Virtue and Vice

The earliest Greek discussion of human excellence appears in Homer, where aretē, the word later translated as "virtue," still means excellence of any kind: the sharpness of a blade, the speed of a horse, the strength of a warrior. Applied to men, Homeric aretē is predominantly martial. Courage in battle, skill with weapons, endurance under danger, and the capacity to protect companions and put enemies to shame form the core of the hero's excellence. The poems present this excellence not as a private quality of character alone, but as a public claim to honor (timē) and lasting glory (kleos).

Homeric virtue is not, however, mere ferocity. Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus display distinct varieties of excellence: Achilles in the intensity of his honor and wrath, Hector in devotion to family and city, Odysseus in cunning and patient craft. Alongside martial prowess the poems place hospitality to strangers, loyalty to kin, reverence toward the gods, and the measured speech that marks the noble man. The hero is the one whose gifts and deeds together entitle him to recognition among men. Questions of education and habit, which later philosophy will treat as the means by which virtue is acquired, remain largely implicit in Homer; the hero's excellence is shown rather than explained as a product of training.

The same poems also show what the heroic code exacts. The demands of vengeance, risk, and the pursuit of glory may destroy cities and break lives. Achilles' choice between a long life without renown and a short life of fame states the conflict with particular clarity. Virtue, in this setting, is what makes a human life shine in the eyes of others; it is also what often brings that life to an early end. The relation of such excellence to the good of the city, and to the costs of war, is taken up more fully under the ideas of Justice and War and Peace.

Homer's heroic excellences supply the materials that later Greek philosophy will analyze, criticize, and transform. Plato and Aristotle will redefine virtue as a condition of the soul or a habit of choice rather than as martial renown; Machiavelli will revive something of the older, effective political energy under the name of virtù. The subsequent discussion of virtue and vice proceeds, in large measure, against this Homeric background.

Plato shifts the discussion of virtue away from Homeric martial excellence toward the condition of the soul. On his view, the virtuous person is the one whose soul is rightly ordered. In the Republic he identifies four cardinal virtues, each related to a part of the soul: wisdom as the excellence of reason, courage as the excellence of spirit, temperance as the excellence of appetite when appetite is properly ordered, and justice as the harmony of all three parts, each performing its proper work. Virtue, he says, is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul; vice is its disease and deformity.

This account detaches virtue from the accidents of birth and military rank. A man may be brave in battle and still vicious if the soul as a whole is disordered; only the ordered soul is virtuous in the full sense. The same analysis is applied to the city: the just city is one in which each class does its own work, and the comparison of soul and state is developed at length under the idea of Justice. Plato thus treats virtue as a psychological and a political principle, rather than as individual prowess alone.

In the Meno the harder question is raised whether virtue can be taught. If virtue is knowledge, as Socrates often argues, then in principle it should be teachable; yet experience shows that the sons of virtuous men are often vicious. The dialogues leave the question open. They also consider whether the virtues are many or one, and whether wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, and holiness are distinct excellences or names for the same thing. In the Laws, education is described as training the first instincts of virtue in children by habituation with respect to pleasure and pain, a training that is not simply the transmission of knowledge. The connection of virtue to education is treated more fully under that idea.

Plato's identification of virtue with knowledge, or with a kind of wisdom, becomes a central problem for the later tradition. Aristotle will ask how the person who knows what is right may still do wrong, and will answer in part by distinguishing moral from intellectual virtue and by assigning a large role to habit. The question whether virtue is one or many, and whether it can be taught, remains a standing theme of the discussion that Plato opens.

Aristotle gives the classical analysis of virtue its most systematic form. Virtue, on his account, is neither a feeling nor mere knowledge, but a hexis: a stable disposition of character, acquired through habituation, that inclines us to act well. Virtues are not in us by nature, nor are they contrary to nature; we are by nature receptive of them, and they are perfected in us by habit. Nature, habit, and rational principle together make men good. The chapter on Habit is closely related, for the notion that virtue combines habit and goodness appears throughout Aristotle's ethics.

