ABSTRACT
SEVERAL of Plato's early dialogues raise the question 'Can virtue be taught?' It has not been fully answered yet, so let us look at the question again. One thing that very properly struck Socrates was this. Subjects like arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, rhetoric, wrestling, medicine and so on can be taught, and there exist professional teachers of them. For a person to become good at engineering, swimming or shooting he needs to be and he can be instructed by experts; and they will make him good at it, if he has the aptitude and the industry. But for a person to become a good man, as distinct from a good carpenter, a good navigator or a good astronomer, we do not seem to provide or require expert coaches. There are no technical colleges where honourableness is taught; there are no periods set aside on the school timetable for classes in unselfishness; Oxford and Cambridge colleges offer no scholarships in ungreediness, frankness or humaneness. If virtue were teachable, we should expect there to exist experts to teach it and examiners to test progress in it. But such teachers and examiners do not exist. So it begins to look as if virtue cannot be taught. If a person is honest or considerate, perhaps he is so because he was born to be so, as he was born to be blue-eyed or snub-nosed, or as he is congenitally asthmatic.
