Menand’s essay made me want to throw the NYer across the room, so it’s good to read your response -- much friendlier and more open that my own!
Your intellectual virtue / moral virtue distinction is helpful in explaining what humanist education does and doesn’t achieve. But are you saying that education in intellectual virtue is *no* part of education in moral virtue? If friendliness and knowing ourselves as human aren’t themselves moral virtues, don’t they at least share a blurry border with the moral virtues? Maybe intellectual virtue is a possible path toward moral virtue, but not the only such path? Or a path toward some of the moral virtues, but not all of them?
I’m not sure. But I want to get the relationship between the two kinds of virtue-education right, partly because how we draw that distinction will also inform how we think about who gets to go to college and about what college can offer to students who struggle to be "intellectual" (in the usual and obvious senses of the word). And I'm sure there's *some* relationship between them.
Thanks for this, Geoff. My own immediate reaction to Menand's essay was initially pretty hostile, but I talked to some enthusiastic students about his essay and Rosenberg's and came to see there was something genuine Menand was driving toward that bore further investigation.
You're right that the border between education into intellectual virtue and education into moral virtue is blurry, and I do not mean to say that education aimed at cultivating intellectual virtue can't be, in some sense, part of an education in certain moral virtues; in fact, it pretty inevitably is. What I wanted to say was that (i) we should not confuse the aim with the side-effects and (ii) that we should not be too confident that we are in a good position to directly bring about the kind of reorientation I describe as part of liberal education itself.
My analogy to the professions might be helpful here, so let me expand on it briefly with a concrete example. Learning the practice of medicine (in our culture and in our time, anyway) tends to inculcate certain moral qualities, both good and bad, e.g., a capacity for certain sorts of self-denial alongside a familiar sort of arrogance. But while doctors might act arrogantly in the workplace, it may be that this behavior does not affect other aspects of their lives. Likewise, while they may be capable of a certain kind of moderation in the workplace - say, doing without sleep or food on long shifts - they may be vulnerable to certain kinds of over-indulgence in other aspects of their lives (say for luxury goods).
A few points drawn from this example: (1) the moral qualities that tend to be fostered by professional medical education may not necessarily be good ones; (2) these moral qualities may be rather circumscribed in their realm of exercise, for good and for ill; (3) even though professional education is devoted to teaching people knowledge and skills, it must still operate in awareness of the kinds of moral formation it promotes, since these may bear quite directly on our success in employing such knowledge and skills.
It is certainly worthwhile for an educator to be aware of the kinds of ethical transformation that serious study of the kind for which they are responsible - whether vocational or liberal - may require. I'm less sure of our grounds for trying to directly foster these qualities. I'll give another example, more closely related to my argument. When I introduce my first-year humanities students to our curriculum, I point out the countercultural demand sustained reading makes on our attention. I encourage them, in their first weeks on campus, to find a favorite quiet place to read their physical course-books, a library or park or whatever it happens to be, because they'll need it. Of course my hope is they will take this invitation seriously, to cultivate a set of intellectual practices that require them to put their phones and other distractions away. I also happen to think it will do them some good, since we all need more time away from screens. But my aim is simply for them to be in a position to engage our shared intellectual project seriously.
Thanks for the response, Dhananjay. What you wrote is helpful; the doctor example makes sense. I'd just add this: in your last example, about talking to first-year students, the relevant distinction doesn't seem to be so much aim/side-effects as aim/hope. We can hope for outcomes beyond the delimited ends that liberal education can rightly claim to be aimed at producing. And that hope is important: it's not the same as an aim, but we don't think of it with the disinterest that "side-effects" suggests. Maybe I should qualify that: A lightly-held hope? A hope we don't always focus on? But still -- a hope. Without acknowledging the role of hope, I don't think I could give a full account of why I want access to liberal education to be as wide, as open, as possible.
Thanks for this corrective - your remarks about hope seem spot-on to me. "Side-effects" is perhaps too neutral, and I certainly don't think our business is to be disengaged or disinterested. But the interests we do have in the flourishing of our students are local in a way I was trying to capture through my examples.
