Of Virtue

The philosophers distinguish, and I think rightly, between the man who does not steal because he has no desire to steal and the man who does not steal because, having a powerful desire, he has nonetheless mastered it. Both men have empty hands at the end. Only one of them has done anything that deserves to be called virtuous. Virtue, in its proper sense, is not a natural condition but a conquest — it requires something to conquer, some resistance to be overcome, some temptation that the virtuous choice has defeated.

This is why I am more moved by those examples in the histories where a man or woman has been required to pay an enormous price for an act of fidelity or justice than by the ordinary catalogue of decent behavior. Ordinary decency costs little and proves little. What interests me — what strikes me as genuinely illuminating about human nature — are the cases where the moral choice required the sacrifice of everything else, and was made nonetheless.

“The virtue that has never been tested is not virtue but comfort. A man who has never been hungry does not know whether he is honest, only that he has never been sufficiently tempted.”

I have read of men who allowed themselves to be tortured rather than betray their friends, knowing that a word would end their suffering. I have read of physicians who stayed in plague-stricken cities when they could have left. I have read of judges who ruled against kings when ruling for them would have been safer, easier, and more profitable. These are the figures I return to when I want to understand what the word virtue is actually pointing at. They knew what their choice would cost them, and they made it, and that is the whole of it.

What troubles me slightly about the way virtue is usually praised is that it becomes, in the praising, too comfortable — a matter of moderation, of good habits, of not doing the obvious wrong things. The version of virtue I most believe in is more violent than this. It demands a kind of tearing away from what we want, what we fear, what is convenient. The man who has never had occasion to pay that price should speak humbly about his own virtue, because he does not yet know what he would do if the bill came due.