Virtues
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on 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.