Common Good: Reflections on Everyday Vices and Virtues

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An Introduction to Vice and Virtue

A Moment of Clarity

I recall with vivid clarity hating a man I had never met. I think his name was Dan. My hatred for him was short-lived. I did not have the self-discipline required to hate him long-term. That would have been too much work. Rather, I hated him for just a few minutes while he sat, literally, in the spotlight.

He had been invited to play piano in a college convocation while we were both students. He played superbly what sounded to my untrained ears like a very difficult piece. When he finished, everyone applauded.

I don’t remember whether I applauded or not. What I do remember are the feelings of envy and shame that swept through me. I was looking at a man my age on stage being applauded by our classmates for his superlative achievement in music. To top it off, someone announced that Dan was not a music major, but a pre-med major who had just been accepted into a prestigious medical school. The musical skill we had all just witnessed was not the result of a focused, full-time endeavor, but the result of spare time well spent.

I could do nothing as well as this guy played piano. If he had developed his musical skills to that level of proficiency in just his spare time, I felt I must be doing something wrong. Looking back, it’s clear that I was. Instead of pursuing my studies wholeheartedly the way getting into a top medical school requires, I plugged along, achieving far less than I could have, distracting myself with socializing, television, and worry. My college career, rather than being marked by the wise use of time, was characterized by aimlessness and purposelessness.

In the end, the difference between me and Dan was a difference of virtue and vice. Dan had cultivated virtues I had neglected. The hours I had spent in pointless amusement, he had spent learning the structures of music and of the human body. Such choices naturally involved a level of self-denial I had never undertaken, a level of focus I had never achieved. The sum of our choices put us each in our respective places that day, me in the back of a crowded auditorium looking for some way to justify my resentment and him on stage being applauded by every cute girl we knew.

This is not to say that Dan was a good person and I was a bad one. It’s not that simple. I wasn’t a bad person. I cared about my friends, was curious about the world, hungered for depth, and took moral and philosophical issues seriously. For all I know, behind the scenes, Dan could have been an embezzler, a sadist, or just an ordinary jerk. To say that his achievement and my lack of it was a matter of virtue and vice is neither a simple moral endorsement nor a criticism. Human beings are complicated creatures. Our moral and spiritual growth doesn’t happen equally in every area of life simultaneously. It is entirely possible to be a person who, for example, possesses a great deal of self-discipline and who yet lacks compassion, or a person who possesses intense empathy, and yet lacks wisdom.

The Moral Nature of Life

Such human complexity necessitates thinking deeply and clearly about both virtue and vice. By committing to a more precise examination of moral matters, we spare ourselves and others difficulty in the long run. Life is inherently moral, and we all think constantly in moral terms.

Something as simple as driving illustrates this point. If someone cuts us off in traffic, passes us on the wrong side, or speeds past us, we might get angry. Behind that anger lies a moral judgment. We don’t think that what the other driver has done is simply not to our liking. We don’t merely prefer that he not drive recklessly. We think he has committed an act that is morally wrong. We think he should not drive that way.

That should not is important. It indicates our inward awareness of a moral standard that we believe should be met no matter how difficult it may be to do so. This inward sense of right and wrong is sometimes called the moral law. Examining the implications of the moral law and how we know it extends far beyond the scope of this book. The salient point here is that life is inescapably moral, even in mundane circumstances, and that we know this intuitively.

Most of us, however, do not have a conscious mental framework for dealing with the moral complexities of life. Instead, we rely on our guts. We feel that something is right or wrong in our bodies and can’t articulate why, beyond pointing to these simple impulses. For this reason, taking some time to reflect on the moral dimension of life is critical if we want to develop into people who have more to say than just that something feels wrong.

The consequences of this unreflective approach are everywhere. Acting on or forming firm opinions based on nothing more than moral prejudice destroys relationships at both the personal and political levels. Rushing to judgment without a developed system by which to form balanced and compassionate assessments erects walls that separate us from our friends, family, and acquaintances.

