The Virtue of Seeking Virtue

Understanding virtue is a virtue.  Seeking virtue is also a virtue.  Therefore there can be virtues and vices in our understanding and pursuit of virtue (or more generally of things that are good).  That raises the possibility of a meta virtue set.  A set not about virtues or goods themselves, but about how one seeks them or knows them.

The virtuous and vicious ways to think about virtue I will have to think more about.  Hopefully our own virtue sets are in the virtuous category!  For now, lets turn our attention to seeking virtue.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talks about how the Adversary likes to tempt you into one vice by having you reject the other one.  It may have been Luther who said that we are never so likely to fall off on the left side of the horse as when we’ve just remounted after falling off the right.  Surrounded by cruelty, the old deceiver hopes to tempt you to cruelty.  But his secondary temptation is to tempt you to be too soft.  Surrounded by smarmy hypocrisy, he hopes you will become another smug virtue signaler.  But if you loathe that, becoming a proud open sinner will do just as well.  Political systems like ours that tend towards two dominant factions have that problem.  The obvious errors of the other coalition lead us to commit our own opposite errors.  I read widely and indiscriminately.  I read druids and narrow minded Christian chauvinists of various stripes and Nietzcheans and bland moderate policy guys and the whole gamut.  What I notice is that some of the most extreme elements are often mirror images of each other.  There are real and serious problems with modern Christianity (many of which restored Christianity avoids, but not all).  Various thinkers see them stark and clear, and so embrace the opposite errors.  No Ned Flanders, therefore Conan!

For a long time I believed that you are particularly likely to fall into that trap of going to the opposite extreme when you are vice-avoidant instead of virtue-pursuant.    If my goal is to be Not-cowardly, then I am extremely likely to be reckless.  In fact, recklessness maximizes Not-cowardly.  But if my goal is to be courageous, I am less likely to fall into recklessness.

I still think that is true to a real extent.  What I now realize, though, is that a method for doing virtue right it itself a virtue, which will have an opposite virtue, and a distorting vice.  In other words, the methods for seeking virtue are themselves virtues and susceptible to being analyzed through a virtue set.

I am a particularly positive thinker.  Not positive in the sense of being optimistic, but positive in that I push out to the limits of a concept, brushing off distractions and caveats.  You see this in a lot of the fables I write.  There’s the animals ones, of course.  But then there are the other ones.  They are often about vast time scales and vast effects from, usually, some superhuman level of insight or effort.  (After I wrote this I realized that the little fable I wrote below also pushes out to extremes).  That you just need to pursue virtue harder is exactly what I would think.

But the virtue set says that the truest good would be some synthesis of pursuing virtue and avoiding vice.

Suppose you are racing through some lonely stretch of road in competition with two other drivers.  Let’s pick Moab to Spanish Fork in Utah.  There are a few turns you have to make, some nice flat stretches of road, and some very windey passages through Spanish Fork Canyon, not to mention the occasional state trooper.

Your first competitor’s father, soundly enough, tells him that getting pulled over, going the wrong route, or getting in a wreck, are all sure fire ways to lose the race.  He is therefore advised to always go well under the speed limit, just in case; maybe to completely skip the cut-off through Price and Spanish Fork Canyon and stay on the freeways the whole way, adding a good 2 hours to the trip but reducing the chances of disaster; or why not wait until next summer when the driving conditions will be better; or why not wait years until its all automated roads an automated vehicles under redundant back-up centralized computer control?  It’s the only way to be safe.  It’s the only way to arrive for sure.

It will take barely any effort at all to beat this guy.

Your second competitor gets told to floor it flat out the whole drive, petal to the metal max possible speed.

The poor guy is going to die in flames at the first real curve.

You will win by going as fast as you can in the circumstances.  Make haste, slowly.  Make haste, slowly, is old advice.  Latin old.  Festina lente.  We have now discovered that though usually used for races and physical tasks, it generalizes to any effort to accomplish a goal, including the goal of being more virtuous.  Get more virtue as fast as you possibly can, but not fast enough to defeat the purpose.  These old clichés have survived for so long because they have great depth to them.  Usually discovered through experience.  Here through reflection.  It is a good feeling to do some thinking and end up discovering old familiar ground.  That may be the proper end of the virtue chart, to discover and rediscover the things that everybody already knows but doesn’t really know.

It may be a flaw in my own thinking, but I have a hard time seeing what the vice is that distorts seeking virtue.   I suppose it could be a failure to balance the hard pursuit of one virtue with the pursuit of others so you end up distorted, virtuous in one area but neglected in others (“one-note gospel”).  It could be that you over-pursue a particular virtue, so you end up with a distorted, exaggerated version of the virtue, aka a vice.  Or like in our driving example, it could be that you insufficiently pay attention to pitfalls and obstacles along the way in your relentless drive to get there.

The vice of avoiding vice is easy.  You never acquire any positive virtue.  And, as discussed above, you are likely to fall into the opposite vice of the one that you are avoiding.

This suggests a generalization.  The vice of avoiding vice is usually the vice that opposes the virtue.  Whereas the vice of pursuing the virtue is usually the vice that distorts the virtue.