Virtue Dichotomies
by Joseph Rowlands
Virtues are the synthesis of mind and body, and of theory and practice. They are a recognition and practice of a moral principle. The moral principle itself is a broad-reaching causal connection between means and ends. The moral principle explains what actions you need to take to achieve a category of ends.
This connection between means and ends should be clear from Rand's definition of what virtues are. She identified them as the means by which you attain values. The whole point of the virtues is to put into practice the means of achieving values.
Given this, it's strange that so many people accept a mind-body dichotomy when it comes to virtues. I gave one example in my article titled "Two Halves of Independence." The usual view of independence is thinking for yourself instead of blindly accepting the views of others. Fair enough, and an important point to remember. But I argued that it's entirely worthless if you've put yourself into a situation where you have to act according to the judgments of others. Without the conventional forms of independence, like financial independence, thinking for yourself is pointless. Without the ability to put it into practice, it is not a means to gaining values.
In other words, virtues by their very nature must be actions taken in the pursuit of values. A mind-body dichotomy doesn't make any sense here. If you focus entirely on knowing or judging, but don't bother with putting it into practice, how can you call it virtuous? How can something be a virtue if it isn't a means to gaining values?
Another example of this mind-body dichotomy is some people's views of justice. For them, justice is only about identification of the moral status of another person. If you recognize them as a benefit or a loss to your life, then you're supposed to be satisfying the virtue of justice. They may not explicitly reject the need to put their new-found knowledge into practice, but they define the essence of justice as being a process of thinking. Figuring out how to put this knowledge into practice is neglected. People think that as long as you're not evading, you must be moral. As long as you identify what people deserve, that's supposed to be good enough.
When classifying the virtues, I've heard people say that many of the virtues are a subset of rationality. That is, they're forms of identification of the world. These virtues, like justice, independence, and honesty, are considered virtues of thinking, not necessarily of action. Each of them focuses on proper identification.
The problem here is in the very nature of virtues. As means to an end, they're concerned with more than just identification. Knowing what's moral and doing the opposite is not morally virtuous. Properly, every virtue is a combination of rationality and productivity. It is concerned with properly identifying what actions are beneficial to your life, and putting them into practice. It's one part identification, and one part implementation. Without the implementation, they cannot be considered means to an end. They cannot be means by which we seek values.
Virtues must be a synthesis of productivity and rationality, or they fall into the camp of the mind-body dichotomy. They would discuss the morality of how you think, but in a way that's severed from how you act. If your thinking doesn't have to be put into practice, how is it tied to the standard of morality, your life? It isn't. It's just another form of mind-body dichotomy that upholds your mental life as a value in and of itself, regardless of whether it's connected to the process of living.
To overcome this, we have to focus on the productive nature of virtues. They are means to achieving values, so we have to ask ourselves what does it take to put them into practice. We have to recognize that their moral importance is defined by how they improve our lives. Life is the standard of morality, and the virtues need to be judged on that scale, just like everything else.
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