Leigh: Welcome back to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. My name is Leigh Johnson, and I am joined by my co-hosts, Rick Lee and Devonya Havis, and today we are talking about virtue. But before we do that, let’s get some drink orders and some rants or raves. Rick, I’ll go to you first. What are you drinking?

Rick: Today I’m going to have a Corpse Reviver Number Two. And I am raving about the BBC series Shetland.
I don’t know if you like police procedurals, but this one is set in the Shetland Islands, in fact, on what they call the mainland. It is moody, and it’s loving. It’s really well written, and each season goes through just one case. Some of the seasons are three episodes, some are five—they just do as many episodes as it takes to go through the case. It’s an amazing series. I’ve been streaming it through BritBox, and I can highly recommend that as well.

Leigh: Nice. Devonya, what about you? What are you drinking, and what are you ranting or raving about?

Devonya: Well, today I am drinking old-fashioned Coca-Cola. Nothing in it, just Coke. And I am raving about kids. Not necessarily raising them, but seeing them in their natural joy, grooving on people. I was at a party celebrating a colleague’s book, and other colleagues had their kids there. They were just joy and happiness and the freedom of movement. It was nice.

Rick: Ah, the Halcyon days.

Leigh: When you thought the world was a playhouse.

Rick: Yes. Leigh, what about you?

Leigh: I think I’m just going to have a Yuengling today, and I am going to be raving about BlueSky’s starter packs.

I think that there hasn’t really been a development on social media platforms in the last 10 years that hasn’t made those platforms worse. And BlueSky has finally broken that streak. So, on BlueSky, they’ve got these starter packs where you can create a list of people—say, philosophers, podcasters, or, I don’t know, news commenters. You create the starter pack, and other users can then access it and just automatically follow everyone or select people in that pack. It’s just a really easy way to tailor your timeline so that you’re seeing the people you want to see and following the things you want to follow. I really think this is a great development, and I encourage everybody, if you haven’t already made the jump to BlueSky, to go ahead and do that post-haste.

So, as I mentioned earlier, today we are talking about virtue. Rick, how are we going to do this?

Rick: The word virtue sounds really old-fashioned. We talk about honesty, integrity, generosity, and justice. Do we call them virtues? What makes something a virtue—or its opposite, a vice? Does the virtue belong to the person, or to the deed?

If, for example, I come to see that telling a lie is wrong, do I have to come to see that again every single time I think I might tell a lie? Now, that seems wrong to me on two counts. First, it can’t be the case that we demand that every time we are about to act, we go through some checklist of what is right and wrong, what is a virtue and not a virtue, and act according to the list. And secondly, that’s just not how we do things.

So, virtue is like muscle memory for morality. We develop the skill of being honest, and because that now seems like it comes naturally, we simply act honestly whenever a situation where I might lie comes up. But because virtues in this sense are like habits, they have to be learned, practiced, and exercised. That means someone needs to teach me to be honest before I even know that honesty is a virtue—or maybe even what honesty is. But what if they teach me virtues that are simply ways to keep the powerful in power and the lower classes low?

Obedience might be considered a virtue, and we are often taught from infancy on to be obedient to our elders and to authority. But should we be obedient? 

Leigh: No. 

Rick: Oh, well, thank you. It’s been great. I’ve had a nice drink. We’ll see you all next week. And that’s a wrap.

So, are virtues the key to moral life, or are they just ways to ensure the status quo? I think a good place to start talking about virtue, even if we don’t want to follow him to the end, is with Aristotle, because virtue plays a big role in Aristotle’s ethical theory.

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Rick: I think Aristotle’s ethical theory has two main elements. 

Virtue—or actually, his word is arete—might be better understood as excellence and not simply virtue. So that’s one element. 

And the other, which we’ve talked about many times in the past, is phronesis, a kind of wisdom or knowing that’s related to acting and doing. Phronesis is required for living well because, even if I know a general rule—for example, that red meat isn’t good for me—I still need to know in which context that applies and how exactly to apply it. Now, that might sound ridiculous today because, if you’re a meat eater, you just go to the grocery store and all the animals are wrapped in plastic that you can see through, so you know what’s white meat or red meat. But if a chicken walks in front of me, I don’t—being a city boy—know what the hell kind of meat is inside there, so, I need some kind of knowledge to know, “Okay, right now, I need to do this.” It’s not so clear, at least not at first, how these excellences or virtues are—for Aristotle or in general—related to living well.

I should say that, on my reading at least, the goal for Aristotle of ethics is—well, the Greek word is eudaimonia, and it means something like thriving, living well, or maybe being a human being really well. And so it’s not immediately clear how virtue is related to being a human being well.

Devonya: The way I’ve been thinking about this with my students—because, in many ways, I am old-fashioned and committed to the idea of there being excellences—is this: when you think about athletics, there are certain kinds of prowess in athletics. There are also certain kinds of people that we gravitate toward, that we emulate, that we admire and want to be like, that we respect. It seems to me that notions of character and virtue have an affinity.

