Jennifer Welchman, Department of Philosophy
Humanities Centre 4-115, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, AB, Canada T6G 2E5
<jennifer.welchman@ualberta.ca>
I: The Problem:
A striking feature of contemporary virtue theory is the near universal tendency to treat moral agents as if they sprang into being as full adults – adults, moreover, who sometimes face death (how else could they display their courage?) but never the incremental decline that comes with the increasingly long lives people today can expect. The virtues most discussed in the literature are traits associated with the middle period of our lives, the period when we possess the means & the opportunity to be just, merciful, or charitable towards others, prudent or temperate with our resources, and honest, vain-glorious, or modest about our accomplishments. By contrast, dispositions closely associated with periods of dependency, such as gratitude, loyalty, and trust, however serviceable they may be to ourselves or others, are either ignored outright or grudgingly allowed an inferior status.
This narrow focus on a single period in our lives is understandable in the principle-based ethical theories that are among the continuing legacies of Kantian and high Modern thought. If one presumes that morality is a matter of reasoning from and about moral principles, then naturally the only sorts of agents who matter will be those agents fully competent to perform as autonomous moral reasoners. [i] Principle-based theories have been criticized for the narrowness of their conception of moral personhood, not infrequently by proponents of character-based approaches. But to judge by the literature, these criticisms have not often been taken to heart. Most virtue theorists give no more serious attention to the development of morally important character traits throughout a lifetime than do their principle-based counter-parts. [ii] The virtue ethics literature focuses almost exclusively on our early to middle adulthood. The malleability that underpins moral development, so far from being a subject of interested attention, is not infrequently deplored as a sign of weakness or degeneration in a moral agent. Thus virtue theorists usually turn out to be talking about essentially the same group of agents principle-based theorists do, individual, independent, autonomous adult moral reasoners.
Contemporary virtue theorists are of course not alone in this. The classical models on which so many draw treat human development as the realization of an essential human nature. Though Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero themselves do give considerable attention to the process by which this self-realization is accomplished, the essentialism of these theorists limits the period of moral agency during which virtues and vices can be possessed almost as severely as do principle-based accounts. For prior to one's mature realization of one's potential character, one either has no character at all or a character not truly one's own. Thus any virtues or functional excellences associated with this early developmental period are either not virtues at all or not truly one's own virtues. [iii] And once one has realized one's potential for character and self-development as fully as one is able, further progress is impossible. Henceforth to change is to regress or degenerate as a person. Again any functional excellences associated specifically with this later stage of life can not properly be called virtues at all or not truly one's own. For anyone approaching middle life, these accounts paint a disturbing picture of one's moral future, even granting the comfortable assumption of these less youth-oriented societies that no one can really be called mature before she is fifty.
Contemporary philosophers put the realization of character much earlier and so also the beginning of the rot. Although most reject essentialism, few it seems are confident about the possibility of significant development of character past our early adulthood. Joel Kupperman writes "people typically have what we would unhesitatingly call characters only when they are past the years of early childhood." [iv] Gregory Trianosky discusses the case of a "nobly motivated young adult ... now set in the ways of his childhood, " putting the formation of character only slightly later. [v] Similarly Jonathan Jacobs holds that "there is a difference between having characteristics and having a settled character. The young person [i.e., a child or an adolescent] [vi] has characteristics that may become fixed, but there is still plasticity of character that can be shaped by voluntary action" (20), which suggests that our characters are pretty well settled by our early twenties.
As I look back over the two decades that have past since I was in my early twenties, I find it utterly incredible that however my life may have changed, my character has not. My closet refutes it. There on the floor are the sensible shoes I was once convinced I would never wear – in not one but three colors. Twenty years ago I had no hobbies, unless you were to count reading. Now I drive antique trams – my blue motorman's uniform is just there on the left. Reading isn't something I have much time for now. Twenty years ago there were no exercise clothes in my closet, because I threw them away when I escaped mandatory school sports. But today I have microfibre t-shirts, leggings, and race-walking shoes, because knee trouble has recently forced me to give up running. My closet used to be crammed with the collapsible backpacks, duffle-bags, and totes that were required for the sort of strenuous travel I favored. Now that I travel with children I have enormous suitcases that have to be stored in the basement. Besides, hotel porters are more willing to help with suitcases than they are with dufflebags and totes. I could go on, but why bother? I am sure your own closets tell similar tales. The important question is what we should make of them.
