“The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.” ―Simone de Beauvoir^[1]

Summary: The Notes on Virtues sequence shares my research into various virtues. This introductory post explains what I’m trying to accomplish.

I think the key to being a better, more satisfied, and more effective person is to become more skillful and well-rounded in practicing the virtues.^[2] Alas, childhood training in the virtues is haphazard, and remedial training (or self-help) as adults is also spotty. I hope to help fix this by assembling information about the virtues, with a focus on practical ways we can improve in them.

Why I think this is important

“The branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest—I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good people, for this alone gives the study its practical value.” ―Aristotle^[3]

Life is complex. We are constantly confronted by a variety of challenges. To address them well, we need to have learned a variety of basic life skills such that they are second-nature to us. “The virtues” are skills that apply to challenges common to human lives.

If you have a better command of the virtues, this helps you thrive and improves your effect on those around you. Society at large benefits from a higher level of competence in the virtues of those in it. But our culture is not good at teaching or encouraging the virtues.

Our institutions of formal childhood education are patchy. You’ll get reading, writing, and ’rithmetic, but will you get resourcefulness, resilience, restraint, responsibility, rectification, or reputability? Institutions like scouting or religion pick up some of the slack, but not nearly enough. Parents have little guidance on how to convey virtue to their children effectively, and also have blind spots from their own spotty educations. There have been some gestures toward formal “character education” of children, which is probably a good sign. But children will learn most from the example of their elders: if we don’t value virtues enough to pursue them in our own lives, that will make more of an impression on the up-and-coming generation than any “do as we say, not as we do” education will.

A virtue gym?

For a few virtues or skills, there are adult education / training / exercise programs. If you want to be more fit, you can join a gym. If you want to be a better public speaker, you can join Toastmasters. If you want to sober up, you can attend Alcoholics Anonymous. But for most virtues, there’s nothing like this, and that’s a shame.

Two misconceptions sometimes cause people to give up too early on developing virtues:

that virtues are talents that some people have and other people don’t as a matter of predisposition, genetics, the grace of God, or what have you (“I’m just not a very influential / graceful / original person”), and
that having a virtue is not a matter of developing a habit but of having an opinion (e.g. I agree that creativity is good, and I try to respect the virtue of creativity that way, rather than by creating).

It’s better to think of a virtue as a skill like any other. Like juggling, it might be hard at first, it might come easier to some people than others, but almost anyone can learn to do it if they put in persistent practice.

We are creatures of habit: We create ourselves by what we practice. If we adopt habits carelessly, we risk becoming what we never intended to be. If instead we deliberate about what habits we want to cultivate, and then actually put in the work, we can become the sculptors of our own characters.

What if there were some institution like a “virtue gymnasium” in which you could work on virtues alongside others, learning at your own pace, and building a library of wisdom about how to go about it most productively? What if there were something like Toastmasters, or Alcoholics Anonymous, or the YMCA but for all of the virtues?

Ben Franklin’s experiment

One day Benjamin Franklin “conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.”^[4] He explains in his autobiography, “as I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.” But he quickly learned he had underestimated the task:

While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.

So he decided to be more methodical. He reviewed lists of virtues in the literature he was familiar with, and created his own list of a dozen virtues that he thought were especially important. To make each of these virtues habitual, he tackled them one-at-a-time, starting with those he thought would help him more easily acquire the others. (Virtues can build on each other: Some, like persistence, curiosity, or self-respect, make others easier to acquire.)

He kept track of each virtue he was practicing in a notebook with a table for each week. The table had one column for each day, and one row for each virtue. Each time he failed to fulfill a particular virtue on a certain day, he marked the table cell for that virtue/day with “a little black spot” (or more than one if he screwed up multiple times). His plan was that when he achieved a week in which he successfully kept the row for Temperance blank, he would move on to concentrating on Silence (attending to Temperance as well). When he managed to keep both of those rows clear for a week, he would move on to Order, and so on.

“I was surpris’d to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined; but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish.” He carried his notebook for several years. “[T]ho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been…”

He considered writing a book, The Art of Virtue, that “would have shown the means and manner of obtaining virtue, which would have distinguished it from the mere exhortation to be good that does not instruct and indicate the means.” He toyed with the idea of a political party that would advocate for the good of the country and of mankind in general (rather than for a faction): the “United Party for Virtue.” This morphed into a fraternity: the “Society of the Free and Easy.” He planned to initiate members by putting them through the same practice he had undergone with his notebook of weeks and virtues. He explained the name of the society this way:

The Society of the Free and Easy: free, as being, by the general practice and habit of the virtues, free from the dominion of vice; and particularly by the practice of industry and frugality, free from debt, which exposes a man to confinement, and a species of slavery to his creditors.

