Can virtue be measured?

The second annual conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Values, University of Birmingham

The Jubilee Centre for Character and Values will hold its second annual conference on January 9–11, 2014. Its theme will be: ‘Can Virtue Be Measured?’

Main Theme

Practical virtue ethics is a hot topic in philosophy and in many cognate areas in the humanities and social sciences. In education, the study of virtue finds application in efforts to cultivate young people’s moral character, and over the last decade a number of interventions have emerged in order to improve character. Educators, parents and policy-makers must know whether such programmes work. A standard demand – that tends to be made of any educational intervention – is that interventions offer pre-tests and post-tests to demonstrate success; increasingly, the demand is that such success is demonstrated via randomised controlled trial. Here, a problem presents itself for virtue-based character education programmes. In order to prove the effectiveness of such programmes, it will be necessary to measure students’ virtues before and after the intervention and to demonstrate that participants’ moral character has truly improved. But how do we measure virtue in people in general and in young moral learners in particular? This is the question that will occupy participants in the Second Annual Conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Values.

A number of problems present themselves in this area, in particular for approaches grounded in naturalist-realist forms of virtue ethics. Firstly, there are problems to do with how we can know that others (and we ourselves) are, indeed, virtuous. The great majority of existing instruments to measure moral character – for instance the positive psychological VIA-instruments for youth and adults – are simple self-report questionnaires. Critics of self-report approaches complain about response biases due to covert self-deception (or even overt attempts to exaggerate one’s virtuous character). In response, supporters of self-reports ask what measures exist to measure real objective moral virtue (as opposed to self-reported virtue) and the answer is not readily forthcoming: no tried-and-tested instruments to operationalise and measure moral virtue – on a naturalist-realist conception – seem to exist. Secondly, there are problems to do with what the virtues are. Experimental results in psychology seem to suggest that much of the variation in what people do cannot be attributed to enduring and general features of their character, but can be better explained as resulting from situational stimuli. If the situationist critique of character is correct, virtuous character either does not exist or varies so much with context that it will be hard to measure consistently.

How can we derive credible measures of virtue? How can we ensure that such measures are reliable and that they have real-world (predictive and concurrent) validity? Or is the demand unreasonable? Have we, by demanding that virtue be assessed, succumbed to a culture of instrumentalism, testing and accountability, inimical to real education? The purpose of this conference is to contribute to these debates and map out avenues of research on the evaluation of virtue-based education programmes.

Keynote Speakers

Professor Stephen J. Thoma, University of Alabama
Professor Nancy E. Snow, Marquette University
Professor Randall Curren, Rochester University and University of Birmingham

Download details for the Second Annual Conference of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Values (PDF, 222KB)