Virtue and character

Courage, temperance, justice and wisdom: the four the Greeks named, and the question of how anyone comes to have them. Plato thinks virtue is knowledge, so that nobody does wrong on purpose. Aristotle thinks it is habit, so that you become brave by doing brave things until they come naturally, and the whole of education is arranging for that to happen. Plutarch wrote fifty biographies to show what the virtues look like in a life, and for eighteen centuries his Lives were the book young men were given to learn them from.

Then Machiavelli split the word in two. His virtù is what gets things done, and it includes cruelty when cruelty is needed, so that a prince who tries to be good in the old sense will be destroyed by those who are not. Every later moralist has had to answer him. Kant answers by locating virtue entirely in the will, so that consequences do not count. Nietzsche answers by agreeing with Machiavelli and going further.

The Christian tradition adds faith, hope and charity, and Aquinas’s Summa spends hundreds of pages fitting the Greek four to the Christian three. The shelf is long because every program assigns it in every year; it is, in the end, what the programs are for.