Abstract
Recently virtue ethicists, such as Julia Annas and Matt Stichter, in order to explain what a moral virtue is and how it is acquired, suggest modeling virtue on practical expertise. However, a challenging issue arises when considering the nature of practical expertise especially about whether expertise requires articulacy, that is, whether an expert in a skill is required to possess an ability to articulate the principles underlying the skill. With regard to this issue, Annas advocates the articulacy requirement (i.e., expertise requires articulacy), while Stichter denies. Stichter raises two objections to Annas’s requirement: first, Annas provides no argument for the requirement; second, there exist counterexamples in which there are experts who cannot articulate what and why they did in skilled performance. In this paper I shall show that Annas did provide an argument and can respond to the counterexamples; however, her argument and response are not convincing. Instead, I construct a new argument for the articulacy requirement by which I call the argument from success-conduciveness. The main idea involved in this new argument, i.e., articulacy is success-conducive, supports further that ethical expertise requires articulacy due to the seriousness of morality.
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Notes
Annas attributes the skill model to Plato (or accurately Plato’s Socrates) while Stichter attributes the skill model to Aristotle. An exegetical issue is raised here: Annas claims that Aristotle rejects the skill model altogether (Annas 1995, p. 228, 2003, p. 16), but Stichter (Stichter 2007a, pp. 189–190) insists that Aristotle does endorse the skill model and accuses Annas of mischaracterizing Aristotle’s position on the skill model due to her ignoring that there is a different version of the skill model from Annas’s own. The exegetical issue of whether Aristotle endorses the skill model (see, e.g., Angier 2010; Stalnaker 2010) is left aside in this paper.
The proponents of the skill model of virtue do not advance the thesis that virtues are identical to skills, but the thesis that virtues are analogous to (or a subset of) skills in certain significant aspects. The former thesis is too strong and vulnerable to objections such as those discussed by Linda Zagzebski (1996, pp. 106–113).
Annas and Stichter are the two most prominent contemporary proponents of the skill model of virtue. But if we use the term “skill” broadly to include the conception of intelligence, then Snow (2008), who explains virtues via social intelligence, and Russell (2009), who explains virtues via practical intelligence, can be counted in.
The condition, so construed, shows that a unified grasp or “complete understanding” (Annas 2001, p. 244) is an integral component of an articulate ability. Thus, what is articulated by an expert must be related to his or her understanding. With regard to the content of grasping or understanding of a skill, Annas characterizes it as follows: “Learning a skill is not just a matter of learning bits of information which pile up in an aggregative way. A skill involves mastery of different things, but they are linked in the expert’s grasp by the way he can see them in terms of the principles unifying the field” (Annas 1995, p. 231). That is, not only an amount of information is required to be known by an expert, but also the relationship that governs all or most of the bits of information. For a related discussion, specifically regarding the holistic and practical features of understanding, see Zagzebski (2001, 2009) for a detailed exposition and Tsai (2014b) for a critical assessment of Zagzebski’s view.
Although in her works Annas uses the terms “articulate ability”, “rational ability”, and “ability to give an account” interchangeable, I shall use the term “articulate ability” in the main in this paper.
An articulate ability is second-order because it takes another ability, in this case a practical ability, as its object of explanation.
For Annas, “Some readers may come to think that ‘analogy’ is not the best term for a relation so close that some have come to think of virtue as itself being a kind of skill; but what is most important is to bring out the shared features and their importance” (Annas 2011a, p. 2).
Gardening, skills in sport, skills in nursing (e.g., Benner 2001, Chap. 2), and so on are often used as examples of skills without articulacy.
Some may think that Stichter is developing only one objection in the quotation, that is, the counterexample objection. However, if this is the case, then Stichter could go straight to Annas’s “argument” for the articulacy requirement.