Every moral virtue is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. Courage lies between cowardice and rashness; generosity between stinginess and prodigality; friendliness between obsequiousness and surliness. The mean is not an arithmetic middle but the right response relative to the agent and the circumstances, as determined by reason and by the judgment of the man of practical wisdom. That master virtue, phronēsis or prudence, enables us to see what each case requires. Without it, the other moral virtues exist only in appearance.

Aristotle distinguishes moral virtues, which are excellences of character shaped by habit, from intellectual virtues, which are excellences of mind shaped by teaching. Both are necessary for human flourishing. The virtuous person is one who does the right thing in the right way, for the right reasons, and with the right feelings. Happiness, treated more fully under that idea, is defined as activity in accordance with complete virtue, sufficiently equipped with external goods throughout a complete life. Virtue is thus ordered to happiness as means to end, while remaining among the goods that happiness includes.

Aristotle's account becomes the most influential theory of virtue in the Western tradition. It depends, however, on a political community that shapes citizens from youth, and on the possibility of forming character by repeated acts. Augustine will question whether fallen human nature can reliably form virtue through habituation alone; Aquinas will recover the Aristotelian scheme and place it within a theology of grace. The distinction between the good man and the good citizen, which Aristotle also draws, remains a standing problem for political philosophy.

Cicero's treatment of virtue and vice in the On Duties and the Tusculan Disputations takes over the Stoic doctrine that the cardinal virtues are four, and that each may be specified as a determinate excellence of the rational soul. Wisdom (prudentia) is the knowledge of what is and is not, together with the knowledge of what follows from each. Justice is the disposition to render to each his own and to keep faith. Fortitude is the firmness of mind which endures what is to be endured and undertakes what is to be undertaken for the sake of the honorable. Temperance is the restraint which keeps the appetites under the rule of reason. Each of these, Cicero argues, is a genuine perfection of the soul, and together they constitute the whole of virtue.

Against this account he sets out what he takes to be the characteristic error of the age: the supposition that a virtue may be sacrificed for an advantage, or that a vice may be embraced for the sake of a gain. The third book of the On Duties is given over to the analysis of the cases in which this temptation arises. Cicero's argument is that no advantage bought by vice is in the end an advantage, because the loss of character which vice brings with it is itself a loss greater than anything that can be set against it. The man who has enriched himself by treachery has bought his wealth at the price of his standing as a human being; the statesman who has preserved his position by betrayal has preserved something of less worth than what he has surrendered. Whether this is a doctrine the facts of moral experience uniformly support, or whether Cicero is generalizing from the narrower case of the public man whose reputation is his capital, is a question the later tradition will turn to repeatedly.

The bearing of this treatment on the idea of Duty is considered under that head, as is the relation of virtue to the useful and the honorable. The connection between the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues, which is not in Cicero, belongs to the later tradition and is discussed under Religion and Theology. What belongs properly to the idea of Virtue and Vice is the fourfold scheme, which Cicero takes over from the Stoics and passes on through the Latin tradition.

Augustine will quarrel with the Ciceronian conception on the ground that the pagan virtues, however genuine they appear, are ordered to the earthly city and fall short when measured by the love of God. Aquinas will recover the Ciceronian scheme and place the cardinal virtues alongside the theological, arguing that the former are true virtues in their own order even when they are not yet perfected by grace. The four-fold scheme, as the common property of the tradition, is in great part the gift of the Roman statesman who set it out with an orator's clarity and a Stoic's conviction.

For Epictetus and the Stoics, virtue is the right use of impressions. Every human action, on this view, flows from how we interpret what happens to us. Virtue consists in assenting only to what is true, desiring only what is up to us, and rejecting false judgments about what is worth pursuing or avoiding. Vice is the contrary: undisciplined assent to false impressions, and the misplacement of desire upon things outside our power. The distinction between what is in our power and what is not becomes the first principle of the moral life.