When I was growing up, my dad would always say things like, “X builds character, therefore you need to practice and do it, even if it’s difficult.” It seems to me that that might be a way of thinking, in a contemporary respect, about what you’re talking about in terms of virtue. It might also challenge the idea that simple obedience or simple acceptance of certain things that are praised as virtuous should go unquestioned.

Rick: Why is it the case that everything that builds character either tastes bad or hurts? You know, it’s not like eating candy builds character, or sleeping builds character. Running or eating your vegetables always builds character. But I think, Devonya, you’ve put your finger on a problem I raised at the end of the introduction. Namely, your dad tells you, “This builds character,” and so we learn these things before we even really know what’s going on, before we even know whether being obedient is something good or bad, before we know whether being pious is good or bad. We’re already taught. And that’s one of the problems, it seems, with this.

Devonya: But to be fair to my dad, obedience, in his estimation, never built character.

Rick: Good for him.

Leigh: Wise man.

Rick: Yeah.

Leigh: I agree with you both. I also, like Devonya, am a little old-fashioned in wanting to hang on to the idea of excellences in various arenas of our life. 

I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding virtue as moral excellence. I mean, just the way we talk about virtue—when we say, “It’s a part of your character,” as if it’s a quality or something of us, and not, as Aristotle demonstrates at length, an excellence in certain kinds of acting and doing. 

One of the things that’s been lost in the last 2,000 years is that, again, virtue has become a quality of a person and not the name of something they do excellently.

Devonya: That’s a nice distinction. 

Rick: I do like that distinction. But I think part of the fault for that lies already in Aristotle, because telling the truth is doing something well, but honesty is something that seems to belong to me as a characteristic, and I think we focus on the fact that I am honest—that’s a virtue that belongs to me—but we lose sight of the fact that it’s the virtue for doing something really well: telling the truth really well. And so, it sits in a middle place. 

Aristotle relates it to a habit. You know, I often compare this with students to a language. Like, I know how to speak Polish, but I’m not speaking Polish right now… but tomorrow, if I were to go to Poland—or for that matter, three blocks away here in Chicago—and start speaking Polish, I wouldn’t have to learn the vocabulary, the grammar, and everything from the ground up. As a habit, I don’t have to relearn it.

I think if we think about virtue as something like that, Leigh, we get back to the understanding that even if it is a quality that belongs to me, it’s a quality for doing what is good or doing the good.

Leigh: I think that’s exactly right. A lot of times when I talk to my students about arete, I point out, just as you did, that although Aristotle, when he uses the word arete, is largely talking about one specific kind of excellence—moral excellence—in the original Greek, it meant excellence of any kind. So, you know, if LeBron James lived in ancient Athens, he would have basketball arete, right? 

But he has that only because it’s a practice. It’s something that he does all the time, over and over and over. And we wouldn’t say of LeBron James that he is a basketball player—that it’s just a quality of his being such that, if he stopped playing or stopped practicing, he would still be an excellent basketball player. We understand that he has to practice doing it. He has to act like a basketball player in order to be an excellent basketball player. 

He has to play basketball!

Devonya: Right. And that playing, that practicing, allows a kind of adaptability for the unpredictability of things that might be encountered. So, he hasn’t seen all possible defenses against which he’s going to play, or all possible offenses, and therefore the practice not only allows the body to achieve a certain physical form of  excellence, it also requires some mental excellences in being able to better discern what is in front of him. 

To me, that becomes important with respect to moral excellence and your question about virtue as we’ve been discussing it through Aristotle incline us to maintaining the status quo rather than challenging it.

Leigh: I think one reason why that subtext is there is because Aristotle does describe virtues as always existing in a “Golden Mean,” right? Like, neither excessive nor deficient. And so, in that sense, when we think about the virtues—like honesty is a virtue—it’s neither being excessively truth-telling nor deficiently truth-telling. This idea that there is a kind of status quo attached to virtues, I think, is not misplaced.

Rick: But I wonder if the Mean is also a bit flexible. Depending on the context, If I’m courageous, I might have to be a little bit more on the reckless side than on the careful side. If I’m too reckless, then I’m just foolhardy—I’m no longer courageous. But in certain situations, I might decide, “Wait a second, I have to be a little bit reckless here.” 

You know, so LeBron James has to decide, okay, dunking is always going to get the ball in the basket, but this might not be the right situation at the right time to dunk the basketball. And so, this goes back to Devonya’s point about a certain theoretical or intellectual side to this.

Leigh: I’m so glad you bring this up, Rick, because it gives me the opportunity to share one of my favorite examples that I use in my classes, which is my bear-fighting example.

So, in my courses, when we’re talking about phronesis and about virtue, I give my students this scenario where I say: Okay, let’s imagine that a bear just busts into the classroom right now, and it’s a human-eating bear.

 I mean, I don’t know, maybe all bears are human-eating bears, but this one is definitely a human-eating bear… intent on eating humans.

Rick: It’s best to assume they’re all human-eating.

