Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [94]
It is similar with other practices and skills, such as cooking. Many cookbooks are published, but no one becomes a great chef simply by reading them. You have to do lots of cooking. Joke telling is another example. You don’t become a comedian by reading joke books and collecting funny stories. Nor could you simply learn the principles of comedy. You have to practice—the pacing, timing, gestures, and tone—and watch Jack Benny, or Johnny Carson, or Eddie Murphy, or Robin Williams.
If moral virtue is something we learn by doing, we have somehow to develop the right habits in the first place. For Aristotle, this is the primary purpose of law—to cultivate the habits that lead to good character. “Legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.” Moral education is less about promulgating rules than forming habits and shaping character. “It makes no small difference… whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.”16
Aristotle’s emphasis on habit does not mean he considers moral virtue a form of rote behavior. Habit is the first step in moral education. But if all goes well, the habit eventually takes, and we come to see the point of it. The etiquette columnist Judith Martin (aka “Miss Manners”) once bemoaned the lost habit of writing thank-you letters. Nowadays we assume that feelings trump manners, she observed; as long as you feel grateful, you don’t need to bother with such formalities. Miss Manners disagrees: “I think, to the contrary, that it is safer to hope that practicing proper behavior eventually encourages virtuous feeling; that if you write enough thank-you letters, you may actually feel a flicker of gratitude.”17
That’s how Aristotle conceives moral virtue. Being steeped in virtuous behavior helps us acquire the disposition to act virtuously.
It is common to think that acting morally means acting according to a precept or a rule. But Aristotle thinks this misses a distinctive feature of moral virtue. You could be equipped with the right rule and still not know how or when to apply it. Moral education is about learning to discern the particular features of situations that call for this rule rather than that one. “Matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health… The agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the art of medicine or of navigation.”18
The only general thing that can be said about moral virtue, Aristotle tells us, is that it consists of a mean between extremes. But he readily concedes that this generality doesn’t get us very far, because discerning the mean in any given situation is not easy. The challenge is to do the right thing “to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way.”19
This means that habit, however essential, can’t be the whole of moral virtue. New situations always arise, and we need to know which habit is appropriate under the circumstances. Moral virtue therefore requires judgment, a kind of knowledge Aristotle calls “practical wisdom.” Unlike scientific knowledge, which concerns “things that are universal and necessary,”20 practical wisdom is about how to act. It must “recognize the particulars; for it is practical, and practice is concerned with particulars.”21 Aristotle defines practical wisdom as “a reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to the human good.”22
Practical wisdom is a moral virtue with political implications.