The Six Core Virtues

Massimo Pigliucci finds six ethical ideals shared by all cultures.

- MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI

The notion of virtue was central to much ancient discourse in ethics, most obviously in the ‘virtue ethics’ tradition we usually associate with Greco-Roman philosophies such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, Aristotelianism and Skepticism. But some scholars have made the point that the ethics of at least three of the big Eastern traditions, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, also share a family resemblance with virtue ethics.

The word ‘virtue’ has nowadays fallen into disuse, perhaps because it reminds people of decidedly old-fashioned Christian virtues such as chastity and purity. Yet, ‘virtue’ comes from the Latin vir, which was in turn the translation of the Greek arete, and arete means excellence in the broadest sense, not limited to the moral realm. For example, not long ago I bought an arete bread knife, which cuts bread both cleanly and easily. Excellence, in other words, applies to anything or anyone that carries out its proper function well. Aristotle, as well as the Stoics, thought that the proper function of a human being is to use reason and live in harmony with other people, because those are the fundamental characteristics that distinguish our species. But who wouldn’t want to be excellent at reasoning and at carrying out harmonious interactions with fellow human beings?

Traditionally the Greeks recognized four cardinal virtues, mentioned by Plato in Book IV of his Republic (426–435). Here is how they are defined, in part, in the Plato Dictionary (ed. Morris Stockhammer, 1965):