Leigh: Err on the safe side.

So, let’s suppose that I just grab the first student in the first row and throw them at the bear and say to everyone else, “Come on, come on, let’s get out! Let’s save ourselves!”

Later in the day, when Action News 5 shows up on campus and they’re interviewing you all, they say, “Oh, we’re so sorry about the tragedy you experienced today, would you say that Dr. J was courageous?” Most of my students say, “Well, obviously not,” right? You were deficiently courageous. You were cowardly in that instance.

So, then I say, okay, let’s start the example over. Let’s say a bear busts into the room, and instead of throwing one of the students at the bear, I distract the bear and sort of draw it towards me and begin to fight the bear. And I say to the rest of my class, ‘Go, go, save yourselves. You’re free! Get out!’” 

And of course, I get killed by the bear and later in the day, when Action News 5 shows up and they’re interviewing my students, they say, “Oh, we’re so sorry to hear about the tragedy that you experienced today in your classroom. Would you say that Dr. J was courageous?” 

I think that most students’ initial impulse is to say, “Yes, she was.”

And I always ask them if they really mean that. I say, okay, let’s imagine that I’m not actually telling you this thought experiment, but I just came in today and said, “Hey, you know what I’m going to do this weekend? I’m going to fight a bear!” Is your first thought going to be, “Oh, that’s courageous”? 

No, it’s not. It’s going to be, “That’s reckless,” right?

And they’ll say, “But you were saving everybody!”

And I respond, yeah, it’s entirely true that there might’ve been other virtues that I was exhibiting, but courage was not one of them. I was being reckless, clearly.

So, there we have an example with a deficiency of courage and an example with an excess of courage, neither of which are courageous.

But then I say, all right, let’s start this example one last time. Let’s say a bear busts into the room, it’s intent on eating everybody in here. I distract the bear, bring him towards me, and I start fighting the bear, you all escape, and I end up dying from the bear attack. 

However, unbeknownst to all of you, I am actually a trained bear fighter. Like, that’s what I do on the weekends. I’ve been training as a bear fighter for the last 20 years. I am, you know, 10–0… or 10–1 in bear fights.

Rick: You know, the weekly bear fights that take place.

Leigh: Right, exactly. So I know how to fight a bear. I mean, I didn’t win this time, but I know how to fight a bear.

And so Action News 5 comes to the campus later, and they ask, ‘Would you say Dr. J was courageous?’”

I think in that instance, you would say that I was courageous. I’m not actually being reckless. I’m not exhibiting an excess of bravery there. I’m doing something that I know how to do. Okay, I lost this time. It happens. But in the same way that it would be reckless for me to run into a burning building, it’s not reckless for a firefighter to run into a burning building. 

What’s the difference? The firefighter has a kind of practical wisdom about it—phronesis. They’ve cultivated the habit of doing this very thing. And they understands what being courageous is and what being reckless is, and what being cowardly is. And those are different for them than they are for me.

I also just want to say as an aside that all of my students hear this bear story, and frequently they’ll talk to other students in other philosophy classes who are also reading Aristotle and say, “Oh, have you gotten to the bear fights yet?” 

I sort of feel bad for my colleagues.

Devonya: Well, the lore of bear fighting and virtue, right? So, it sounds like you’re suggesting that virtue requires a kind of knowing, too. That it’s not simply a matter of acting, but that a kind of knowledge is required in order to be virtuous.

Leigh: But it is a very specific kind of knowledge that can only be gained through acting.

Rick: And it is interesting that in this place, Aristotle—who almost always has a preference for theoretical knowledge and the life of the mind and so on—will say It turns out that when it comes to the practice of living well, people with experience are often in a better situation than the philosophers are, because they have this knowledge that Leigh is talking about right there at their fingertips, and they just do the thing that needs to be done. Whereas we philosophers will say, “Well, but, okay… imagine that the bear and Leigh were on Jupiter…” and we’ll try to engage in this entire theoretical apparatus. 

Meanwhile, someone’s getting eaten by the bear.

As the narrator says in The Big Lebowski, “Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.” The bear quickly.

Leigh: Rips through the veil of ignorance! Enough with this!

Devonya: I really want to push this connection between thinking, knowing, and acting, which I think becomes crucial and might be a stopgap against using virtue to maintain the status quo. 

Yes, I agree that lingers because we are talking about practice and habit, but I also want to think about the practice of interrogating our status quo as a kind of virtuous engagement and as a necessary thing for living our best lives.

Rick: Let me just lay out a little bit more my worry about the status quo.

If, for example, courage is a virtue, then I need to be taught how to be courageous. As Aristotle says, I don’t become courageous by knowing what courage is. I become courageous, in fact—strangely—by being courageous. The virtue is learned, in a weird way, by doing it, right? So the goal is to come to learn the virtue, but I have to enact it before I learn what the virtue is.

Now, this gives, for Aristotle, a really large place for education, so that the elders, the teachers, the schools, and so on are teaching me virtues. And they’re teaching me virtues, as I said, before I even know what virtue is, before I know what honesty is, and so on. I come to be taught to practice these things.

