Some questions to ask about the particular virtues

In prepping for class tomorrow I jotted down a list of 12 questions that we can ask about any particular virtue. I imagine others have made better lists of questions and systematically answered them, but still, I thought the list might be useful to teachers of virtue ethics.

What is it?
1. Can you give a pithy definition of it?
2. Is it a form of self control with regard to an emotion?
3. Is it a mean between two extremes?

How does it relate to the other virtues?
4. Is it a special case of another virtue?
5. Does it need to be distinguished from another virtue that it is often confused with?
6. Is there a general class of virtue that it falls under?

What can we learn about this virtue from others?
7. Are there relevant findings in empirical psychology?
8. Do different cultures regard this virtue differently?
9. How have people symbolized or represented this virtue artistically?

How do I cultivate this virtue in my own life?
10. Is this one that I am good at, or one that I need to work on?
11. What happens to people who lack this virtue?
12. What habits can I adopt to cultivate this virtue.

Empirically verifying models of competences

The ethics textbook I use is called Moral Competence, and its focus is just what it says it is. The book develops a five-fold model of a morally competent decision maker. Although the book is riddled with arguments--for instance claiming that virtue alone, as the book defines it, is not sufficient for moral competence--it doesn't make an effort to empirically verify the system as a whole. This makes sense for what the book is trying to do. The model is presented mostly as a framework for students to deliberate on their own moral competence and for synthesizing results and ideas from a wide range of philosophers and psychologists.

Still, something could be gained by looking at the ways that other disciplines have developed models of competences and verified them. The focus on language competence in Chomskian and post Chomskian linguistics would be a good model. A lot of emphasis is placed there on error patterns. It is a big deal that children frequently overgeneralize grammatical rules, but never simply spit out strings of words without any grammar. Something similar happens in neuropsychological models of different abilities. A stroke can impair one aspect of the ability but not another--for instance a patients ability understand written number words like "One thousand fifty four" but not Arabic numerals like "1054"--and this says something about how we model the competence.

I'm trying to figure out what the equivalent data for moral failings would be. Liszka's system encompasses many classical distinctions between kinds of moral failings, such as Aristotle's distinction of failures of knowledge and failures of will. It also brings in psychological theories of failure, like ideas about anti-social personality disorder and failures of empathy. But I still don't have a good sense of what the data to be explained is.

Are there kinds of moral failure we just don't see, akin to Chomsky's grammatical mistakes that don't get made? Are there cases of selective impairment that would help us here?

If I still had time for a research program, I would do more reading in the moral psych literature to figure this out. Right now, though, the things I've seen really work orthogonally to this issue. So now I'm just wondering out loud.

TED video classroom success

I showed this video by Daniel Goleman on sympathy to my ethics class Friday, and it was a smashing success. People who did not talk before volunteered comments early in the discussion. Links were drawn to the textbook. People demonstrated quick comprehension of Goleman's underlying themes and thesis. Way cool.



I also showed this, since we were talking about sympathy.

Loompanics and free speech

This post is mostly a note to myself, although it may interest others. I routinely use the publications from the late great Loompanics Press as examples in classes on free speech, and I've been meaning to collect more internet resources for the class for some time now. Right now on the Angel page for my ethics course, I only have some badly formatted and probably now dead links to old Loompanics books. I want to get a fixed batch of links in this post.

Loompanics was an independent publisher that specialized in how to books for various criminal acts, from lock picking and counterfeiting to assassination. Their staple, though was books on drug manufacturing. Sifu Tweety, at Unfogged just informed me that one Loompanics author, Steve Preisler ("Uncle Fester"), became a widely used resource in the crystal meth boom, and was subject to some media attention. (It was Tweety's comment that inspired me to try to fix some of this old info.)

The company went out of business in 2006, but its website continues to exist in a semi functional ghost form, no doubt generating ad revenue. My original discussion forum had links to the pages for their books on lock picking, counterfitting, assassination, faking your own death, and gaslighting. It looks like I can recreate all those links, except faking your own death, which was a fun one. I also had lots and lots of drug links, but I can substitute the category link and a link to Uncle Fester's more influential work. These new links will probably die soon also, so I should find a more stable way to refer to these books, but I'm not going to now.

Wow, browsing the Loompanics site, I see they once carried How to Lie with Statistics, which is a book used in real stats classes sometimes, and I've considered using in critical thinking courses.

The other reference I want to find is to a review (I swear it was by Frank Rich, but nytimes.com disagrees with me) which described the incredible voyeuristic appeal of these books, and hypothesized that most of this advice is never acted on, but read for entertainment purposes.

Ok, enough for now. I'll revisit this before I teach free speech issues again.