Virtues as Objective Standards for Living Well

       Most of us still admire excellence in human beings. Sports enthusiasts admire Olympic athletes and honor their achievements with medals; concert pianists are admired and honored with ovations at the end of the performance; excellent scientists are admired and honored with prizes like the Nobel Prize.

      How do people become excellent? One part of the answer is acquiring certain kinds of habits or discipline. Here I must make some distinctions. In general, a habit refers to things like your morning routine, having a cup of coffee in the morning, or biting your nails: that is, patterns of action we settle into over time, often thoughtlessly, that are hard to change. Closely related to this is conditioning. One thinks of Pavlov’s dog: repeated instances of ringing a bell and feeding it causes the dog to salivate at the sound of the bell. Our reactions to red and green lights while driving is another example of conditioning.

    The kind of habit I am referring to is fundamentally different from these kinds of things. What I have in mind is not a routine habit but what we might call a personal disposition: a stable pattern of skill and judgment acquired through practice. A personal disposition to make things well refers to the relevant habits of an artist or craftsman, for example. Art in the broadest sense (including craft) requires a stable disposition, a set of habits and skills, acquired by practice, necessary to make things well. The masters find the making easy because these dispositions are so much a part of their person that they come easily to them. The same with the athlete or musician. “Practice makes perfect” because the habits required to be excellent become an ingrained part of the person. These personal dispositions, moreover, all serve the purpose of the art: playing the instrument well, making good chairs and tables, or excelling in one’s sport.

     This is still very much a part of our culture and even school life. Teachers still stress the need for good study habits, note taking skills, extended concentration ability, etc. to excel as a student. A student who comes home and plays video games rather than doing their homework or reviewing a part of the lesson they did not understand well; or a student who cannot pay attention in class will not be a good student (all things being equal). So not just intelligence but the cultivation of stable habits such as discipline, attention, perseverance is still an important part of education.

   Someone can be a great piano player yet a bad human being in a moral sense. This raises a deeper question: what would it mean to excel not merely at making things well but at living well? Things indeed get trickier when we move from art or practices analogous to art to acting and living well in general. That is distinguishing between the kinds of habits that can make someone good at soccer, woodwork, science, or piano playing from the kinds of habits that make one good at being a human being, good at living an excellent human life. (These kinds of habits are traditionally called virtues.) For one thing, it will be said, there is no one way to live an excellent human life. And it will be said that what someone considers excellent human life will depend on differing personal and cultural orientations. Some might see in a saint or a hero an embodiment of human excellence while others may rather admire Lady Gaga, or Michel Foucault, the intellectual who lived out his sexual fantasies in the face of social stigmas. (The examples could be multiplied.) Is there nothing to be said in general about what it means to be “good at” living a human life? Are there no standards for judging among different possibilities?

      This is where I claim the virtues come into the play. My claim, which is an old claim held by most serious people in pre-industrial culture, is that no one who lacks them can be good at human life, can even be happy in a morally relevant sense. A dishonest person, especially a dishonest political leader, for example, no one would consider them an example of acting well or human excellence. Why? What is wrong with being a dishonest person? Dishonesty can make one’s life easier in many situations and allow one perhaps to enjoy pleasures otherwise out of reach? To engage in sex it might be convenient to pretend more interest in a permanent relationship than one intends, for example. A political leader can gain power through strategic lies. A parent or teacher could perhaps control children better with falsehood than truth. What’s wrong with that? I want to take some time to answer that, so please bear with me.

    Perhaps most fundamentally, dishonesty corrupts the mind’s relation to reality. Our minds are ordered toward truth. To lie is not merely to deceive another person; it is to misuse one’s own gift of mind. The dishonest person trains himself to treat reality as something to be manipulated rather than something to be understood. Over time this damages the very faculty by which we live as intelligent beings. The liar must constantly maintain a division between what is real and what he says is real. Eventually that division collapses. The habitual liar often ends by deceiving himself. The lie becomes internalized. What began as manipulation of others becomes confusion of one’s own mind. Thus dishonesty undermines the basic human good of living in truth.

