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Is Ethics a Skill?
Towards a Developmental Account of
Ethical Know-how
Jen Wright
University of Wyoming
Departments of Philosophy and Psychology
“…he might have said, if any man could have
got him to talk about it, that like the morning
dove, the bittern, the Indian, he had a sixth
sense. What he thought of as his sixth sense
was in fact only what his five senses agreed
on and communicated to his mind, acting
together, like an intelligence agency, to sort
out, accept or reject, and evaluate the
impressions that came to them.”
- Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher (1965/2000), University of
Idaho Press: Moscow, Idaho, p. 6-7
Sam’s ‘sixth sense”
• It involves a robust and fine-grained appreciation of
(and connection with) his environment
• It involves the development of a way of perceiving
and responding to his environment that
• He didn’t possess as a “green horn”
• Leads to appropriate/successful understanding and
action
• A similar story might be told for moral maturity (or
“moral excellence”)
Principle-based approach
• Conceives of moral maturity in terms of
conformity with moral principles.
• Such conformity is typically cashed out in one (or both)
of two ways:
Moral guidance (MPs guide MMJAs)
• Normative authority (MPs justify MJAs as mature)
 Contra this conception, I want to argue that
moral maturity is a movement away from, rather
than towards, conformity with MPs.
Model of expertise
• Dreyfus and Dreyfus (hereafter ‘Dreyfus’)
• Proposed a general (five stage) account of the
development of expertise
• Suggested that we liken the development of
moral maturity to the development of
expertise.
Moral maturity should follow the same
general developmental trajectory as other
forms of expertise.
Development of expertise
• When we examine a wide range of skills, we
find:
• Skills develop through training, instruction,
imitation, practice.
• Gradual mastery is achieved through the
development of a body of ‘know-how’.
• Results in reliable, appropriate (“successful”)
action under a wide range of circumstances.
Stages of Development
• Novice: the performance task is decomposed into
basic context-free features that can be recognized
without the benefit of experience. Rigid rules for
determining actions on the basis of these features
are given.
• Advanced beginner: Early experience brings
encounters with situation-specific elements.
Situational maxims are acquired, enabling
deliberation about what actions to take on the
basis of features plus (minimal) context.
• Competence: Performers must identify a general
guideline/principle to organize incoming
information and assess those elements that are
salient with respect to the chosen perspective.
• At this stage, deliberation is accompanied by an
emotionally involved experience of the outcome,
allowing competent performers to experience
their decisions less as rule-guided decisions and
more as natural “choices of action”.
• Proficiency: Performers begin to identify
meaningful action-guiding patterns without
decomposing them for deliberation.
• They can quickly comprehend the domain
environment -- they see what is going on.
• Since such observations typically
underdetermine appropriate action, they must
often still engage in rule/maxim-guided
deliberation to determine action.
• Expertise: Experts are typically able to
spontaneously comprehend not only what is
going on, but also what to do.
• Experience provides the skills necessary for a
flexible, adaptive responsiveness to the
environment that is both more spontaneous and
more accurate than non-experts.
• Accordingly, experts commonly do not need to
detach to analyze, problem-solve, or deliberate:
they simply respond.
“There is no choosing. It happens
unconsciously, automatically, naturally.
There can be no thought, because if there is
thought, there is a time of thought and that
means a flaw…If you take the time to think ‘I
must use this or that technique’ you will be
struck while you are thinking.”
• Expertise is not the mere internalization of rules.
 That is, the expert is not just someone who uses
the same rules/principles as the novice, only faster
and better.
• Expertise involves (at least) two crucial capacities:
 Trained perception: the ability to perceive and
comprehend complex (rich) patterns of situationspecific information as meaningful features.
Automatic responsiveness: the linking of perception
and action that allows for non-deliberative, flexible
responsiveness.
Moral expertise?
• Even if we accept Dreyfus’ account of
expertise, it remains to be established that it
applies to ethics.
• Dreyfus’ account relies on distinct, isolated skills.
• It is unclear whether ethics can be conceptualized
as a skill (or set of skills).
• Skills involve concentrated practice and overt
instruction, but this doesn’t seem true of ethics.
Developing “know-how”
• For Dreyfus, the mastering of a distinct,
isolated skill is accomplished through the
cultivation of know-how.
• Know-how is embodied, often implicit, and
probably non-propositional knowledge.
