Scrooge and significant moral change

ABSTRACT

Virtue theorists commonly assert that significant moral change, such as the cultivation of a virtue or the elimination of a vice, can only occur over a prolonged period of time. Many scholars who make this claim also accept the comparison between virtues and skills. In this article I argue that if one accepts the comparison between virtues and skills, there should be instances in which significant moral change can occur relatively quickly.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtue
• skill
• moral change
• Annas

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was made possible through the support of a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Religion Trust.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Scrooge is of course a fictional character, but unlike other fictional characters such as Swampman, etc., it is clear that Dickens intends his character to have the same abilities any real-life human would have and no more. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to clarify this point.

2. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

3. Annas is the only one who uses the term ‘understanding,’ but her term seems to encompass what Hursthouse and Zagzebski have in mind. I am aware that a great deal of scholarly literature exists on ‘understanding’ itself—on whether it is a virtue, for instance, on whether and how it is related to practical wisdom and so on. For the puposes of this article, however, I use the term simply in the way that Annas, Zagzebski and others who draw comparisons between virtue and skill use it.

4. Annas seems to think that virtuous people will also have a certain level of articulacy but, as I shall indicate in what follows, I see no reason to insist on this.

5. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this example and for pushing me to develop the argument along these lines.

6. A particularly good example is the character Ramsay Bolton in George R. R. Martin’s book (now HBO series) Game of Thrones. Bolton delights in arranging opportunities for his victims to escape, only to capture them at the last second, because he realizes that a newly crushed hope makes his torments all the more bitter.

7. One might well dispute whether the possession of a skill necessarily implies a continued motivation to improve. Though I do not have the space to go into a full discussion of this point here, it seems to me that one can distinguish two very different senses of ‘possess.’ In some sense, it seems that someone who has a natural talent or a skill they have not cultivated over a long time ‘possesses’ the skill, just because they are ‘good at’ the activity, or ‘better at’ it than most people are. However, they clearly don’t ‘possess’ that skill in the same way as someone who makes perfecting that skill a central life goal. It is possession in this latter sense that I think the scholars referred to here have in mind.

8. Stitcher, for example, uses Dreyfus’s model of skill acquisition, where the individual first follows rules, then maxims, until he ultimately develops an intuitive sense for the ‘right’ action.

9. In his book How Children Succeed, Paul Tough (2012) describes the teaching technique practiced by Elizabeth Spiegel, a teacher at Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn, who coached her chess teams to surprising victories over far more privileged students from elite schools. He reports that after Spiegel’s students completed a tournament, she would replay the games with the students, asking them to explain why they chose the moves they did at each step. Through this process, the students developed a genuine understanding of the game.

10. Annas holds that articulacy is an essential component of understanding. To really possess a skill, in her view, is to be able to articulate the reasons behind the things one does. If apparently skillful people are inarticulate about their reasons, then they have likely acted out of technical proficiency rather than skill. As I noted earlier, this claim has been disputed by others. It likewise seems incorrect to me, precisely because one can be inarticulate about some things that are clearly the result of the possession of a complex skill. In his Faster, Smarter, Better, for instance, Charles Duhigg (2016) describes the ability of some veteran nurses to perceive that infants are in distress, even though all their vital signs are normal. The nurses correctly see that ‘something is wrong,’ but cannot explain why they know that something is wrong. These and similar cases make me think that one can have the understanding that a skill requires without being articulate about what it is one understands. Nothing in the portion of Annas’s account that I am interested in here, however, stands or falls on her articulacy requirement.

11. I say ‘aspects’ because I do think that the complete understanding requires current proficiency in the skill. I think there is an important sense in which a former champion whose reflexes have been dulled by years of inactivity ‘understands’ less about his sport than someone in his prime, at least in the sense that understanding is tied to an ability to actually practice the activity. At the same time, I also think that the former champion retains a great deal of that understanding.

12. It is not my intention to claim that every former star athlete will make a good commentator or teacher. Teaching or commentating are skills in their own right, and they involve capacities that go beyond merely being able to ‘see’ what needs to be done; among other things, the ability to communicate what one sees to others. One can certainly possess athletic ability and yet be unable to teach or commentate. My point is merely that the capacity to ‘see’ that athletes possess and that is also a necessary pre-requisite of commenting or teaching clearly seems to persist.

13. Charles Barkley’s golf game at first seems to be an exception to the general case: he went from being an excellent golfer to a terrible golfer almost overnight. Yet by his own admission, Barkley arguably never possessed the skill of golf in the way he possessed the skill of, say, playing basketball. His seems to have been a natural aptitude which he lost as soon as he started to think about it.

14. This example doesn’t apply uniformly, however. We might well go to someone who used to be dishonest to learn about dishonesty, and we might well approach such a person instead of attempting to learn about dishonesty from a dishonest person.

15. My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Templeton Religion Trust [TRT0096].

Notes on contributors

Angela Knobel

Angela Knobel is associate professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America. Her main areas of research are Thomas Aquinas’s virtue theory, ethics and bioethics. Her papers have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Thomist, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Nova et Vetera, International Philosophical Quarterly, Christian Bioethics, Studies in Christian Ethics and The Journal of Moral Theology. She is working on a book, Aquinas and the Infused Moral Virtues.