is: can we develop expertise in virtue while aiming for something else, or must we always aspire directly to be just, generous, and so on, in order to satisfy the requirements of intelligent virtue? Second, the folk paradigm of habituation into virtue does not require that a virtuous individual always be able to explain her virtuous behavior. This falls foul of Annas (2011)’s articulacy requirement. To sum up the disagreement between the two accounts for the case of the person who develops virtue in order to be a good parent, we can say that the parent has the need to learn (in order to be just in the parenting context), but not the drive to aspire (in order to excel in justice). On Annas (2011)’s view, she is somewhere in the lower or intermediate ranges of virtue acquisition, but she is not on the path to expertise.

An expertise model of virtue cultivation that meshes well with Annas (2011) is offered by developmental psychologists Narvaez and Lapsley (2005), who build their account on an understanding of the workings of the nonconscious mind. To take just one example of how the workings of the nonconscious are incorporated into their account, consider their discussion of chronic priming as a tool that enables us to teach and learn virtue. As we teach virtue to children, we repeatedly expose them to virtue concepts and their meanings and applications in various social settings, with the hope that they will internalize the schemas and scripts (descriptions of action sequences) that show how to be virtuous, say, how to be kind or generous. The idea is that children’s learning of virtue through repeated exposure to schemas and scripts can result in chronic or enduring manifestations of virtue, so that children, internalizing guidance for how to act virtuously, will begin acting virtuously over time, and eventually develop virtuous dispositions as parts of their emerging characters. Here we can note compatibility between Annas (2011)’s view that virtue develops in embedded contexts and the development of virtue as a unique part of personality. Given the differences in the contexts in which we live and grow, it is entirely possible for me to develop the virtue of kindness as part of my unique character and personality, whereas you might have more frequent occasions for the development of courage. Embedded contexts for virtue acquisition make a difference as to which virtues develop, as well as the shape they take in individual lives – a point on which Annas (2011) and Narvaez and Lapsley (2005) agree.

Assuming, then, that the nonconscious mind is an active element in the acquisition of virtue, Narvaez and Lapsley (2005, 150-151) draw on the expertise literature in psychology to point out three respects in which experts differ from novices. First, experts’ knowledge of a domain is richer in concepts, more well-organized, and more highly interconnected than that of novices. This is connected with the second difference between experts and novices: owing to the differences in the depth, organization, and accessibility of their knowledge, experts see the world differently. In other words, the more experience one has, the better able one is to “read” or interpret the terrain one is navigating. This is consistent with Annas (2011)’s account of virtue as dynamic and as similar to practical skill development. Due to her experience with practicing virtue, the expert has a better developed ability to “read” situations than the novice, and can better recognize occasions for virtue, as well as the shape virtuous action should take in specific contexts. Finally, Narvaez and Lapsley (2005, 151) maintain that experts have developed a different set of skills than novices. Experts use routinized problem-solving skills and heuristics, and know what knowledge to access, which procedures to apply, and when and how to apply them. Novices, by contrast, proceed slowly, step by step, and their decision-making is often superficial. Narvaez and Lapsley (2005, 151) write: “Experts use automatic, goal-dependent processing, seeing meaningful information where novices do not.”

How are experts formed? Narvaez and Lapsley (2005, 152-154) identify three crucial factors. The first is that experts learn in situations that reward appropriate behavior. These situations provide “learning structures” that shape the intuitions of learners. Similar to what Annas (2011) calls ‘embedded contexts,’ these are environments that provide learners with opportunities to engage their skills and get supportive feedback and mentoring. The second factor is that expertise is acquired by the use of explicit theory to guide actions. That is, the implicit or nonconscious learning described earlier is reinforced or deepened by the use of explanation. This meshes well with Annas (2011)’s emphasis on articulacy and explanation. Expertise in virtue is not just a matter of developing virtues in the context of automatically pursuing goals, but requires deliberate thought and the ability to explain actions explicitly in terms of reasons. Explicit explanations deepen the practitioner’s understanding of virtue and situate its practice within the larger context of her life and evaluative commitments. Finally, time and focused practice in a domain is the third factor implicated in the development of expertise. Narvaez and Lapsley (2005, 153-154) note that some psychologists believe this is the key to expertise, and that expertise development requires about 10,000 hours or ten years of focused practice. This is consistent with Annas (2011)’s insistence on the need to learn and the drive to aspire. Practice in virtue that is geared to expertise development requires commitment, self-directedness, and the desire to improve. Narvaez and Lapsley (2005, 154) note that past a certain level, expert practice becomes automatic, and many experts lose the ability to explain what they are doing. Though this conflicts with the articulacy requirement, it is prima facie compatible with another aspect of Annas (2011)’s account, namely, her observation that reasons for acting become self-effacing, but do not evaporate entirely.

The skill/expertise accounts of virtue cultivation take us beyond the folk paradigm of habituation in three key respects. First, roles for nonconscious processing involved in cultivating virtue as a form of expertise are explored in detail by Narvaez and Lapsley (2005). This goes beyond explanations currently provided by the folk account, according to which people nonconsciously acquire virtue in the course of developing other life goals, imitating role models, or following practical advice. Second, the use of explanation, articulacy, and practical reasoning is stressed by both Annas (2011) and Narvaez and Lapsley (2005), though the latter recognize that at higher levels of expertise, the ability to articulate what one is doing becomes lost. This heightened role for conscious virtue cultivation contrasts with the minimalism assumed by the folk paradigm. Finally, the skill/expertise accounts pay attention to the deliberate use of situations or contexts to cultivate virtue. The folk paradigm acknowledges the role of situational factors in triggering virtue-relevant goals and setting in train virtuous action, as well as in eliciting deliberation about how best to act virtuously in certain settings, but does not explore the deliberate use of such factors as a means of cultivating virtue.