The political consequences of unreflective moral outrage are painfully evident in the public square. People polarized into opposing camps shriek at one another hysterically rather than seeking the kind of understanding that would allow a multi-faceted analysis of the other side’s claims.

On the personal level, we are normally more vocal about those times when others have wronged us than about those times when we have wronged others. We desire justice from them, but not for them. We insist on our total innocence and their total corruption. Our impulse to defend ourselves from even the gentlest and most obviously correct moral criticism shuts down the conversation and sharing that is the lifeblood of real relationships.

Escaping this situation requires serious consideration of moral realities, of the failings of others and of ourselves. We must step back and think through the urge toward moral judgment to see if there isn’t a way to refine these impulses into a more sophisticated and compassionate system.

A Quick Sketch of Ethical Approaches

Fortunately, much of this work has already been done for us. Because humans have always wrestled with moral issues, people have been thinking about these matters for a long time. This thinking has tended, in the West, to fall into three broad categories: one seeks to determine our moral duties; one judges moral actions based on their consequences; the last takes an entirely different approach and roots the solution to ethical problems in the habits of the good person.

The first of these traditions is technically referred to as deontology. It gets its name from the Greek word deon meaning duty. Deontological perspectives tend also to be absolutist, holding that one must do one’s duty regardless of the consequences for oneself or others. Deontologists aim to find a moral principle which can guide right action in every conceivable circumstance and render a sense of moral certainty in the face of messy situations.

Many deontological approaches exist. Perhaps the most common argues that right and wrong are determined by God’s commands and prohibitions. According to this view, we have a duty to do those things God has commanded and not to do what He has prohibited. God, from this perspective, is the only authority with a legitimate right to dictate the difference between right and wrong and to demand that we should obey.

Deontological views are not, however, solely for the religious. Immanuel Kant sought to create a deontological system that rooted the call of duty not in religion, but in human reason and experience. From Kant’s point of view, moral principles or imperatives could be arrived at through the use of human intellectual powers. The most important of these was his Categorical Imperative which, in a rough paraphrase, argues that we ought not to act in ways we can’t simultaneously want everyone else to act.

The primary alternative to deontological systems are consequentialist ones. While these approaches vary, their common thread is the claim that the rightness or wrongness of an action can be determined by whether or not it produces beneficial results.

Probably the most well-known of these systems is Utilitarianism. Developed in the 18th and 19th centuries by Jeremy Bentham and later by John Stuart Mill, this philosophy holds that actions must be judged according to the principle of utility, or how useful an action is for producing happiness. Over the years, philosophers working in this stream of thought have nuanced these claims, but this idea remains its base.

Most approaches to ethics in the history of Western philosophy, with a few notable exceptions, can be classified under one of these approaches. Rare is the system that is neither deontological nor consequentialist.

It is to one of these rare exceptions we now turn. This approach, originating in ancient Greece, emphasizes not so much the question of whether individual actions are right or wrong, but the question, What is a good person? This small shift of emphasis makes a big difference. Rather than a search for a knowable, universally applicable moral principle or set of moral rules, focusing on personal virtue launches us into a process of trial and error, learning and habituation. Because this approach spotlights the connection between the inner characteristics of the actor and the moral status of the action, we might say that virtue ethics is more psychological than the other approaches.

Rooted in the thinking of Aristotle, virtue theory stresses the need for moral education, for the cultivation of certain habits of heart and mind. The goal of this practice is a state Aristotle called Eudaimonia, a word often translated as happiness. Happiness here, though, is no mere fleeting mental condition, but an ongoing state of flourishing in which a person’s capacities for reason and enjoyment are fulfilled.

The promise of this fulfillment relates to the practice of individual virtue through the assumption that reality has an inherent moral structure. Behind the call to pursue certain character traits lies the notion that by pursuing these traits, a human being puts himself in line with the underlying moral skeleton of human relationships. So, a person we call fair is so because fairness is a real thing that the virtuous person exemplifies in his actions. The character of the virtuous person, in this view, is a reflection, on a small scale, of that larger set of moral realities I called the moral law. The moral order is a round hole, and it is through the practice of virtue we take our square selves, round off the edges, and fit ourselves for the invisible order that governs human realities.