Annas’s statement “Either ‘knowing how’ involves ‘knowing that’ or it does not” can be read more charitably as saying that “Either ‘knowing how to do something’ involves ‘knowing that such-and-such is an underlying principle upon which one acts’ or it does not”. Otherwise, the term “knowing that” might be read to refer to any kind of propositional knowledge.
Cf.: “This idea, that conveying and acquiring a skill requires articulacy, often meets resistance. This may take the form of pointing to skills where articulacy does not appear to be necessary; sometimes gardening is given as an example. In some cases, such as physical skills, the person outstanding in the skill may not be the best at conveying it (as with athletes and coaches). Many of these will be cases where what is at stake is really mastery of technical matters needed for the exercise of the skill, or where what is important is natural talent” (Annas 2011a, p. 19).
Elsewhere Annas makes a similar response to the counterexample objection with an explanation of why she is interested in a particular kind of skill: “In any case, it does not matter for this account [i.e., mastering a skill requires articulacy] if there are such cases [i.e., the cases of skill in which articulacy is not necessary], since the claim is simply that virtue has a structure which can be found in cases of skill which do exhibit the features of need for learning and drive to aspire. That we sometimes use the notion of skill more broadly than this does not affect the account” (Annas 2011a, p. 19).
The background of this contrast is Ryle’s concern with what it is that constitutes intelligent action. Assuming that an intelligent action is a manifestation of knowing-how, the question then is what knowing-how is. The question is discussed in Chapter Two of The Concept of Mind (1949) entitled “Knowing How and Knowing That”, in which Ryle proposes two theses: the negative thesis claims that knowing-how is not a species of knowing-that, and the positive thesis claims that knowing-how is abilities, skills, or intelligent capacities. Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson’s much-discussed article “Knowing How” (2001) helps to renew interest in Ryle’s theses, although they challenge both theses. See Tsai (2011a, b, 2014a) for defense and elaboration of the Rylean theses.
This condition is rough because here I omit, among other things, considerations about an agent’s intention and physical condition to use a skill.
A single-track disposition, when extended, becomes a multi-track disposition. But it should be noted that there are two kinds of multi-track disposition (corresponding to D2 and D3 mentioned in Sect. 4). A mere multi-track disposition enables its possessor to obtain success in a limited variety of situations, while an articulate multi-track disposition enables its possessor to obtain success in a greater variety of situations.
Sosa uses this account to deal with the value problem in epistemology, i.e., why knowledge is more valuable than its corresponding mere true belief. Here I shall not address how Sosa applies his account to solve the value problem.
An articulate skill is a skill to articulate the underlying principles of a first-order practical skill. Such a skill includes telling one why such and such is not a way to perform an operation of a first-order skill; that is, telling one doing such and such will lead to a failure. So, risk-assessment is a part of an articulate skill.
In the above quotation Stichter offers three reasons for the view that morality requires articulacy: first, morality is serious, second, articulacy assists to formulate more concrete success conditions for acting morally and well, and third, articulacy assists to reach moral agreements. Furthermore, no matter how detailed Stichter explains the relation between articulacy and morality, he does not and will not explain it in such a way that articulacy contributes to moral expertise qua expertise. However, even if morality requires articulacy due to a variety of reasons that are irrelevant to the idea of expertise, this does not exclude the possibility that articulacy can be relevant and contribute to moral expertise qua expertise. What matters for the present paper is to show how it might be possible to attribute articulacy to moral expertise qua expertise, rather than to examine all the reasons Stichter offers.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their constructive comments and encouragement. The material of this paper was presented at Soochow University, Chinese Culture University, National Taiwan University, National Yang-Ming University, and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. I thank the audiences on those occasions for helpful discussions, especially Feng-bin Chang, Yiu-ming Fung, Kai Marchal, Michael Mi, Shane Ryan, Ellie Wang, and Wen-fang Wang.
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This study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (Grant Nos. MOST 103-2410-H-031-068-MY5 and NSC 101-2632-H-031-001-MY3).
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The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.
