RT Article
T1 Virtues, Skills, and Right Action
JF Ethical theory and moral practice
VO 14
IS 1
SP 73
OP 86
A1 Stichter, Matt
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2011
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1785695983
AB According to Rosalind Hursthouse’s virtue based account of right action, an act is right if it is what a fully virtuous person would do in that situation. Robert Johnson has criticized the account on the grounds that the actions a non-virtuous person should take are often uncharacteristic of the virtuous person, and thus Hursthouse’s account of right action is too narrow. The non-virtuous need to take steps to improve themselves morally, and the fully virtuous person need not take these steps. So Johnson argues that any virtue based account of right action will have to find a way to ground a moral obligation to improve oneself. This paper argues that there is an account of virtue that can offer a partial solution to Johnson’s challenge, an account where virtue is a type of practical skill and in which the virtuous person is seen as having expertise. The paper references the account of skill acquisition developed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus. Their research demonstrates that novices in a skill have to employ different strategies to act well than the strategies used by the experts, and so the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis provides support for Johnson’s claim that the actions of the non-virtuous will differ from the virtuous. On the other hand, their research suggests that there is no separating the commitment to improve yourself from the possession of expertise, and so the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis has the resources for grounding the obligation to improve oneself in an account of virtue.
K1 Virtue
K1 Skill
K1 Right action
K1 Johnson
K1 Hursthouse
K1 Expertise
K1 Ethics
K1 Dreyfus
DO 10.1007/s10677-010-9226-y