ABSTRACT
How do we become good? One increasingly popular answer emphasizes the importance of building character by instilling good habits. It runs roughly as follows.
Being good and living well are skills, just like, say, being able to ride a bike or play the piano. And skills are primarily acquired, not through thinking, but by doing. Just as we cannot intellectually work out how to ride a bike, and then hop aboard and confidently cycle off in style, so neither can we intellectually figure out how to be good and then immediately proceed to behave well. If we want people to behave well, we need to drill into them the right behavioural dispositions. It’s in having such dispositions that having ‘good character’ consists, and it’s on instilling those dispositions that ‘character education’ focuses.