    Furthermore, dishonesty is contrary to justice, which presupposes truth. To treat another person justly one must acknowledge what is actually the case: what one has promised, what another is owed, what has been done, what responsibility belongs where. A dishonest person cannot reliably recognize or acknowledge these realities. If words no longer correspond to facts, then promises lose their binding force, testimony loses credibility, and agreements lose stability. This is why dishonesty is not merely a private defect. It is an injustice. The liar manipulates another person’s understanding of reality to gain advantage. Dishonesty reduces other people to instruments. A lie treats another person as someone who may be manipulated for one’s own advantage. Thus dishonesty is closely connected with exploitation. The seducer lies to obtain pleasure, the politician lies to obtain power, the teacher lies to obtain easier control. In each case the other person is treated as a tool. Honesty, by contrast, acknowledges the dignity of the other person. Indeed, honesty is part of the overarching virtue of justice.

     Moreover, dishonesty dissolves community. Human beings are social animals whose common life depends upon shared trust. Language itself presupposes an implicit commitment to truthfulness. When someone speaks, others assume (unless there is reason to think otherwise) that the speaker intends to communicate what is actually the case. If dishonesty were normal, cooperation would become impossible. Contracts cannot be trusted, promises cannot be relied upon, testimony cannot be believed. Every relationship becomes defensive and suspicious. Thus dishonesty corrodes the invisible fabric that makes community possible: trust. This is why a dishonest political leader is so destructive. Political authority depends less on force than on credibility. Once trust collapses, the community itself begins to disintegrate.

      I can go on: dishonesty fragments the self. Virtue is a kind of inner order. The virtuous person’s intellect, speech, and action align with one another. What they see to be the case, what they say, and what they do belong together. But the liar lives in division, constantly maintaining different versions of reality for different audiences. This fragmentation produces anxiety, instability, and eventually cynicism. Such a person does not have the unity of soul required for genuine happiness. (Dostoevsky understood this. Characters like Fyodor Pavlovich are not simply immoral; they are chaotic. Their speech is a mixture of truth, exaggeration, mockery, and invention. They no longer stand firmly anywhere in reality. As Dostoevsky’s narrative says: “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him.”)

    Finally, dishonesty ultimately destroys freedom. The liar appears clever and free in the moment. But lies generate further lies. One deception leads to another to sustain it. Soon the liar is trapped in a web of fabrications they must constantly maintain. The truthful person, by contrast, does not need to remember what they have said to whom. Reality itself carries the burden of coherence. Thus honesty is not merely morally admirable; it is existentially liberating.

    Therefore, honesty is a necessary condition of living a good human life. Whatever one’s religious or cultural outlook, it is difficult to imagine calling a fundamentally dishonest person a good human being.

 

   How does someone become honest? Simple. By telling the truth, over and over, especially when it is not easy to tell the truth. Over time, telling the truth will become easier, almost automatic, part of one’s character. To cultivate this, we need a caring family and a nurturing community. Just as there are social prerequisites for being excellent at soccer or science, so there are for being honest.   

    So honesty will have to serve as a paradigm of the other virtues. What make a habit a virtue is precisely that it is necessary to live a good human life. The habit of being just to other people, of subjecting the desire for pleasure to moral and rational limits, of being courageous in the many ways life requires us to be, of having the good sense to distinguish between what is really important and needful and what one just happens to desire – these are some of the virtues I have in mind. A coward, a purely egocentric person, a pure hedonist, or a fool cannot be said to live a good human life. There we have a clear standard.

        And how does one become just, courageous, self-restrained, and wise (in a commonsense kind of way)? Through practice, in the same way one becomes honest, with the same social prerequisites in the background.    Virtues grow within practices sustained by communities that recognize and honor excellence, just as excellence in music, athletics, or craftsmanship develops within communities structured around excellence in those activities. A child learns what honesty, fairness, and courage mean not primarily through abstract instruction but through participation in relationships where these qualities are expected, practiced, and honored. In this sense moral life resembles the learning of an art. Just as a young musician improves within a tradition of teachers, standards, and disciplined practice, so the virtues grow within families, schools, and communities where truthfulness, justice, and responsibility are taken seriously.

