The Decline of ‘Virtue’

A better comparison is provided by a book like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In Greek that would have been The Seven Virtues of Highly Effective People. Or The Seven Habits of Highly Virtuous People.

Really? Doesn’t ‘effective’ connote being good at achieving one’s aims, whatever they are while ‘virtuous’ connotes, also having the right aims? That seems like a very significant sort of difference.

Weird! I always associate virtue with the bicyclists who can blow thru stopsigns and perform other interesting maneuvers. I thought they were superior to us walkers and drivers as well as horseback riders due to their virtue. YRMV.

The (usually) qualifier was inserted to acknowledge the PR game theory of reputation management. Enron looked virtuous at the outset, but when the balance sheet of social cost/benefit was correctly calculated, their true standing was easily distinguished.

I am in sympathy with Dawkins regarding the evolutionary fitness of fundamental human behaviors, and thus a utilitarian grounding of virtue readily explains both its persistence and variability.

Does an evil genius have virtue? Say, Karl Rove — he is more like himself than anyone before or, God willing, anyone after — a gifted maniuplator without one scruple — can the sociopath be virtuous ?

The sociopath fails the obvious test of helping the group. The Joker in the latest Batman film is the very model of a modern nihilistic sociopath, and the fact that he elicits the sympathy of the audience is a reference point for our current state of decadence. Once people grasp that the actions of such people will deprive them of air conditioning, super-sized soft drinks, and popcorn, this personality style will fall out of favor.

Let us stop moving the word virtue around under the shells of general and specific manifestations. We might as well talk about what is “good” if the zoom lens of context is racked in and out to change context.

Obviously, Caligula, Stalin, and Dr. Evil all had documented moments of “virtuous” conduct. Enron probably donated lavishly to charities. This does not render us incapable of drawing a line under the column of figures and taking a total. That is the basis of a character judgment, which is entirely separate from the evaluation of a discrete action.

The lifeboat paradigm provides an illuminating illustration of how “virtue” can be defined by evolutionary fitness. Survivors adrift in a lifeboat for an extended time must choose between altruism (keeping many alive in hope of early rescue) and predation (keeping a few alive expecting late rescue).

If the survivors of all the altruistic lifeboats populated Island A, and the survivors of the predatory lifeboats populated Island P, the standing of altruistic and predatory behaviors in the ranking of virtues would be sharply different, but both would likely be taught as dogmas having absolute worth.

Sorry about the lifeboats, but I was trying to make the point that the two survivor communities would have different resultant views of virtue, and that these local values would be enshrined as reified independent “truths.”

The Platonic search for absolutes was the best that the ancients could do absent their grasp of evolutionary dynamics. We have more knowledge and better tools for attacking this problem. Sweeping all of that off the table and pretending that we are strolling in the Agora as re-enactors is silly.

A good example of obsolescence of a “virtue” was the concept of honor in personal combat. Before society outlawed dueling, it was incumbent on the virtuous man to defend his honor by engaging an adversary who offended his honor in personal combat.

No amount of argument could have dissuaded the doomed duellists of past centuries that they were not showing the virtue of manly courage by defending their “sacred honor” to the death.

Today, we think duelling is quaint and a bit silly. (Of course, the availability of automatic weapons makes it exceptionally unproductive.)

If one does not accept utility as the measure of virtue, one must either posit a supernatural/religious frame of reference that renders further analysis moot (because the Pope says so!), or one must explain how a secular system of absolute virtues exists independently when there is no cross-cultural consensus on any but the most sweeping notions of personal virtue.

While I enjoy the discussion of virtue as a metaphor for proper lady sex, I don’t relate to it at all. Of course, I’ve never been a big consumer of Victorian stories in any format. Virtue for me has always meant “qualities worth valuing” when spoken of as a collective noun, a property, and the opposite of vice or flaw when spoken of as a specific thing, i.e. in the grammatical form “a virtue”. That’s all I’ve ever taken from that word and it has no other connotation in my mind. I certainly am familiar with Victorians and Puritans using it as a metaphor for following certain social mores, usually having to do with sex, and I’m familiar with it being a euphemism for a woman’s virginity, but those connotations aren’t the first things in my mind, nor do they really enter it at all except when the word is actually used in one of those contexts.

Most people, I shall stipulate, know virtue when they see it. The Greco-Roman arete/virtus model is alive and well. I offer you the firefighters running into the towers on 9/11; a British soldier recently honoured for jumping on a live grenade; coastguard/lifeboat crews everywhere…

The issue with incomprehensibility for your students is that they have forgotten that people – people like them – can live like this, if they choose. Such forgetting is conditioned by the consumer society which says that the last thing anyone should do before making a decision is consider the virtue of it (as opposed to its potential to satisfy some passing ‘need’.)

One of the things that makes many people viscerally resistant to the more consistent and rigorous applications of environmentalist logic, I personally suspect, is that to acknowledge that logic and act upon it would require coming to terms with a burden of shame for past personal behaviour that is, literally, unbearable. Therefore, people prefer to repress that potential for shame by shouting down such suggestions as impossibly/offensively ‘puritanical’/killjoy/communist, etc. They thus get the chance, so common in today’s society, of feeling good about being bad. This is, of course, pathetic and shameful, and as soon as they were trapped in a burning building, they would be screaming for a better person to come save them.

But hey, if virtue was so easy, people wouldn’t have been wittering about it for thousands of years, would they?

The history of an English word is a matter of fact and you can find most of it in the OED. John Holbo is plain wrong to ascribe the chastity sense to the Victorians; it’s in Shakespeare (1599). “Excellence” comes in as sense 5, in Wycliffe (1382). “Conformity with general morality”, the dominant meaning in modern English, is OED sense 2, and goes back to the very beginnings of English, in the Ancrene Rewle (1225). (Sense 1 is theological). Languages borrow what they need, and usage is what it is, not what we would like it to be or have been.

Your students are morons to require such hand-holding.

