Thank you, good Sir. This is a remarkable piece of scholarship. These days, most higher education institutions would salute this as more than adequate for a Masters dissertation. You may, exercising your humility virtue, respond by suggesting that this is more about the decline of higher education, but try not to. It is a fine contribution, and clearly one that led you to rethink your assessment of this important virtue. As it did me. I guess good old temperance drops in, or should do so, whenever we have any unambiguous praise for, well, anything. I had considered being empathetic (and, importantly, empathic) as the key to the selflessness that seems to undergird all virtue, but now find myself wondering whether the disposition to be selfless is logically and behaviorally prior to empathy. And, if so, where the heck it comes from! Thank you again. And think, please, about consolidating your Notes into book form. That exercise would force you to expose more of your thinking about how the virtues hang together, and I for one would look forward to that.
David Wynne Owen
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.
I am impatient, so shoot me, but would be delighted if you could post your always-valuable Notes on the candidate-virtue of poise. You listed it in your scary list of 88 candidates, but offered only a teasing list of potential synonyms/neighbors—“confidence, grace, unflappability, authority, gravitas, refinement”. While these offer insight into the ways in which we identify poise in another, I wonder if the term deserves a broader approach, especially if it is to join the Pantheon of other bona fide virtues. My own conception of poise is perhaps captured by the image of the raptor, high above its prey (or hoped-for prey, anyway), at almost stalling-stillness, ready to swoop, waiting for some internal or external cue that signals now, do it now. Balance, readiness, attention and resolve combine in ways that can potentially contribute to the purpose-driven agency that we understand as flourishing. In your Notes on Resolve, you offered a seven-point schema for taking action. I am inclined to suggest that a state of poise, if indeed it can be understood as a state, squeezes in somewhere between 3 Weigh the case for different options and 4 Make a decision. Meanwhile, I shall re-read your Notes on Patience and Forbearance, and hope that your thoughts on poise will emerge at some time!