One might say -- "nothing." Your tastes in footwear have changed, so what? Raising children may change your luggage and your vacation choices but surely it does not change your character. Nor do hobbies or exercise. Such incidental changes are no indication of a change in one's character. But that conclusion may be premature.
As to the first point, it isn't my aesthetic appreciation of shoes that has changed, it is the value I assign to them. I still think my sensible shoes are unattractive. Attractiveness is no longer as important a quality in shoes for me as it once was. I used to spend my time at school, in libraries, hanging out, going to clubs. Now during the day, I stand for hours in lecture halls and after work I chase toddlers down supermarket aisles or stand at the sidelines of muddy soccer fields. As to the second, parenting has changed a great deal more than my luggage – for parenting behavior is not easily switched off and on. I find I look at my students with a motherly eye I certainly did not have even ten years ago. And I worry more about them than I used to. Third, I do not read as much now because increasingly I prefer to spend my leisure time in group activities. I started running when a group of neighbors did. I drive trams in part because I enjoy working with the volunteer organization that restores them.
In his latest book, Jacobs claims that "when a person changes for the better in significant ways it can be very difficult to ascertain whether the positive change occurs because conditions are now favorable to bringing out the good that was in him or because he is making dramatically new acknowledgments and re-composing his character." [vii] From a pragmatic point of view, the idea that we can possess dispositions to act not expressed in our actions (bar extreme and unusual circumstances) is hard to credit. I find equally hard to credit the idea that a sustained change in a person's behavior is not good evidence of a change in her character. If a person's patterns of activity change substantially over time, then the dispositions from which she acts must also have changed. So though my temperament has not altered and I retain many of the same tastes and interests I had in the past, the consortium of predominant dispositions that determine my choices and actions – i.e., my character – has changed. The changes have been far from radical. Constancy of temperament and of my social environment assures that. But though incremental, the changes are cumulatively significant. Some of the changes were involuntary, others the effects of deliberate tinkering on my part. And judging by my mother's closet, the process is not over yet.
II: A Deweyan Perspective:
This conception of the relation of character and action is one I have taken over from John Dewey. As a pragmatist, Dewey viewed ideas and theories, descriptive and evaluative, as socially constructed instruments for managing human experience. His constructivism was not limited to his understanding of our beliefs, scientific and moral. He also viewed human character as largely constructed rather than given. We are biological creatures born with physiological and temperamental traits that are the basic stuff of our development as persons. Development of a functional and well-integrated character out of the multiple and competing drives that constitute our raw human nature is an achievement, not a given. If you and I are free, autonomous persons who can claim virtues of character, it is not because we were born so but because interaction with others has taught us to reflect upon and to take some control over ourselves and our actions. [viii]
Initially most of the credit goes to our social group, whose inculcation of habits of thought, reflection, approval and disapproval, gave us the tools to recognize and reflect upon, and inhibit or reinforce, our first-order dispositions and temperamental promptings in accordance with more or less coherent schemes of value. The credit thereafter, is increasingly our own, as we reflect upon and revise the membership and rank-ordering of the consortium of higher order action-guiding dispositions that for Dewey constitute our characters. But the credit never becomes entirely our own. Early socialization leaves enduring legacies for good or ill. And characters are never transparent to their possessors. A Deweyan conception of character does not entail that radial character reform would be easy or frequent. But it does involve commitment to the position that as he puts it: "conduct and character are strictly correlative." [ix] Character traits with no externally observable influence on conduct are traits whose existence we have no business positing. By the same reasoning, since individuals' patterns of conduct vary over time, we have no business positing that character once formed remains constant. These changes are indicators of life-long, if gradual, character change.
