Look how torturous Plato's attempt to define "justice" was -- mostly because no one had been particularly interested in doing so before in Hellas. And neither virtue nor morality figures in the Iliad or Odyssey - though the former contains the only 'new' knowledge ever embodied in a poem: the discovery that humanity existed.
As far as I can tell, "virtue" for the last 2+ centuries means something like "Isn't it lucky that I'm not as everyone else." You can see that sense developing in Addison and it is fully dramatized in one of the greatest of English novels, Richardson's _Clarissa_. It has nothing to do with politics but rather is an implicit assertion of the superiority of "idiocy" (Greek sense) to public engagement.
You are not usually as aggressively ahistorical as this.
Carrol
On 5/2/2011 2:18 PM, // ravi wrote:
> On May 2, 2011, at 2:46 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
>> Joanna, I think you are missing the point of this discussion. If
>> moral virtues could improve the lot of the humankind, religions would
>> be all that is needed.
>>
>
> I think you guys may be missing the larger point, perhaps because of Grand Ayatollah Marx’s distaste for “morality”. The point being: religions are all we have. The rest is hand-waving, back-scratching, prostitution…
>
>
>
>> PS. I think that most people (save a few die hard idealistic
>> intellectuals) would prefer to be rich and live amongst selfish
>> bastards than to be poor and live amongst the virtuous.
>>
>
>
> Doug said the same sort of thing years ago. This is a false dichotomy, of course… one could have sustainable wealth (i.e., neither poor, nor rich) and live among the virtuous. As a good chunk of humans do. Today.
>
> IMHO. Fire away!
>
> —ravi
>
>
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