Virtue
Contents
Definition
Applications
Lack of Virtue Makes People Ill
One of the things I’ve learned for example, being a clinical psychologist (I’ve spent thousands of hours helping people sort out difficult problems), is that lack of virtue makes people ill. I’m not saying that my clients themselves lacked virtue, I suppose some of them do and some of them don’t, but to the degree that they’re embedded in a network of relationships where virtue is fundamentally absent, they’re tortured and tormented and they’re unable to find firm ground. And that’s not a biological problem, although biologically fragile people might be hurt more by a lack of virtue. [1]
Virtue is a Mode of Being
Virtue, ethics, morality isn’t a field of study. It’s a mode of being upon which all fields of study rest. It’s also a mode of being upon which everything you do in your life rests. The way you understand yourself or fail to, the way you understand other people or fail to. And more deeply than that, what role it is that you play in your life in the world.[2]
There Is a Transnational and Transethnic Morality Based On Virtue
I do think that modern people can believe in virtue, but not easily, because virtue sounds religious in a sense and we have real trouble, whether we’re religious or not, with religious preconceptions because our scientific forms of knowledge and our fundamental materialism has really radically undermined our ability to believe in any transcendent being. But one thing that modern people can believe in, I think without much difficulty at all, is evil. Solzhenitsyn said, for example, that the most important event of the 20th century, as far as he was concerned, was the Nuremburg judgement. And you may know, you should know, that after World War 2 a group of National Socialists from Germany, who were deemed particularly responsible for the absolute horrors of the final solution and the mass factory genocide that accompanied it, were put on trial. And a standard defense for their actions was ‘Well, I was ordered to do it.’ And the Nuremburg decision denied human beings, regardless of their ethnicity or national background or beliefs, the legal right to use that as a defense, under certain limited circumstances. And the argument was that there are some things that are so self-evidently not good, not virtuous, that if you engage in them you’re existentially guilty. You’re guilty outside the bounds of your culture.There’s a transnational and transethnic morality. We don’t know what it is, but we know what it isn’t. It isn’t pointless torture and genocide.[3]
Interpretations
See Also
References
- ↑ Necessity of Virtue Transcript from memoirsofanamnesic.wordpress.com
- ↑ Necessity of Virtue Transcript from memoirsofanamnesic.wordpress.com
- ↑ Necessity of Virtue Transcript from memoirsofanamnesic.wordpress.com