Of course Dewey is not the only possible source for such a view of character. There are other, more or less pragmatic, conceptions around. But what is unique and particularly valuable about Dewey's own theory is the way he integrates his notion of the continuous evolution of character into his conception of human flourishing and of the role of the virtues within it. Unfortunately, his approach has been underappreciated by moral philosophers because it is most fully developed in his philosophy of education, especially texts such as Democracy and Education and Education and Experience, not in his better known contributions to moral philosophy, such as Human Nature and Conduct or Ethics. [x] The reasons for this were twofold. First, Dewey feared that virtue language was so inextricably linked with classical or theological perfectionist theories as to be unsalvageable by post-Darwinian naturalistic philosophies. Second, despite his resistance to twentieth-century philosophy's linguistic turn, his own moral philosophy became preoccupied with many of the same issues of the language, logic, and ontology of morals that everywhere were pushing questions of character to the periphery of philosophical debate.
The situation was different in educational circles. Progressive era educational reformers had seized upon Rousseauian notions of education as a basis for reforming public schools. Traditional schools, they argued, distorted child development because they interfered with the natural unfolding of the child's latent potential. Though a critic of traditional education himself, Dewey could not let what he considered to be a misappropriation of Rousseau to go unopposed. In his responses, he began to work out the basis for a pragmatic conception of character and the virtues.
In Democracy and Education, and Education and Experience, [xi] Dewey argues for recognition of continual growth as a sine-qua-non of a 'good' or meaningful life.
Our net condition is that life is development and that development, growing, is life. Translated into its educational equivalents, that means (1) that the educational process has no end beyond itself, it is its own end; and that (2) the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing, transforming. [xii]
How ever we define human flourishing, Dewey reasons, we must recognize that human beings change profoundly over time as do the physical and social environments in which they operate. Thus there is no particular condition or state of affairs that will constitute flourishing for any person throughout their lives. Flourishing and its requirements inevitably change over time. If we are to flourish, we must continually be able to adapt our dispositions to our perpetually shifting circumstances. As early as 1897, Dewey was pointing out to educators that "it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions." [xiii] Nor can one tell what anyone's abilities, interests, opportunities, or resources will be twenty years hence. Peter Pan could step out of time and live in an endless present. We can not. Our dispositions, resources, and abilities are not static. The question is whether we are content simply to change as circumstances dictate or whether we prefer to grow.
Dewey defines 'growth' as the development of new interests and abilities that can take the place of or transform failing interests or abilities over time. Growth differs from mere change in that it is a directed transformation, development, or reconstruction of abilities, interests, and activities. As such, growth is desirable as a means of promoting flourishing for oneself and others. But it is more than – it is desirable for its own sake. Thus growth, he argues, is the key to flourishing.
Although the claim that growth is desirable is hardly new, Dewey argues, it has in the past almost invariably be misinterpreted. In educational theory, he writes:
Our tendency [is] to take immaturity as mere lack, and growth as something which fills up the gap between the immature and the mature ...We treat it simply as privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard. [xiv]
That is, growth is treated as a process of a development that ends on arrival at a state called "maturity" Once maturity is reached, growth is over – we can only regress or decay. Dewey agrees that when we cease to grow, our character and welfare do begin to decline. What he rejects is the idea that we reach a point beyond which further growth is unnecessary or undesirable. Thus, he writes:
Normal child and normal adult alike, in other words, are engaged in growth. The difference between them is not the difference between growth and no growth but between the modes of growth appropriate to different conditions.... we may say the child should be growing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic curiosity unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness. One statement is as true as the other. [xv]
Normal adults can continue to grow in this sense, that is, to develop, reconstruct, and transform their interests and abilities and thus the contents of their closets. But the natural and spontaneous pre-dispositions that support growth in children seem to wither away unless they are deliberately cultivated in later life. Dewey identifies these capacities as the child's natural dependence and plasticity. He notes that: "it sounds absurd to hear dependence spoken of as something positive, still more absurd as a power.' [xvi] And it sounds equally absurd to speak of plasticity as a "power." [xvii] But Dewey insists that the child's psychological dependence is not mere helplessness. It is a set of powers to elicit and maintain assistance in growing by encouraging and rewarding social interaction. [xviii] Similarly the plasticity on which growth depends is not simply malleability. It involves powers to respond constructively to internal and external changes. Dependence and plasticity are thus complexes of capacities, interests and dispositions to act, more or less spontaneous in children, that must nevertheless be cultivated to foster ongoing personal growth.