Menand’s essay made me want to throw the NYer across the room, so it’s good to read your response -- much friendlier and more open that my own!
Your intellectual virtue / moral virtue distinction is helpful in explaining what humanist education does and doesn’t achieve. But are you saying that education in intellectual virtue is *no* part of education in moral virtue? If friendliness and knowing ourselves as human aren’t themselves moral virtues, don’t they at least share a blurry border with the moral virtues? Maybe intellectual virtue is a possible path toward moral virtue, but not the only such path? Or a path toward some of the moral virtues, but not all of them?
I’m not sure. But I want to get the relationship between the two kinds of virtue-education right, partly because how we draw that distinction will also inform how we think about who gets to go to college and about what college can offer to students who struggle to be "intellectual" (in the usual and obvious senses of the word). And I'm sure there's *some* relationship between them.
Thanks for this, Geoff. My own immediate reaction to Menand's essay was initially pretty hostile, but I talked to some enthusiastic students about his essay and Rosenberg's and came to see there was something genuine Menand was driving toward that bore further investigation.
You're right that the border between education into intellectual virtue and education into moral virtue is blurry, and I do not mean to say that education aimed at cultivating intellectual virtue can't be, in some sense, part of an education in certain moral virtues; in fact, it pretty inevitably is. What I wanted to say was that (i) we should not confuse the aim with the side-effects and (ii) that we should not be too confident that we are in a good position to directly bring about the kind of reorientation I describe as part of liberal education itself.
My analogy to the professions might be helpful here, so let me expand on it briefly with a concrete example. Learning the practice of medicine (in our culture and in our time, anyway) tends to inculcate certain moral qualities, both good and bad, e.g., a capacity for certain sorts of self-denial alongside a familiar sort of arrogance. But while doctors might act arrogantly in the workplace, it may be that this behavior does not affect other aspects of their lives. Likewise, while they may be capable of a certain kind of moderation in the workplace - say, doing without sleep or food on long shifts - they may be vulnerable to certain kinds of over-indulgence in other aspects of their lives (say for luxury goods).
A few points drawn from this example: (1) the moral qualities that tend to be fostered by professional medical education may not necessarily be good ones; (2) these moral qualities may be rather circumscribed in their realm of exercise, for good and for ill; (3) even though professional education is devoted to teaching people knowledge and skills, it must still operate in awareness of the kinds of moral formation it promotes, since these may bear quite directly on our success in employing such knowledge and skills.
It is certainly worthwhile for an educator to be aware of the kinds of ethical transformation that serious study of the kind for which they are responsible - whether vocational or liberal - may require. I'm less sure of our grounds for trying to directly foster these qualities. I'll give another example, more closely related to my argument. When I introduce my first-year humanities students to our curriculum, I point out the countercultural demand sustained reading makes on our attention. I encourage them, in their first weeks on campus, to find a favorite quiet place to read their physical course-books, a library or park or whatever it happens to be, because they'll need it. Of course my hope is they will take this invitation seriously, to cultivate a set of intellectual practices that require them to put their phones and other distractions away. I also happen to think it will do them some good, since we all need more time away from screens. But my aim is simply for them to be in a position to engage our shared intellectual project seriously.
Thanks for the response, Dhananjay. What you wrote is helpful; the doctor example makes sense. I'd just add this: in your last example, about talking to first-year students, the relevant distinction doesn't seem to be so much aim/side-effects as aim/hope. We can hope for outcomes beyond the delimited ends that liberal education can rightly claim to be aimed at producing. And that hope is important: it's not the same as an aim, but we don't think of it with the disinterest that "side-effects" suggests. Maybe I should qualify that: A lightly-held hope? A hope we don't always focus on? But still -- a hope. Without acknowledging the role of hope, I don't think I could give a full account of why I want access to liberal education to be as wide, as open, as possible.
Thanks for this corrective - your remarks about hope seem spot-on to me. "Side-effects" is perhaps too neutral, and I certainly don't think our business is to be disengaged or disinterested. But the interests we do have in the flourishing of our students are local in a way I was trying to capture through my examples.