Learning to be Moral

In her paper, Julia Hermann argues that being moral requires moral competence, which is developed in practice. What makes us moral is not the teaching of moral principles, or a desire for happiness, or any kind of argument, but growing up in an environment which enables us to develop the rational and emotional capacities necessary for moral agency. Hermann discusses Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between knowing how and knowing that and suggests conceiving of what the moral agent knows as primarily a form of knowing how. She addresses Ryle’s own objections to this view, which he formulated in his two relatively unknown papers “On Forgetting the Difference between Right and Wrong” (1958) and “Can virtue be taught?” (1972). Hermann discusses Ryle’s reasons for claiming that virtues are not skills, and looks at different skill models of virtue. Unlike Ryle, she stresses the ways in which virtue is like a mastery, pointing out that moral teaching and learning involve a significant amount of training. Finally, Hermann argues that it follows from her account of moral competence that the philosophical conception of the amoralist is implausible.