III: The Implications:
Dewey does not analyse these powers or abilities much further. But we can begin to do so for ourselves by asking which dispositions or interests, especially pronounced in children, seem to make the greatest contribution to their growth as persons. We must remember that these will
not necessarily be traits that make children "good" from their elder's point of view, such as docility, obedience, or quietness. Actively growing and changing beings are often unpredictable and so more difficult to manage than we might like. But from the child's point of view, the characteristics making them difficult to raise may turn out to be the most desirable. If moreover, these traits desirable for their contribution to the child's growth are also desirable in themselves, then these will be plausible candidates for recognition as virtues of plasticity and dependence.
Of course, the virtues of our minority are not virtues proper according to classical theories of the virtue. For example, Aristotle remarks, "The child is imperfect, and therefore obviously his virtue is not relative to himself alone, but to the perfect man and to his teacher. [xix] To be specific, their worth is relative to their tendency to help us achieve the virtues of our majority, i.e., courage, benevolence, temperance, justice, et cetera. To have any further need of the traits that help us develop the virtues would indicate arrested development. As Aristotle says of the feeling of shame, "we think it right for young people to be prone to shame since they live by feeling and hence often go astray, but are restrained by shame... No one, by contrast, would praise an older person for readiness to feel disgrace, since we think it wrong for him to do any action that causes a feeling of disgrace." [xx] Because the virtues of minor children are virtues specific to minority – he views them as precursors to virtues rather than virtues themselves.
Indeed if they were not outgrown, the virtues of minority might even undermine the virtues of majority precisely because the former promote growth and change. If a virtue proper is the stable realization of a mature human disposition, then traits fostering continual change threaten our virtues. Dispositions and interests that keep us plastic and inter-dependent beyond childhood are weaknesses to be overcome, not strengths to be encouraged. Thus for Aristotle, it is virtuous to be benevolent, but not to inspire benevolence in others. It is virtuous to have cause for self-esteem, but not to have cause to esteem others. And it is virtuous to be trustworthy in the face of danger, but not to be trusting. [xxi]
Although his reasons would differ, David Hume would have been no less quick to reject the virtues of minority as virtues proper. Hume holds any disposition or ability to be a virtue if it is customarily either useful or immediately agreeable to its possessor or other people. But Hume's broad definition rests in part on his denial of the traditional distinction between natural abilities as involuntary attributes and dispositions as acquired traits: "it being, " he claims, "almost impossible for the mind to change its character in any considerable article." [xxii] If character is unchangeable, then the minor virtues cannot customarily be useful or agreeable for promoting life-long character development. Any esteem or approbation associated with such traits must have some other source. For Hume then, as for Aristotle, the denial of value or importance to the traits that make us plastic or interdependent appears to arise solely from presuppositions about the nature and extent of character development; presuppositions which we have little reason to share.
A pantheon of what I shall call our minor virtues will thus differ significantly from more traditional pantheons, classical or modern. But which dispositions will it include? It would be impossible in the space available to present and defend any set of dispositions as complete or definitive. For the moment, I will just suggest seven likely candidates: curiosity, playfulness, confidence, sympathy, trust, gratitude, and loyalty. All arise more or less spontaneously in children, though most must be cultivated to become significant ingredients in their characters. Each may be said to foster growth in at least one of the two ways Dewey mentions, i.e., in keeping us plastic and/or interdependent in desirable ways. And each is arguably valuable in itself to its possessor as well as instrumentally. Indeed, each is arguably of greater value to its possessor than are any one of the traditional virtues of majority.
