Virtues (number and structure)

The questions of how many virtues there are, how the virtues relate to one another, and is any one virtue more important than any other, can be answered by looking either at the history of the subject or at the logic lying behind it. A recent survey across various cultures around the world concluded that there are six virtues. Western tradition on the other hand maintains that there are seven. Other numbers have been put forward and this article will look briefly at these, at any underlying structure that has been proposed, and, by taking the major virtues in turn, at the alternative view put forward by many that there is a whole spectrum of virtues to contend with.

Primary virtues

In Aristotle’s opinion, the different kinds of virtue arose from the nature of being itself: In order to know what a good man is, he said, we must firstly determine what man himself is.^[1] Human beings were seen as part of a wider concept of being which had previously been distinguished from non-being by containing within itself variety and interrelationship.^[2] For Aristotle there were three kinds of relationship through which people engage with the world and from these arose three different kinds of virtue:^[3]

• Firstly, numerical or geometrical relations. These led to a sense of order and proportion and the virtues of fairness and justice.
• Secondly, the relations of cause and effect. These led through the need for material satisfaction to the virtues of temperance and prudence.
• Thirdly, knowledge-based relations. These led through our notions of culture and significance to the virtues of honesty, propriety and wisdom.

Plato in his dialogue Laws had already abstracted from this list the three virtues of “justice and temperance and wisdom”^[4] and in Phaedrus he referred to the three “heavenly virtues” of “justice, temperance and knowledge”.^[5] In the Republic and Symposium he referred to four virtues adding “courage” to the list; and in Protagoras, Meno and Phaedo he talked of five virtues adding “piety”, “magnificence” and “nobility” respectively.^[6] But the three primary virtues remained fairly constant throughout his work and it will be useful to look at each in turn before looking at any others that there might be.

Justice

The importance of justice is emphasised in the Republic where justice, Plato wrote, “gives order to the other virtues”.^[7] Whether in ordering the state or ordering one’s household, justice required perception and an ability to contemplate the whole,^[8] and the whole included all the other virtues. In law, justice depended upon the ability to determine questions regarding the whole of the facts and not just part, and in “shrewdly perceiving omissions and faults”. Behind justice lay the concepts of impartiality and transparency, or what Plato called “frankness”.^[9] Justice lay in fairness and in correctly apportioning what is due (the term judge, dikastis, is derived from one who bisects), and these ideas are reflected in the scales of justice that sometimes crown the law courts. Indeed many of the concepts lying behind justice derive from the category of number. Besides equality the concepts of harmony and proportion were also important: Plato wrote, for example, that “from justice springs harmony”, and Aristotle that justice “… is a species of the proportionate”.^[10]

It was not until the seventeenth century that, in regard to equality, John Locke developed the idea of human rights.^[11] The idea of “right” (ius) was important to Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century and he divided his book, the Metaphysics of Morals into two sections the Doctrine of Right and the Doctrine of Virtue respectively.^[12] Also drawing on the concept of number, he developed the idea of universality, and his own principle of the categorical imperative which stated that one should act “as if the maxim of one’s action were to become, by one’s own will, universal law”, a law that should apply to everybody equally.^[13]

Temperance

If the virtue of justice addressed the concepts of fairness and number, then for the Greeks the virtue of temperance addressed our engagement with the relationship of cause and effect. It was causality that lay behind motion and activity. Goodness itself was seen as a “differentia of motion and activity” and happiness resulted from “living and being active”.^[14] Our activities developed from the needs to achieve certain ends, to eat, to drink, to keep warm etc; and pleasure derived not only from satisfying these needs but also from “exercising the faculties” through which such needs are satisfied.^[15] The virtue of temperance arose from our need to deal with conflicting pleasures.^[16] For Aristotle it consisted in the idea that anything in either excess or defect destroyed one’s health, and for a proper functioning of the body there needed to be a careful exchange between work and rest, intake and pleasure, and expenditure and reward. This in turn would reduce excess and waste and increase the efficiency or good working ability of the whole.^[17]

Kant included the virtue of temperance under a section entitled “On Duties to Oneself”. Having divided the Metaphysics of Morals into two sections on rights and virtues, he further subdivided the latter into two sections entitled “On Duties to Oneself” and “On Duties to Others”.^[18] The laws of nature (the laws of cause and effect) underlie our natural desires for “food, sex, rest and movement”, but complementing these are laws of ethics by which we raise ourselves above our animal natures and improve ourselves, firstly, through controlling our consumption and, secondly, through industriousness and diligence, to become “useful members of the world”.^[19]

