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Nancy Snow, University of Oklahoma

Character education is of great importance these days.  This is true not only as regards children -- witness character education curricula offered in schools -- but also as regards adults – witness programs offered for the workplace. Apart from deliberate initiatives to cultivate character, I believe that  “ordinary people” can acquire virtue.  By “ordinary people,” I mean people who are not specifically or directly concerned with becoming virtuous, but who have goals or aims the pursuit of which requires them to develop virtue.  E.g., parents acquire patience and generosity in the course of pursuing their goal to be good parents; those concerned with being peacemakers acquire tact and diplomacy in the pursuit of that goal, and so on.  In this essay, I continue the exploration of ordinary virtue begun in earlier work with an eye to identifying possible pathways by which ordinary virtue can take on the characteristics of full Aristotelian virtue (see Snow, forthcoming and 2013).  In the spirit of empirical collaboration, I suggest these pathways of virtue development as testable hypotheses.