Major virtues such as courage, prudence, and benevolence are not, on reflection, dispositions we want highly developed in children. Courage in the face of threats to life and limb is not desirable in children and not only because children, especially younger children, lack the phronesis required to make wise choices about what risks to accept and for which sorts of projects (though this is usually true.) It is also because the sorts of projects that warrant serious risks are adults' projects and not the business of children to care for. [xxiii] Confidence in the future serves children better than courage in facing the challenges of education and growth. Prudence is a virtue in adults, but like courage it is not particularly desirable in children. Prudence in a child suggests an inappropriate close-mindedness to the new and untried. [xxiv] Curiosity and playfulness foster development better than prudent husbandry of existing skills or enjoyments.
Even benevolence seems out of place in young children, and again, not simply because children lack the capacity to make wise decisions about others' wants and needs. Benevolence is a disposition to devote one's resources or one's efforts to others. But children lack resources they can devote to others. And all their efforts are required for well-rounded growth. Wise parents take care to exhibit benevolence in ways children can comprehend. But they focus on cultivating children's natural but impulsive sympathetic responsiveness to others into the more stable and reliable sympathy that is a sine qua non of a truly benevolent character.
We approve and encourage children's trust in others, especially adults. Trust is essential for cooperation, which a child needs to grow physically and psychologically. [xxv] But we also encourage trust (and the sense of security that goes with it) as desirable in itself. Mistrustfulness, we think, can poison a child's experience of interaction with others. We try to inculcate the virtues of beneficiaries – gratitude and loyalty -- by which children can reward and positively reinforce their benefactors. [xxvi] We do this not simply for their respective instrumental values, but also because they are agreeable in themselves. Beneficiaries can suffer from feelings of inferiority in relation to their benefactors, if they feel unable to make a return (as Aristotle's disdain for gratitude and loyalty attest.) To be genuinely grateful or genuinely loyal is to have a happy appreciation of others' beneficial influence over one's life and character that acknowledges and honours beneficence, thus supporting rather than detracting from self-esteem.
What curiosity, playfulness, sympathy, confidence, trust, gratitude, and loyalty do for children, they also do for adults. Curiosity and sympathy for others fosters the redeployment and transformation of goals, projects, and purposes that prevent physical aging and decline from entailing the decline of meaningful activities. Trust in others and confidence in the future help us to face discouragement in learning new skills. Gratitude and loyalty make us fit companions of the colleagues and family who support our endeavours.
Some may nevertheless feel a mistake is being made, that although loyalty or gratitude, curiosity, or trust may make one better in performing specific social roles, they do not make one better as a person. Loyalty, it may be argued, makes one a better colleague, but is a better colleague necessarily a better person? Curious people are more likely to prove entertaining and informative dinner guests, but surely one could be a bore and be none the worse for it as a person? Sympathy is both useful and agreeable in doctors, lawyers, and other professionals whose services one may employ, but it is no guarantee that they are in other respects admirable people. Confidence is always an attractive quality but are there not diffident, self-deprecating people who have excellent characters despite their lack of confidence?