Two young men signed up and begin the work, but Franklin got distracted with other things and abandoned the project. “[T]ho’ I am still of opinion that it was a practicable scheme, and might have been very useful...”

The Society of the Free & Easy

In 2019 I tried to pull together something like Franklin’s Society (and borrowed his name). I worked with a group of friends and acquaintances to come up with what I think is a pretty good framework for working on virtues in a peer-supported way:

Find a partner or form a small team.
Each choose a virtue to work on.
Examine your virtue, and any obstacles you face when you try to practice it.
Work with your partner(s) to come up with exercises in which you will frequently, deliberately practice that virtue in ways that challenge your current level of fluency.
Check in with your partner(s) regularly to encourage each other and to keep each other accountable. Adjust your curriculum as you learn more about what works and what challenges you face.
When you have integrated the virtue adequately into your character, start again with a new virtue.

Alas, after a promising start, the group dwindled, and then the pandemic disrupted everything, and now the group is defunct. But during our efforts, we dug up a lot of information about virtues in general, about particular virtues, and about habit formation, and that forms the basis for the posts I’m sharing here.

Notes on virtues

“ ‘Becoming better’ is a process involving an exercise and refinement of moral vocabulary and sensibility. Yet we must also in discussing virtue, as distinct from practising it, beware of seeming to suggest that the articulate educated man is better than the inarticulate uneducated man because he can think rationally and formulate and verbalise his distinctions.… Morality… is right up against the world, to do with all apprehensions of others, all lonely reveries, all uses of time. Virtue shows in actions… The human situation is much more mixed-up than theorising about it can suggest…” ―Iris Murdoch^[5]

I hope to assemble practical ideas for people who want to improve in a certain virtue. I sometimes find it challenging to define the virtue precisely, or to distinguish it from another virtue—and sometimes the term for the virtue gets overloaded with a variety of meanings in common use—so I include discussion of those nuances too.

I plan to be inclusive of a variety of perspectives and cultures, rather than to be definitive or dogmatic. It’s a fuzzy subject matter. I’m feeling my way about, leaning on existing guides when I can find them (though I tend to find more examples of people praising or advocating certain virtues than of people explaining them or giving practical advice on how to go about improving in them).

I take some inspiration from Aristotle, who, when he examined a set of virtues in Nicomachean Ethics, started with virtue-concepts already found in common language and folktale, rather than starting from a theoretical foundation and building ideal virtues from there. When it comes to dividing up a complex subject matter into manageable and coherent chunks, previous generations have already done a lot of the work for us and handed that down to us in the language and tropes we use. That we have found a word or trope useful is a good clue that there’s some helpful regularity behind it. While this sort of understanding shouldn’t be confused with the gospel truth of how reality is constituted, it seems wise to glean as much as we can from it before trying to systematize more deliberately.

I investigated several virtue-based traditions (the Greek cardinal virtues, the traditional Christian virtues, the virtues of Bushido, Confucian virtues, the virtues of Scouting, the West Point virtues, the pāramitās and other Buddhist virtues, the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers), the virtues favored by some particular philosophers (Aristotle, Cicero, Ben Franklin, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Baruch Spinoza, Henry David Thoreau, Shannon Vallor, the Cynic philosophers, the developers of care ethics, William De Witt Hyde, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ibn Miskuyah), virtues highlighted by the Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues, and the virtues identified as “character strengths” by psychologists operating in the positive psychology paradigm. This isn’t comprehensive by any means, but it was revealing.

For one thing, there was a lot less consensus than I expected about which virtues are the important ones. This is complicated by problems of terminology. For example, what one philosopher will call self-control, another will call continence, another restraint, another discipline. Or, while Paul says that the greatest virtue is love,^[6] he defines “love” in such a way^[7] that it incorporates patience, kindness, mudita, modesty, humility, respect, good temper, forgiveness, righteousness, care, trust, hope, and perseverance.