By the mid-18th c in Europe, the feminine sense was becoming more prominent. Virtuous republican citizens were imagined to be unlike decadent aristocratic polished politesse-practitioners in many ways, sexual mores not least among them. Republics need virtue, and for women that consists of chastity. Rousseau in Emile on Sophie: “It is thus not only important that the wife be faithful but that she be judged so by her husband, by those near him, by everyone. She must be modest, attentive, reserved, and she must have in others’ eyes as in her own conscience the evidence of her virtue.” (I’ll bet that Emile is an important book in this story, and not only in French.) The equation of women’s virtue with chastity is a major complaint of Wollstonecraft’s.

I’d say that the story that follows– the very late 18th c and 19th c story– is the story of “virtue” falling away as the primary category of discussing morality or excellence for men, outside classically-oriented prep schools and the like, while leaving this vestigial sense of the word as a way of talking about women and sexuality. That is, the two senses coexisted for a long time, then one went away; I don’t think it went away under the force of the other one.

By the 1820s, say, the classical language of virtue has disappeared from the central place it had during the US founding generation as the way to talk about the morality of action in politics– not because virtue was for girls, but because that language was incompatible with the underlying social changes that end up generating the spoils system.

@49: the other side of the story to bear in mind is that there was a strong de-emphasis on personal virtue flowing through all the major religious strands of Christianity. Whether you go for efficacious grace or predestination, the idea that a quality inherent in the individual could outweigh the temptation/predisposition to sin was seen as, well, disrespectful to God, I suppose. Miserable sinners needed to accept that fact about themselves, and grovel appropriately….

The Rise of the Novel was published in 1957. I agree with Paulo at 12 and the other people who said they didn’t exclusively associate virtue with sexual propriety. I think you’d be making a mistake to argue that view too strongly.

Although Andrew has already won the thread, it may interest you to know that Austen’s 1790s-originating novels do use virtue in the sexual sense but the nineteenth century ones don’t. There it just means a good quality.

oops, must have hit “submit”, here’s the rest:

This dynamic would define West-German society for quite some time – as late as the 80s former chancellor Helmut Schmidt was criticized for his advocacy of such “secondary virtues” by a rival within his party saying, that with these virtues alone he could very well run a concentration camp.

Late to the thread, and highly confused by so many of the comments, because they seem to be answering the questions, “What does the word ‘virtue’ mean to you?” and “Where has all the virtue gone?” rather than the question posed, which as far as I can tell, is, “How and when did the concept of ‘virtue’ get to where it is now?”

So, given that maybe I’m reading it wrong, and no offense to John and Andrew, but … why the Victorians? Because, you know, there’s a whole lot of time between Rome (and even more from Greece) and the Victorians.

First, although I know that arete is generally translated as ‘virtue’, I’m not sure this is the best way of looking at it. It’s kind of at the root of John’s question, because virtus was originally gendered (although I really am not sure if it was exclusive — I should ask that somewhere), i.e., would it be a bad thing in Republican Rome to be a woman accused of virtus? When Lucretia killed herself, or when Portia supposedly swallowed coals, I don’t think those things would have been feminina — I’m pretty sure those things indicate virtus, if anything. The fact that ‘virtue’ is based on ideals of manliness may not mean much more than that for Romans (and even more so for Greeks), male is the default gender. In other words, even when used properly in its temporal context, it’s not exclusively a masculine ideal. And, because I think it’s important to think about here — it’s a feminine noun — sometimes what looks like gender (and is in origin) is not necessarily gendered in use.

Whatever — in Late Rome, we still have this idea of virtus — and also, still, the idea of arete – and this is something I just don’t know for sure, but needs to be considered: well educated Romans knew Greek. Why would we assume that they would have translated, or conflated the two ideas? I think it may have some bearing on the question, JH. Anyway, there’s also Christianity, whose ideals are in some ways in opposition to both virtus and arete as defined up to this time. Both of those are attached to cultures where the community, and one’s place in the community — the man of the polis, if you will. virtus and civic service (in all its forms) are still connected in ideology, even though the transition to an imperial government has started to eat away at that ideal. Christianity focuses on the individual and salvation — martyrs like Perpetua (ok — she’s late, but it’s early here and I’ve not had my caffeine) are, to Romans, pretty much rejecting virtus, where virtus is understood as encompassing civic values.

So, Late Antiquity … we do have all these Christian philosopher types who are trying to come up with ways to connect Christian philosophy with Greco-Roman philosophy. Possibly just a bit of change in the meanings of virtus there, as Christianity becomes dominant and then the official religion? Except we also have to bring in those pesky barbarians, who have their own versions of what is good/excellent/virtuous. Some of those things are similar or even identical to aspects of Roman and/or Christian virtus, but some are not. What I think you have to accept is that, even before the Middle Ages, you’re looking at a word that is in use for several hundred years, at least, and may have not just a scholarly meaning — one for those who know it in a philosophical context — but also in a daily language kind of way, where it is imbued with ideas of ‘good/right behaviour’ that reflect major changes in society and its values, which have changed in dramatic ways.

In the MA, I think it’s fair to say that we can see the rise of two very different kinds of virtue — and I think we can now use the vernacular word that is much more related to John’s question: theologians are refining Christian virtues, which is probably the most important and lasting thing; but by the 12th C, we also see the rise of the courtly/knightly virtues. You’d have to ask someone who specialises in the period (me, I try to stay on this side of 1000), but to me, the whole chivalry thing really is the application of Christian continence to warrior virtues, in other words (and IIRC, there are books on this, so not my words), a ‘feminisation’ of the masculine.

Fast forward to the Reformation — Calvinism, especially, does help to equate financial success (because these things were mentioned upthread) with Christian virtue, in that it may be seen as an outward sign of being a member of the Elect — and of course the Elect should be virtuous. Don’t underestimate the effects of Protestantism — that re-focusing on scripture and a strengthening of gender divisions is important, I think. And whatever one may say, there is plenty of evidence that one of the effects of the Reformation was to put upper- and middle-class women in their place, where their place was much more restricted than it had been in the MA.

This is what the Victorians inherited. But to a certain extent, the divisions we see in Victorian society are not that different from those we see in Georgian society. But the changes due to the Industrial Revolution, for example, where people have to face up to what really are, for most people, immoral conditions may have affected the ways in which those running the society defined themselves. After all, those feminized (and Christian) virtues get loaded only onto a very small group of women in proportion to all of society.

