Virtues (number and structure)

The questions of how many virtues there are, how the virtues relate to one another, and is any one virtue more important than any other, can be answered by looking either at the history of the subject or at the logic lying behind it. A recent survey across various cultures around the world concluded that there are six virtues. Western tradition on the other hand maintains that there are seven. Other numbers have been put forward and this article will look briefly at these, at any underlying structure that has been proposed, and, by taking the major virtues in turn, at the alternative view put forward by many that there is a whole spectrum of virtues to contend with.

In Aristotle’s opinion, the different kinds of virtue arose from the nature of being itself: In order to know what a good man is, he said, we must firstly determine what man himself is. Human beings were seen as part of a wider concept of being which had previously been distinguished from non-being by containing within itself variety and interrelationship. For Aristotle there were three kinds of relationship through which people engage with the world and from these arose three different kinds of virtue:

Plato in his dialogue Laws had already abstracted from this list the three virtues of “justice and temperance and wisdom” and in Phaedrus he referred to the three “heavenly virtues” of “justice, temperance and knowledge”. In the Republic and Symposium he referred to four virtues adding “courage” to the list; and in Protagoras, Meno and Phaedo he talked of five virtues adding “piety”, “magnificence” and “nobility” respectively. But the three primary virtues remained fairly constant throughout his work and it will be useful to look at each in turn before looking at any others that there might be.

The importance of justice is emphasised in the Republic where justice, Plato wrote, “gives order to the other virtues”. Whether in ordering the state or ordering one’s household, justice required perception and an ability to contemplate the whole, and the whole included all the other virtues. In law, justice depended upon the ability to determine questions regarding the whole of the facts and not just part, and in “shrewdly perceiving omissions and faults”. Behind justice lay the concepts of impartiality and transparency, or what Plato called “frankness”. Justice lay in fairness and in correctly apportioning what is due (the term judge, dikastis, is derived from one who bisects), and these ideas are reflected in the scales of justice that sometimes crown the law courts. Indeed many of the concepts lying behind justice derive from the category of number. Besides equality the concepts of harmony and proportion were also important: Plato wrote, for example, that “from justice springs harmony”, and Aristotle that justice “… is a species of the proportionate”.

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Wikipedia