Wisdom

In several of Plato’s dialogues it is wisdom that takes predominant place among the virtues. In Laws, for example, after asking “… and what is the right way of living” he concluded that “wisdom is the guide to the other virtues” and that the right way of living, besides providing exercise and nourishment for the body, consisted in providing “instruction and education for the soul”.^[20] The virtue of wisdom addressed our relationship with the realm of knowledge and in particular that of practical knowledge where wisdom is sometimes known as prudence. Knowledge itself derived from the way we compare and classify the various aspects of the world,^[21] and this in turn was based on the more fundamental relations of sameness and difference from which truth, or at least the correspondence theory of truth, was derived.^[22] Besides truthfulness other virtues that emerged here were those of fittingness and propriety. Aristotle defined appropriateness, for example, as “what is fitting in relation to the agent, the circumstances and the object”. These and the associated virtues of honour and decency are culture-based, but the idea of fittingness does introduce the higher virtues of honesty and integrity where as Aristotle said “with a true view all the data harmonises but with a false one the facts soon clash”.^[23]

Kant under his “Duties to Others” made a similar two-fold division, firstly into virtues such as dignity and respectability, the latter consisting in being “like” others, but not in “blindly imitating them”; and secondly in the virtues of honesty and truthfulness where “lying to others” would deny the speakers overall integrity.^[24] People know intuitively, he said, that they should be “honest and truthful” but he was aware that people are not all born with the same talents of “intelligence, wit and judgement” and that wisdom consists as much in common sense as it does in extensive knowledge.^[25]

Primary and secondary virtues

If these represent the three primary virtues there are other virtues such as duty, love and courage which, following Jeremy Bentham’s terminology, can be called secondary virtues.^[26] In his view the secondary virtues played a supporting role only, but there are other systems where they represent a higher stage of development, for example, those incorporating the Christian virtues of faith, love and hope.^[27] There are various ways in which the virtues have been brought together and it will be useful to look at three of these:

i) Firstly there are simple list structures. Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics compiled a fairly indefinite list that included courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, pride, magnanimity, ambition, good-temper, friendliness, truthfulness, wit, justice, and the intellectual virtues of science, wisdom and intuition.^[28] Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century listed thirteen virtues, namely, temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility.^[29] There is little structure to these lists and the virtues are picked up, as Kant said of Aristotle’s categories, just as they happen to occur to the writer.

ii) Secondly there are hierarchical structures. These are generally shaped like a pyramid with individual virtues along the bottom, which are then grouped into families higher up, and rise to one, or possibly two, overriding virtues or categories at the top.^[30] In the Platonic system, for example, Being is placed at the top with Beauty, Goodness and Truth at the next level down. These in turn become subdivided; and Goodness, or virtue, becomes “a separate whole” of which Justice, Temperance and Wisdom are parts.^[31] In another example, Aquinas took the four cardinal virtues of Justice, Temperance, Wisdom and Courage and added them to the three theological virtues of Faith, Love and Hope to arrive at what we now know simply as “the seven virtues”. However, he later found this list to be unsatisfactory and possibly influenced by the Islamic scholar, Alfarabi, he further subdivided wisdom into the three intellectual virtues of wisdom, science and understanding to arrive at a hierarchy of nine virtues: three theological, three moral and three intellectual.^[32] Jeremy Bentham claimed that there were only two primary virtues at the top of the tree, namely prudence and beneficence, under which all the secondary virtues such as pride, benevolence and fortitude could be arranged.^[33]

iii) Thirdly there are circular structures. Ramon Llull, following Aquinas, listed as virtues the nine attributes of God showing them circling around a divine centre, and these (a pale reflection of the ninety nine divine names of Islam) included: greatness, goodness, eternity, power, wisdom, will, virtue, beauty and truth.^[34] In another example, Goethe, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and with similar references to divinity, adjusted Isaac Newton’s colour circle to show the three primary and three secondary colours alternating saying that such a diagram reflected both “primordial relations” and the “earthly and heavenly generation of the Elohim”.^[35]

Goethe’s proposed structure also corresponded with Kant’s earlier division into analytic concepts and synthetic concepts. If there were three analytic relations underlying the three primary virtues then through a process of combination a complementary set of “derivative”, or secondary virtues could be discovered.^[36] Kant’s Duty to Others, for example, followed from the category of community, itself a derivative category, and similarly virtues like faith and duty, or hope and courage, could be derived from the secondary categories of substance and will respectively. Indeed, David Hume, a little before Kant, had subdivided his material in a similar way to that between the analytic and the synthetic in his division of human nature into reason and feeling. Book Two of his Treatise on Human Nature, which discussed the nature of feeling, was further subdivided into three sections, namely Pride, Love and Will,^[37] a group which leads on to a consideration of the secondary virtues.