Come to think of it, it might not be too big a stretch to bring the pre-Raphaelites and their focus on the Age of Chivalry (as they saw it) into the discussion … continence and passion, all in one ball.

Yeah, I know this kind of went off the rails. But seriously, I think that John’s question cannot and should not be simply answered by “oh, yeah there’s this switch in the 19th c.” That ignores a hell of a lot of history, and I think reinforces a false idea of the locus of change.

Oh — in that case, I think you have to wonder about the decline of ‘good’. Seriously, I think this is a much more historically recent thing. And goodness knows, I’m not about to get into one of those cultural relativism debates. But to a certain extent, I think we can trace some of this to the rise of some of the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology, and the debates that originated in larger culture with them. My gut feeling is that generally, we have got to a point where a large segment of western society is uncomfortable with the idea of moral absolutes, and it became unfashionable to deal even with the language that helps to reflect a moral viewpoint. It’s one of the reasons I think the liberal political groups find themselves scrambling. Conservatives have reappropriated the language of morality (although not the behaviours) to suit their agenda, and all of a sudden, liberals have to prove that they are in fact moral, decent people.

But that’s a different argument.

“Awesome can be God smiting Jericho. Awesome can be the New Kids On the Block reunion concert.”

And totally awesome is God smiting the New Kids On the Block reunion concert.

I recall that Machiavelli was deeply impressed by the notion of Roman civic virtue, the tremendous binding energy that enabled that mighty empire. He wanted the princes of the Renaissance city states to foster this kind of virtue to bring better government to Italy.

As I mount my utilitarian hobby horse, I shall point out that, just as Machiavelli wanted to augment and transform contemporary notions of civic virtue, the political philosophers of today should be aiming at similar goals. That’s what Robert Putnam’s work is about, and that is why practical progress on the synthesis of trust is so important.

These Socratic threads are delightful, be we should not forget that we are transacting in the stuff that makes and breaks peoples reputations and lives. Does it spoil our fun to try to fill the sails of progress with the winds of philosophical thought?

my question is WHY is there a decline in the 19th c.

How about a sociological answer? It seems to me that the concept of virtue strives in societies with unequal access to some societal good (the groups having exclusive access reify some “virtues” they alone possess and which justify they exclusive status). So “virtue” is in decline whenever there is a more open access to social goods. This also explains the Victorian use of virtue: as women were excluded of many social goods, men had to find a way to rationalize their exclusion, so they attributed to them negative virtues (for instance modesty, lack of ambition, purity), asserting in other words that women were (or should be) too pure to covet what they were deprived of (independent life, political power…).

Going back to Plato, I can’t help but notice that his political conceptions, his family background, and even his rhetorical jousts against the Sophists all indicate that he was deeply against open access to social goods (at least in the second part of his life) so that I don’t find surprising his almost obsessive interest for the question of who possesses virtue.

Coming late to the debate, and haven’t read all the comments.

I may be showing my age, but I don’t have a problem with the word virtue. I don’t predate the Victorians, however, so I came by a meaning somewhat like arete in the last several decades.

Of course, I read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance during formative years. I don’t see it mentioned in a quick skim of the comments.

Seems to me that discussing the issue of virtue‘s meaning and possible decline and Pirsig’s attempt at applying it would work well in a class. Time constraints might make it impossible, though.

I am not swayed by the Victorian subreption of ‘virtue’ but then I was reared with virtue talk, the virtue of temperance, patience etc. If that is a problem then why not adopt the use of ‘virtus’ as a technical term for the inner power which manifests as patience, temperance, continence, chastity, courage etc. At different times society makes some ‘virtue’ or other central. That might have been adaptive at the time. The antique meaning of virtue is retained in a once common superstition. It was said that the first to get the milk from a cow on May morning would have the virtue of the milk for the year. The ‘good’ of the milk was the expression.

Those who ‘depart before the mysteries’ won’t get that.

Also, when chiding utilitarian analysis for being caught up in the raging debate in the trenches with the fundamentalists, don’t forget to include the feminist, Marxian/egalitarian, and leftist-creationist fundamentalists.

Anti-empirical fundamentalism is fundamentalism, whether a christian fundamentalism or a feminist fundamentalism. They seem to breed like rabbits.

Hmm, my first contact with the term was at http://www.gnxp.com and was used by one of the two owners and main contributors who calls himself “godless capitalist”. It’s a term that loosely refers to people who hold that human behavioral patterns have completely divorced themselves from any biological/genetic factors. Yes, both gc (godless capitalist) and myself certainly hold that there are mean and pattern differences between different ethnic groups in regards to cognitive function (IQ). How any reasonable person cannot see that there would almost be inevitable genetic divergence over the course of 50 to 100 thousand years is beyond me. Oh, and gc just happens to be a “brown” Pakistani.

“Left creationist” is an updated way to say “blank-slater”; i.e. someone like P.Z. Meyers who boils all human behavior to “social factors”.

“But it strikes me as odd, with everything we now know about psychology, biology, and social systems, that the posture of the classic philosopher remains credible. The notion that one individual can be a heroic arbiter of truth, using nothing more that a supremely powerful mind, seems decidedly out of date.”

I disagree. I’m very much a modern empiricist, well versed in science, and am someone who uses that worldview as my intellectual foundation. Nevertheless, I think that Plato is still relevant and disagree with your central claim that a sort of absolutist rationality is outdated and misleading. It is only if one doesn’t or isn’t capable of keeping this point-of-view in context—just as is the case with keeping in context the point-of-view that you want to assert is the high road to “truth”. You’re being naive in a different way.

