Virtues & Vices

🏛️ What Virtues and Vices Are

Virtues and vices are fundamental attitudes toward oneself and life.

An attitude is a manner of thinking, feeling, and acting that reflects a settled orientation of mind. In this sense, virtues and vices are not isolated behaviors, habits, or personality traits. They are enduring ways of relating to existence that express themselves consistently across contexts and over time.

A virtue is a life-affirming attitude.
A vice is a life-negating attitude.

They represent the psychological posture a person takes toward reality, value, action, and selfhood.

🏛️ Virtues as Attitudes Toward Life

Every virtue answers a basic existential stance:

• Is my life worth living well?

• Is reality something to face or evade?

• Am I competent to act, choose, and judge?

• Is success possible — and worth pursuing?

• Do I deserve to know the truth?

• Am I worthy of experiencing values?

When a person answers these questions affirmatively in practice, the result is virtue.

Independence is the attitude that one’s life is one’s own to direct.
Ambition is the attitude that one’s life is worth improving.
Courage is the attitude that one’s life is worth acting for despite fear.
Honesty is the attitude that reality matters more than comfort.

These are not rules imposed from outside. They are the psychological expressions of a being that takes its life seriously.

🏛️ Vices as Attitudes Toward Life

Vices are not mere moral failures or lapses in conduct. They are negative orientations toward existence.

They express attitudes such as:

• My life is not really mine.

• Effort is pointless.

• Truth is dangerous.

• Avoidance is safer than action.

• Responsibility is a burden to escape.

A person governed by vice does not merely act badly on occasion. They approach life with a posture of resignation, evasion, hostility, or self-distrust — and their actions follow accordingly.

🏛️ Why Virtues and Vices Are Not Traits or Behaviors

Virtues are not traits. Traits describe temperament or personality — cautious, bold, introverted, agreeable — and are largely descriptive. Virtues are normative. They concern how one ought to relate to reality in order to flourish.

Virtues are not behaviors. A single action proves nothing. A coward can perform a brave act. A dependent person can make an isolated independent choice. Virtue explains why certain kinds of actions recur when circumstances change.

Virtues are not moods or passing feelings. One can feel afraid and act courageously. One can feel confident and act dishonestly.

Virtues are attitudes — stable, chosen orientations of mind that govern thinking, feeling, and acting across time.

🏛️ Virtues, Value, and Flourishing

Virtues are embodiments of the success of one’s life, values, and flourishing.

Where life is the standard of value, virtues are the psychological forms that make flourishing possible. They presuppose the attitude that:

• Life is valuable,

• Success is possible,

• Truth matters,

• And the self is competent to deal with reality.

Vices presuppose the opposite.

This is why virtues are objective without being external commands. They are grounded in the requirements of a flourishing life, not in social approval, tradition, or authority.

🏛️ Virtues in Practice

Because virtues are attitudes, they are visible in action.

They show up in:

• What a person chooses when no one is watching,

• How they decide under pressure,

• Whether they act or evade when fear is present,

• Whether they direct their life or allow it to be directed for them.

A person’s virtues are not what they profess, but the stance they repeatedly take toward choice, effort, risk, truth, and responsibility.

🏛️ Moral Principles

Virtues can also be considered as moral principles. General rules and guidelines that direct thought, word and action towards proper survival. Principles provide a structure of preferred behaviour in times when choice is demanded. Without these principles, one is subjected to choice making by whim, treating every situation as new and dissimilar to every other situation they've encountered. This makes it extremely difficult for one to build a coherent character able to follow a code of self interested action. 

If one does not make choices by objective moral principles or by whim, they end up adopting subjective moral principles which are most commonly used by the majority. More often than not, these principles are wrong and cause more harm than good. 

To objectively flourish, one must implement an objective code of action, a complete set of moral principles that have been discovered which best support ones welfare.

These moral principles and this code of action is what the virtues are.

🏛️ Summary

Virtues and vices are fundamental attitudes toward oneself and life, expressed through characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting.

A virtue is a life-affirming attitude.
A vice is a life-negating one.

Virtues are the attitudes of a being that takes its life seriously.