Virtue

 Now I'm interested in the connection between all this and virtue.

Yes—and I think this actually pulls the various threads together rather neatly.

If happiness, pleasure, well-being, and prospering are ideals of a life, virtue is rather different. Those are things we want to have or experience; virtue is a quality of the way we live. And that distinction becomes particularly interesting once we notice how transient most of the other goods are.

A successful career ends. A system becomes obsolete. An insurance policy expires. Money changes hands. Even pleasures disappear almost as soon as they occur. In a literal sense, very little of what we accomplish is permanent.

Virtue, however, isn't valuable because it produces something permanent. It is valuable because it governs our responses to impermanence.

That gives your recent observation about acceptance a surprisingly deep connection to virtue. Suppose you recognize that something cannot be changed. There are at least three possible responses:

    You can refuse to accept it and waste yourself fighting reality.

    You can passively surrender and simply stop caring.

    You can recognize the fact, accept it, and then ask, given that this is the world I actually inhabit, what is the best thing I can do?

The third is a genuinely virtuous response. It requires judgment, self-command, courage and, often, a certain humility.

And this helps explain why virtue doesn't itself belong on the same list as happiness or prosperity. Virtue is closer to the condition under which those things become worth having. Prosperity without prudence can become waste; pleasure without moderation can become addiction; success without justice can become exploitation; acceptance without courage can become resignation.

There is another interesting consequence. If achievements are inherently temporary, then making achievement itself the measure of a life is going to produce a rather peculiar form of dissatisfaction. One keeps having to replace the thing just achieved with another thing to achieve. Your blog is an especially nice example: you enjoy doing it, but you don't require it to become a monument. The activity itself is worthwhile, even though you expect modest results.

That sounds to me much closer to the classical conception of virtue than the modern idea that a virtuous life must somehow culminate in a great accomplishment.

And perhaps the deepest point is this:

Virtue is one of the few goods whose value does not depend upon its permanence.

You can act intelligently today even though today's decision will eventually be forgotten. You can be fair to somebody even though neither of you will be around forever. You can enjoy something without demanding that it last. You can recognize that something cannot be changed without becoming bitter about it.

The action passes. The circumstance passes. The pleasure passes. But while it is happening, you have lived well.

That may be why the ancient philosophers put so much weight on virtue. They weren't necessarily claiming that virtue makes you happy in some simplistic sense. They were identifying something more fundamental: when almost everything outside us is transient and partly beyond our control, the quality of our conduct remains the part of life that is genuinely ours.

It's simple: I can look back at events and feel good about them.

Exactly. And that gives a wonderfully uncomplicated meaning to virtue.

You don't need virtue to guarantee happiness, success, prosperity, or even a lasting legacy. You can simply look back and think: “I handled that well.”

The event itself is gone. The achievement may have disappeared, the pleasure ended, the money spent, the work superseded. But your judgment of your own conduct remains available to you. You can remember kindness, courage, competence, restraint, generosity, or simply having made a sensible decision under difficult circumstances—and feel good about having done it.

In that sense, virtue has a kind of retrospective permanence. Not permanence in the world, but permanence in the story you can tell yourself about your life.

And perhaps that also explains why virtue fits better than achievement as a measure of a life. You don't have to ask, “What did I leave behind?” You can ask, “When things happened, how did I behave?”

That is a much more manageable—and perhaps much more satisfying—accounting system.