To the main point of this post, it seems to me that there’s something terribly wrongheaded about attempting to pin down a correctly nuanced definition for virtue as a translation of ἀρετή instead of simply insisting on using the Greek and comprehending its connotation via context and, better yet, actually learning some Attic Greek. Trying to explain to your students what virtue “really” means in this context is very odd, considering that Plato wrote in Greek and not English. A translator who chooses virtue for ἀρετή is one who, as you say, fails to properly account for contemporary usage and is relying upon a tradition of the English translations of Plato that your students, of course, are unaware. Either use a translation of Plato that uses contemporary usage, or instruct your students to ignore virtue and replace it with ἀρετή, spending some time acquainting them with the term. If it’s unrealistic to except them to have learned some Greek or to teach them some Greek, then spend a class or two on an overview of the actual Greek of this and a few other technical terms and avoid compounding the problems of the ambiguity of translation by asserting some alternative meaning for virtue.

I agree with all of those above who have mentioned the 18c republicanism contexts. But remember that virtue wasn’t, in the eighteenth century, as far from the Greek as you seem to think. Cf. Johnson’s definition for ‘virtual’: “having the efficacy without the sensible or material part.”

Oh, and gc just happens to be a “brown” Pakistani.

I suppose that should explains the apparent defect in his cognitive function. What’s your excuse?

Late, and briefly…

1) There should be a giant pile of contemporary virtue-ethics stuff lying around, no? Pretty major movement in ethics last 20-odd years.

2) Agree wholeheartedly about the “reification” models of semantic change.

3) I very much like your Seven Virtues of Highly Virtuous People example–but think it’s got an interesting negative counterpart (strongly tied to widespread, if tacit, recognition of No. 2) in our more-or-less universal acceptance of the idea of moral luck (outside raving Neo-Con circles)–e.g., you don’t hear sportscasters trashing losers and, in general, you just don’t hear a lot of people talking about how awesome they are, but rather, how some combination of hard work and good luck, etcetera, helped them obtain their goals (even though, in many cases, it was in large part their awesomeness).

4) Slightly separate, but related: Oh boy how I’d love to teach Laches alongside DFW’s essay/pamphlet on McCain. Except: No one in their right mind would let me do so… Someone: pick up this torch.

5) G. E. Moore!

OK, interesting discussion, where it stays on the rails.

IIRC, from reading the original GNXP website, the guy ‘godless capitalist’ was a strong supporter of Murray and Hernstein’s (sp?) ‘The Bell Curve’. Which, considering that he was a genetics guy and knew better, rather d*mning of himself.

The way I was brought up (at least in academia) I gradually forgot all about this, the oddness of the term ‘virtue.’ I think the sooner students recognize (a) their own difficulty at putting reason and emotion and action together and what a pain in the ass that is and (b) that some people are much better at this,–the less clunky and weird the term becomes, the less it retains its Victorian baggage (if that is where the baggage comes from). It’s a term that describes something we are very familiar with. ‘Continence’ gets snickers even in grad seminars but damn if that isn’t what every single person sitting there wishes they had. Perhaps virtue is the thing that Stephen Covey describes, but I’m not familiar enough with his book to say. That sounds very plausible, actually. (I’ve also seen the strange connection between self-help and Ancient philosophy but I’m almost afraid to talk about this too much in class for fear that’s all the students will remember in the end.)

Anyway, this made me remember how weird all that philosophy is when you first hear it, and how quickly it becomes the knife you use to carve the joints of the world–and then how hard it is to remember the strangeness of it. I now eat my virtue-geometry Reese’s and they taste great together. You must be a very good teacher if you can get into that place again and bring students along in that way.

What on earth are you doing in blog comments, then? Surely you can find some such miscreants closer at hand, so that you can use honest violence rather than empty rhetoric.

Maybe you missed it, but my first post noted that the shift from male-oriented virtue to female-oriented virtue seems to coincide with a shift from male-oriented sexual structures to female-oriented ones. Secondly, I was responding to a comment about “fundamentalists” made by someone else, and I simply noted that one should include all flavors of fundamentalism under that label.

was a strong supporter of Murray and Hernstein’s (sp?) ‘The Bell Curve’. Which, considering that he was a genetics guy and knew better, rather d*mning of himself.

Not sure where you get the idea that the basic theme of the Bell Curve has been thoroughly refuted. All the book claimed was that

A) IQ measures something that is significantly conveyed by genetic variation
B) IQ substantive predicts outcomes

The book also drew the conclusion that given these two premises this held both for comparisons within and between ethnic groups. The study of human nature on a solid empirical basis is still in its infancy. No one is saying that the Bell Curve is the final word in this field, and it’s quite probable that there is far more to study and discover here. But summarily discounting Murray is like discounting Isacc Newton for not forumlating string theory.

Science isn’t about establishing something unassailable, it is about comparing competing theories and how they explain the various phenomena we are trying to explain. What you are basically doing is operating from a baseline that unless something is definitively demonstrated to have a completely genetic basis then it must be assumed to have nothing other than a foundation in “social factors”. Basically, it ends up being a wholesale rejection of the very attempt to examine human behavior using a natural/causal model.

And that is what I mean by left-creationism. You’re no better than the morons who insist that the world was created in 6 days and 6000 years ago.

Here’s a just-so story for you. Before the industrial revolution, if you were going to use the word much you’d be familiar with the classical sources, or would at least come from a class within which such familiarity would be relatively common. As Britain industrialises, the rising middle class wants to signal that it’s not common by imitating what it takes to be upper-class behaviour. It knows that ‘virtue’, whatever it is, is classy. But what exactly is it? Of the various forms of behaviour that fall under the description ‘virtuous’, the more concrete it is the easier it is to cotton on to. Your unmarried daughter getting pregnant vs. her not getting pregnant is pretty concrete. Hence feminine chastity becomes the paradigm. This may have very little to do with the truth, but it’s fun to speculate.

Let’s take this all the way back to geometry, a subject that fascinated the Greeks. Geometry has astonishing intellectual leverage. A brilliant man can develop enormous understanding of space and structures by drawing with a stick in the sand. If civilization were erased tomorrow, new men drawing in the sand would rediscover all of the geometric theorems and put up elegant temples by using them.

I submit that the Ancients applied the mindset of geometers to a vast array of intellectual challenges, and that this fierce belief in highly leveraged reason is what makes philosophical debate in our era so frustrating. It is no longer reasonable to believe that we can deduce the laws of ethics and the absolute meaning of virtue by drawing theoretical figures on the sand of our dispassionate integrity. We simply know too much about biology, evolution, and the emerging science of complexity. Moreover, we are increasingly part of an increasingly integrated superorganism that values individuals as components rather than masterminds.

