DRMacIver's Notebook
Asymmetric vices and the unity of virtue
Asymmetric vices and the unity of virtue
I was trying to find a post I’d written about this and then realised it was a Twitter thread. This post is just me copying out that thread and lightly editing it for format so I have somewhere more stable to refer to it.
Aristotle’s conception of “virtue” is as a golden mean between two vices: One of deficit, one of success. e.g. courage is the virtue that lies between cowardice and foolhardiness.
Something I realised is that there’s a sort of fundamental asymmetry between these two vices. A vice of excess has a totally different character from a vice of deficit. If you think of a virtue as a kind of drive in a direction, one vice is a lack of that drive, but the other is not in fact an excess of it.
Take honesty as the virtue defined by valuing truth. A dearth of valuing truth is certainly a vice. But the vice of being “too honest” is not really about valuing truth too much. An excess of honesty is bad not because too much truth is bad but because of non-truth considerations. e.g. you’re overly blunt if you tell the truth without consideration for others’ feelings. You’re foolhardy if you speak truth to power without care for consequences.
The vice of being overly honest is not that your drive to truth is too strong, but that you’ve not stabilised it by taking into account other things.
What other things do you need to take into account? Anything you value.
Not everything you value is valued for good reasons. e.g. if you tell or omit the truth in the circumstances where that is the right thing to do, but it’s because you’re lazy and it’s too hard work in the cases where you should be circumspect, that’s not true virtue even if results are good.In large part because this is not going to reliably track the situations in which you should tell or omit the truth. If somehow laziness were exactly tracking the right thing to do, I think it would be reasonable to call it a virtue, but it doesn’t. Sometimes you need to tell the truth even when it’s hard work.
What’s a properly virtuous stabilising force?
Well, another virtue.
You are properly practicing the virtue of honesty if your desire for truth is tempered by the other virtuous desires you’ve cultivated. i.e. the proper exercise of a virtue requires that it be tempered by all the others.
This is not, I think, exactly what Aristotle means by the unity of the virtues, but it’s pretty close.
It is, however, partly an artifact of us insisting that there is a unified good to aim for, and it’s not clear that all such goods unify the same way.
If we take the drive towards truth, this is not naturally unified with the drive to face fears. But once we allow for the fact that both matter, we are forced to unify them in some way by allowing for there to be an “appropriate” amount of each, in which each balances the other.
By defining virtues as the appropriate level of exercising individual drives for the good, we demand their unity, because without unity we cannot have a suitable notion of “appropriate”.