For rather too many years, I have been slogging away at my own attempt to identify the virtues and then derive from them the actual duties, the specific actions, that we must carry out in order to warrant the adjective “virtuous”. Once upon a time, I might have argued that because I am beavering away here at the end of the world (Tasmania), I can be excused for not knowing about your contributions on the subject, indeed about LessWrong. These days, that excuse seems just plain silly, an attempt to cover up a failure of scholarship.
Either way, I am enormously grateful for your posts. My initial focus had been on Andre Comte-Sponville’s “A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues”, which I highly recommend to those interested in the subject (unless you have an allergic reaction to the use of the Oxford comma, in which case please spare yourself the agony). ACS managed to offer just 18 virtues, daunting enough for someone like me trying to translate them into duty-injunctions but still leaving me adding my own candidates for the virtue Pantheon. Finding this Gross guy and his (still evolving, still growing) list of some 88 candidates was simultaneously exciting and flattening.
My first reaction was that surely many of your suggestions would neatly fold into other higher-order virtues—that the final collapsed list wouldn’t be anything like as terrifying. Nope. Didn’t happen. Yes, there are overlaps, as there are across all virtues, it seems to me. But no, when I posed the (to me) crucial question “are these strengths/excellences critical for human flourishing?”, I wasn’t able to discard a single one.
Anyway, I sincerely hope that you do continue posting your emerging thoughts. I will be trying to harness a bit of that courage stuff in order that I add my own posts in virtues generally and on some of the specifics arising from your notes. Thank you again.
For rather too many years, I have been slogging away at my own attempt to identify the virtues and then derive from them the actual duties, the specific actions, that we must carry out in order to warrant the adjective “virtuous”. Once upon a time, I might have argued that because I am beavering away here at the end of the world (Tasmania), I can be excused for not knowing about your contributions on the subject, indeed about LessWrong. These days, that excuse seems just plain silly, an attempt to cover up a failure of scholarship.
Either way, I am enormously grateful for your posts. My initial focus had been on Andre Comte-Sponville’s “A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues”, which I highly recommend to those interested in the subject (unless you have an allergic reaction to the use of the Oxford comma, in which case please spare yourself the agony). ACS managed to offer just 18 virtues, daunting enough for someone like me trying to translate them into duty-injunctions but still leaving me adding my own candidates for the virtue Pantheon. Finding this Gross guy and his (still evolving, still growing) list of some 88 candidates was simultaneously exciting and flattening.
My first reaction was that surely many of your suggestions would neatly fold into other higher-order virtues—that the final collapsed list wouldn’t be anything like as terrifying. Nope. Didn’t happen. Yes, there are overlaps, as there are across all virtues, it seems to me. But no, when I posed the (to me) crucial question “are these strengths/excellences critical for human flourishing?”, I wasn’t able to discard a single one.
Anyway, I sincerely hope that you do continue posting your emerging thoughts. I will be trying to harness a bit of that courage stuff in order that I add my own posts in virtues generally and on some of the specifics arising from your notes. Thank you again.