In short, it doesn’t make much sense to approach a discussion of virtue by pretending to be strolling in Periclean Athens. Freud, Jung, Einstein, Levi-Strauss, Wittgenstein, Pierce, Rorty, Rawls, Putnam and many, many others equip us to bring much more to this project than Plato’s greatest hits.

I’d be very interested in knowing whether HH has actually read Plato, as opposed to reading about Plato.

I’d be very interested in knowing whether HH has actually read Plato, as opposed to reading about Plato.

It was a long time ago, when tuition had fewer digits. I still aspire to being a philosopher king, but there are few openings where I live.

“Whenever someone mentions ‘the emerging science of complexity’ I reach for my gun.”

Ho, ho. While some of it is hand-waving hoo-hah, as is always the case with new disciplines, there’s also been a lot of good work, too. I have a number of Kaufman’s books (can’t say that I’ve read all of them, though) and I certainly agree the core idea of complexity theory. It’s been badly distorted in the pop science press and the media, of course—Jurassic Park annoyed me mightily.

Hmm … Let’s see: Ancient Greeks vs. 21st century, for learning about a topic

Geometry: Euclid’s OK as a textbook. Not the best, but you won’t be steered outright wrong.
Medicine: Completely nuts to use ancient greek texts.
Physics: No. Lots of nonsense.
Chemistry: No.
Literature: Not really a problem to use ancient greek plays.
Philosophy: ? (I decline to take a position, beyond my pay grade)

Thinking about the Iraq war for example, the “virtue” argument was that to be against Saddam was virtuous and this virtue could be demonstrated only by going to war.

Quite so. The Victor David Hanson school of Homeric martial virtue is alive and thrashing, as exemplified in the cinematic bloodbath of “The 300.” The virtues of Socrates may be fading, but the virtues of Alexander have never been more popular.

“… something of value may tumble out.”

Assumes facts not in evidence? 1/2 :-)

Yes, it is unreasonable to make such an assumption – it’s the classic thinking fallacy of “if a little is good (once), more must be better (always)”.

“Left-creationists need a jackboot to the neck rather than a convincing argument.”

If you’re not happy with my four word reply in #78, I now have a one-word reply, if you’d prefer.

“The point-of-view I’ve described is something that I believe contains a very real threat to the existence of Western Civilization, a threat I consider rather immediate. ”

I’d ask you to expand upon this rather unusual claim (I don’t even think actual creationism contains a very real and rather immediate threat to the existence of Western Civ, and I have enough obsessive loathing towards creationism that Mrs. S. has requested that I not greet visiting friends/acquaintances/ campaign volunteers at the door by waving a newspaper or printout at them and ranting about the latest creationist idiocy – ok, some of that also has to do with me having the social skills of a rotting yam, but still . . ) except, well, #88.

“What you are basically doing is operating from a baseline that unless something is definitively demonstrated to have a completely genetic basis then it must be assumed to have nothing other than a foundation in “social factors””

Who is the “you” in this sentence? It doesn’t seem – at least in any obvious way – to describe anyone here. And who ordered the jumbo shipment of straw?

it’s the classic thinking fallacy of “if a little is good (once), more must be better (always)”.

Thus Google, Wikipedia, EBay, Facebook, and blogging are just ephemeral noise, and should not be viewed as precursors of notable advances in the evolution of society and the machinery of collective thought? This is just the curtain going up. We haven’t even heard the overture yet, but you say you don’t think much of the show.

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass”
—–

Good advice,Walt. I’ll take it (and even better, go to bed)/

I’d be more persuaded by JH’s thesis about the replacement of OED sense core 2 by OED sense 2c in the 19th century if it were backed by some numbers rather than lit crit sampling, subject to selection bias. Can’t you analyse a corpus like LION comparing 18th and 19th-century usage? But even a marked shift in usage in current production (say in pieces in the London Times and the Edinburgh Review) would overstate any shift in the general understanding of a word, as classics were still widely read, heard, and understood, including the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Foxe, Shakespeare and Bunyan.

I want something descriptive and confirmable or disconfirmable, not a normative, speculative fudge.

Consider the Kamikaze. A society that makes a virtue of fighting to the death will extinguish itself, but usually long before that happens this “virtue” will be removed from circulation, as its danger becomes apparent. This extreme instance of self-extinguishing “virtue” directly confirms the link between survival fitness and promotion of a specific behavior as “virtuous.” In modern Japanese culture, and in modern Japanese military doctrine, the “virtue” of fighting to the death is extinct. QED.

I want something descriptive and confirmable or disconfirmable, not a normative, speculative fudge.

The industrial revolution brought factories, and factories required production discipline and scheduled work. An agrarian population, accustomed to being loosely guided by the weather and the seasons, and subject to feuds and brawling, could not be productive unless harnessed to greater behavioral regularity. Enter the new public “virtues” of obedience, punctuality, and orderliness, over-emphasized to this day by our increasingly obsolete public schools. QED.

This reminds me of when I was taking a history of ethics course with Dallas Willard. He was kind of ruing the disdain with which “analytic” philosophers viewed those of the continental tradition, that analytics apparently felt the continentals should be taking the opposite approach.

“What’s the opposite of continental philosophy?,” he mused.

I didn’t miss a beat: “Incontinental philosophy?”

Regarding dueling schools of thought, philosophers should not view themselves as conservators of a disputative perpetual motion machine. Defending the legitimacy of all established schools and notions is a stasis cult. Even those who do not believe in progress should still be compelled to refute evidence of its occurrence. Otherwise, we might as well establish departments of Alchemy and teach students to read entrails.

But how do you know that obedience, punctuality and orderliness ‘maximized utility’. And for whom? And by what standard?

I don’t have to prove the attainment of some global optimum; all I have to do is prove a linkage between some social benefit and the reconfiguration of public “virtues.” It is absurd to say that the mill owners who directly profited from a more disciplined workforce did not arrange to have the schools produce more suitable workers.