Secondary virtues

Duty

From the old Aristotelian category of substance arose the need to engage with our “material nature”, which is, as Plato said, “… always undergoing loss and reparation”.^[38] Hierocles pictured each one of us, “as it were, entirely compassed by many circles, some smaller, others larger” extending outwards from oneself to one’s family, or through clothes, dwellings, to all one’s property and possessions.^[39] Each of these, as Hume pointed out, may give rise to feelings of pride and self-esteem, but they also give rise to various duties and obligations.^[40] Firstly there was the duty of care to oneself through “medicine, bathing and gymnastics”; secondly there was the need to care for “one’s own property” through proper maintenance and security; and thirdly there was the need to maintain family and social bonds through the virtues of responsibility and loyalty towards one’s country and society generally.^[41] There is a negative side to pride, however, and Aristotle noted that the virtue of pride takes the middle ground between vanity and conceit on the one hand and undue humility on the other.^[42]

Kant, like Cicero before him,^[43] emphasised the virtue of duty saying we all have duties imposed on us through the very fact of our existence. One has a “duty to maintain one’s own life”, he said. He admitted that it was often the “gifts of fortune… health, wealth, power and happiness” which inspire pride, but there is also a duty to develop one’s bodies, minds and spirits in order to achieve self-respect.^[44] Conscientiousness (“religio”) in carrying out these duties leads not only to faith or religion, which he defined as “the sum of all duties”,^[45] but also to a sense of humility. Kant realised that there was a negative side to humility in the form of servility, but there was also a positive side, central to most religions, of which he became aware when he compared his own relatively lowly life with “the starry heavens above and the moral law within”.^[46]

Love

If the virtues of duty and self-respect developed out of the category of substance then the virtues of love and humanity developed from the category of relation. Empedocles, after listing the four material elements of substance, added the two further elements of love, or friendship, which brought all things into relation, and strife which separated them.^[47] Plato in his dialogue, the Symposium, suggested that love embraced all the other virtues, and introduced the concept of “sympatheia – which the best of us delights in” and which arose when love “fills men with affection… kindness… friendship… forgiveness”.^[48] He also linked this feeling with the concept of communication when he wrote: “if there were not some community of feeling among mankind… I do not see how we could ever communicate with one another”.^[49] Aristotle remarked on the more practical aspects of community and human relationships that when “men journey together… they share in discussion and thought”.^[50]

The ideas of Plato and Aristotle influenced the development of Christianity and Islam. St Paul proclaimed that the virtue of love was the greatest of the three theological virtues, faith, love and hope;^[51] and St Augustine in turn explained the four cardinal virtues as being different forms of love.^[52] Alfarabi in the tenth century introduced liberality, or generosity, alongside the classical virtues of justice, courage and moderation, to underline the Moslem traditions of hospitality and alms giving.^[53] David Hume in more secular vein developed the ideas of love and sympathy in his Treatise of Human Nature; and Immanuel Kant, while precluding feelings from any list of rational virtues, recognised that sympathetic feeling could be effective in promoting the virtues generally. After defining love as the “maxim of benevolence” Kant proceeded to divide the subject into three parts:^[54]

• Sympathy, or humanity, which included both “friendship” (sociability, hospitality, courtesy, gentleness) and “respect” (tolerance and privacy).

• Beneficence, which included charitable giving and an obligation to help the poor

• Gratitude, which implied honouring others for their generosity and kindness.

A virtuous action, Kant said, required an act of will; and the reasoning behind our Duties to Others derived from the categorical imperative, that where the will promotes “universal law” then it cannot but be altruistic in intent.^[55]

Courage

Courage is commonly recognised as one of the four cardinal virtues. Plato, however, was equivocal about its status among the virtues as can be seen in both Protagoras and Laws.^[56] In the Republic, he recognised that there were three sides to the human soul, the rational, the appetitive and the spiritual, and the virtue belonging to the spiritual, he said, was courage. Courage was necessary in periods of civil strife and it complemented wisdom in requiring “… a knowledge of the grounds of fear and hope”.^[57] Central to the notion of courage was the concept of the will, and Longinus developed the concept further in relation to a hope for future things.^[58] Hope, as we have seen, became one of the three theological virtues of Christianity and was linked by St Paul with courage, or endurance, not least in his phrase “faith, love and endurance”.^[59]

David Hume’s third section of Book Two of The Treatise of Human Nature was entitled “Of the Will and the Direct Passions”. The title reflected the two ways in which people are motivated, or moved, to carry out their affairs,^[60] and Kant, in distinguishing between rational will and general inclination, promoted will as the supreme virtue claiming that the other virtues can only be effected through the moral strength that the will provides.^[61] Paramount to Kant’s discussion of the virtues was the concept of freedom which is, he said, “our one innate right” and which allows us to choose for ourselves our own moral ends - insofar as our maxims conform to universal law.^[62] Mental attitudes or “predispositions of the mind” were also important in relation to the will and amongst these Kant listed the virtues of self-control, cheerfulness and tranquillity of mind.^[63]