The cardinal virtues remain wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice, as in Plato and Cicero, but they receive a distinctly inward interpretation. Courage is the steadiness of the will in the face of fear; temperance is the quieting of desire; wisdom is the clear discrimination of what is and is not ours to control; justice is the treatment of other rational beings as sharers in the common reason of the cosmos. All of these virtues are traced back to the disciplined ruling faculty, the hegemonikon. External conditions cannot make us virtuous or vicious; only our response to them can. In that respect Stoic virtue is always within reach, so long as judgment remains free.

This ethics is therefore an ethics of the inner life. The wise man lives in accordance with nature and reason, and finds in that conformity a sufficiency that does not depend on fortune. The Stoic claim that virtue is its own reward, and that the virtuous man needs nothing else for happiness, is discussed more fully under the idea of Happiness. The same claim raises questions about the will and its freedom, which later writers will press with some severity.

Epictetus gives Stoic ethics one of its most accessible statements. Augustine will later dispute the confidence that the will can always govern itself by rational discipline alone. On Augustine's account the will is divided against itself, and no technique of self-command can heal that division; only grace can reorder what sin has disordered. The Stoic ideal of the sage remains, nonetheless, a standing alternative in the tradition of moral philosophy.

Augustine redefines virtue in terms of love. Virtue, he holds, is nothing else than the perfect love of God; every virtue is a mode of well-ordered love, and vice is love disordered or misdirected. The four cardinal virtues of the classical tradition are redescribed in this light: temperance is love preserving itself uncorrupted, courage is love bearing hardship, justice is love serving God alone, and prudence is love discerning what aids and what hinders it. The standard of Christian virtue is thus more stringent than that of pagan ethics. What may appear to be virtues are, according to Augustine, rather vices than virtues so long as there is no reference to God in the matter.

This account marks a break with Plato and Aristotle, for whom virtue was the perfection of the soul's own natural powers. For Augustine those powers are real but fallen, and their perfection depends on grace. The virtuous person is not the Stoic sage confident in his own discipline, but the lover of God whose heart has been reordered toward its true end. Without that reordering, even the disciplined behaviors of the pagan become, on Augustine's view, splendid vices: acts that serve disordered loves. The ideas of Sin and Will are closely implicated in this analysis of the divided heart.

Augustine adds three theological virtues to the four classical ones: faith, hope, and charity. These are infused, not acquired by habit. They are gifts that orient the soul toward God. Faith believes what it cannot see; hope trusts what it has not yet received; charity loves what is ultimately worth loving. Together they complete the Christian account of the virtuous life and direct man to a supernatural end that exceeds nature. Their place among the great ideas is distinctive: unlike courage, justice, temperance, and prudence, they appear mainly in Christian rather than pagan literature.

Augustine's framework is inherited by the whole of medieval ethics. Aquinas will preserve the language of ordered love and the theological virtues, but will also try to retain more of Aristotle: if grace perfects nature rather than replacing it, the classical virtues remain good in their own order, and the pagan who achieves courage or justice need not be said to have produced only a splendid vice. The tension between Augustine's severity and this more generous reading of natural virtue remains a central dispute of the tradition.

Aquinas brings together Aristotle's analysis of virtue and Augustine's theology of grace. He preserves the definition of virtue as a good habit disposing one to act well, and the doctrine of the four cardinal virtues. He also distinguishes natural virtues, acquired by habituation in the ordinary human way, from infused virtues, given by God to orient the soul toward its supernatural end. The discussion of virtue and vice is placed within his Treatise on Habit in the Summa Theologica, a placement that indicates how closely he joins the ideas of habit and of moral excellence.

The cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) regulate human life in relation to its natural ends. They can be attained, to some degree, by pagan as well as Christian effort. The theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) have God himself as their object and cannot be acquired by human acts alone. They are infused by divine grace and elevate action toward a goal that exceeds nature. Only the infused virtues, Aquinas holds, are perfect and deserve to be called virtues absolutely; the acquired moral virtues are virtues in a restricted sense, good with respect to an end that does not surpass the natural ability of man.