It will not profit you to constantly raise the hurdle of empirical proof I have to clear. As long as the logic of a social outcome -> virtue redefinition controlling mechanism is established and historically validated, my argument is sound.

You are effectively arguing that I cannot prove that clothing design is governed by utility, because I can’t explain the history of fashion. I don’t have to deal with fashion to prove that people who don’t wear warm clothes in arctic regions die.

What’s the term for “the greatest good for the the most powerful”?

What’s the term for “the greatest good for the the most powerful”?</i?

Plutocracy. See USA, circa 2008.

See USA, circa 2008.

Any society at any point in time. Just a matter of degree.

HH, I don’t think that Holbo disagrees with the gist of what you just said at #136. And perhaps all you meant all along was that a society’s concepts of virtue undergo a form of evolution based on their ‘fitness’, which strikes me, at least, as perfectly reasonable. But I do think that a fair reader would not have gotten that from your earlier posts – it really does look like you were saying that ideas of virtue form and change so as to maximize (or nearly maximize) utility.

Perhaps you two need to start over – it doesn’t look to me like HH is not at all interested in defending the idea that Holbo initially disagreed with, and I don’t think the remaining disagreement is particularly deep or relevant. At this point, the argument is becoming nothing more than a debate over what some of the arguers’ earlier posts mean.

I take “utility” to mean favoring or promoting some end, and I use “govern” to mean controlling, in a causative manner some course of events.

I determine that the disutility of dead Kamikaze and suicidal island defenders, and the resulting national catastrophe, caused the abandonment of bushido-type military virtue as a Japanese shared cultural value. This isn’t post hoc ergo propter hoc. The dysfunctional “virtue” literally died out.

I determine that the profit-seeking factory owners persuaded educators, authors, and ministers to elevate obedience and punctuality to virtues. This isn’t post hoc ergo propter hoc. Educators of that time actively consulted with business leaders to shape instruction (and they still do).

The problem with your theory, HH, is the problem with all totalizing theories, from Marxism, to Freudian psychology, to neoclassical economics. You are assuming that your theory is axiomatically true, and that any amount of fiddling is therefore allowed to fit the theory. You state as much right here:

Biologists have a lot of trouble winkling out obscure connections between species traits and survival advantages, but they must be there, or they would not persist.

Your theory is true not because it must be true.

HH, do you think it is possible that your theory is false – empirically? If so, then how could it be falsified? If not, isn’t that a problem.

First, let me be clear that my theory, let us call it Evolutionary Determination of Virtue by Consequential Suitability, or EDVCS, is not an EXCLUSIVE theory. It does not fully and exclusively determine all manifestations of virtue, no more than protective and comfort utility govern the design of clothing. It is more strongly determinative in times of social stress and transformation (e.g., the Protestant reformation or the “sexual revolution”). In times of relative calm and societal equilibrium, virtue is largely a matter of inertia, tradition, and indoctrination, with some minor assists from the tiny number of genuinely thoughtful and principled people.

I do not believe that this theory is falsifiable, because to fully discredit it, one would have to posit the persistence of a “virtue” that has destroyed its host population – an impossibility. Thus, I believe that EDVCS is an elementaly and important driver of the formulation and valuation of public virtue, but by no means the exclusive determinant of the inventory of virtues at any specific place or time.

I am using the most basic dictionary definition of utility:

1. fitness for some purpose or worth to some end

http://www.merriam-webster.com

Moving on, if evolution is true, why do they call it a theory?

A scientific theory explains phenomena with some degree of accuracy and repeatability. A scientific law (e.g., Newton’s laws of motion) explains phenomena with perfect accuracy and repeatability subject to its conditions.

The theory of evolution does not provide the exactitude of Newton’s Laws, but it is so massively supported by available evidence that it is very close to being a law of nature. A determined search may find odd exceptions and freakish survival of unfit species that deny Evolution the force of an absolute scientific law, but that does not discredit Evolution. It is just background noise against the signal achievement of Darwin, probably the greatest scientist of all time.

Did I miss something?

It’s odd to read a post & thread like this without seeing any recognition that the Straussians are just *nuts* about this “whatever happened to ‘virtue'” topic.

Mansfield makes a huge hoot about translating virtu as “virtue” in The Prince, regardless of how weird it sounds, and Allan Bloom says in his intro to his translation of The Republic that a student who traced the fortures of ‘virtue” would be poised to make “the most exciting of discoveries.” (A promise that has never excited me enough to exert the effort.)

There is no committee that upgrades theories to laws. (Notice the silence of Schoolhouse Rock on the subject.) Once people get in the habit of calling something “The Theory of Blah”, they keep calling it theory. You hear physicists talking about relativity theory or quantum theory, even those are well-established — quantum theory is considerably better established than is Newtonian mechanics.

Thanks for this meditation, John. Whenever I go back to classical Greek literature, I always find it worthwhile to worry about Greek words, and arete is right up there with agape in its ability to confuse modern readers. I do have a couple of questions for you:

Is there a seperate ancient Greek word more akin to the modern use of “virtue” as “ethics”? Is there a place in classical literature where that word plays a central role?

I haven’t read Meno. How does geometry come in?

There is no committee that upgrades theories to laws.”

Yep. See for example here.

Dan S: For a split second, I thought you were saying that there really was a committee that upgrades theories to laws, rather than the opposite.

Many forms of Disgust and “instinctive” repugnance reactions are probably biologically coded survival-enhancing traits (e.g., aversion to insects and rodents results in avoidance of disease carriers). These intense aversion reactions can be inculcated by sufficient indoctrination as well. A Hindu or Jew confronted by pork will often react with disgust, while a member of another religion will consider it a delectable dish.

Again, we see the reification of a “value” that is actually the result of a societal or biological fitness selection process. It is more efficient behaviorally to trigger aversion by reaction to a token (e.g., pork or idolatry) rather than to follow a long reasoning chain, just as it is more efficient for the nervous system to yank a hand away from a hot stove by a local reflex control loop, rather than a brain directive.

Do I dare to chip in to support David Wright’s comment at 157? When considering the contextual meaning of agape, I remind myself that while it’s invariably rendered as “love” in modern translations, Lancelot Andrews thought it wise to give it as “charity”. Which obviously raises the question of what Andrews meant by “charity”, but still.