And the question is, at what point does this moment that Devonya brings up—about reflecting on the virtue itself—arise? If I’m taught—and let’s go back to my example (and frankly, I think it’s not a virtue myself)—but if I were taught that obedience is a virtue, at what point in becoming obedient do I have the ability, and from where do I have the ability, to reflect back on obedience and say, “Wait a second, that’s actually not a virtue”?

You could think about all sorts of virtues that Aristotle and other ancient Greeks would list. Take a moral virtue like this—I don’t think that’s a virtue. I could see why it would be taught as a virtue because it affirms a certain status quo. And then other things, even like courage, make sense in a society built around the constant need for warfare.

But does it make as much sense in a different society? And when does the moment arise in which I can reflect on all of this?

Leigh: Well, I think for Aristotle, there never will be a point where that reflection is necessary because virtues are self-evidently virtuous in your living well, in your happiness.

You know, if a virtue wasn’t really a virtue, you wouldn’t be flourishing. You wouldn’t be living well, you wouldn’t be doing well, you wouldn’t be happy. And not happy like a warm hug—happy like truly human flourishing. So I don’t think that is so much a worry for Aristotle. 

And when we say things like, “Well, actually, why are we taught that obedience is a virtue when, in fact, I’m not happy? I’m not doing well. I’m not living well. I’m not flourishing when I’m always obedient,” well, that right there is evidence that it isn’t a virtue.

Rick: I like that because that rehabilitates the need for the time and space of reflection so that I can, as it were, interrogate myself and say, “Hey, is this really helping me or not? It seems like I’m not getting the things I want or even maybe need to be a human and to be a human really well.”

Leigh: Can I just note one other thing that you mentioned earlier, which is that in order to cultivate a virtue, we have to be in a situation that calls for that virtue often enough that it becomes a habit. And for that reason, I frequently tell my students, probably most of us are not courageous. Most of us are not frequently enough in dangerous situations that we have developed a kind of practical wisdom about what to do in dangerous situations, which is what the virtue of courage would be for someone who really knew what it was.

Rick: Right.

Leigh: That also means that everybody can’t develop every virtue. You have to be sort of smiled on by fortune to some extent in order to even have the opportunity to cultivate certain virtues. And that’s where a lot of people want to push back, because the logical consequence of that argument would be that, for example, poor people can’t be generous.

Devonya: Right.

Leigh: And a lot of people don’t want to say, “Poor people can’t be generous.” My students will often come back and say, “Well, maybe they can’t be generous with their belongings or with their money, but they can be generous with their time, their love, their affection, or their friendship.”

And I say, yeah, but they’re not “poor people” in time, right? Or in love and affection and friendship. Where they are poor people, they cannot be generous.

Rick: There comes a moment where we have to look at the relationship between the well-being of each of us and the well-being of all of us. In a sense, it might be the case that the virtue of generosity demands that I work as much as possible to bring about a body politic in which everyone can be generous in all the ways.

And that would be, by the way, a society in which generosity would no longer be necessary, right?

We often misplace where we want equality to show up. We don’t like to say we have unequal distributions of talent. I think we’re all aware that our society puts people in all sorts of situations in which they can’t practice virtues of many different kinds.

But the problem is not that we don’t have equally distributed talents. The problem is that we need to live in a context in which, no matter what talents we have, we can all thrive.

Devonya: And that when we are engaged in developing virtue, we’re doing so within community. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about individual virtue and individual cultivation, and I find it very important that Aristotle says we alone cannot be judges of our virtue.

We require other people and embeddedness in, for him, what would be the political life. I’d call it, for us, a social life. In order to have a clear sense of whether we’re virtuous. It’s not me declaring, “Hey, I am a virtuous person.” It is someone observing the things that I choose over time, right, and assessing me within the context of my community or communities to have a certain set of traits.

Leigh: That’s such a good point, Devonya. And I’m wondering if you think that communities can be virtuous. I mean, I think it’s pretty evident that communities can be vicious.

Rick: Well, but if communities can be vicious, then I think it has to follow that they can also be virtuous. To the extent that one would argue that justice is a virtue, then I think communities could be just, and therefore, they can be virtuous.

Communities could be honest. Communities can be generous, equal, and exhibit all sorts of virtues because of the way in which that community is structured.

Devonya: So, in many respects, the idea of engaging in virtue requires, for lack of a better description, a kind of theater where it unfolds and has to be observed.

We may have muscle memory for it that makes it easier to do or easier to judge—a muscle memory, a kind of knowledge that allows us to more rapidly assess. But we also have to be in a particular context, in a particular setting, where those actions unfold.

And, as you pointed out earlier, we also may require certain material conditions that give us the ability to do those things. That has always been a challenge for me and Aristotle because, you know, you have to have a certain degree of good looks, money, and good friends to really attain virtue.

And I think, “Okay, what are the conditions for the possibility of those things to be in place? How then do I proceed? And in what ways must a community committed to a larger good also be a resource for providing those things to others,” as Rick was raising earlier?