For another, different cultures partition virtue-space differently: sisu is only kind-of like perseverance; mudita is only kind-of like sympathy; nying je is only kind-of like compassion. This is challenging when I interpret translated works, in which the translator chose the closest equivalent English word, but the author meant something different from what English speakers typically mean by that word. But it can also make English works treacherous: some words for virtues, like “prudence” or “continence” or “magnanimity,” have very different connotations in current English than they did only a few generations ago.

I tried to correct for things like these. I consolidated various terms for similar virtues together, and created a spreadsheet where I could note which virtue-clusters had been promoted in which systems or by which philosophers. But of the hundreds of virtues I found, only eleven are on more than half of the lists:

honesty/trustworthiness/promise-keeping
courage/bravery
self-control/continence/restraint/discipline
loyalty/fidelity
temperance
sincerity/straightforwardness/earnestness/frankness
justice
wisdom/philosophy
piety/reverence
respect for others/thoughtfulness/consideration
forbearance/patience

Among the virtues that didn’t make that cut: compassion, prudence, industry/effort/enterprise/productiveness, harmony/balance/moderation, friendliness, rationality, humility, righteousness, civility/social responsibility, hope, perseverance, courtesy, generosity, creativity, cleanliness, mercy, forgiveness, wit, originality, calm, curiosity, hospitality, pride, and gratitude. Some lonely virtues like daring, assertiveness, spontaneity, and punctuality appear on only one list. Other skills that are popularly admired—like solidarity, engagement, charm, or intimacy—aren’t on any lists at all.

Some virtues are debatable. Selflessness, pride, altruism? The apostle Paul and Ayn Rand would disagree about what’s the virtue and what’s the vice. Virtues like chastity, obedience, and patriotism give some of us the willies.

I plan to be inclusive and to eventually give attention also to these less-prominent and more controversial virtues.

Why am I going to this trouble?

My hope is that, whichever virtue you want to improve, you can get a head start with the research and write-ups I’ve done.

I’m also motivated by self-improvement. I’ve been working to deliberately improve some of these virtues in my life, and I hope to make that an ongoing project, so putting together these virtue-dossiers helps me.

If we manage to reboot the Society of the Free & Easy in the post-pandemic time, these may help us hit the ground running.

I also have vague ideas about this being a worthwhile political project. I’ve come to distrust talk of elections and revolutions and institutional reforms. I think the longer, harder, more subtle project of helping people improve is a more reliable path to a better future than trying to impose wise policies on them from on high. If people become braver, wiser, more just, and more honorable, public policy will follow their lead. If people become more cowardly, foolish, grasping, and disreputable, conniving politicians will lead them by the nose.

I’m posting these at LessWrong because I think LessWrong readers are likely to grok the usefulness of this project, and because I value the insightful feedback people share here. Since I’m not an expert at any of the virtues I’m writing up, I’m also slyly taking advantage of Cunningham’s Law^[8] to correct my misunderstandings.

Note

This is an ongoing research project. Whenever I dig up information about a particular virtue that I think can usefully add to what I’ve written, I will go back and revise the page associated with that virtue. Or if you leave a comment about something that I’ve gotten wrong or something important I’ve neglected to mention, I’ll fix that. I think it’s more important for these pages to be useful than for them to be a fixed record of what I thought when I first wrote them.

