ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the implications of an account of virtue as skill, based in the psychological literature on skill acquisition and self-regulation, for acquiring moral virtues. Skills are acquired through deliberate practice, where you improve by correcting past mistakes and overcoming your current limitations. So, in acquiring moral virtues as skills, we have reasons to focus on some of our common moral mistakes, in order to correct those mistakes and thereby increase our moral skillfulness. Here this project addresses the situationist critique on virtue, as social psychology experiments highlight some of our current weaknesses when it comes to acting morally, such as being strongly influenced by irrelevant factors of a situation, such as one’s mood or the presence of passive bystanders. Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate the effects of these influences by deliberate practice and self-regulatory strategies. Instead of viewing such influences as barriers to moral development, a skill model of virtue can view the recognition of these limitations as opportunities for further developing virtue. However, we must also address the distress produced by a recognition of one’s own moral failings, with emotion regulation, as otherwise the distress can lead one to respond to failure with defensiveness rather than self-improvement.