Leigh: I’m gonna be honest—I’m not entirely convinced that communities can be virtuous. I can’t quite wrap my head around that yet. So, Rick, you’re the one that proposed the idea that it would be appropriate to recognize a just society as virtuous. Can you tease that out a little bit?

Rick: Yeah, I am someone who, by and large, really despises the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. And especially, I despise his moral philosophy, which is fundamentally what is called a natural law morality. So, we look to nature, and nature tells us what is right and wrong.

But I think one point of his is really astute. And that is, in looking back on Aristotle, he recognizes—for many reasons we’ve all been pointing out—that in order for me to be virtuous, or better still, in order for me to develop virtues, I have to live in a community or a society in which the development of virtues is a goal of that society itself.

In that sense, he says justice is the basic virtue of all, because only in a just society can we all develop virtues so that we can all live well. And this leads him to say that a virtuous society or a virtuous community would be one that is marked by justice—whose laws are just and is structured in such a way that we can all develop as many virtues as possible, and we can all therefore live well or thrive to the extent possible.

I have to say, I’m convinced about this both as a reading that pulls on one thread of Aristotle that might not be so evident, but I think it’s also, for me, a really interesting point about the way in which the virtuous individual is not isolated from and separate from society, nor is society eliding all differences among those individuals.

Leigh: So, let me try to articulate my hesitation about this.

I agree with your point that a just society is a society that provides for the possibility of virtuous citizens. In that sense, it’s the kind of milieu for virtue to be cultivated and for people to become morally excellent.

But I think there’s a big difference between virtue and justice, and part of it has to do with the action part of virtue. It’s a little bit hard for me to think about communities as acting virtuously or viciously in the same way that an individual acts virtuously or viciously.

And part of that is because I do think that, at bottom, all communities—all political communities—are agonistic. They’re not all acting as one. The order that the community adopts to manage that agonism, I think we could call just or unjust, but I’m not sure that I would still call it virtuous.

Devonya: Say a bit more. So, you’re making an assertion that communities as such, under the way we’ve defined virtue, cannot be virtuous. They can act, but not necessarily be virtuous?

Rick: I don’t know that I would say that communities act.

Here’s a difficulty: If a community—particularly a political community—has laws, for example, those laws are rules through which that community is going to act. Now, I may disagree with those laws or rules, but my disagreement doesn’t mean that the community is not acting through those rules.

I can find myself living in a non-virtuous—a vicious—community. But that doesn’t mean that that community is not acting. There’s a strange way in which the community is, on the one hand, a collection of individuals, and, on the other hand, it is not just the collection of individuals.

The community can do things that I couldn’t then say, “Oh, each individual does it.” And I can’t really even point to any individual who does it. It’s collective—even while that community is agonistic.

Leigh: Yeah. Again, sorry to be so stubborn here, but I’m still not convinced. I mean, can you give me an example of a community action?

Rick: Sure. For example, erecting and supporting a fire department or incarcerating criminals. These are community actions—some of which I agree with, and some of which I don’t.

But it’s not as if any individual is doing this—it’s the action of the body politic. In that sense, it’s acting on its own, and those actions can be either virtuous or vicious.

Devonya: So, it seems to me that you’re talking about a state or a political entity, which I might want to distinguish from a community.

I mean, states and political entities act in ostensibly communal ways and on behalf of individuals that come under the aegis of those states or political entities. But I’m not sure I would call the state a community.

And so, I’m struck here in the conversation by the need to parse out what we mean by “community.” We are members of multiple kinds of communities, even sometimes communities that are in conflict with one another, right?

Rick: Sure.

Devonya: So, I may have membership in several communities, some of which are in tension with each other, even while I’m a part of both of them.

Whereas, as you noted, states and political entities have laws that, whether I agree with all of them or not, I am, in some ways, obliged to accept certain aspects of those laws.

Or, as I think you’ve raised, in the face of those entities not behaving in just ways, I may have some kind of recourse—some form of disobedience to those laws—to work to engender change.

Leigh: I really do like this distinction between states and communities.

But, again, I’m still struggling to think of what a community action would be. And the reason this is difficult for me is because I think, if we’re going to talk about a community exhibiting a virtue in action, we’d have to pick an example of something where a community of individuals acted as one.

Rick: So, for me, the example that many people point to is the Occupy movement. Yes, there were a lot of actions that Occupy “took,” yet there was no body deciding on these—there was no central authority, which was the whole point of the movement.

And yet, I think it cannot be denied that Occupy did this, Occupy did that. Occupy held classes in downtown Chicago. Occupy marched on a statue in Grant Park. And that was the community, not just the individuals.

Leigh: I was thinking of just that example. The closest I could come to a community acting virtuously would be something like a protest.

But here’s where I want to kind of retrench myself in my previous position, because I think what’s happening there is that you have a community that is organizing itself justly in order for the individuals to act virtuously.