Tentative Sequence Outline

Honesty (truthfulness, veracity, trustworthiness, promise-keeping, probity, reputability)
Courage (bravery)
Self Control (continence, discipline)
Loyalty (faithfulness, fidelity)
Temperance
Sincerity &c (straightforwardness, frankness, earnestness, candor, parrhêsia)
Justice as a virtue (epieikeia)
Wisdom (philosophy)
Piety (reverence, faith, religion, spirituality, transcendence)
Respect for Others (thoughtfulness, consideration)
Patience & Forbearance (kshanti)
Altruism (philanthropy, generosity, charity, munificence, magnanimity)
Prudence (practical wisdom, decision theory)
Amiability (friendliness, geniality, agreeableness, conviviality, affability, niceness, affection, warmth)
Industriousness (assiduity, effort, enterprise, industry, productivity)
Compassion
Social Responsibility (civility, community, citizenship, patriotism)
Forgiveness (mercy, clemency, epieikeia, placability, indulgence, leniency)
Righteousness (love of virtue, rectitude, conscientiousness, megalopsychia)
Honor (nobility)
Moderation, Balance, & Harmony
Rationality (reason, love of truth, clear-headedness, deduction/induction)
Attention (awareness, discernment, mindfulness, focus, concentration, alertness, observation, presence)
Integrity (unity, authenticity)
Fitness (health, fettle, hardiness, vitality, toughness)
Care
Fairness (impartiality)
Good Temper
Humility
Kindness (including kindness to animals)
Duty (responsibility, purposefulness)
Endurance (fortitude, hardiness, toughness, stamina)
Benevolence (goodness, goodwill, metta)
Joy (cheer)
Optimism, Hope, & Trust
Empathy & Sympathy (mudita, pity)
Serenity (calm, equanimity, tranquility, composure, contentment, peacefulness, consolation)
Caution (carefulness, preparedness, foresight, deliberation, heedfulness, vigilance)
Perseverance (persistence, resilience, grit, fortitude, tenacity, sisu)
Know-how (practical knowledge, craft)
Simplicity
Ambition (drive, aspiration, loftiness, initiative)
Propriety (decorum, etiquette, refinement, gravitas, sobriety, sportsmanship, chivalry)
Courtesy (manners, politeness, consideration)
Love
Frugality (thrift, economy)
Resolve (determination, commitment, dedication, devotion) / Steadfastness (firmness, decisiveness, consistency)
Cleanliness (orderliness, hygiene)
Creativity (art, imagination, inventiveness, problem-solving)
Chastity
Gentleness (tenderness, mildness)
Modesty
Gratitude (appreciation, reciprocity)
Wit (humor, playfulness)
Pride (self-worth, self-esteem)
Dignity (self-respect, rectitude)
Judgment & Righteous Anger
Perspective (prioritization)
Philomathy (studiousness, scholarship, seeking good advice)
Zest (exuberance, vigor, enthusiasm, wholeheartedness, zeal, virya)
Awe (elevation, wonder, appreciation of beauty, sensitivity)
Intelligence (ingenuity, mental quickness)
Obedience (respect for authority, submission)
Gracefulness (confidence, poise, unflappability, authority, gravitas, refinement)
Filial Piety (and respect for elders)
Friendship
Helpfulness (service)
A Sense of Shame
Flexibility (adaptability, agility, resourcefulness)
Cultivation (self-improvement, growth)
Self-awareness (emotional intelligence)
Taste (fashion sense, beauty)
Self-reliance (independent thinking, originality, independence, liberty)
Selflessness (meekness)
Surrender (stoicism, acceptance, amor fati)
Valor (heroism, defense-of-others, glory, chivalry)
Connectedness (social intelligence)
Curiosity (exploration, inquisitiveness)
Mentoring (counsel, nurturance)
Innocence (purity)
Quiet (silence, stillness, listening)
Concern
Being Knowledgeable
Hospitality
Liberality (tolerance, understanding)
Cooperation (teamwork, coordination)
Steadfastness (firmness, decisiveness, consistency)
Non-attachment (relinquishment, renunciation)
Intuition (insight)
Leadership
Diligence
Tact (discretion)
Graciousness (e.g. accepting fault, accepting help)
Openness (candor)
Rhetoric (persuasion, conversational competence, expressiveness, influence)
Assertiveness (boldness)
Open-mindedness (intellectual humility)
Sacrifice
Skepticism
...more as I discover them...

What am I missing?^[9]

^{^}
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
^{^}
While the theoretical discussion of “virtue ethics” interests me, it is not the aim of this sequence to argue the case for it. Regardless of whether you find virtue models, deontological models, or consequentialist models to be the most sensible way of considering ethical questions, I think you will be best able to live up to the answers you derive from those considerations if you put effort into developing the virtues.
^{^}
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Ⅱ.2
^{^}
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, chapter 9 (“Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection”)
^{^}
Iris Murdoch Metaphysics as a Guide to Morality (1992) p. 324
^{^}
1 Corinthians 13:13 “And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.”
^{^}
1 Corinthians 13:4–7 “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs;it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
^{^}
“The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.” (Named after, but not formulated by, Ward Cunningham.)
^{^}
Some maybes: charisma / charm, unpretentiousness, comforting/consoling, engagement/participation, intimacy, penitence/rectifcation, kinetic interaction (sport, dance, sex, massage, etc.), post-traumatic growth, recognition / honor / remembrance (of others), solidarity, conciliation / peacemaking / compromise / negotiation, adventurousness / daring, historical understanding, living-in-the-present / spontaneity / wildness, punctuality / time-management / promptness, reputation, ahimsa / nonviolence, follow-through, parenting, precision...