Talking about Good Deeds: Elaborative Discourse and Moral Virtue
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Talking about Good Deeds: Elaborative Discourse and Moral Virtue Sabrina Little1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
1 Introduction A current trend in the early child development literature is an emphasis on the role of language in healthy moral and emotional development. Caretakers who equip children with moral and emotional vocabularies through elaborative discourse and emotion coaching strategies tend to raise children who are more capable of both understanding and regulating their own emotions and can better navigate moral decisions than those whose caretakers have less verbally articulate parenting strategies. These findings offer new insights for understanding how verbal instruction and a child’s acquisition of virtue and vice vocabularies can be helpfully employed in virtue formation, complementing the use of indirect measures such as role modeling. As of yet, these findings have not been sufficiently engaged in the virtue theory literature. The intention of this article is to place elaborative discourse in conversation with questions of virtue development—highlighting the role language can play in training a child’s concepts of moral permissibility and judgments, and in shaping appropriate motivations from an early age. There are three sections: First, I offer a preliminary sketch of what a virtue is, describing variations of virtue accounts that might impact what virtue pedagogy need involve. I offer this analysis in order to provide the relevant conceptual backdrop, but the goal of this paper is not centrally conceptual, in terms of smoothing rough edges in an account of virtue. Rather the central intention of this paper is to start a conversation about how elaborative discourse might feature in the development of virtues. Throughout this paper, I flag conclusions that would differ depending on the account of virtues assumed. Next, I introduce empirical work on elaborative discourse. I define these strategies and explain their relevance for questions of moral development. I also examine how this empirical work challenges current assumptions in virtue pedagogy. Lastly, I place this work in conversation with a current debate in virtue theory—the articulation requirement. I argue that while moral language may not be required in the mature expression of particular * Sabrina Little [email protected] 1
Philosophy and Religious Studies Department, Morehead State University, 354 Rader Hall, Morehead, KY 40351, USA
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virtues, this literature may press us to reconsider the importance of articulation, possibly as a type of success condition in the acquisition of virtues.
2 A Primer on Virtues and Character Education A virtue is an acquired, kind-specific excellence of a thing with a strong motivational component. It involves being disposed to act in the right ways, at the right times, over an extended period of time. By “acquired,” I mean to distinguish excellences that are intentionally developed from those that are merely natural, habituated, or imitative. Virtuous acti
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