Table Talk on Virtue Sets

“Table Talk” is the way us literary gentlemen say “random observations.”

First,

Handle has an approach to virtue that I think is less useful for thinking and systematizing but better for applying.     Basically less accurate in  my opinion but probably handier.

Here is how I think of it. In any situation and context, there is the right decision. We are used to talking about “the narrow path”, but that is walking on a two-dimensional surface, and so deviations are only to the right and left.

Imagine instead that “the narrow path” is a flight plan for a small airplane, and you can divert from it and your “trim could be off” and be going off course in two different ways, which are distinct dimensions. You could be off yaw and going too far to the left or right, or pitch, lacking balance between weight and lift, and going too high or too low.

We are already familiar with Aristotle’s axis of deficiency or excess in any particular virtue. Call that the “yaw” axis.

But for situations of conflict between competing virtues, the “pitch” axis is one of striking the proper balance / temperance / moderation, and the extremes of the axis are “bias” (favoring one virtue too much at the expense of the other), and “indiscriminate” (unjust neutrality, false equivalence, unfair equality over merited equity.)

So, all this is like a recipe for decision making. Decisions happen at human scale and “must fit the pans” of human nature and experience – so you cannot make your cake arbitrarily large or small. But to make it you need the right amount of complementary ingredients, and you need the various ingredients to stay in the right, balanced proportions.

The virtue sets arise naturally in terms of the virtue which pulls you in the opposite direction of the pitfall which awaits you if you become obsessively focused on, or entranced by, one particular objective, and forget to keep it in check.

-thus Handle

(more…)