Recent developments

With regard to the number and structure of the virtues a survey was carried out by the psychologists, C. Peterson and M. Seligman for a book, published in 2004, entitled Character Strengths and Virtues. Their findings taken from a consensus of the major philosophic and religious traditions from around the world resulted in the discovery that, firstly, there was “a surprising amount of similarity across cultures”,^[64] and secondly, that there was a set of six families of “core virtues” which could be brought together under the following headings: Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, Transcendence, Humanity and Courage. Under each of these headings was listed an indefinite number of other virtues or character traits each of which bore an affinity, or “family resemblance”, to other virtues within that group. They found that the two virtues of justice and humanity occurred most often across the various cultures, with wisdom and temperance a close second.^[65] The virtue of transcendence in the cultures surveyed was stated to be often implicit only, and the subheadings of religiosity or faith could perhaps be substituted, or even the virtue of duty which was considered at one stage for inclusion among the main headings. The virtue of love or charity on the other hand might, also by reasons of affinity, be substituted for humanity as a heading.

The methodology used by Peterson and Seligman was, they admitted, scientific rather than philosophical in looking for an “exhaustive and mutually exclusive” system of classification. The philosophy of the twentieth century on the other hand has been much concerned with the problem of the meaning and definition of words and this in turn has influenced the development of moral philosophy. Gilbert Ryle, using an analogy reminiscent of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, gave as an example the concept of liberty when he wrote: “The problem is not to pinpoint separately the locus of this or that single idea but to determine the cross-bearings of a galaxy of ideas… The problem is not to anatomise the solitary concept, say of liberty, but to extract its logical powers as these bear on those of law, obedience, responsibility etc”.^[66] The analogy again was that of a circle of ideas, or categories, revolving around a concept, in this case, liberty; and from this analogy there arose two further areas for investigation: firstly, that of the virtues, combining, merging or overlapping around the perimeter of the circle; and, secondly, that of the virtues, opposing or complementing one another across the centre of the circle. Both of these were aspects of the “unity of the virtues”, an idea that goes back to ancient Greece.^[67]

i) First, regarding combination, the scientific method of classification proposed by Peterson and Seligman can be contrasted with a looser “overlapping” system of categories that philosophers of the early twentieth century such as R.G.Collingwood^[68] or Ludwig Wittgenstein^[69] would have recognised. The concepts of “family resemblances” and “overlapping threads” had been developed by Wittgenstein, and it was the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, noted for translating the Philosophical Investigations into English, who has been credited with bringing, in an essay of 1958, the study of virtue back into mainstream philosophy.^[70] Justice, for example, might include as components a love of mankind and the courage to confront injustice; temperance, might include courage, or strength of mind, but also add the duty of self-preservation; and wisdom might take the duty of self-preservation and add a requirement for love and understanding. But because the virtues do not overlap entirely Anscombe could ask of any particular action not whether is it right or wrong in any overall sense but only is it just or unjust, wise or unwise etc.

ii) Second, regarding complementation, the notion that virtues might compete or complement one another similarly stretches back to Plato who wrote that although the aim should be not “to promote part of virtue but the whole” it is often the case that different parts of virtue “may be at war with one another”.^[71] Kant also noted that there were times when there could be a “conflict of duties”;^[72] and Philippa Foot in her essay Virtues and Vices of 1977, after giving as an example the need for a “charitable disposition” to be united with “justice and wisdom”, spoke then of cases where charity might conflict with justice, and where human rights might “stand in the way of the common good”.^[73] Similar questions might then be asked of the other virtues: how do justice and the concept of human rights relate to duty towards family and country; how do the virtues of temperance or efficiency relate to the humanity required towards those not in work; and how does the wisdom of tradition relate to the courage required in dealing with new situations or new ideas.

Like Kant, the philosophers of the twentieth century have been wary of ascribing any particular number to the virtues.^[74] In one sense there is an infinite number of virtues, and the analogy of a spectrum reaches back to at least Basil of Cappadocia who likened the problem to that of a rainbow where each colour merges imperceptibly into the next.^[75] Any one of us can delve into any or all of the six families suggested and pull out alternative sets of virtues, just as we might pick out alternative colours; but it may be that only by grouping them into recognisable families as Wittgenstein hinted at, or in the way that Peterson and Seligman developed, we can start to make sense of such a complicated and diverse subject.

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