Virtue and Vice

Content: some rambling thoughts on the particulars of a vast psychological construct; dense with lists.

A lot of virtues/vices concern treatment of others. General distinctions of treatment toward others include praising vs. blaming, complimenting vs. insulting, welcoming vs. shunning, helping vs. interfering with, caring for vs. hurting, giving to vs. taking from, expressing gratitude vs. contempt toward, and forgiving vs. remembering transgressions.

Depending on your social roles/titles, others will think that you have a duty to treat certain people/groups well, and depending on whether you do a supererogatory or insufficient job of this, they may designate you with corresponding virtues/vices, like respectful/disrespectful, loyal/disloyal, reciprocating/exploitative, trustworthy/manipulative, and scrupulous/prejudiced.

I don't have a good grasp on what sort of standard relationships exist in human societies. There are some more reciprocal/bidirectional relations like kin, partners, friends, fellows, members, citizens (with nouns for the corresponding standards of behaviour generated by adding the suffix "-ship"), and then there are more asymmetric relationships like between (omitting the second party of the relationship for brevity) designers, producers, lessors, rulers, judges, guardians, caretakers, representatives, mediators, advisers, teachers, managers, investors, patrons, and employers. Maybe these relationships are all like vendor/customer pairs, and they each detail a different set of social goods provided - tangible goods, information goods, designs, advice, transferable resource access rights, domain expertise, services, loans, insurance, stable trade opportunities under the employer's conditions, persuasive/prestigious/impartial decision making, protection, repairs, improvements, customization, et cetera.

Ownership and stewardship are commonly thought of as relations between a person and an inanimate object or resource, but these relations also have normative consequences for other parties - just as much as the other relations detailed so far¹, and the presence of these relations in a community/society also contributes to communal/institutional judgements of what preferential treatment an actor should perform toward which parties.

That sketches some conceptual content surrounded virtues/vices which are based on interpersonal treatment viewed through role obligations derived from established social relations. Another large swath of virtue and vice falls under the heading of willpower: patience and caution vs. recklessness, diligence and high standards vs. carelessness and neglect, abstinence and moderation vs. desire and indulgence, and regulated emotional stability vs. unregulated emotional volatility.

One commonly finds words with positive connotations on both sides of the pairs in this section, but largely the trend in moral rhetoric is to endorse more self-control.

Also, people can get virtue/vice credit through the abstinence/indulgence facet based on whether they engage in or avoid acts that evoke disgust or indignation in an ordinary human observer, regardless of whether the actor feels tempted or resists temptation. Standard elicitors of disgust are things associated with pathogens (bodily effluvia, symptoms of transmissible disease, body envelope violations, corpses, spoiled food, vermin), some sex acts (often based on the partner, and often having an interpretations as being costly to the one's reproductive fitness), and some atypical/abnormal physical/psychological conditions (where the emotive force probably comes from a mix of the disease-avoidance and costly-mate avoidance heuristics).

The largest remaining part of virtue/vice construct as it appears to my introspection at this late hour is competence/incompetence. When there is no large harm or temptation or indecency surrounding an act, then we apply somewhat less morally charged labels for judging conduct, like elegant/inexpert, productive/wasteful, clever/hackneyed, versatile/limited.

I  don't have any good idea of why some personality descriptors seem (to me tonight) like virtues/vices, while some others have positive/negative connotations, but do not seem like virtues/vices. I should probably check these ideas against my rambling notes on the topic from previous years. Maybe that will be a future post.

-:-:-

1. For example, full owners can manage the access and use that others make of a resource, can revocably transfer rights for trustees to manage others' use and access of the resource, and can irrevocably alienate their title of ownership to another party. In the absence of these acts or in the other party's absence of particular knowledge as to how the owner has parcelled out jural rights to other parties, then parties usually have in rem duties to respect the owner's reasonably-assumed exclusive access, use, and management of the resource without term limit.