Virtues
In my desire to become a more virtuous person, I want to develop a better explicit understanding of virtues. Let’s discuss them!
Log in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.
Core Moral Virtues (influenced by Ayn Rand and CR)
Rationality: The commitment to the ongoing deliberate use of conjecture and criticism, and to only adopting ideas that have no pending criticisms.
Honesty: A refusal to evade one's thoughts, a commitment to searching for one's own errors, and a refusal to fake reality to others.
Integrity: The refusal to permit a breach between one's convictions and one's actions.
Independence: The acceptance of one's own mind as the first and final executor of rationality in one’s life.
Justice: The application of rationality in judging ideas, people, and actions, and acting on those evaluations proportionately.
Productiveness: The application of rationality to sustaining and improving one's life and circumstances.
Pride: An insatiable drive to find and fix errors in one's character, knowledge, and creations. “[M]oral ambitiousness”, as Ayn Rand puts it.
It’s interesting how connected these virtues are. Rationality, honesty, integrity, justice, all relate to each other or even fall out of each other. For example, you can’t be honest and irrational, you can’t be a rational liar (with some exceptions), you can’t be dishonest and conscientious, etc.
Maybe the underlying, most fundamental principle is rationality. Or maybe it’s the law of identity, and all of these virtues are different expressions of it. Not sure yet.
Some quotes relating to your idea:
Rationality is man’s basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues... [It] means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action.
— Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, ch. 1
and
Since these virtues are expressions of rationality, they are logically interconnected... None can be validated in isolation... nor can a man practice any one of them consistently while defaulting on the others.
— Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, ch. 8
Nice, thanks.
Thinking about it some more, I wonder if honesty is more fundamental than some of the other virtues. As I’ve written elsewhere, honesty includes the refusal to ignore certain criticisms. That’s a prerequisite of rationality. Whereas justice, for example, seems downstream of rationality.
I’m having trouble with the idea that honesty is a prerequisite of rationality. This seems to imply honesty somehow comes before rationality.
I think it is more accurate to say rationality and honesty are interdependent, and from there you can deduce that rationality depends on honesty (in a way that maybe it doesn’t depend on justice).
Is “the refusal to ignore certain criticisms” not a case of treating ideas justly?
What happens when you fail to commit to these values?
I think forgiving yourself could be another core value. Something like 'when I make mistakes, I will pick myself up at the earliest possible time and keep going.'
For something to be a core virtue, it needs to be a virtue that should always be applied in any situation where it can be applied. Forgiveness is not something that should be applied in all relevant situations, so I don’t believe it is a core virtue.
At best it would be an applied virtue, as an expression of Justice.
I actually think people are too forgiving in some ways.
I’ll think about adding it to the applied virtues list.
No need to. That was a good refutation. I agree that people do forgive too much and forget to ask how that forgiveness is contributing to the problems they have. But, I think there is a kind of forgiveness, really justice, an honest version of it. Because you are fallible. Something like 'I messed up there, here is why I messed up, and here is what I am going to do so it won't happen again.' After that, you forgive yourself.
I think forgiveness could be another core value. Something like 'when I make mistakes, I will pick myself up at the earliest possible time and keep going.'
This sound like it’s meant to be an example of forgiveness, but I’m not sure it is. It sounds more like an example of resilience.
What do you think forgiveness means, @zelalem-mekonnen?
One of the definitions from Merriam-Webster is 'to cease to feel resentment against (an offender).' Resilience is defined as 'an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.' When you fail against your own value, you are offending yourself.
Applied Virtues
Curiosity: The drive to find new problems and generate conjectures.
Self-Criticism: The primary tool of intellectual honesty.
Clarity: The virtue of refining thoughts to be less ambiguous and easier to criticise.
Epistemic Humility: The consistent recognition of one's own fallibility.
Thoroughness: The commitment to accounting for all known uncontroverted ideas and pending criticisms that may pertain to the problem at hand. {This seems weak}
Good Faith: The commitment to "steel-manning" ideas and criticisms.
Resilience / Fortitude: The ability to recover from failure and re-apply the process.
Decisiveness: The will to act once a conjecture is provisionally accepted and criticism is exhausted.
Courage: The will to face the potential pains of the epistemic process (facing uncomfortable truths, acting on counter-intuitive conclusions, thinking alone).
Accountability: A social manifestation of integrity; the willingness to "own" the consequences of one's actions.
Reliability: The practice of meeting one's voluntary commitments.
Proportionality: The skill of acting proportionately to a given situation, criticism or event.
Intellectual Impartiality: The skill of separating the content of an idea from its source, allowing criticism to be applied fairly.
Fairness: The consistent application of the same critical standards to all ideas.
Intellectual Patience: The willingness to give a problem the time it needs, rather than using a problematic solution (a solution with pending criticisms). {Okay but what if it is an emergency?}
Foresight & Planning: The application of conjecture and criticism to problems pertaining to future circumstances.
Diligence / Industriousness: The sustained application of effort to the problem-solving process, usually to a particular problem.
Creativity / Ingenuity: The skill of generating novel conjectures and criticisms.
Efficiency: The drive to reduce the work, resources or steps it takes to solve problems.
Resourcefulness: The skill of solving problems within constraints.
Purposefulness: The skill of defining a hierarchy of problems to solve, ensuring one's productive effort is directed at goals worth pursuing.
Focus: The ability to sustain mental effort.
Sharpness: Raw mental processing power.
Energy / Vitality: The capacity to be highly productive, especially over long durations.
Athleticism / Physicality: The capacity of the body to execute actions.
Memory: The ability to store and retrieve important conjectures and criticisms.
Conscientiousness: The opposite of negligence. A commitment to making genuine efforts; not cutting corners.
Excellence: The opposite of mediocrity. Man can go “as high as his ability will carry him” (The Virtue of Selfishness, ch. 12).
Is there overlap between conscientiousness and thoroughness? Is being thorough part of being conscientious?
There is overlap but I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. Many virtues overlap. The purpose of identifying them is to draw focus to different aspects of virtues as such. Conscientiousness and thoroughness are quite similar, but I think different enough to merit mentioning both.
Excellence and pride are more similar IMO, but I think that it is fine to feature both.
I am stuck on the subject of self-discipline.
It seems important to be able to get things done, even when we aren’t in the mood for it (basic chores, for example).
But this conflicts with CR ideas to do with self-coercion.
Found this. Will read it when I have a moment to sit down.
Yeah I’d consider discipline irrational because it means one part of you coerces another.
Having said that, there could be value in learning how to deal productively with situations where you cannot avoid coercion. Like the government forcing you to do your taxes, which you will only do if you translate that external coercion into internal coercion. Nobody else can really coerce you, only you can coerce yourself. It would be nice to do this productively and also in a way that doesn’t practice/internalize self-coercion. And it should be rare. I don’t think basic chores qualify.
After our conversation today, I agree that chores don’t qualify.
Maybe a solution to the self-coercion for things like paying taxes is to internalise the fact that paying taxes keeps you out of prison, and that therefore it is good for you to pay your taxes. Putting paying taxes in it’s proper context for your subconscious.
It occurs to me that self-discipline can literally be interpreted to mean disciplining the self in the way a parent might discipline a child. That framing makes it easier to see problems with self-discipline.
Have you seen: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/core-objectivist-values
Might have some more virtues to include.