And that’s where I was earlier trying to say, I can think of groups as being just or unjust because they provide the mise en scène for people to be virtuous or vicious.

Rick: So, just for Dave, my brother-in-law, mise en scène is the setting of the scene—like in cooking, mise en place is setting your place, chopping your vegetables and everything. Sorry. Mise en scène is setting the scene.

But, you know, it’s funny, Leigh, because at the beginning of that you named an action—organizing itself. If that’s an action, that action could be either virtuous or vicious. I think that the action of organizing, as you put it, is in order to enable other actions—maybe of individuals, maybe of the community itself—that would either be virtuous or vicious. The virtue or vice of the original action of organizing itself is what Aristotle and Aquinas would call justice.

Leigh: Yeah, I think all three of us are on the same page there. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t call that organizing a virtue.

The action of a community setting itself up in a certain way is either closer to or further away from justice, but it’s not virtuous or vicious. A just community is a community in which virtue is possible, and an unjust community is a community in which virtue is not possible.

Rick: So, I want to disagree with you, but in playing the disagreement out in my head, I don’t think in the end it actually makes a difference. Because what I wanted to say is, okay, if communities could be more or less just, we’d call those communities just. This action of organizing brings about well-being—the well-being for all, the well-being for all of the members. And insofar as it leads to thriving or happiness, then it’s a virtue… but in the end, I can’t see what hinges on saying whether justice is a virtue or not.

So, I either disagree or concede, because I don’t know—can either of you see what difference it would make? I can’t really.

Leigh: I suppose for me the difference would just be that I don’t think that a community can be “happy” in Aristotle’s sense, because communities are always comprised of multiple people and are agonistic.It doesn’t make any sense to say that a community is happy.

I don’t think that the telos of a community is virtue. I think the telos of a community is justice.

Devonya: Right. So, the possibility of individuals acting in a just society as virtuous people defines that society as just. Whereas in an unjust society, the potential for acting in virtuous ways is diminished. Am I hearing you correctly, Leigh?

Leigh: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Much better stated than I did.

Rick: So what you’re saying is that justice is the ultimate end.

Devonya: Or that it is the condition for the possibility of individuals being virtuous.

Leigh: Yeah, the second of those.

Devonya: So that it is, in fact, a state.

Leigh: You mean a state like a condition, not like a “State”

Devonya: as in condition, yes, I guess that’s hexis.

Rick: But I think that’s a virtue. For Aristotle, I’ll put it this way: one excellence might be “eating well.” But that’s not an end in itself—that’s an end so that I could be healthy. But that’s not an end in itself, either—that’s an end so that ultimately, somewhere down the line, I could thrive, so that I could live well, or, as it’s often translated, so that I could be happy. For Aristotle, happiness is the ultimate end.

I think that, in this case, justice is not the ultimate end. Justice is a goal that a community strives for. And, by the way, individuals can also strive for this as a goal. But it’s a goal that they strive for, for another goal. And that is the happiness of all.

Now, we could think, okay, is that the happiness of all in the sense of each and every individual? And I think the answer to that has to be no, because that’s technically impossible, or that’s literally impossible. So it must mean something like the happiness in common. What I think “happiness in common” would be is a situation in which the community makes it possible for all of us to develop virtues to the highest extent possible. That’s justice, but that’s justice for, in the name of, and on the way toward happiness or thriving.

Leigh: Yeah. I mean, I’m not going to die on this hill. I suppose I just want to say that I cannot think of an example in which I would call a community “morally excellent.” Unless we’re talking about, you know, Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, or something like that.

Rick: Which, for those of you who haven’t heard, go back to the last episode of last season and listen to our discussion of Kant’s Kingdom of Ends. And one thing you’ll learn there is it’s a “possible” kingdom that is not an actual kingdom.

Leigh: Right. And, you know, earlier I mentioned the bear that I was fighting ripping through the “veil of ignorance” and didn’t really explain what I meant by the veil of ignorance. But this is, of course, a reference to John Rawls’ theory of justice, in which he sets up this imaginary pre-state meeting between people who are trying to build a community and a state and trying to decide the rules of that community prior to knowing anything specific about themselves.

I do think that this might be helpful in drawing together some of our reservations about Aristotle’s point—that, in some ways, our ability to be virtuous or not is going to be dependent upon how fortune shines upon us or fails to shine upon us.

So, behind the veil of ignorance, this community of people—or, they’re not a community yet—these people are trying to decide what is the organization of this new state that will make it possible for each of us to be happy, to be virtuous. That, I don’t think, is a virtue.

I don’t think the community they create is a virtuous community. I think it’s a “just” community. And I think justice, when we’re talking about communities, is about a certain kind of organization that makes it possible for everybody to be virtuous as possible, to make up the difference between what is required to be happy and how much or how little fortune has shone upon you.

Rick: That being said, one thing we all agree on is that justice is the situation in which we are all encouraged and have the possibility for developing all the excellences that we are capable of developing.

Leigh: Yes.

