Ryle Can Virtue Be Taught?

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the analogy of learning our mother tongue and learning virtue: we can continue to maintain that
moral standards are not inborn but have to be learned, while allowing that the learning of them
does not require the existence of professors of probity, charity and patience
Learning how to ride a bike. The father cannot just lecture his son into mastery of the bicycle.
No, the boy has not just to be told what to do; he has to be shown out on the gravel what to do;
he has to be made to do it; he has to try out everything time and time again, try it out in
operations on the recalcitrant bicycle itself. He is trained or coached much more than he is told.
The skills are inculcated in him by example and by exercise; they are not and could not be
crammed into him by mere didactic talking.
The same thing goes for a lot of more academic or intellectual things like calculating,
translating, pronouncing, drawing, dissecting, reasoning and weighing evidence.
Acquisition of skills and competences comes, if at all, only with practice.
The very same thing holds true of conduct. It is not enough just to have memorized five moral
lectures or sermons which admonish us to curb our greediness, malice or indolence. This
memorization will not make us self-controlled, fair-minded or hardworking. What will help to
make us self-controlled, fair-minded or hard-working are good examples set by others, and then
ourselves practising and failing, and practising again, and failing again,but not quite so soon and
so on.
In matters of morals, as in the skills and arts, we learn first by being shown by others, then by
being trained by others, naturally with some worded homily, praise and rebuke, and lastly by
being trained by ourselves.
This point, that virtues, like skills, crafts and arts, can indeed be taught, not by lectures alone,
but by example and critically supervised practice, is a big part of Aristotles reply to Socrates.
Roughly, he says to Socrates, You are wrong to be surprised that, if virtue is teachable, there
should exist no specialist lecturers on standards of conduct. For standards of conduct, like skills,
are not bits of theory or doctrines, and so are not learned by the memorization of things
dictated. We learn them by exercise. The things that we have to do,when we have learned to do
them, we learn to do by doing them.'
Keeping ones temper is, in this respect, like playing the piano.
But still the puzzle remains. There do exist rowing coaches, swimming instructors, golf
professionals, laboratory demonstrators and college tutors, who all teach people to do things
chiefly by exercising them in the doing of these things. But again I ask: Where are the
corresponding tutors, demonstrators and coaches in considerateness, toleration, pluck and
candour?
A proficiency can always be improperly as well as properly employed.
Virtues are not skills or proficiencies, since for any skill or proficiency it is always possible that a
particular exercise of it be both technically first rate and unscrupulous.
a kind of learning by which he acquired not information and not proficiencies, but the caring for
some sorts of things more than for others; a kind of schooling as a result of which, to put it in
metaphor, Joness heart came to be set on some things and against other things
But how can a person have been so instructed or trained that he now feels things that he would
not otherwise have felt?
1. acquiring information
2. acquiring proficiencies
3. acquiring virtue
We remember how our parents reprimanded certain sorts of conduct in quite a different tone of
voice from that in which they criticized or lamented our forgetfulness or our blunders. Some of
the examples set us by our parents or by the heroes of our stories were underlined for us with a
seriousness which was missing from the examples they set us that were merely technically
enviable.
In our abstract theorizing about human nature we are still in the archaic habit of treating
ourselves and all other human beings as animated department stores, in which the intellect is
one department, the will is another department and the feelings a third department.
Seasickness and vertigo involve feelings of a purely physical sort, i.e. sensations. We feel these
in our stomachs or heads. There is no question of our learning to feel sensations of these sorts.
But amusement, indignation and compunction are not sensations. Only thinking beings can feel
amused, indignant or penitent, and to feel these things they have to be, for example,
appreciating the point of a joke, considering the injustice of an allegation or recollecting what
they themselves had so inconsiderately done. To be educated up to the point at which we can
recognize the injustice of an allegation is to be educated up to the point at which we can be and
therefore, feel indignant about it, and vice versa.

Where Socrates was at fault was, I think, that he assumed that if virtue can be learned, then
here, as elsewhere, the learning terminates in knowing. But here the learning terminates in
being so-and-so, and only derivatively from this in knowing so-and-soin an improvement of
ones heart, and only derivatively from this in an improvement of ones head as well.
So if Socrates now asks us, Well then, who are the teachers from whom, on your view, young
people learn to be straightforward, unspiteful, industrious and so on?, our answer will be partly
a Protagorean one. We shall say something like this: To ask your question is to ask whom young
people are apt to try to live up to; and the familiar answer is that many of them try, off and on,
to live up to (a) some of the elders who bring them up, namely parents, uncles and aunts, elder
brothers, parsons, schoolmasters, etc.; (b) some of the folk that they happen to live among or
meet; and (c) some of the people that they hear about and read about. But most of these folk,
being quite unaware that anyone is trying to live up to them, could not, even with a stretch, be
classed as teachers.