Mendelssohn and Kant on Virtue as a Skill

The idea that virtue can be profitably conceived as a certain sort of skill goes back to the Socratic dialogues of Plato, was developed by competing schools in the Hellenistic era, and has recently attracted renewed attention from virtue theorists. My aim in this chapter is to examine a neglected episode in the history of this idea — one that focuses on the pivotal role that Moses Mendelssohn played in rehabilitating the skill model of virtue for the German rationalist tradition, and Immanuel Kant’s subsequent, yet significantly qualified, endorsement of the idea. I begin with Mendelssohn’s place as a critical developer of the German rationalist tradition. Although his rationalist predecessors frequently spoke of virtue as a skill or proficiency, they did so — Mendelssohn contends — without adequately considering what this notion might be good for, what philosophical problems it might help solve. Mendelssohn finds in the concept of skill the requisite resources to meet an objection that might be lodged against the perfectionist and agent-based ethics of his tradition: namely, that a virtuous person would seem to act for the sake of realising his own perfection in everything that he does, thereby taking a morally inappropriate interest in his own character. Since for Mendelssohn the hallmark of skilful activity is unselfconscious automatism, he argues that the expression of skill — and thus virtue, if it is a skill — does not involve thoughts about what one is doing, much less thoughts about one’s own dispositions and capacities. The objection can be neutralised, he proposes, with renewed attention to the ancient thesis that virtue is itself a certain sort of skill. I then turn to Kant, who rejects the automatism featured in Mendelssohn’s account, on grounds that it renders virtue mindless and unreflective. But Kant does not reject the skill model wholesale. Rather, he indicates that any successful deployment of it calls for greater clarity about which skills can serve as apt models for virtue than Mendelssohn and his cohort offered. To this end, Kant distinguishes between “free” and “unfree” skills, and admits only the former as a possible guide for thinking about virtue as a skill. This move allows Kant to recognise how reflection can be embedded in the expression of free skills, which underwrites in turn his qualified endorsement of the skill model of virtue.