Listing Virtues and Vices

The pursuit of virtues and the avoidance of vices are important for the progress of humanity. Both sets of rules and personality traits are designed to improve humankind individually and collectively. Two important affiliated questions are how many rules or qualities we need and how to enforce them.

Fortunately, nowadays, the internet facilitates listing the inventory of such rules. For instance, this site lists a total of 650 virtues and 350 vices. Obviously, not everyone will agree with the classification of a given rule or trait as a virtue or a vice and many rules are correlated or are only variants of other rules. For this reason we need taxonomy to group and classify them.

Indeed, the Wikipedia entry for list of virtues is based on 5 categories defined in relation to their purpose, namely: self-control, self-efficacy, regard, respect and kindness. Others choose to select the top 5, 10 or whatever number they feel appropriate. What is undeniable is that such lists or taxonomies reflect both their historical context and their religious or philosophical roots.

In fact these are often outdated and prevail over a classification system based only on an empirical analysis of their contribution to the betterment of humankind. For instance, the Ten Commandments, The Hadiths, The Modes of Sattva and the Ten Perfections followed by Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, respectively, have many virtues in common but cannot explain the civilizational differences between their followers.

So, when picking up a list of virtues one must choose on the basis of their universality, longevity, and rationality. On the basis of the first two criteria we must certainly include Aristotle´s list of virtues and using the third criteria one must include lists based on the philosophy of enlightenment.

Aristotle defined a virtue as a balance point between a deficiency and an excess of a trait that lies not in the exact middle, but at a golden mean sometimes closer to one extreme than the other (see list here).

From the enlightenment philosophers we can build multiple lists ranging from the popular list of 13 virtues by Benjamin Franklin to Adam Smith´s analysis of the amiable, respectable and intellectual virtues discussed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Yet, some modern philosophers have associated the virtues of enlightenment with being tantamount to bourgeois virtues (e.g. McCloskey) or have criticized them for failing to include the Aristotle´s concept of mean (e.g. MacIntyre´s book After Virtue).

Following on Francis Wheen's defense of the principles of the Enlightenment against various strands of irrationalism in his book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World; we believe that it is possible and desirable to merge the ethics of Enlightenment and Aristotle. We will try to do so in future posts on specific virtues and come up with our own list of enlightened virtues.

Art Is About Emotions Not Truth

Copenhagen currently hosts two interesting exhibitions of paintings by Gauguin and Lautrec. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) were contemporaries who used different techniques to paint marvelous pictures of two different societies.

The first painted the primitive inhabitants of Polynesia while the second painted the sophisticated Parisians in the late 19th century. Their different styles can be appreciated in the following two paintings.

Lautrec

Gauguin

While Lautrec choose to depict the theater and brothel-going Parisian bourgeoisie drawn in bizarre drawings to give us a sarcastic view of his epoch, Gauguin has drawn the native Polynesian girls in a favored way to make them look much prettier than they really were.

In fact both gave us distorted views of reality. Have they lied to us? Yes and no.

They would have lied if their intent was to give us a realistic representation of those two different societies. However, as they simply wanted to criticize the vanity of the Parisians and the simplicity of the Polynesians they did so in a truthful and beautiful way.

Moreover, despite using simple colors and drawings, they also demonstrate that they dominated the drawing and painting techniques often only associated with the realist painting school. This is in contrast to most of the modern artists currently shown at the Copenhagen Modern Art Museum who do not need to know how to draw or to paint.

To sum up, art in general, and painting in particular, are aimed at arousing our aesthetic emotions in relation to humankind and nature; and this can be done using realism or abstraction with recourse to friendly or vicious approaches. Technique in itself may also generate admiration but it is not essential for the aesthetic arousal of bad and good emotions. Neither is the pursuit of beauty the sole purpose of art. However, the happiness of humankind is better served by an abundance of beauty and good sentiments.

Taxation and Moral Values – the Case of Conspicuous Consumption

Everywhere, politicians advocate public policies to foster virtues (e.g. philanthropy) and discourage vices (e.g. smoking) through both the revenue and the spending side of the budget. However, they frequently treat them differently by failing to measure separately the costs of tax breaks and surcharges applied to achieve such policies.

Free markets do not require neutrality in the rates of taxation on property, income and consumption. Indeed, they should not be neutral in relation to the taxation of consumption for the satisfaction of basic needs (food, healthcare, etc.) and the taxation of luxuries and conspicuous consumption. Fiscal neutrality is often defined as in the FT Lexicon: “when the impact of taxes and of government spending cancel each other out, with demand neither boosted nor curbed”. Others add the requisite that it does not cause distortions. Besides, to some extent, the use of taxation for policy purposes goes against the principle of budget unity, and the repudiation of earmarking specific revenues for given expenditures.