Whatever arete meant before Plato made it a term of art would have influenced how Plato’s audience understood it when he used it as one. As far as I know, in Homer it was particularly an attribute of heroes and gods, and was a quality which today you might find in Superman, but not in Clark Kent, however good a journalist he was.

In 4th century Athens, I’m quite sure it was applied much more mundanely – the semantic journey seems to have been via Pindar, according to Liddell and Scott, which makes good sense – but the older meanings would have resonated with an educated audience, and I’m betting they wouldn’t have just heard “fit for purpose”. This comment will start rambling in a moment, so I’ll shut up, but really, don’t leave the translation problem out of this. Virtue != arete; at best it’s a useful approximation.

HH, why is farming considered virtuous work? Farming, as it exists in the popular imagination, doesn’t exist anymore, replaced instead by conglomerates, factory farms and illegal labor – which (must, by your theory) maximizes utility because it exists so strongly and so completely over the past few decades. More people play World of Warcraft than farm in the United States, though the image of the virtuous farmer shows up in the popular talk over and over again.

Yes, if a form of ‘virtue’ is so mal-adapted that it dies off, then it dies off. But it does not follow that ‘virtue is determined by competitive advantage’ is therefore any sort of empirically interesting generalization.

You are now arguing from extremes, but I can interpolate for you all day long. Under a repressive regime, like the Third Reich or Stalinist Russia, the virtue of plain-spoken honesty was quickly devalued, as those who displayed this virtue conspicuously were arrested. (Solzhenitzn was imprisoned for mocking Stalin’s mustache in a letter.)

The advent of oral contraceptives did not erase chastity as a virtue, but you must agree that this virtue has been significantly devalued. Women who utilized the sexual freedom afforded by the new contraceptives had, shall we say, a competitive advantage over their chastely virtuous peers. This CONSEQUENTIAL modification of the valuation of a virtue is as clear an instance of an evolutionary mechanism as a habitat change in an ecosystem.

To restate my argument: behavioral contexts change, and these evolving changes significantly alter public valuation of virtues. Plato had no knowledge of evolution, so I can understand why he favored an abstract, a priori treatment of virtue. What is your excuse?

HH:Until about 200 years ago, slave holding was a respected mark of wealth and power. As recently as the 1850s in America, abolitionists were considered dangerous radicals and disreputable characters. Today, slave-holding is considered criminal and despicable.

Slavery is still a respected mark of wealth and power.
Slave-holding is old hat and sneered at on television and in the classroom.
By slavery you mean simply not paying people who do work that benefits you, work that you force them to do because you own them.
As opposed to not paying them enough to live on while allowing them the freedom to not work and starve. Free-range slaves.
Slavery, really, is the damaging misuse of the life of another for your own material gain, yah?
It’s the lifeblood of the modern economy.

you have provided no reason to believe that the undeniable changes in attitudes towards virtue are, per se, products of some sort of natural selection for increasingly adaptive traits.

1. Abolition of serfdom and slavery as agriculture evolves toward more efficient forms extinguishes virtue of owning human property.

2. Increasing societal costs of killings and vendettas lead to outlawing of dueling and honor killings, nullifying virtue of killing to defend honor.

3. Folly of suicidal combat in WWI and WWII in the face of insuperable weaponry ends martial virtue of fighting to the death.

4. Rise of factory labor results in elevation of cleanliness, punctuality, and workplace discipline to personal virtues.

5. Invention of contraception effectively nullifies pre-marital chastity as a popular virtue.

6. Career advantages of “spin” in decadent 21st century societies undermines truthfulness as a personal virtue.

In each case, the virtue in question is functionally linked to the behaviors selected by societal evolution. QED.

I was under the impression that, culturally, chastity was very highly valued in the USA; and that, empirically, those that value it particularly highly tend to have more children. Are those children ‘catching’ unchastity from their environment somewhere?

And a few other points – your #2, duelling was illegal and frowned-on long before it actually became uncommon.

#3 doesn’t make sense. There has not been enough time for any such change to happen by Darwinian, physical-genetic, means. #5 ditto – the pill is less than a lifetime old. #6: Political spin, OTOH, goes back to Cicero and Demosthenes, Seneca and Pericles, so I call bullshit on that one.

Now, if only you were talking about Dawkinsian memes, you might have a chance of making sense, but your choice of these examples to impose (what you imagine to be) a Darwinian model of genetic change is nonsensical.

Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 1976…

Sorry, perhaps you were actually trying to make a distinction of rigour in use of the “meme” meme. But in the case of friend above, probably not of great worth.

187 was to 185, obviously.

So, 186, now you’re telling us it’s all actually a metaphor? Most of what you say could be rephrased without altering its meaning – ‘change’ or ‘development’ for ‘evolution’, ‘utility’ [or ‘convenience’] for ‘fitness’. You’re using a strict set of vocabulary to try to impose unity on a thoroughly woolly set of real-world objects.

And “adaptation to competitive fitness” is a teleological fallacy.

. It is absurd to posit that evolution of ideas is not operative unless it is proven that ideas are rendered fully extinct – something that is impossible.

Ah, ah. Not ideas, just the traits. It’s not absurd when the mechanism that you’re proposing requires evolutionary fitness to be proven before the relevant trait is turned into a virtue. Because you’re claiming, roughly: X aids fitness, therefore we call X a virtue (and if X suddenly stops aiding fitness, it is no longer considered to be a virtue.)

And if you’re not willing to admit that much, then it seems your whole position is very weak. The conversation goes like this:
“Since the pill has been invented, chastity is no longer considered to be a virtue because it is no longer advantageous to be chaste.”
“Yes, it is. Plenty of people value chastity, perhaps even more so now that it is harder to make the case for being chaste only instrumentally.”
“Oh, well, we can’t expect them all to get in line that quickly.”

You can slap a scientistic label on it, but it’s just a way to dress up a bad argument.

I am not engaging in scientific name dropping when I say that evolution applies to bicycles, operating systems, and virtues. Unlike living creatures, these are products of the mind, but like living creatures, they change to make them more FIT for their intended purposes.

