>>Linda Zagzebski: One of the most important issues in the study of virtue going back to
Socrates and Confucius is the question whether virtue can be taught. Socrates argued that
virtue is a kind of knowledge- knowledge of what is good and bad. He believed that if
you really know what is good, you will act to achieve it. Nobody does wrong in full awareness
of the wrongness of what they are doing. If virtue is a kind of knowledge, it would seem
that virtue can be taught, but Socrates says in Plato’s Meno that virtue cannot be taught.
It’s a gift from the Gods. This is interesting in at least two ways. One is that it is an
intellectualist view of the nature of virtue. Virtue is a matter of mentally grasping what
the good is. That sounds optimistic for learners of virtue. But it turns out that it doesn’t
work that way. Plato’s Socrates does not think that we get the knowledge that constitutes
virtue the way we get the date of a historical battle. It’s knowledge that we had before
birth but which we forgot when we were born into a human body. Getting the knowledge that
makes us virtuous, like all true knowledge, is a matter of recovering what we knew before
we were born. This is interesting in a second way. It means that everyone has a dim awareness
of good and evil. To me that sounds very plausible. Aristotle’s approach to learning virtue
was different from Plato’s because Aristotle thought that virtue has an element of handling
emotion, something that is not just a matter of knowing what is good and bad. To see how
Aristotle approaches the learning of virtue, it is helpful to see the stages in between
being non-virtuous and being virtuous. When we are born, we are neither virtuous nor vicious,
but we have the capacity to become either one. So we start out in a neutral state. As
we grow, our parents and teachers tell us what to do and what not to do, and we go through
the motions of acting virtuously without inner-direction. But eventually good behavior becomes a habit,
and if all goes well, habituation makes virtuous acts easier and easier to do until eventually,
acting virtuously is even pleasant. Nobody is really virtuous, according to Aristotle,
unless acting virtuously is like a second nature. The process of becoming virtuous explains
two states in between non-virtuous and virtuous: incontinence and continence. Children do not
know what virtue requires them to do and they do not desire to do it. They are not virtuous
because they do not have a stable virtuous character, but they are not vicious either
because they also don’t have a stable vicious character. They are not kind, but they are
not unkind. They are not just, but they are not unjust. They act naturally and without
any habits whether good or bad. Learning virtue means that there will be times when we are
incontinent. The incontinent person knows what virtue requires, but his desire to do
the opposite is too strong, and he does not act virtuously. It is important that Aristotle
does not think that an incontinent person is vicious. Such a person is morally weak.
I think we are all morally weak a good deal of the time. Moral weakness is not the same
as vice because the vicious person doesn’t even think she shouldn’t be vicious. She
wants to be unkind and she doesn’t even aim at being kind or feel remorse when she
is unkind. Continence brings a person much closer to virtue. A continent person knows
what virtue requires, desires not to do it, and after a struggle, does the right thing.
Both the continent and incontinent person struggle. The incontinent person struggles
and virtue loses. The continent person struggles and virtue wins. The continent person is morally
strong but not virtuous because a virtuous person does not have to struggle. The virtuous
person has made virtuous motives as well as virtuous behavior a deep part of her character.
When she acts virtuously, she is doing what she wants to do. Learning virtue is therefore
partly a matter of educating the emotions and desires according to Aristotle. How can
we do that? I think that mere practice and habituation cannot explain it. We need models
of what we want to be. Most of what we learn in life is by imitation, and emulation is
a kind of imitation in which we try to be like someone whom we admire, who is a kind
of ideal for ourselves. There is evidence that learning by emulation works for young
children. In a very interesting empirical study, children ages 3-7 years old were put
in a situation in which they had to decide whether to lie. Some of the children were
first told a story. The children told the story of George Washington and the Cherry
Tree were much less likely to lie than children who were not told a story. Even more interesting,
if the children were first told the story of Pinocchio, it did not affect their behavior
at all. They were affected by a positive model but not a negative one. What about adolescents
and adults? We imitate throughout our lives, but you and I are not likely to emulate George
Washington because we heard a story about him telling the truth. David Velleman has
argued that we can see in others an ideal self, or what I call an exemplar- a person
whom we find supremely admirable. Velleman has described a process by which admiration
leads to the emulation of an admired person’s motives through wishful picturing of oneself
in the image of the admired person. We imagine ourselves as like the exemplar in the relevant
respect- say, a generous or an honest or kind person, and then we go about enacting this
self-image. It is interesting to investigate the psychology of learning emotions from others
by imagining being them with the emotions they have. I think we do this a lot when we
watch movies or read novels. What precipitates the identification with them is admiration-
not necessarily in every way, but in some respect, and we can project ourselves into
the character in imagination. It seems to me that imagining having an emotion is not
that different form actually having it. Sometimes people acquire an emotion or increase its
intensity by imagining it over and over again. Unfortunately, this can happen with negative
emotions. Think about how you can get angry with somebody, and by reliving the experience
over and over in imagination, the anger gets stronger and stronger. But my point is that
this can happen with positive emotions too. In the Analects Confucius speaks of imagining
himself as his exemplar, the Duke of Zhou. He used to dream of the Duke of Zhou frequently,
and he expressed sadness when he stopped doing it so much. He associated his admiration and
emulation of the Duke with dreaming of him as an ideal. It seems to me that Confucius
was doing what Velleman proposes that we all do. In projecting ourselves into an image
that we then enact, we gradually become the person we want to be. It seems to me that
human selves are very pliable. Obviously when we’re young we are much more pliable than
when we are older. As we age, it’s harder to change our character because our character
has already been formed in one way or another. But there are ways we can get ourselves to
grow in a certain direction, and the strategy I am talking about in this lecture is one
in which we imaginatively identify with a person we admire. Admiration is an important
motive in learning virtue, but so is love and friendship. In the next lecture we’ll
look at the role of friendship in acquiring virtues.