Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be this afternoon. We are delighted to welcome Matthew Dougherty (Cambridge), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Skill, Role, and Virtue'. The abstract is below:
Alongside the renewed interest in virtue ethics in the past fifty years has also come a renewed interest in the so-called *skill analogy*, the Ancient idea that ethical virtue is best thought of on the model of practical skills. Pretty much all virtue ethicists think that the skill analogy holds to some degree, but most stop well short of saying that being a virtuous human being *is* a skill. In this talk, I will be considering various reasons that have been given in support of this stopping short. I will be arguing, however, that each of them embodies a basic misunderstanding of the skill analogy: The skill analogy proposes not that the virtuous human being is analogous to the mere possessor of a skill but, rather, that she is analogous to the good occupant of what we might call ‘a skill-role’, a distinction which comes out in the ordinary-language difference between, for instance, ‘being able to play tennis’ and ‘being a tennis player’. The purpose of the talk will be to give some substance to this distinction and to show that understanding the skill analogy in terms of ‘good skill-role occupants’ not only defeats various objections to it but gives us reason to think that virtue is a skill. The meeting will be held at 2:30 until 4:15, in the Barbara White Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. -- Karamvir Chadha and Cathy Mason Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