       To be taken seriously, the structure of the community matters. Virtues grow best in relationships that are long-term and personal, where people know one another well enough for character to become visible over time. Such communities maintain shared standards of conduct, recognize and honor trustworthy behavior, and allow older or more experienced members to guide and correct the young. People rely on one another and thus trust is essential. In this way moral education resembles apprenticeship in an art: one learns not merely through instruction but through participation in a form of life where certain qualities are expected and practiced. Without such social conditions the cultivation of virtue becomes far more difficult, because the habits required for living well must be sustained and recognized by others.

     Certain structural features of modern society can make the formation of virtue more difficult. High social mobility weakens the long-term relationships in which character becomes known and tested over time. Media and social media increasingly mediate recognition through images and curated representations rather than through direct acquaintance. Consumer culture encourages people to think in terms of preference and satisfaction, while many institutions structure relationships in transactional terms. Under such conditions individuals are directed to cultivate an image rather than a character; to manage, in other words, how they appear to others rather than to form the habits by which a good human life is actually lived. When social life rewards the performance of the self more than the formation of character, the learning of virtue becomes more difficult because the habits that sustain honesty, trust, and responsibility depend on relationships in which character matters more than appearance.  (see my entry of February 28, 2026)

 

    One last point. We often assume that moral understanding begins with reasoning and ends with virtue. Yet the order is partly the reverse. The ability to judge well about the good life depends on a certain formation of character already being present. Without some prior experience of honesty, fairness, and self-restraint, a person will struggle to recognize why these qualities are good at all. One must already be disposed to feel and act in roughly the right way to judge well about what is good. A person lacking the virtues will thus not be able to think well about human life. The same pattern I identified in the arts appears in moral life as well: just as someone who has never practiced music cannot easily recognize what makes a performance excellent, someone who has never practiced the virtues cannot easily see what it means to live well. In this sense virtue is not merely the result of ethical reasoning but also one of its preconditions.

        This has deep pedagogical implications. Aristotle states this quite bluntly in the Nicomachean Ethics: the young (or morally unformed) are not good students of ethics because their lives are governed by passion rather than by a stable orientation toward the good. Ethical reasoning thus does not start from neutral premises in the way geometry does. It presupposes certain moral dispositions already formed through upbringing and practice. A person who has never learned to take pleasure in honest action, who habitually deceives others, or who pursues pleasure without restraint will find it difficult to see clearly what honesty, justice, or self-restraint are for. Their reasoning will incline toward the defense of their existing habits. One must already be disposed, however imperfectly, to admire honesty and justice before one can judge well about them.

     I want to illustrate this with practices like music or chess, though the analogy should not be stretched too far. The point is not that novices cannot think at all about these activities. Rather, it is that deep understanding requires participation and training. Someone who has never practiced the piano cannot really grasp what counts as a subtle or excellent interpretation of a piece. A beginner at chess cannot yet see the strategic beauty of a position that an experienced player recognizes immediately. In each case the ability to judge – wisdom one could say – itself is shaped by practice. Something similar happens in moral life. The just person comes to interpret situations differently from the unjust person. They notice what fairness requires in a way that the selfish person may simply overlook. Moral understanding thus requires a certain formation of character. More, some things must already be seen as significant before reasoning about them can even begin. This rubs against the modern assumption that pure reasoning alone can determine how we should live.

      In societies where capitalism shapes social life, a different style of reasoning tends to emerge. Instead of beginning with the formation of character and the cultivation of virtues, even children are encouraged to reason in terms of choice, strategy, and advantage. High social mobility, image-driven forms of recognition, and consumerist habits of thought reinforce this orientation. People come to see themselves primarily as autonomous agents pursuing lifestyle preferences and managing opportunities rather than as people being formed within a moral tradition. Thus the insight that practical wisdom presupposes a rightly formed character cannot flourish. 

Sources. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, especially the second part. And Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.