Still Here

[omorka]

There are still birds singing outside.

The wind is picking up, short gusts coming out of the northeast - but no rain yet, and there's still significant sunlight peeking through the clouds.

CNN.com says she's down to a (very strong) Category 3. All bless the Desert, sending hot, dry air to force her to spend energy rebuilding her eyewall instead of picking up more steam from the warm moistness of the Gulf. Io, Set!

Projected landfall is pretty much over Port Arthur sometime Saturday morning.

Our windows are taped up in the front room. The Spouse is going to work on the back room next. I'm going to be securing any objects that haven't already been put up and sticking them in the Harry closet or the carport (depending on how big they are - including the bag of trash that some moron left ON THE LAWN this morning.

--

I'm tired of talking about the hurricane. I'm going to talk about something else now.

What does it mean to be virtuous? I have been faced several times recently with the realization that something that I consider a virtue is seen by others as a vice; and once with the reverse realization - something I see as clearly a harmful thing is seen by, at the very least, a majority of my colleagues and most of my administration team, as a positive virtue.

Is there something more to "virtue" than "that which promotes weal"? If a society thinks something is a vice, is that enough to make it one? It seems obvious to me that some things (including all four of the house "virtues" from the HP books) are virtues or vices only in context, but it seems that this is a minority view as well - if bravery is a virtue, then it is virtuous even if it is bravery for a destructive purpose (such as, say, steering a truckful of explosives into a pizzeria). This leads to people doing weird things like calling suicide bombers "cowards," which I have an incredibly hard time wrapping my head around.

Comments

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

What are the examples you refer to?

The dictionary definition of "virtue" is something along the lines of "moral goodness", which implies that virtues can't be bad things. So I guess bravery as a virtue is supposed to be derived from strong/good moral character, which wouldn't/couldn't apply to people doing "evil" stuff.

I agree that this is a really screwed up way of looking at things, but it's not inconsistent from a moral absolutist standpoint.

[brezhnev.livejournal.com]

As for what is virtue, Plato wrote his most famous work about that one. I've had too much cheap beer to summarize it well, other than it comes down to fortitude, temperance, prudence, and justice. He does state early on that adhering to a virtue formulaically, without regard to the consequences, isn't the idea.

Aristotle qualified this further, stressing moderation. For example, too little bravery is obviously bad. ("Nothing ventured, nothing gained" I figure.) But too much isn't the right idea either. Too much bravery is foolhardiness, obviously counterproductive.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

One example, for illustrative purposes:

I think that intellectual curiosity is a virtue. I was taught that it was by my parents, especially my father, as I was growing up, and in the course of re-examining my values from age 12 to age 24, it was one of the ones I agreed with and kept. Of all the ones I kept, it's one of the ones that is intuitively obviously a wealful thing. And yet, there are a lot of people in the school who find it either problematic (this was one of the few real debates I got into with Debate last year) or a generally bad thing (several of the APs). And it appears that large sections of the fundie community also see it as a bad thing, denoting a lack of faith.

If you agree that the absolutist view of "virtue" is a mess, then is it a null concept for you, or do you have a better working definition?

[omorka.livejournal.com]

"Fortitude, temperance, prudence, and justice" isn't a bad summary of the Harry Potter house virtues (Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Slytherin, and Hufflepuff). I wonder whether JKR did that on purpose.

So is moderation a metavirtue?

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

Interesting. What's Debate's problem with it?

My definition of "virtuous" is adhering strictly to one's moral/philosophical code. I would say that "virtue" is a superset of "ethic" that includes traits and behaviors that actively make the world a better place rather than just not causing it harm. Active improvement seems to be fairly common among the standard virtues(bravery, for instance), so my usage mostly overlaps. But you always have to throw prima facie in there somewhere, so it's not an absolute concept.

Maybe I'll write a post about this later.