Devonya: And I guess I struggle with this. This is where my lived experience and my love of philosophy often clash—sort of conflicted communities—because my existential communities often don’t experience the state as just. They don’t experience the larger framework, or the series of commitments, or the choices that are ostensibly made behind the veil of ignorance as conditions that contribute to the thriving of those communities.

And so, I’m often struck by how we—and I’ll put myself in this category, as philosophers—think a lot about what is just without teasing out the ways in which our presumptions about justice sometimes land us in precisely the opposite position, namely trying to dig our way out of existing unjust conditions. There are limits to thinking about just societies, because I haven’t exactly experienced one.

I keep thinking about a point that Rick made in terms of disobedience. Can we think about disobedience as a virtue? And is the practice and cultivation of certain forms of disobedience necessary for a more just civil society? Can we then think of groups or communities who are acting on behalf of those forms of civil disobedience as exercising a certain kind of virtue?

And maybe we can’t, on Leigh’s objections.

Rick: I like that last point a lot. And I also think that if disobedience can be understood to be a virtue, then maybe resistance could be understood as a virtue—perhaps even, in certain contexts, revolution.

Leigh: Man, I feel really terrible because I’m going to be ornery again here, but I don’t think that either resistance or disobedience—or even revolution—are themselves virtues. But I’d completely agree that they are practices in the service of certain virtues.

Devonya: Say more about the distinction you’re drawing.

Leigh: When the protesters sat down at the lunch counters during the Jim Crow era, I don’t think that the disobedience itself was a virtue. The disobedience was a practice that they were employing as courageous people, as just people.

Devonya: Okay, so the action spoke to a virtuous state that allowed them to engage in the action, and the action was oriented toward bringing about a certain kind of society. So, the condition for the possibility of them engaging in that action had something to do with what was cultivated in them as individuals.

Leigh: Yeah, and this goes back to phronesis, to how Aristotle describes the type of knowledge—the type of know-how—that you have to have in order to cultivate a virtue.

It’s not just disobedience for disobedience’s sake. It’s understanding that, under these conditions and at this time, I know the action to take here. If I want to cultivate courage, or if I want to cultivate justice, or if I want to cultivate community, this is the action that I have to take here: disobedience.

I don’t think disobedience is a virtue by itself. Obviously, if we were living in a perfectly just state—if we were living in the Kingdom of Ends—disobedience would not be a virtue.

Rick: And yet, it has all the hallmarks of a virtue. It is only a virtue when it’s practiced in the mean; it’s aimed at some end, which is recognized as a good.

It has to be recognized at the right time, in the right place, in relation to the right people. And ultimately, it has as its goal thriving or happiness. So, I don’t know how something can have all the hallmarks of a virtue and yet not be a virtue.

Devonya: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Leigh: But it’s not a duck! It’s not a duck in this situation, I’m telling you!

Listen, let me give you an example of disobedience: You remember that court case a few years ago where the bakers refused to make wedding cakes for gay people?

Rick: Yes.

Leigh: They were disobeying. They were disobeying the law. And there, you wouldn’t describe that disobedience as a mean.

Rick: Exactly.

Devonya: And yet, they saw their disobedience as contributing to what they believed to be a just society. And I think, for me, that is again the question about collectivity and elder knowledge. In my communities, we would talk about it in terms of ancestral knowledge. There are ways that we are cultivated.

Leigh: And here I’m saying that disobedience is the action that’s taken—or not taken—it’s not the virtue itself.

Rick: Just as when you threw a student in front of the bear—or, before you went through your intense training and joined the professional bear-fighting circuit—when you fought the bear, while one might say, “Oh, that’s an act of courage,” it turns out that it’s not. And it’s because, in each case, it doesn’t hit the mean.

So, there’s disobeying the law, but this is not a virtue because it doesn’t hit the mean.

Leigh: Exactly right. I mean, I don’t think that I would say when LeBron James practices dribbling with his left hand that “dribbling with his left hand” is a virtue or a demonstration of “basketball excellence.” It’s just a practice in the service of the excellence that he is cultivating.

Devonya: Right.

Leigh: See? It’s not a duck!

Devonya: Well, to me, the important part of what you’re saying there is also this amazing coming-together of all these pieces and the execution of something that we can look at and judge to be excellent. So, the pieces themselves are not, alone, excellent… but it is the combination of choosing in a way that achieves the mean, acting under conditions that demonstrate that you have a knowledge of how best to apply virtue in a way that is a midpoint between excess and deficiency, and actually executing it in an excellent way.

Leigh: Right. I mean, I think that sums up exactly what I was trying to point out—that I don’t think you can call specific actions virtuous.

Devonya: So, if you think about the lunch counter example—sitting at a lunch counter, taking an action where one does not retaliate against the experience of violence in the interest of a larger cause, namely overturning laws that are unjust because they degrade the humanity of those who suffer under them but also degrade the humanity of those who impose them—how then might we think about that action as part of a larger context of virtuous action, or the action as part of virtue?

