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Browsing by Subject "Virtue"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Cultivating practical wisdom
    (2013-05) Swartwood, Jason David
    Practical wisdom (hereafter simply "wisdom") is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live and conduct herself. Because wisdom is such an important and high-level achievement, we should wonder: what is the nature of wisdom? What kinds of skills, habits and capacities does it involve? Can real people actually develop it? If so, how? I argue that we can answer these questions by modeling wisdom on expert decision-making skill in complex areas like firefighting. I develop this expert skill model of wisdom using philosophical argument informed by relevant empirical research. I begin in Chapter 1 by examining the historical roots of analogies between wisdom and practical skills in order to motivate the expert skill model. In Chapter 2, I provide the core argument for the expert skill model. I then use the remaining chapters to pull out the implications of the expert skill model. In Chapter 3, I show that the expert skill model yields practical guidance about how to develop wisdom. In Chapter 4, I address the objection, due to Daniel Jacobson, that wisdom is not a skill that humans could actually develop, since skill development requires a kind of feedback in practice that is not available for all-things-considered decisions about how to live. Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply the expert skill model to the question, much discussed by virtue ethicists, of whether a wise person deliberates using a comprehensive and systematic conception of the good life.
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    The structure of virtue: An empirical investigation.
    (2009-09) Shryack, Jessica
    This project is guided by the need for a common model of virtuous personality that can integrate theory and research on positive personality traits across the fields of positive psychology, personality, moral development and character education. A particular concern is that character education programs lack an empirically-based structural model of virtue - which could be provided by mainstream psychological research - even while initiatives to strengthen character in America's schools have been popular and wellfunded in the past few decades. The current project was designed to do two things: 1) examine the structural validity of a rationally-derived model of virtue in two separate factor analytic studies, and 2) relate the resulting major virtue dimensions to dimensions of normal personality and to virtue-relevant criterion variables. Specifically, in Study 1, an exploratory scale factor analysis of a popular virtues assessment (the VIA-IS) was conducted to determine the fit of different models using multiple retention criteria. In Study 2, an exploratory item factor analysis was conducted using items from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) to represent the VIA-IS item content domain and factors were related to measures of normal personality, altruism, academic experiences and relevant demographic variables. Evidence for a three- and five-factor structure was found, with certain factors (e.g. Temperance) replicating across Studies 1 and 2. In addition, virtues predicted variance in altruism scores over and above that provided by a measure of normal personality.