Why Virtue Matters Today

Virtues 101 is not a new series but a fresh look at integrity and what it means in contemporary society. An appreciation of virtue’s formidable history can highlight its importance in allowing the individual to engage with life meaningfully, and a discussion of the present countervailing cultural trend of postmodernism puts a point on the precarity of virtue and meaning in today's world.

Virtue of Hope

Source: author, Frank John Ninivaggi, oil on canvas 2022

Postmodernism is the predominant cultural movement of our time. Beginning in the 1950s and peaking in the 70s, it has radically altered the meaning of reality on multiple levels.

Postmodernism inclines us to react skeptically to any fixed, objective, or universally accepted meaning about identity and truth. This challenge runs counter to the centrality of “meaning,” diminishing the reliability of the experiences and beliefs one accrues during life.

High reliability and meaningful life engagement imbue an individual with essential self-confidence, a sense of agency, a desire for self-improvement, and the self-esteem that comes from believing one’s values are consistent in a world of inevitable change.

What Meaning Means

Meaning is a cognitive and emotional sense that ideas, values, and behaviors are worthwhile personally, and instrumental to functioning well in culture and society. Meaning permeates values and virtues and structures personality development and character formation. These faculties permit self-aware learning from experience and proactive planning, which may manifest as personal goals and improved behaviors. Meaning affords a position of strength for the freedom to improve.

The framework of meaning and virtue prepares one for conscientiousness and supports emotional intelligence, the foundation for high-value payoffs in life. As a result, emotional skill performance grows and amplifies emotional literacy. Interpersonal and social dialogues become more fluid, enhancing empathetic reciprocity.

Background and History

Before the 1900s, the term “virtue” was most commonly used as a goal to strive for in life. After Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle epitomized virtue as knowledge and wisdom, virtues grew to include goodness, moral excellence, and righteousness. Virtue was and has been considered the cornerstone of morality, of leading a good and moral life.

The last half-century produced a dramatic challenge to these ideas, with the rise of postmodernism. A landmark contribution to postmodern thought was the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, who, in the 1970s, introduced the blunt concept that knowledge is produced only to be sold, or the “mercantilization of knowledge.” As information becomes available, he wrote, it is no longer used to help generate knowledge, facts, and mental expansion. Instead, information is used for the production of goods to be sold. People no longer ask if something is true, but of what use it can be to them. As such, the acquisition of knowledge actually disconnects us from questions of truth, often toward the extreme of truth’s utter negation.

In the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism emerged as both a response to and a rejection of the prevailing influences of the French Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Following World War II, while many felt idealistic and optimistic, some intellectuals and skeptics felt let down by society. The traditional grand narratives of history no longer seemed a sufficient framework upon which to understand why the past was as it was or why the present is as it is.

What emerged was a loss of faith in institutions and the lionization of individualism. Postmodern thinkers became disillusioned and disenchanted by what they viewed as false promises of progress and a naïve striving toward improvement. Objective reality, as facts to be explored for their truth value, faded in its importance, replaced by an emphasis on subjective perspectives with self-referential validity.

The technological advancements of mass media: first radio, then television, and eventually the internet and social media created an “exposure explosion” in which information and entertainment became more and more plentiful and available. This explosion in one's access to ideas and information, culminating with social media, where each individual is able to have their own broadcast, progressively blurred the boundaries between reality and virtual, or digital reality. Thus, reality as fact—what is true and having a close fidelity to what it describes, i.e., meaning—descended from a source of stable authenticity to an interpretation of fluid and changing, sometimes conflicting, simulations of reality.

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Postmodernists redefined truth and knowledge as subjective social constructs, arguing that timeless narratives of what is real had become worthless. Politically, postmodernism framed itself in binary dualisms: truth versus alternative truth, traditional narratives of history versus marginalized voices left out of the books.

What Lyotard called “paralogy,” or false reasoning, was an attempt to increase the potential "language moves in a particular language game" designed to defend the legitimacy of a plurality of diverse opinions. Since postmodernism views knowledge as inherently biased and mercantile, it elevated subjective views about the world. Thus, what had begun as a healthy skepticism became a goal of negation. This post-modern solipsism relegated virtue, ethics, and morality to the obsolete, untrustworthy past. Belief in improvement and progress, including self-improvement, became naive ideals from a bygone era, one which may never really have existed to begin with.

How Virtues Are Distinct From Values

Virtue is a character trait guiding moral excellence in action. For example, leadership (a.k.a. phronesis), considered a superior virtue in Greek philosophy, was wisdom in determining ends and means. Its objective was practical and sound judgment. Virtues afford a stable psychological position for contemplation and guidance. They are a psychological mindset that provide a behavioral compass, offering the framework and driving force for living a life whose mission statement is practical self-improvement and social enhancement.

Values, by comparison, provide a vision toward long-term goal-setting. Values help one decide what is essential to uphold. The fundamental difference between value and virtue is that values show one’s visions, principles, or behavior standards, which may be socially influenced. Values are visions; virtues are their incremental performance.

Virtues are qualities one considers desirable, usually ideal. They empower reason to pursue the vision of who we want to be. The “goodness” inherent in virtuous morality is its mindful equipoise, its moderation between the extremes of excess and shortcoming.

While value as vision and virtue as mission may be incommensurable as binary concepts, their overlap is unmistakable as psychological forces in thinking and acting. For example, justice is classically seen a social virtue, hallmarked by the fair treatment of all. The social and cultural impact of shaping values and virtues cannot be underestimated. What qualifies as "good" and "bad" in the world depends on virtue; in this sense, virtues and morals are synonymous. Without them, "good" and "bad" are open to subjective interpretation.

The virtues a society holds in esteem typically reflect their time. Some groups within society posit timeless, absolute virtues, such as the Ten Commandments. Groups influenced by postmodernism are more likely to tout “perspectivism,” an infinite set of opinions, subjective and fleeting, where some may hold dear certain virtues, while others hold different ones, and no one is necessarily right or wrong.

Morality and Ethics

Ethics derives from the Greek word “ethos” (i.e., character), with the Latin being “mores” (i.e., customs). Together, they define how groups of individuals choose to behave and interact. Ethics, also called moral philosophy, is an overarching philosophical category with two subdivisions: axiology, the theory of values aspirationally sought, and deontology, the theory of obligation, a performance based on right and wrong.

Ethics aligned to obligations refers to externally imposed codes of conduct. Such morality seems profoundly subjective because no universal standards exist, and various groups compose codes particular to their stakeholders’ changing needs and preferences. A prima facie term, "ethical" means correct, right, and honest. Postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty (2017) claims there is no absolute right or wrong to be discovered and no absolute standard of truth.

Morality is a set of personal beliefs, often prescribed by faith or humanistic values. While ethics is an external code of conduct for groups, morals are an internal code used to guide individual behavior. Morality is built upon the framework virtue. People acting in accordance with their morals consistently exercise virtuous behavior, such as cooperation, empathy, and integrity, even while acknowledging and managing uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity of the situations in life in which one might find oneself. The postmodern flux of change in digital and social media, the arts, politics, institutions, communications, and society formidably challenges this position of traditional strength in a universal ideology of virtue.

Take-Home Message

Examining virtues, examining the underlying values that constitute one’s morality, whether implicit or explicit, shows that meaning exists. Even within a culture’s timeframe, dominant themes preserve the historical threads from which virtues grow. Hope, fairness, concern, and well-being are implicit emotional threads of subtle prominence.

Social progress and self-improvement counter the blur of postmodern disillusionment. Could substantive considerations of value and virtue be a formidable redress to the postmodern themes of identity, uncertainty, and untruth?

It's worth thinking about.