It is cultivated through experience, giving rise
to spontaneous, flexible, and decisive action
that is appropriately responsive to one’s
environments.
• Consider expertise in chess and driving.
• What is notable about each of these cases is that:
Experts are able to perceive complex
meaningful patterns.
For experts, perceiving and responding
appropriately have become interconnected.
• There are few deliberative pauses between what
one perceives and what one does: rather, it is as if
they have become two aspects of the same
activity.
Know-how as “Effective Living”
• Varela: “Knowing is effective action; that is,
operating effectively in the domain of
existence of living beings”.
• Dewey: “We may…be said to know how by
means of our habits…We walk and read
aloud, we get off and on street cars, we dress
and undress, and do a thousand useful acts
without thinking of them. We know
something, namely, how to do them”.
• Whether it is walking across rugged terrain,
reading a newspaper, putting on a pair of
pants, or engaging in a conversation, most of
our daily activities are accomplished without
effortful planning, deliberation, or reflection.
• In this way, know-how plays a central role in
our lives, enabling the seamless, “mindless”
(yet often appropriate) engagement that
makes up much of our daily experience.
• Know-how is not just that which is achieved
through the mastery of particular distinct and
isolated skills.
Rather, it forms the very backbone of our daily
experience.
• Activities need not qualify as distinct, isolated
skills to be “skillful”.
Instead, they might be “life practices”.
Life Practices
• Involve the highly developed, intricate
coordination of different skills woven together
into a complex pattern of meaningful activity.
• Are distinct from (and irreducible to) any
particular set(s) of skills.
• One’s engagement in a life practice can involve
any number of skills that can differ (at least to
some degree) both between persons and between
instances.
Sam, the Mountain Man
Imagine Sam and a guy from Manhattan (call him Fred)
walking through the mountains of Montana…
• Sam literally sees things that Fred cannot
• Sam is able to respond in ways Fred is not
• Sam and Fred is that Sam has developed a life
practice that Fred has not.
• That is, Sam mastered the coordination of a diverse
set of skills (e.g. trained perception, learned
movement patterns, etc.) into a way of living that is
inseparable from his daily existence.
The Principle-Based Conception
• Relies heavily on propositional knowledge.
Our greatest moral achievement is our ability
to conform to moral principles that identify
reasons for action.
• The importance of know-how to appropriate
moral judgments/actions suggests that this
view of moral maturity gets things backwards.
Ethical coping
• “Consider a normal day in the street. You are
walking down the sidewalk thinking about what you
need to say in an upcoming meeting and you hear
the noise of an accident. You immediately see if you
can help. You are in your office. The conversation is
lively and a topic comes up that embarrasses your
secretary. You immediately perceive that
embarrassment and turn the conversation away from
the topic with a humorous remark. Actions such as
these do not spring from judgment or reasoning, but
from an immediate coping with what is confronting
us.” (Varela)
• Points that emerge:
• When faced with situations that call for moral
judgments/actions, we are often able (like
Sam) to perceive and respond appropriately.
Such responsiveness is indicative of moral
excellence.
• Moral engagement is the fabric of our social
existence.
Moral excellence requires the mastery of a life
practice
• Stage 1 ~ Concrete Principles
• Stage 2 ~ Qualified Principles
• Stage 3 ~ Abstract Principles
• Moral principles fail to provide moral agents with the
tools they need to become mature moral agents.
• We ought to look for the process by which moral
maturity develops in the realm of skillful activity
 i.e., in the development of know-how.
• The development of moral maturity is the
development of a rich capacity for moral engagement
that surpasses what any principle based system can
articulate.
• At best, moral principles are descriptive of mature
moral agency: they cannot be prescriptive.
A quote…
“…the [principles] are not moral
commandments…Rather they reveal how a
deeply enlightened, fully perfected
person…behaves. Such an individual doesn’t
imitate the [principles]; they imitate him.”
- (Roshi) Philip Kapleau (1980) The Three Pillars of Zen.
New York: Doubleday, p. 231-232 (emphasis added).
Another quote…
“Moral imperatives and ought-statements
have no place in the lives of saints or
complete sinners. For saints are not still
learning how to behave and complete sinners
have not yet begun to learn.”
-Gilbert Ryle (1971), “Knowing How and Knowing That”,
Collected Papers, Vol. 2, p. 222.