However, in general, when it comes to differentiating between different classes of conspicuous consumption there is a strong case to advocate the rule of fiscal neutrality. We will exemplify with a choice between spending on impressionist masters and trophy wives, because the first may have some cultural value while the second may be morally degrading.

Imagine for example an ostentatious billionaire who is considering spending 50 million on a master’s painting or in marriage to a super-model under a pre-nuptial agreement that grants her the same amount if the marriage lasts three years. Since he is neither an art lover nor is he in love with his trophy wife both types of investment are morally questionable.

Yet, most countries will treat differently the two investments when he decides to file for divorce or sell the painting. Assuming that he cannot earn transfer fees on his wife and makes a capital gain in the painting, some tax codes will give him a tax credit on his divorce settlement and charge capital gains in the sale of the painting. As a result, he will be rewarded in the most degrading investment and will be punished in the cultural investment. This is exactly the opposite of the proclaimed objective of encouraging virtue and discouraging vice.

Not only is the taxation of virtues and vices difficult on practical grounds. For instance, it is impossible to distinguish between a genuine and a convenience marriage. But it is also impossible to make a distinction between capital gains and losses on ethical grounds. Therefore, taxation should be kept away from policies based on moral judgments. Its concerns should be based mostly in a fair sharing of the funding and the minimization of the government revenue collection costs.

You do not need to agree with James Buchanan and other libertarians that a moral order is preferable to moral anarchy and moral communities because it only requires a minimal intervention of the Government. Simple common sense tells us that governments are not apt to judge on the basis of moral merits, without becoming an easy prey of vocal interest groups.

Means vs. Ends: Hedonism and Happiness

Our blog is mostly about reflections on the means to achieve human happiness. Still, from time to time, we need to keep sight of what are the end pursuits of humankind. Often, these are not easily distinguishable from the means like when we pursue a long but healthy live or when we need to trade immediate pain for future pleasures.

The later is often discussed when pursuing a hedonist approach to achieve happiness. A hedonist is defined as “someone who strives to maximize net pleasure (pleasure minus pain)”. This definition is vulnerable to the usual caveats of defining inter-temporal maximization in an environment of life uncertainty and volatile preferences. Equally important is the trade-off between individual and group satisfaction (family, social, national, etc.), sometimes called utilitarianism.

Constrained maximization is not only complex but also a poor guide for action when inter-temporal choice is involved. Despite the fact that at the unconscious level we seem to be wired in a hedonistic way to seek pleasure and avoid pain at the conscious level the science of the brain has not yet uncovered ways to explain masochist or depressive behaviors and similar deviations. Consequently a simplistic taking up of hedonism would lead us to sacrifice the future for the present.

Yet, despite its limitations, hedonism can also help us to tackle the eternal human despair over life expectancy. Almost 2000 years ago, when Seneca wrote his essay “On the Shortness of Life”, life expectancy was about one third of what it is now in developed countries. Nevertheless we continue to suffer over the same issue. Should medical science find ways to treble it again our descendents will still despair over the same issue and so on until eternity? Like Seneca, in the end we all conclude that life is never too short if we do not waste most of it. By living a full life we mean enjoying both the immediate sensorial pleasures as well as the pleasure obtained from friendship and idealistic conscious pursuits, whether metaphysical or not.

In conclusion, a mild and responsible pursuit of hedonism when complemented by love and enlightened virtues is an essential means to achieve human happiness.

Why only six pillars?

No doubt, the happiness of humanity cannot depend only on six pillars. However, at the dawn of a new millennium, we selected only those that strike us as the most important means to promote human happiness. By focusing on the means rather than the ends, we left out some important values like peace, friendship, family bonds and a healthy body and soul, as these are simultaneously means and ends in the pursuit of joy by humankind.

The most controversial pillar that we have left out is religion. Because of its crucial role to secure compliance with moral values and to help us face death, it should have a prominent role. Yet, since religion is at variance with the scientific method and it is often used to fuel hate and extremism we cannot consider religion as an unequivocal pillar of human betterment.

We see the six pillars as sustaining an equal number of columns in the gate of human progress. We looked for such beautiful gates with an historical significance but all we could find to illustrate our approach were the stone archway at Yuling, in China, and Hadrian’s Gate in the Ancient City of Ephesus in Turkey. Neither is particularly well suited to show the many sides supported by each pillar (so, if you are keen on art and may help us find a more beautiful gate we will be obliged). We are looking to add to each column the many ratings appropriate to monitor the multi-faced nature of the columns supported by each pillar.

Each pillar will be the subject of future posts. For now we close this post with a simply note on their role. The first two – representative democracy and constitutional liberalism are essential to understand how to manage power for the benefit of all. The next pair – market capitalism and productive work – is the key to a prosperous economy. The last two – scientific method and enlightened virtues provide the foundation for a gratifying life that goes beyond the satisfaction of our material needs.