Postgraduates work in progress

Speaker: Mara Neijzen

Title: Towards a Virtue-as-Skill Conception: Contesting the Miscategorisation of Virtues and Capacities

Abstract: While research which conceptualises virtues as skills is growing, arguments posited against this conception have not been fully addressed. The most pressing of these arguments are collected in this paper. These arguments often depart from the idea that virtues and skills are two different categories with their own characteristics. While these categories have some characteristics in common, the argument goes, there are also fundamental differences between them. The category of skill, however, is large and varied. For many of the characteristics of virtue that are supposedly not present in skill, it is possible to find an example of a skill which does have this characteristic. The argument posited in this paper is that using these characteristics of virtues to define virtues as a separate category from skills, is to make an arbitrary division. As such, the arguments against the virtue-as-skill conception are not definitive, thereby allowing for the virtue-as-skill account to be taken seriously.