What seems to underlie the all such questions is a common but often unstated presumption that to function well socially is somehow peripheral to one's functioning as a person. Human sociality is treated as if it were just another instrumentality we have developed to help us overcome material obstacles to our species' survival; another artefact like stone tools, irrigation, or electric lights. But sociality is not an human artefact, it is our nature. We are incapable of leading flourishing lives that are not focussed around active social relationships. Social interaction is as necessary to our flourishing as food or shelter. Thus it is no surprise to learn from sociologists that two-thirds of the conversations of people in every walk of life, including university professors, are devoted to social gossip. We are unendingly fascinated with the minutiae of social interaction. Depression and anxiety are predictable results of the failure or create and maintain good working social relationships. [xxvii]
We are all familiar these days with the expression, "use it or lose it." We know we stand to lose physical fitness and well-being if we do not use our bodies as nature designed them to be used. We did not evolve in environments that favoured sedentary lifestyles combined with high calorie diets. To ignore this is to risk health problems that can seriously reduce the quality of one's later life. Increasingly, it seems that "use it or lose it" also applies to our mental flourishing. If we fail to develop substantial mental skills and abilities in early life or fail to cultivate and maintain these skills afterwards, we are at greater risk of developing serious cognitive impairments later in life, impairments that threat our quality of life. [xxviii]
Philosophers are thus not at elevated risk of developing dementia, whatever others may say of us, given the high-levels of early education most of us have had. And since philosophers usually engage in what occupational psychologists consider "cognitively demanding jobs," we are at less risk still. Studies of people with cognitively demanding occupations suggest they retain greater intellectual flexibility into later life than others in less demanding situations. But it is extremely important to understand what makes our work "cognitively demanding," for it may not be the features that most readily come to mind.
To quote one researcher: "the more diverse the stimuli, the greater the number of decisions required, the greater the number of considerations to be taken into account in making these decisions, and the more ill defined and apparently contradictory the contingencies" together with the degree of "self-direction"involved, the more demanding the work environment. [xxix] Cognitively demanding jobs are not necessarily jobs that require higher education. Supervision of other people by contrast, whether the work is skilled or unskilled, may rate as highly cognitively demanding. Jobs requiring a high-degree of self-direction in workers are liable to be more cognitively demanding than those that are less so. Thus even housekeeping can turn out to be a cognitively demanding occupation that maintains intellectual flexibility in those engaged in it. [xxx] On reflection, what makes professorial activity cognitively demanding may have less to do with our research and writing than with the time we spend engaged in teaching, evaluating, and advising our students and serving on committees with our colleagues. It seems likely that these aspects of professorial work, the ones calling upon interpersonal skills and dispositions such as sympathy, confidence, trust, and loyalty, count at least as towards making it "cognitively demanding" and so beneficial to one's long-term flourishing, as the more outwardly 'intellectual' ones.
Cognitively demanding occupations, paid or unpaid, seem to be ones in which people who have cultivated the minor virtues are apt to fare better. Indeed people who have cultivated the minor virtues are more apt to seek them out in the first place. Curiosity allows a work-place fraught with uncertainties to be rewarding. Playfulness makes it possible to view the necessary departures from previous learned strategies as entertaining. Sympathetic interest in others makes coping with the unpredictability of co-workers, employees, or clients enjoyable. Gratitude and loyalty to others makes it possible to reward those from whom help must be sought with the result that accepting help is not felt to be as weakness or powerlessness. And so forth. While we need not go so far as to predict that people who are disloyal colleagues, incurious bores, unsympathetic professionals or simply diffident, are necessarily the worse as persons, it is not unreasonable to fear that they may become the worse, over time, if they do not reflect upon and try to cultivate the minor virtues.
IV: Conclusion:
I am not arguing that the major virtues are not also virtues because they do not promote plasticity and interdependence as the minor virtues do. Virtues like courage, prudence, benevolence, and justice are valuable for the reasons usually given. But I think the argument does suggest that the major virtues may have been over-valued. At the very least their status as non-dependent, intersubjectively valuable virtues should be questioned. First, their value appears to be restricted to the relatively short period of our lives when we are mature and fully independent beings, suggesting they are highly context-dependent. By contrast, the minor virtues seem desirable as primary constituents of personal character through the whole of our lives. Second, the major virtues may be dependent in a another sense, i.e. directly dependent on the prior cultivation of the minor virtues. It is difficult to see how a person without sympathy for others could succeed in recognizing when benevolence or mercy are appropriate. It is equally difficult to see how a person mistrustful of others would display charity or generosity towards them. Even critics of loyalty's claim to be a virtue have recognized its necessity for the development of virtues such as justice, equity, and impartiality. [xxxi] Prudence in the absence of curiosity about the untried could become a fearful conservatism. Thus of the two groups of virtues, it seems that the minor virtues might be the more central to human flourishing.
