To the question, “What is virtue?,” an old answer is that it is knowledge of things good for you and things bad for you. This is the answer Socrates gave and it remains, in the words of Alan Ladd’s Shane, “as good as any, better than most.” In saying that virtue is knowledge, Socrates meant both knowledge of what is good and knowledge that it is always better to act in accordance with that knowledge. Both are required because if virtue is knowledge, then, provided you know what is good to do, you will do it—a conclusion that seems contrary to experience and, perhaps, Christian scripture (Romans 7, for example). However, “virtue is knowledge” does not mean “if one knows only what is virtuous, one will do what is virtuous”; it means that if you know what is virtuous and that it is always better for you to do what is virtuous, then you will do what is virtuous.

On this account of virtue, the close connection between education and knowledge makes it natural to set apart virtue as the chief end of education because, on any account of education, its goal is to help students increase in knowledge. Thus, thinking of virtue as a kind of knowledge gives us strong motivation to establish it as the end of education, especially since that knowledge is not of insignificant things but of the most significant and fundamental—of what is good and bad.

Furthermore, though we can talk about different virtues—such as courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom—they will really all amount to the same thing: knowledge, applied to different types of good and bad things. The unity and identity of the virtues encourages educators and students to not emphasize one virtue at the expense of others. Educators can help students grow in courage, for example, by helping them grow in knowledge of what is to be dared and dreaded, which will not be merely an ability to recite correct answers to specific questions about courage but will involve the appropriate experience as well. And the attention to and experiences necessary to develop courage must accommodate what is needed for the other virtues, too.

Supposing virtue in this sense to be the chief end of education, what other goals can be accommodated in our educational endeavors?

First to consider are the goals that, in a manner of speaking, are beneath virtue. Some examples of these are wealth, skill, vocational preparation, reputation, and pleasure. An important reason that these are less than virtue is that none of them have a necessary connection with truth. Knowledge, on the other hand, is the ability to talk and think about things as they truly are—it has an intrinsic connection with the truth. Wealth, vocational preparation, and the rest do not, but virtue does.

Although wealth, skill, and the rest are inferior to virtue, they are not incompatible with it. In fact, we should not be surprised to find that anyone who possesses knowledge of what is good and bad for him or her will be well prepared vocationally, be skilled in important ways, be possessed of a good reputation, and have moments of genuine pleasure. The point is rather that such things cannot be the chief end of education.

After these, there are goals that are, in a way, beyond what education can provide, and the most prominent of these is a happy life. It is true that virtue is an important component of happiness—you cannot be happy without being virtuous—but happiness is beyond our control in a way that virtue is not. (It’s worth noting that the ancient philosophers who wrote on virtue and education are not all in agreement about this. Boethius, for one, is an interesting test case because it is not obvious how his Consolation of Philosophy is to be interpreted on this point.) Happiness requires at least a modicum of advantageous circumstances, but whether or not we find ourselves in those circumstances is not up to us. In other words, we need a bit of luck in our happiness. But, and here is the relevance to education, what is not up to us to attain through education cannot itself be an end of education. By helping students attain knowledge of what is good and bad for them, educators can prepare students to be happy if the right circumstances are also in place, but the placement of those circumstances are beyond the control of educators.

Apart from the goods that are inferior to virtue and happiness, there is one remaining significant good of human life: friendship. The obvious goodness and centrality of friendship to a happy life raises the question of whether it can or ought to be one of the ends of education.

One way of questioning the harmony of virtue and friendship is to ask whether it is possible for one person to be both as virtuous as possible and as good a friend to others as possible. The main difficulty is a practical one, primarily in terms of time and attention: a person might choose to not develop a higher degree of virtue for the sake of spending time with his or her friends. Consider, for example, the state of your own courage. Could you become more courageous? If so, why don’t you? You can even acknowledge that it would be good in itself to become more courageous, but then consider what you would have to give up in terms of time and attention to do so. One likely candidate is that you will have to give up spending time with friends. And at that point, one has to decide: which is more valuable, virtue or friendship?

Of course, as philosophers like Plato (in his Lysis) and Aristotle (in his Nicomachean Ethics, books 8 and 9) have noted, friendship and virtue are interconnected in important ways. But these interconnections do not alleviate the tension in our practical attempts to harmonize virtue and friendship. In fact, the question of whether friendship or virtue is more valuable should cause educators more consternation than it usually does. Although it is much more common to find schools whose mission is to educate students in virtue than it is to find schools who educate students toward genuine friendship, it is an open question regarding which of the two ought to be the chief end of education.

Gary Hartenberg, is an associate professor of philosophy, director of the Honors College at Houston Christian University, and author of Aristotle: Education for Virtue and Leisure, available from Classical Academic Press. 

https://hc.edu/the-honors-college/faculty/#hartenburg

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