What is Virtue

Female Speaker: Is there one thing that brings it all together? Male Speaker: Yes, I think there is. Female Speaker: Oh, great! Male Speaker: It's virtue. Female Speaker: Ah! Male Speaker: Believe it or not, it's an old fashioned word and it's badly misused by a lot of people today. But virtue, classically understood, goes back to Aristotle, and it makes all kinds of sense. Virtue is training your emotions, to have a taste for what is in your long run best interest. Female Speaker: Okay. Male Speaker: Okay, and the keyword there is training, you train them, like you train the dog. You train them to have a taste, and when you succeed with that, then everything changes. One of the first things it does is it frees you up. If you are emotionally driven, you might as well be getting on a horse in the morning and saying, well, Dubbin, where are we going today? Because you don't know, because your emotions aren't in control. So your emotions have to be to some extent, either given a taste, or if they are out of control, ignore it, and your reason has to assume ascendancy, but if they were been given a taste, more and more, it will become easy. It's a habit. It's developing a habit, just like developing a golf swing or a tennis swing, it's developing a habit, and -- Female Speaker: I was going to ask some of those contemporary comments that we always hear, follow your feelings. It's meaning us? Male Speaker: Well, if by that, they may follow the feelings that were given the taste in the long run, you'd be alright, but if they mean just do whatever you feel like doing at this moment, you meet somebody like that, you want to run, again, I mean there's a lot of people who run from him. Female Speaker: Oh! Okay. Male Speaker: And this is one group, because you don't know what they are going to feel like on a given day. Female Speaker: I see, right. Male Speaker: And they may do almost anything. So you can follow your feelings if your feelings trained. Female Speaker: Okay. Male Speaker: Just like you're going to ride the horse if the horse is trained. When the horse isn't trained, you get on him, you get thrown. Female Speaker: Right, right. Male Speaker: So that's a very dangerous out for people who don't want to have to think their way through life. Now the second thing that the emotion does is it matures us. Female Speaker: The virtue? Male Speaker: The virtue, yeah. The trained emotion and the virtue give us a sense of constancy of being settled, of being able to come objectively, or at least more objectively than we were otherwise, to a situation and in order to judge the thing, the emotions are not getting in the way. The emotions are not telling you what to do. So that makes you mature. It also makes you human, because when your intellect is telling you what to do, that is the thing that makes you free. Female Speaker: Right. Male Speaker: And if your emotions are telling you what to do, you are not free, and so freedom is the quintessential definition of being human, of the behaving humanly, and if the emotions interfere with that, they interfere with your humanness. Then of course, it's an easy thing to do in the sense that it doesn't require a PhD in Psychology or a PhD in Counseling or a PhD in anything. You meet very very humbly people, humbly educated people and not educated at all to some extent in some of these rural countries where the -- the so called Banana Republics, where people are not given any kind of training, and they can't read and write, but they are very good people. Female Speaker: So, virtue does not require a high level intelligence or education? Male Speaker: No, no. Female Speaker: Interesting! Just the desire, the will? Male Speaker: Yeah. In fact, I had a professor who used to tell us that we become irrational by degrees, and you become terribly specialized sometimes and what. So you have to be careful, I mean, education is not the answer to everything, and it's certainly isn't the answer to being a human being. It's a help, because in many cases it's information, but it's not necessary, because for most decisions in life, you don't need an education. If you have a child, it doesn't come with a course. Female Speaker: Right, right. Male Speaker: And you have to work at how, learning how to raise it. So that's the real meaning of being virtuous. It's to be a free human being. It's the ultimate achievement of freedom. It's to have your emotional life in control.