Leigh: Oh, yes. I think you’re now causing me to realize that I misspoke earlier. I do think that you can call actions “virtuous.” I don’t think that you can call actions “virtues.”

Rick: I agree.

Leigh: So, being disobedient can be virtuous or vicious, but disobedience is not a virtue or a vice.

Devonya: Yeah, I think that makes sense, because one needs to be in a particular condition that instantiates that choice of action. And I think we may have under-discussed that aspect of Aristotle—namely, we are trained to do something before we know whether it is, for example, courageous. We are trained to tell the truth as a practice, but in all cases, truth-telling is not necessarily virtuous. And so, the part I think we may have undersold about Aristotelian virtue is that the knowledge that allows us to make those choices in particular circumstances is something that we cultivate and that becomes necessary if we are going to be considered as excellent persons or virtuous persons.

The case I use in class is: Aunt May has worked on this dress for ages and ages. She’s toiled. She thinks the dress is wonderful. She shows up and shows you the dress.

Are you virtuous if you say to Aunt May, “That is the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen, Aunt May”? Or do you lie through your teeth, knowing that lying is wrong?

Rick: Lie through your teeth 

Devonya: And I say, “Lie through your teeth” because there is a virtue in preserving Aunt May’s integrity and honoring Aunt May’s work.

Leigh: Absolutely.

Leigh: Something you said, Devonya, at the end of the last section in reference to the part of Aristotle that we’ve kind of undersold, I think is really important. Often, we are practicing thesevirtues before we really possess the virtues, or before we even really understand what they are—before we actually have the phronesis that a person with that virtue would have.

This always reminds me of a really interesting point in Aristotle where he explains an answer to a pretty obvious question: if you don’t already have a virtue, how do you get it, right?

Devonya: Mm-hmm.

Leigh: If a virtue is a habit, and if it’s something that has to be cultivated over time, how do you, for the first time, know how to act courageously, or honestly, or whatever?

Aristotle says, well, you just imitate an honest person. You imitate a courageous person. But in that instance—the first time I act courageously, when I’m acting only in imitation, when I haven’t cultivated it as a habit myself, when I don’t yet have the phronetic understanding of it, when I haven’t established the habit of acting virtuously—that first time, that action is not a virtuous action. It’s just an imitation of a virtuous person and what a virtuous person does.

But over time, if I keep doing it, I am going to develop that virtue. I mean, if you tell the truth one time, does that make you an honest person? No. What makes you an honest person is not only telling the truth over and over, but developing the habit of telling the truth—knowing, as in your example earlier with Aunt May, the right amount at the right time, in the right circumstances, to the right person, what truth-telling requires in order to be honest in that scenario. So, I’d completely agree with you that we’ve undersold this point. It’s something really important to highlight.

Rick: I think it also clarifies for me the way in which I actually agree with the arguments both of you were making. As Devonya put it before, actions can be virtuous, but not every action is a virtue. And in fact, probably no action is a virtue. No action is courage, although I can act courageously.

And so, just as you said, Leigh, telling one truth doesn’t make me an honest person. So also, telling one lie does not make me not an honest person—or a dishonest person.

Leigh: Thank God, right?! Because if every instance of my vicious actions made me vicious, I’d be in really bad shape right now.

Devonya: Yes. But if we choose those actions repeatedly, in the same way that we become a virtuous person by choosing virtuous actions repeatedly, we can also become a vicious or non-virtuous person over time… and I like this element of choice as key here. As we were talking in a previous section about how we determine it, I’m reminded that Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, talks about the critical attitude as something that is akin to virtue.

What are those kinds of things that are not simply trainings in order to imitate the behavior of virtuous people, but what are those internal forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that allow us to choose in ways that are virtuous based on the situation? And I know Leigh talked about phronesis, which is practical wisdom—the kind of knowledge that operates to aid me in making a distinction between when to be truth-telling, when to say something truthfully, and when maybe to withhold or tell an untruth for a greater cause.

Leigh: Yeah. And just to return to my argument from the first section, I would say that a just society is a society in which it’s easy to be virtuous.

Devonya: Yeah.

Leigh: And an unjust society is a society in which it’s easy to be vicious.

Rick: I agree wholeheartedly.

Leigh: So, unfortunately, our bartender is giving us last call.

Rick:Temperance, after all, is a virtue.

Leigh: I was waiting for somebody to make that joke!

But we’ve got to get out of here. This has been a really fantastic conversation. I want to thank you both. I’m sure that we will return to this issue of virtue several times over the course of the season. But I think we’ve started it off really well here.

Devonya: And I think these are important times in which to talk about the idea of virtue. I think the slide in education has been toward character education and if we’re talking about character education, I think it makes sense to return to some of the engagements around what it means to develop a civil society, what it means to develop people, and how teachers play a role in that, how elders play a role in that.

Rick: And what better way to introduce Devonya as a co-host to our audience than to show her as a lover of virtue.

Devonya: Whoo-hoo!

Leigh: Haha that’s a duck!

All right, you guys, I’ll catch you next time.

Devonya: Take care.

Rick: Later.