Arts and Virtues
What’s the difference between an art or skill and a virtue? The obvious one that comes to mind is that virtues are essential to human survival, and, while so is some art, if its possessor is to participate in social cooperation, no particular art is essential. On the other hand, each virtue, by quickening its chakra (remember that the chakra system is a model of the human soul; if there is a better model, let me know, but so far I’m sticking with this one), makes human existence possible.
A second distinction is more pertinent. Aquinas expresses it as follows: with virtues it is better to fail involuntarily than to fail voluntarily; with arts it’s the other way around. (ST, II-I, 21, 2, reply 2) Why? A virtue, as I have mentioned below, is a combination of a moral ideal, conformance to that ideal, and enjoyment of that conformance. So, being vicious on purpose undermines the virtue altogether, because by stipulation you enjoy failing or enjoy being vicious. An art, on the other hand, is merely an ideal of technique + conformance to that ideal and does not presuppose pleasure in being skilled or in performing skillful actions. Therefore, failing deliberately does not corrupt the art nor is a sign of incompetence, while failing involuntarily has both of these features and therefore is the worse of the two. Philippa Foot puts the matter this way: “a virtue is not, like a skill or an art, a mere capacity: it must actually engage the will.” (Virtues and Vices, 8)
It might be objected that a doctor who kills his patient voluntarily is worse than one who kills him involuntarily. This is true but only because killing voluntarily is a murder and an injustice. But the doctor’s skill is still questioned less in the first scenario than it is in the second.
Posted: March 19th, 2009 under Ethics, Philosophy.