A speech on what ethics and virtue mean and why we should care. Delivered at a Toastmasters session. The transcript below may not exactly match what was spoken.
What is virtue? It is a word which almost all of you must have come across in your lives at one point or the other. Live a virtuous life, people say, or civic virtue makes us better citizens, others say. But what is it exactly? And why should we care? That is after all the perennial question, is it not? Why should we care?
The most common and closest definition to virtue is simply ethics. When a person is asking you to live a virtuous life, they are asking you to live an ethical life. But for our purposes, this is not enough. I personally define ethics as the actions we take and decisions we make, but virtue as a state of life.
Aristotle defined virtue as the ability to do the right thing at the right place at the right time. This is somewhat vague, but we can make it more concrete with an example. Let us assume we are walking down a street when we see a person getting robbed at gunpoint. The cowardly thing to do would be to run away. The foolhardy thing would be to walk up and confront the robber directly, for it puts both us and the victim at risk. The middle ground — the one which takes the best of both approaches — is virtue. In our case, we would be demonstrating the virtue of bravery: call for help, rally people around us, devise a distraction, give the victim a chance to escape.
This is what virtue is to Aristotle: the golden mean between excess and deficiency. The virtue of generosity lies between profligate spending and miserliness. The virtue of magnanimity lies between pride and self-deprecation. And so on.
Doesn't sound very heroic, does it? We have all grown up on tales of bravery and heroism, where people beat the odds and succeed. We try to emulate those people to reach the very same heights. But this business of straddling the middle path does not lend itself well to any story. After all, how inspiring would it be if someone tells the story of you preventing a robbery by calling the police?
But to Aristotle, the main point of virtue was not heroism. Let us digress briefly and discuss heroism itself. We all want to be heroic, but at the end of the day it is because we want to be recognised for who we are. I am much the same — until a very short while ago, the one thing I wanted most in the world was to not be forgotten after I die. I wished to do things of such overarching achievement that my name would be written in the annals of history. Perhaps that is where our innate drive for heroism comes from.
We as humans are afraid of oblivion. How many of you think of death on a daily basis? Not "I have so much work, I want to die" — I mean genuinely contemplating the fact that one day we would no longer exist. That sometime in the future, there would be nothing to perceive, because we would be incapable of thought and perception. The void, from whence we came and thus we return.
It is from this contemplation that the morals propagated by religion emerge. They teach us to live ethical and thus, by one definition, virtuous lives. They offer a chance at eternal life, passing the problem of death entirely: those who live virtuously go to heaven, those who don't go elsewhere, but in the end all live forever.
But to Aristotle, that wasn't the point of virtue. And to us, living now, having recognised that we are bound to oblivion after death, it should not be the point of virtue either. We should not be virtuous because it offers us something in return. If we are "good" only because we have an incentive to do so, will we then become "bad" if we have an incentive for that?
To Aristotle, the point of virtue is a concept termed eudaimonia. He maintained that we become better at virtue as we practise it, in the same way we become better at anything as we practise it. And we need to become better at virtue so that we can achieve eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia is a Greek word translated now as "human flourishing." It is that feeling when we are living our life to the utmost extent. The purpose of a virtuous life is thus to flourish as human beings. To me, eudaimonia means something specific: it is that feeling when at the end of a long day, you lie down on your bed and sleep comes easily to you. It is that feeling when you are not plagued by restlessness, because you know you have given it your all, because you have lived a full life.
The best way to become a more virtuous person is to look at a person you find virtuous and emulate them. We become the person we admire the most. The people I admire most are Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. In both, I admire the fact that they lived what they taught — their genuineness, how they preached by practising their teachings themselves.
If you do not have any such person, there is another way: sub specie aeternitatis. Act as if each and every single one of your actions will be scrutinised all the way from now to eternity. This was a concept propounded by Baruch Spinoza in his Ethica.
Another way is to ask: if I allow myself this action, should it then be allowed for every person in any scenario? If we allow ourselves to lie, that should mean it is also allowed for every single person to lie in any scenario. Certainly not a world one would like to live in. This thought experiment is the categorical imperative, devised by Immanuel Kant.
But why? We have talked about what it means to live a virtuous life and how to begin doing so, but why should we bother? What do we gain from it?
To this, I have another question in turn: must we be virtuous only if we gain something from it? The Romans believed it was their civic duty to behave virtuously. I believe that it is our fundamental duty to act virtuously. We should lead an ethical life for the sake of it, and not for any reward. We should do good things because they are good and not do bad things because they are bad. Any person who seeks justification beyond this is offering excuses to be unethical.
Yes, the world is not so black and white, and yes the world is not a good place, but we should do our part to make sure it is better. Whether what we do is small or not means nothing. The only thing that should matter is whether we do the right thing. Because, as a wise man once said, we find out who we are when we face the choice between doing what is right and what is easy.
At the end of the day, it is up to us to make this choice. So — will you choose the path to virtue? Because at the end of the day, the pursuit of virtue is the only worthwhile goal in life.