On the unity of the virtues, Aquinas holds that the four cardinal virtues are really distinct as habits, yet qualify one another by a kind of overflow: the qualities of prudence overflow into the other virtues insofar as they are directed by prudence, and each of the others overflows into the rest. He also distinguishes general or legal justice, which commands the other virtues into the service of the common good, from the special virtue of justice. The relation of virtue to law, citizenship, and the end of the state is treated more fully under those ideas.

Aquinas gives Catholic moral theology its classical form by reconciling the classical pursuit of excellence through habituation with the Pauline insistence that every good gift comes from above. Grace perfects nature; the theological virtues complete but do not replace the natural virtues. Kant will later break with this entire tradition, Aristotelian and Thomistic alike, by denying that virtue is to be defined as a habit acquired by the practice of good actions, and by locating moral worth in the will that acts from duty rather than from inclination or trained character.

Machiavelli separates political excellence from the Christian catalogue of virtues and restores something older under the name of virtù. In his usage, virtù is not meekness or otherworldly holiness, but the effective capacity of princes and peoples: energy, courage, resourcefulness, decisiveness, and the ability to act under pressure. It overlaps at points with classical aretē, yet it is stripped of the moral frame that Christian and classical writers had given to virtue. Even Machiavelli, however, does not deny that virtue is good and vice evil in the ordinary sense; he rather bemoans the necessity of vice in a successful prince when circumstances require it.

He confronts the tradition directly. Many, he observes, have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; how we live is so far distant from how we ought to live that a prince who always practices the Christian virtues of humility, mercy, and truthfulness will be destroyed by men who do not. The ruler must therefore learn how not to be good, and to use or not use that knowledge according to necessity. The traditional virtues may be practiced when circumstances permit and abandoned when necessity demands. The question of the good of virtue, whether it is an end in itself or useful and profitable, here receives an answer that subordinates character to political outcome.

This is not a simple endorsement of wickedness. Machiavelli admires Roman republican virtù: civic courage, patriotism, and the disciplined willingness to risk the self for the common good. He distinguishes the temporary cruelty of the effective founder from the persistent cruelty of the tyrant. Yet he refuses to pretend that moral goodness and political success always coincide. The relation of such political virtue to the form of government, and to the citizen, is taken up under the ideas of Citizen, State, and War and Peace.

Machiavelli's virtù reopens a gap between goodness and political effectiveness that later moral and political theory must address. It influences Renaissance republicanism and modern political realism, and it forces subsequent accounts of virtue to reckon with the harsh criteria of the political world as well as with the ideals of the good man.

Hume places virtue on a foundation of sentiment rather than of pure reason, divine command, or a metaphysics of the soul. Virtues, he argues, are those qualities of character that an impartial observer, considering their effects, approves of, because they are pleasing or useful either to the person who possesses them or to others. Vice is the contrary: qualities that evoke disapprobation when viewed with the same detachment. The distinction between virtue and vice is thus drawn by the pleasure or pain that any action, sentiment, or character gives us by the mere view and contemplation of it.

This yields a fourfold classification. A virtue may be pleasing to its possessor (as cheerfulness is), useful to its possessor (as industry is), pleasing to others (as wit is), or useful to others (as benevolence and justice are). The single common feature is that virtues evoke sentiments of approval when we view them impartially. Reason, on Hume's account, is and ought only to be the slave of the passions; it can discover relations of ideas and matters of fact, but it does not by itself determine moral distinctions. The good of virtue is therefore explained in terms of utility and agreeableness, not as an end independent of human sentiment.