Virtue, as conceived by Aristotle, was the mean between extremes¹. He thought virtuous action consisted of the ability to choose actions that fell in the middle of a spectrum. One famous example of this is bravery. Bravery, Aristotle thought, was the mean between the extremes of foolhardiness, a habit of proceeding without taking stock of risks, and cowardice, a habit of fleeing all danger.

However, in the centuries since Aristotle, virtue has come to have a more colloquial, less technical meaning. When we use the word, we don’t necessarily mean the mean between extremes. Instead, in modern usage, when we say virtue, we mean something like a good trait to have or a trait that indicates an overall good character. In this book, I will use virtue" in this modern, casual way rather than in the strict Aristotelian sense.

The Ethics of Everyday Life

All this philosophy can seem like abstract and rarefied stuff. It’s not. Rather, the matters touched on here have much to do with the patterns of our everyday living. Whether we take a strictly deontological or consequentialist approach to determining right from wrong, or whether we look at things from a virtue ethics perspective makes a difference. We cannot simply avoid employing one of these approaches. Daily life demands constant moral decision making, and that demands we have an approach for making such decisions.

This becomes clear upon a moment’s reflection. Daily life is hard. Our difficulties form the context of and the impetus for our moral decision-making. Our interactions with friends, spouses, children, work associates, and strangers constantly require assessing right and wrong. Our choices in these relationships both reveal and form who we are. It is in the crucible of our daily moral challenges that our character is formed.

Take a common example. Most parents who have been home from work all day with their children have found it a mixed blessing. Imagine this situation. After several hours of listening to her children play loudly, argue with one another, and whine because there is nothing good to eat in the house, our hypothetical mother may begin to find herself on edge. Tensions, often indiscernible to children, who tend to be oblivious about such things, grow. Feelings reach a boiling point when a child needs to be told for the thousandth time to pick up her coat off the living room floor and return it to the place where it hangs.

What a parent does in this situation will depend on his conception of moral reality. A strict deontologist might mentally scan the list of divine commands and prohibitions looking for guidance on how to best interact with his children. A consequentialist will think through what action would make life better for everyone. A virtue ethicist will ask what a virtuous parent should do in this situation.

The parent who holds to a virtue ethics paradigm will not merely think about consequences or duties, though both of these may play a part in choosing his response. He will also think about the moral education his child is receiving. He will be concerned with her practical habits in the areas of obedience to legitimate authority, care for property, and orderliness of life. His response to his child will be more than punishment for having contravened her duty nor will he attempt to merely create a bad consequence for the child. A virtue-oriented parent sees these moments as part of a child’s ongoing moral education, the process that builds the soul.

This example illustrates two important strengths about the virtue ethics approach and why such an approach serves as the basis for this book. Virtue ethics, because it stresses the overall moral development of the individual, encompasses concerns about both duties and consequences. The virtuous person is one who possesses the wisdom necessary to weigh these factors and to determine how to pursue one’s duties even when unpleasant consequences are likely to follow. Rather than making either duty or consequence the final criteria for moral decision-making, virtue ethics acknowledges the importance of both and offers us an image of the person who balances them well.

Our story of the flustered parent is just one example of the myriad moral complexities we face in daily life. Again and again we find ourselves looking for the right response to situations that arise. For most of us, this search is unconscious. Making this search conscious is important because, as virtue theory insists, our moral behavior is largely a matter of habit. We cannot possibly engage in deep reflection on each moral situation we face daily. Instead, we cultivate a series of habits to see us through. These habits eventually form the core of our self. Over the long run, the habits we develop determine the quality of our relationships and of our self-understanding—yet another reason why these matters matter. To allow this process to remain wholly unconscious is to surrender our freedom to choose the quality of our character and relationships. Far from being an abstract academic exercise reserved for intellectuals, moral reflection is a practical means for determining the trajectory of our lives.