Virtues have purposes. They are not merely intellectual fashions that we use to cover our personal ethics. Platonists would declare that these virtues are as immutable as man’s nature and can be discovered by reasoned inquiry. But we fortunate beneficiaries of the knowledge of Darwin, Dawkins, and Kaufman know that man’s ideas ADAPT and EVOLVE.

It is an absurdity to assert that our thinking on any subject “evolves” but our notions of virtue do not.

Like jholbo says, like I said above at 189, and will say again now more harshly: this is just blither. You have no concrete mechanism in mind, you are just shoe-horning every conceivable idea of change into a sack labelled “evolution” for your own cranky reasons. Consider, for example, the very precise differences between a Darwinian and a Lamarckian account of physical evolution. Which of these two applies to the ‘evolution’ of bicycles? Do bicycles reproduce? Do they have traits acquired by individual effort or random mutation and passed on through chromosomal change?

Or do bicycles in fact get designed by people who think about them and can imagine and carry through teleological, goal-oriented, conscious efforts at improvement? That’s not Darwinian evolution, it’s not even Lamarckian evolution, it’s just thought, reflection, the application of consciousness.

If you want to make some grander startement about modern and pre-modern notions of change over time, go ahead. Yes the Ancients were not very good at seeing progressive incremental change. Since about 1750 Moderns have been very good at seeing such change. But they didn’t need Darwin to start doing that, and that change in perspective itself is just a change in perspective. The history of almost any piece of technology will show you that for hundreds of years before cultures realised the idea of ‘progress’ was out there, people had been making incremental improvements that changed their lives, to ploughs, windmills, carriage-springs, cannon…

You want the whole of history and culture tied up in your “evolution” sack. You’re a crank.

You’re a crank.

Permit this crank to turn again. If you have read Dawkins, you know that he was trained as a biologist. Here is what Wikipedia tells us about Dawkins’ similarly cranky ideas:

Dawkins coined the term meme (the cultural equivalent of a gene) to describe how Darwinian principles might be extended to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.[44] This has spawned the field of memetics. Dawkins used the word meme to refer to any cultural entity which an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes are not always copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes, which may themselves prove more, or less, efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a hypothesis of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.

I say virtues are memes and they evolve. So would Dawkins and other cranks. If Plato had had the same scientific knowledge base, I believe he would have been a crank too.

HH, you proclaim “evolution” at a level of generality that no one could argue with, and then complain that no one dare meet your challenge. The idea that social norms are useful to a society or to individual factions within that society is new to precisely no one. The idea that forms can change over time to become more useful is not particularly new either. You just like biology as metaphor.

But we thought you were making a sharp statement that we disagreed with. We’ve come to discover that you’re making a vague statement, so vague it’s hard to agree or disagree with it.

Do not underestimate the power of evolution.

Indeed. It has taken a long time for popular music to evolve to the point where artists chant their greatness over an insistent beat.

In regard to the original question – doing your research from my armchair –

Viewing the human being as a single, unitary entity of many qualities (think for example of a brass ball, which is hard, solid, gold-colored, shiny) it makes sense to talk of this entity as possessing ‘virtue’.

Viewing the human being through an analytic lens, dissolving the self into parts (I think particularly of Freud here, with ‘ego’ ‘superego’ and ‘id’), the qualities that a human being may have, will be assigned into those parts. Hence the id is selfish, full of desire, and so on (whatever it was Freud said about id, ego, superego.)

Now it should be the case that – in theory – you can unwind from the analytic perspective and once again assign qualities to the entire system. For example, one might say – “In that man there is a virtuous interaction of ego, superego, and id.”

But I think it is our flaw that we cannot see the whole – and retain a qualitative feeling for it – after understanding the analysis. We are just too naive about what analysis is telling us (and of course Freud was naive in describing the interactions between his components, introducing a hydraulic sort of model.)

So the analytic perspective being applied to individual humans (and the human species) in the 19th and 20th centuries is what would ultimately be fatal to addressing the quality of the whole person.

Somewhat relatedly, the faux-empiricism from the 19th century would come into common discourse – pseudo-empirical assessments such as ‘neurotic’ or ‘egotistical’ would replace value judgements such as ‘weak’ or ‘worthy’ (or ‘virtuous’) , since they carry the prestige of science and a pretense of objectivity with them.

Darwin dethroned the human species … Freud dethroned the human soul.

I would also point, since we’re empirically-oriented in this thread, to the work of Jonathan Shay (no dummy), which makes extensive use of the insights of Homer and Aristotle, especially–insights which helped him understand the work he was doing as an M.D./Ph.D. in studying PTSD.

As one of my undergraduate advisors in Philosophy once said, “A wise person often trusts their judgments much more than their reasons for them. If they’re in error, it’s far more likely to be on the side of the former than the latter.”

OK: back to arguing about how memes have replaced the necessity of studying Plato… it’s fun to watch.

Seriously… I will sleep tonight.

But: I think one (tragic) thing about all this is that in philosophy, charitably speaking, it is (due to the complexity of life) all-too-easy for people to fasten up on a single true aspect and talk past a more complicated whole (cf., much of this thread)… while in writing, well: fuck-it, even if you’re spouting dumb-assed, hippy-dippy ideas… they’re your characters’ ideas–and who hasn’t met with enough of those to identify with their reality? Or, what’s more, who doesn’t realize that there are enough of those to self-identify with your characters and make you a ‘star?’ Oh shit, I miss DFW…

As I said… depending on your constitution (oh no: the whiff of essentialism, subsequently, cue Kripke’s “Naming and Necessity”), that’s either a blessing or a curse.

[UPDATE: I just noticed that comments automatically closed. I guess each of us said our piece. HH, just wanted you to know that I didn’t turn it off manually so as to deprive you of the last word. I don’t think I actually need to email Kieran for instructions on how to override the auto-close-comments function. Sometime later we will be able to leave a comment somewhere else again. Or HH can leave his last word in my “how much music” post comments, which hasn’t expired yet. He has my permission, and I promise to read it. – JH, intervening in Joel’s final comment.]