The Virtue of the Virtue Set

I have too many irons in the fire to give the virtue set theory the reach that it deserves. And in case I lack the intellectual marketing chops (Intellectual marketing is real.)

Too bad because it’s a useful cluster of tools even for ordinary people who are not inclined to abstraction or knowledge for its own sake.

For those of us who are infinitely curious of course we can use it to shake insights loose and that’s valuable to is. For everybody else I see two main uses of The Virtue set.

Excluded virtues and excluded vices: people often talk about the excluded middle when they feel there is a dichotomy that has something missing but for virtues and vices the excluded middle is a false version of what is missing.  Society tends to fall into opposing pairs of a virtue and a vice that excludes the other virtue and the other vice that go along in the set.  So yes there is something missing but it’s not halfway between the virtue and the vice.  It’s not the middle that is excluded.  A good example of this is the particular virtue we were discussing when we first discovered the idea of the Virtue Set which is authenticity.  https://www.jrganymede.com/2014/09/09/the-virtue-with-no-name-or-the-best-mormon-essay-youll-read-this-month/

Society recognizes authenticity and hypocrisy and what’s missing is not halfway between authenticity and hypocrisy.  What’s missing is the virtue of upholding standards that you fail to meet. We called it the nameless virtue.  It lacks a name because Society doesn’t understand it or even know that it exists and the result is a lot of times people who are engaged in the virtue get accused of committing the vice of hypocrisy.  Similarly Society lacks a term for and doesn’t understand the vicious version of authenticity (which we have called The cult of authenticity) and because of that people can be engaged in vice and think they are being virtuous and be praised as virtuous.

There are a whol

https://www.jrganymede.com/2014/10/14/the-puzzle-of-celebrity/e lot of excluded virtues and excluded vices around. When you run across something that we all condemn you can ask yourself what is the virtuous version of this? And when you run across something that we all praise you can ask yourself what is the vicious version of this? The answers are very illuminating.

Synthesis: the synthesis of two opposing virtues in a virgin set is often something inspiring, moving, and beautiful. It opens up your mind to a possibility you didn’t know of.

The synthesis of two opposing vices tends to be surprisingly common, naming and labeling it illuminates your world.