Virtue & Vice

Of course, saying “my beneficial choices are the only good things” begs the question of what we mean by beneficial. The inverse is also true - what do we mean by harmful? Indeed, many a philosopher has realized that much of our ignorance and suffering comes from not deeply or wisely being able to distinguish between true harm and true benefit. Here we will need to consider Virtue and Vice. In so doing, I will be proposing a specialized and practical definition for each.

For naturalists, the idea something is virtuous ‘just because’ or because of some traditional belief, or some authority says so, is not very persuasive or useful. But it is also not very useful to go the postmodernist or cynical route and suggest that any and all talk of virtue is completely culture-based and groundless. Remember that, in our practice, Spiritual Naturalists are doing something very practical and its procedures need to make sense within the goals of our project.

So, for us, we can consider something virtuous if it is truly beneficial - not merely seeming to be beneficial in a shallow or misguided sense. To determine what is truly beneficial, we need to look at the nature of the thing for which an action is prescribed. Namely, we need to look at what a human being is, in order to suggest which choices will be beneficial to it.

What ‘a human being is’ could (and does) fill volumes. We are very complex creatures and there are all kinds of ways you could categorize our traits, inclinations, physical nature, evolutionary history, and so on. You would probably want to do it differently depending on your purposes. So, to avoid digression, let’s stick to our purpose: discovering the best way to live in order to flourish.

As any organism on the planet, we obviously have certain instinctive drives and capacities. Some of these we typically view as a problem in today’s world (violence, aggression, cowardice, etc.) and some we typically view as helpful (empathy, revulsion at likely infectious things, family bonds, generosity, etc). But these impulses are simplistic and, as such, we can take almost any of them thought commonly to be positive or negative, and find examples to the contrary. Aggression might be helpful in being assertive or ambitious in achieving noble goals. Empathy might be misapplied and prevent us from defending ourselves or others against bad actors. Revulsion might prevent us from treating a person with injuries.

Our nature also includes something more rare among organisms. The most obvious and striking feature differentiating us is our ability to reason, understand, and our ability to override those impulses in favor of more abstract principles¹. The former allows us to more precisely determine courses of action suited to the specific situation, rather than relying on only a generalized impulse. The latter ability, if cultivated, allows us to follow through despite what might be impulses to the contrary.

I like the ancient Greek terminology, which referred to the important aspects of us - that thing which makes us human - as the moral-rational being. It doesn’t mean we are always moral, or always rational. But it means we are a rational animal, in the sense that we have the ability to comprehend our situation and actions in more elaborate ways. And, it means we are a moral animal, in that we have the ability to create abstract rules of behavior for interacting more productively with one another, and the capacity to conform ourselves to those rules, despite other drives.

Such a creature is going to have a wide array of psychological dispositions, and cognitive capabilities that make certain ways of living and acting more conducive to mental health and happiness than others. In a way, the ancient philosophers that talked about this were our earliest evolutionary psychologists, even if neither field had yet been established formally.

So, as we proceed in life, we need to ask what our real goal is and who it is for. We know that all organisms, including we ourselves, will die. Self preservation is important and worthy to keep us going for the time we are alive, but ultimately, if our practice is only about biological benefit we are taking on a mission that is destined to fail. And, as we are more than merely biological, it will fail to take advantage of our moral and rational capacities, resulting in unhappiness. Instead, our focus should be on preservation of the moral-rational being to whatever extent possible. Some might call this our ‘higher selves’.

That means there are many ways such a being can be harmed or destroyed besides harm or destruction of the biological body. So, as we look at harm and benefit, we look at it through the lens of what is harmful to the moral-rational being, and what is beneficial to the moral-rational being².

While we have conceived of good and evil as subjective dispositions we take on in response to events and conditions, virtue and vice here is not subjective, but refers to something objective.

Virtue and vice, in this framing, is based on the objective consequences to the mental health and well-being (flourishing) of moral-rational beings. That means that we can believe something to be virtuous or vicious (as in ‘of vice’) and we can be objectively wrong about that. In fact, entire cultures can go through all of history and believe something to be virtuous which is actually vicious, and vice versa. The answer to the question of what is virtuous, within this lexicon, is as objective as the question of how best to build a bridge or the wing of a plane, with similarly concrete consequences. It is the science of engineering healthy subjective experience for homo sapiens.

Granted, the task is easier said than done. For one, these things are highly complex with innumerable variables. Such higher order concepts as ‘health’, ‘well-being’, and such are going to involve so many factors that there is no simple way to weight them all; with much room left to interpretation and differing opinions. But the complexity of a problem, and the difficulty of finding a commonly agreed upon solution should not be mistaken for something that is, at its core, only subjective. There are many examples of objective facts which are equally complex and difficult to agree upon, and yet there is a correct answer or course of action, such as with complex medical issues or ecological systems.

It is also true that what is virtuous in one situation may not be in another. But circumstantial variability should not be confused with subjectivism either. There are many cases where the correct answer to a problem will vary depending on circumstance. But it doesn’t mean there was no right answer beyond feeling or opinion. It just means the issue was complex and needed many caveats to describe completely³.

Lastly, it is easy to think that, if we say there is an objectively correct answer to ethical questions, that we know what that answer is. The fact that virtue is being defined here as an objective matter does not mean we can ever know with perfection what is and is not virtuous. Like all complex things, we will need to explore the arguments for and against various ideas about it. We will need to compare them to observation, and we will need to examine and eliminate as much of our ignorance, bias, and misjudgment as possible. We will need to be humble in holding such beliefs provisionally⁴. Yet, approaching the matter with the view that there is a right answer is substantially different from the approach that no answer is any more true than another.

So I will proceed with this conception of virtue as being those values and actions which have objectively positive benefits to human flourishing. And, I’ll call vice those values and actions which have objectively negative effects on human flourishing. As such, virtue then becomes something closer to its ancient Greek meaning: excellence in the art of living.

Now we have a means to talk about the actions of others (being outside our control) within a value system, but without confusing the proper distinction placed on our own values and actions. So, when speaking of the values or actions of others or ourselves, which are harmful to flourishing, we call this vice (or vicious action). But we do not say the negative values or actions of others are evil. Why? Because we reserve that highly charged word for where it belongs - on our own vicious choices and acts. Likewise, when it comes to the positive values and actions, we call them virtuous, but we only call them good when they are our own positive values and actions.

In other words, what we are doing here is separating emotionally charged labels from more intellectualized labels. We are then placing the charged labels as descriptors for our values, choices, and actions (within our control). And we are using less charged, more intellectualized words to discern between those choices and actions which are consistent or inconsistent with the nature of a moral-rational being, no matter who commits them.