Virtues

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Benjamin Davies’s avatar
Benjamin DaviesOP revised about 21 hours ago·#3162
6th of 7 versions

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 within their own lives.

  • 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.

Criticized1
Dennis Hackethal’s avatar

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.

Benjamin Davies’s avatar
Benjamin DaviesOP, about 20 hours ago·#3168

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

Zelalem Mekonnen’s avatar
Zelalem Mekonnen, about 22 hours ago·#3158

What happens if and when you fails at the commitment to these values?

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. '

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Benjamin Davies’s avatar
Benjamin DaviesOP revised about 20 hours ago·#3169
2nd of 2 versions

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 relevant all 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.

Criticism of #3158
Benjamin Davies’s avatar
Benjamin DaviesOP, about 20 hours ago·#3165

Superseded by #3164. This comment was generated automatically.

Criticism of #3162