Hume further distinguishes natural virtues from artificial ones. Natural virtues (benevolence, gratitude, parental affection) are direct expressions of human sentiment. Artificial virtues (justice, promise-keeping, fidelity to government) arise from human conventions because they serve common interests. Both are genuine, but their origins differ. In either case morality rests on sentiment, refined by reflection and stabilized by custom. The connection of justice as an artificial virtue to the idea of Justice is of particular importance for later political philosophy.

Hume's naturalistic account of moral sentiment, of the impartial spectator, and of artificial virtue shapes Adam Smith's ethics and remains a major alternative to rationalist and duty-centered ethics. Mill will later develop the utilitarian strand of this tradition by making the contribution of character to general happiness the measure of virtue's value.

Kant defines virtue against both Hume's sentimentalism and the classical identification of virtue with habit. Virtue, he holds, is not a disposition of character grounded in cultivated feeling, nor a long custom acquired by the practice of good actions. It is the moral strength of a man's will in fulfilling his duty. Where Aristotle defined virtue as a mean determined by practical wisdom, Kant defines it as a power: the power of practical reason to govern sensible nature and to overcome the natural inclinations that may conflict with the moral purpose.

This conception makes virtue essentially a matter of struggle. Human beings are not naturally virtuous; they have powerful inclinations that pull them away from the moral law. Virtue is what is displayed when those inclinations are resisted and action is done for the sake of duty alone. The person who enjoys being kind and helps others without effort has not yet shown virtue in Kant's strict sense; only when the right act is done from respect for the law does genuine moral worth appear. The good will is good not because of what it effects or accomplishes, but because it is good in itself. The relation of virtue to duty and to happiness is discussed more fully under those ideas: for Kant, morality is not properly the doctrine of how we should make ourselves happy, but of how we should become worthy of happiness.

Kant distinguishes duties of right, which are external and enforceable, from duties of virtue, which are owed to oneself and to others and are enforceable only by conscience. The duties of virtue include the cultivation of one's natural perfection, care for the happiness of others, and the refusal to degrade oneself or others. It is not enough that a person refrain from violating rights; he must also have adopted the right ends. Virtue is its own end and, by deserving well of men, is also its own reward.

Kant's duty-centered account of moral character stands in contrast both to Aristotelian habituation and to Humean sentiment. It shapes modern ethics of autonomy and respect, and it forces later writers, including Mill, to ask whether virtue can be reconciled with a theory that takes happiness, rather than worthiness of happiness, as the measure of the good.

Mill relates virtue to utility by making the increase of happiness the object of virtue. On the utilitarian doctrine, traits such as honesty, courage, benevolence, and self-command are valued because persons who possess them contribute to human welfare and lead lives of higher quality. Virtue is not, originally and by nature, part of the end; it is good because of its contribution to happiness. Mill criticizes the Stoics for striving to raise themselves above all concern about anything but virtue, and for supposing that the virtuous man has everything needful without regard to other goods.

Yet Mill also holds that virtue can come to be desired for its own sake by those who have cultivated it. Just as money, originally valued for what it buys, can become prized in itself, so virtue, originally pursued for the happiness it produces, can be integrated into a person's conception of happiness. It becomes to the individual a good in itself without looking to any end beyond it. This is not, on Mill's view, a betrayal of utilitarianism, but its psychological completion: the virtuous character experiences the practice of virtue as part of its own flourishing. The multiplication of happiness remains the object of virtue, even when the agent no longer looks beyond virtue to that object.

Mill further insists that virtue must be chosen and formed, rather than only inherited or imposed. Individuality and self-development are themselves near-virtues in his framework, because they are the conditions under which any character can be truly the agent's own. A person of virtue is one who, through cultivation and active choice, has come to desire and act in ways that reliably serve human well-being. In politics, the most important excellence a form of government can possess is to promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves, a claim that joins this discussion to the ideas of Education and the State.

Mill's attempt to honor both the primacy of happiness and the value of character shapes later welfarist and eudaimonic ethics. It remains one of the principal modern alternatives to duty-centered and purely sentimentalist accounts of virtue and vice.