The second reason this book takes a virtue-oriented approach is because, as has been said, virtue ethics stresses moral education. Inherent in an ethical system that emphasizes moral education is the promise that it is never too late. At any point, an individual can begin to pursue virtue. Through a combination of intellectual reflection and embodied practice, any person can move from being less virtuous to more virtuous.

We can also teach others to be virtuous. Sometimes, as with our children, this teaching can be explicit and may involve measures of discipline and even punishment. More often, we teach others to be virtuous through our example. Through our own pursuit of virtue, we breathe life into others’ desires to do the same. For this reason, virtue is most effectively pursued in community. When virtuous people seek to become more virtuous in one another’s company, they can create an upward spiral of moral learning.

About This Book

Since ongoing moral education is a central value in a virtue ethics paradigm, it’s no surprise that such a paradigm would give rise to this book. One method of moral education is to reflect on various vices and virtues. With the goal of translating insight into daily practice.

This book aims to help. Rather than seeking to be another academic text on ethics, this book aims to offer reflections on common vices and virtues and the many ways those character traits play out in our daily lives. In addition to this, you’ll find short reflections on the nature of vice and virtue themselves. The particular character traits mentioned in this volume were chosen for various reasons. Some, like discipline, sloth and love, were chosen because they are fundamental to many other vices and virtues. Others were chosen because while they are important, they are much more rarely remarked on. When, for example, did you last hear a thorough discussion of gossip or of domestic virtue?

This book is, by no means, an exhaustive examination of every possible character trait. There is more to say on these topics than could ever fit into a single volume. When you close the back cover of this book, you may not have a complete understanding of your own moral system or a comprehensive ethical philosophy. There are many resources that can help you with that, if that is what you seek.

Rather, the purpose of these essays is to open space in the reader’s mind and heart. For some, these essays may constitute an initial attempt to think seriously about the content examined here. For others, I hope to cast new light on these central and ancient concepts. Failing that, perhaps I can present well-known truths in a way that connects with a new and often bereft generation.

These essays seek to address the mind, of course, but to penetrate more deeply than any merely mental exercise. They aim to inform in the deepest sense, to shape the inner and, ultimately, the outer lives of their readers. They aim to penetrate to the moral center of the individual and to make such an impression there that, even once their words are forgotten, their outline will remain.

To aim at this place and for these reasons is not the job of philosophy alone, but of wisdom, and that is what this volume seeks to impart. Wisdom, in all her forms, is apprehended not by mind nor by heart alone but by the soul. And it is the health of the soul, of course, that is ultimately at stake in our daily navigation between vice and virtue.

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. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics,

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Understanding Vice

A Shortage of Categories

Most of us, if we think about it at all, think of evil as acts that are especially heinous. We use the word for actions like those in the September 11, 2001, attacks which took the lives of more than 3,000 and caused incalculable suffering. Sometimes we hear about a particularly violent crime, perhaps a crime against a child, and we don’t hesitate to call it evil.

We are right to do so. Those acts are evil, and it is good for us to call them so. Our recognition of the evil in these instances is evidence of our inner awareness of the moral law. If we had no inner sense that human beings should not behave in these ways, we would have no motivation for condemning them.

But, we do have this inner sense. If we are sensitive to it, we will see that it is always active, forever signaling us about the moral quality of our experience. Our inner moral sense doesn’t flare up just in those situations where something egregious is going on.

Few of us have a difficult time seeing how extremely damaging behaviors fall short of our inward ideal. But we have a harder time acknowledging and articulating a moral diagnosis of more pedestrian failings. We know that not every failure to live up to the inner sense of what we should be is evil. Though we often lack the categories necessary to describe these intuitions, we feel an undeniable sense of discomfort when we fail to meet these ideals.

To talk intelligibly or helpfully about these more routine failures requires more categories than simply good and evil. We cannot sort every human action easily