Though more central, however, they are not sufficient in themselves. Growth and development ultimately present problems for which the minor virtues alone are not enough to cope successfully. This seems too obvious to require much elaboration. The independence of adulthood inevitably makes temperance important. The investment of unrecoverable time and energy into long-term projects makes prudence desirable. Opportunities to exercise power over others invite disaster, personal and social, if justice is lacking. But if the minor virtues are not sufficient for human flourishing, they seem collectively necessary to it.
In summary then, Dewey's incorporation of development into his account of human flourishing has interesting and important implications for traditional accounts of the virtues. From this perspective, any account will be seriously incomplete if it does not include growth-promoting dispositions as crucial virtues of character. Dispositions especially associated with children, such as sympathy, curiosity, playfulness, confidence, trust, gratitude, and loyalty, turn out to be virtues central to human growth and flourishing. If as I have surmised they prove equally important through out the course of a life-span, then,on a pragmatic approach, the minor virtues turn out to be better candidates for recognition as primary or cardinal virtues than the traditional virtues of majority. Thus in appropriating and reconstructing traditional virtue theories for our own use, we should take a cue from the character of children.
NOTES:
[i] 1. Children, psychologically impaired adults, and the declining elderly are interesting, if at all, as 'marginal' cases who may present theoretically interesting challenges to moral agents but who are not themselves moral agents.
[ii] 2. There are some notable exceptions to this generalization, but even they will agree that they are exceptions.
[iii] 3. The first are not truly virtues because their value is purely instrumental to the development of adult character (e.g., docility in children); the latter though virtues are not truly one's own because one ceases to possess them on reaching maturity (e.g. the 'innocence' which does not survive childhood.)
[iv] 3. Joel Kupperman, Character, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) 15-16, (emphasis mine.)
[v] 4. Gregory Trianosky, "Natural Affection and Responsibility for Character: A Critique of Kantian Views of the Virtues," in Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, eds, Identity, character, and Morality (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 1990) 93-110 (emphasis mine.)
[vi] 5. Jonathan Jacobs, Choosing Character: Responsibility for Virtue and Vice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
[vii] 6. Jacobs, Choosing Character, 64.
[viii] 7. The sort of reflection required need not involve a highly developed ability for abstraction, conceptual analysis, or articulation of one's ideas. Simple 'pattern-matching' comparisons between my own behavior and the behavior of those I admire can be sufficient to show me whether I am or am not characteristically acting admirably or poorly and to show how I may reform my character. Adolescents are clearly capable of this sort of self-reflection and evaluation, and so are many pre-adolescent children
[ix] 8. As a rule, he says, we may think of character and conduct as "morally the same thing, taken first as effect and then as [the] casual and productive factor." John Dewey, Ethics (1932), Later Works, vol. 7, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press) 172-173. But although very act says something about us, its clearly not going to be the case that all acts will be directly traceable to nor revealing of the dispositions most central to our characters.
[x] 9. In fact, the latter are quite deliberately discouraging. Like most philosophers in the first half of the 20th century, Dewey associated virtue theory with classical and Christian perfectionist theories, especially Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine. When he discussed the virtues at all it was usually only to critique their views of value and human nature.
[xi] 10. John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, (New York: The Free Press, [1916] 1944); Experience and Education (New York: MacMillan, 1938).
[xii] 11. Democracy and Education, 50.
[xiii] 12. "My Pedagogical Creed" in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898 (vol. 5): 1895-1898 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972) pp. 84-95.
[xviii] 17. Adults are often said to 'fall in love' with their children as if the children were purely passive beneficiaries of the process. In fact children devote enormous energy to cultivating their parents' and other adult's attention and support with smiles, giggles, hugs, demands to 'look at me,' 'play with me,' 'let me help,' and so forth. By these means children transform their own growth into a social project whose success rewards their care-givers as well as themselves.
[xix] 18. See Aristotle, Politics , trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle, (New York: Random House, 1941) [1260a] 1145.
[xx] 19.See Aristotle, See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1985), [1128b]
[xxi] 20. Aristotle not only denies that childish traits can be virtues, he denies that children possess virtues at all – a denial common from Nicomachean Ethics on through such recent texts as Christine McKinnon's Character, Virtue Theories, and the Vices, (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999). His objection goes directly to the plasticity of children's characters. Children are incapable of the voluntary cultivation of virtues necessary to make them true virtues, Aristotle thinks, in part because they are so plastic and changeable. None of their choices are sufficiently 'firm and unchangeable' to count. McKinnon agrees, describing children as possessing "personalities" rather than moral characters (see p. 62.)
[xxii] 21. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) 608.
[xxiii] 22. It is not because children make bad soldiers that we deplore the use of child soldiers. Children make excellent soldiers. We deplore it because we understand that soldiering, however noble the cause, unmakes children, morally and spiritually.
[xxiv] 23. For a discussion of the dependence of such virtues to the agent's age and state of development see Michael Slote, Goods and Virtues, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983).
[xxv] 24. On trust, including trust in children, see Annette Baier's "Trusting People," in her Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995).
[xxvi] 25. Neither loyalty nor gratitude figures importantly in traditional pantheons of the virtues. For reviews of recent discussions of the claims of either to be virtues, see respectively Jennifer Welchman, "The Virtues of Stewardship," Environmental Ethics 21(1999): 411-423; and Christopher Heath Wellman, "Gratitude as a Virtue," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (1999): 284-3000.
[xxvii] 26. Even cloistered, celibate, inhabitant of religious orders are in relationships with one another and order their lives around what they take to be the most important relationship of all, that between human beings and their creator.
[xxviii] 27. Low levels of education is a risk factor for dementia in later life. The degree to which one remains cognitively functional in later life seems to be conditional at least in part on the reserve of cognitive abilities and skills one had developed in one's earlier years. See, e.g., Karin Anstey and Helen Christensen, "Education, Activity, Health, Blood Pressure and Apolipoprotein E as Predictors of Cognitive Change in Old Age: a Review," in Gerontology 2000 (46): 163-177. And see, B. Schmand, J. H. Smit, M. I. Geerlings and J. Lindeboom, "The Effects of Intelligence and Education on the Development of Dementia. A Test of the Brain Reserve Hypothesis," Psychological Medicine 1997 (27): 1337-1344 and Y. Stern, G. E. Alexander, I. Prohovnik, L Stricks, B. Link, M.C. Lennon, and R. Mayeux, "Relationship between Lifetime Occupation and Parietal Flow: Implications for a Reserve Against Alzheimer's Disease Pathology, " in Neurology 1995 (45): 55-60.
[xxix] 28. See, e.g., Carmi Schooler, Mesfin Samuel Mulatu, and Gary Oates, "The Continuing Effects of Substantially Complex Work on the Intellectual Functioning of Older Workers," Psychology and Aging, 1999 (14): 483-506; and see K. Warner Schaie, "Intellectual Development in Adulthood," in James E. Birren and K. Warner Schaie, eds, The Handbook of the Psychology of Aging, 3rd ed. (San Diego: Academic Press,1990), 291-309, esp. 300.
[xxx] 29. See Schooler, C. Kohn, M.L., Miller, K.A. and Miller, J. "Housework as Work," in M.L. Kohn and C. Schooler, eds., Work and Personality: an Inquiry into the Impact of Social Stratification, (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1983) 242-260.
[xxxi] 30. See, e.g., Andrew Oldenquist, "Loyalties," Journal of Philosophy, 79 (1982): 173-193.