The V-Word

Superhabits #7 (#1 is here )

Why are scholars and researchers in a variety of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, and management science all studying habits of excellence, but apparently not seeing the full picture of how these habits are the foundation of all of human flourishing? I argued yesterday that this is not a case of several blind people gathered around an elephant, each thinking they've got hold of something else.

The problem, I believe, is the “V”-word. The “V”-word is Virtue. These habits of excellence have been called, for millennia, by another name: virtues. A virtue is a particular habit of excellence. Courage, Forgiveness, Generosity, and Creativity are all virtues. So why aren’t researchers calling them by that name? Some are. The contemporary Stoics do, and the positive psychology researchers call some of them virtues, and others character strengths. But by and large I see a reluctance to use the word "virtue."

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. First, over the past couple of centuries, the word seems to have lost much of its meaning. See how dictionaries now define it: the Cambridge Dictionary calls virtue “the general quality of being morally good”; Merriam Webster has “conformity to a standard of right”; and for the Oxford English Dictionary it is “a moral quality regarded (esp. in religious contexts) as good or desirable in a person.” They don't mention what is most important about virtues, namely that they are habits. And, frankly, it all sounds rather moralistic.

Perhaps you don’t mind the moral connotations of the word. Even so, it is likely that you think of virtue as just generic goodness, not as a specific set of durable, concrete and thoroughly evidence-based habits that I have been describing.

More likely, though, the word “virtue” probably makes you a bit uneasy. Think about it: in what context did you hear the word “virtue” used most recently? Chances are, it was part of the phrase “virtue-signaling.” According to one definition in the Urban Dictionary , virtue-signaling means “To take a conspicuous, but essentially useless action, ostensibly to support a good cause but actually to show off how much more moral you are than everybody else.” That doesn’t make virtue seem a very attractive thing.

How did it come to this? How did we come to lose interest in this important word, "virtue"? The story is told at length and in great detail by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his masterful 1981 book After Virtue . For our purposes, what’s important to know is that during the big debates about faith and morality that arose around the wars of religion of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, to the extent that virtue became associated almost exclusively with morality, and with a particular view of morality, it came to be sidelined and replaced by other, more modern, theories of ethics.

Given this, is it even possible to propose such a thing now: a universal set of habits – of virtues – that underly all human flourishing? In a time of such debate and division about every aspect of morality, could we possibly reach agreement about anything so foundational? I believe that we can, to quite a wide extent, because virtue in its full sense is not exclusively or even primarily about morality. Virtues are the habits of human flourishing in all its fullness. They do include moral greatness, but also greatness in thought, in our actions, and in managing our feelings. Virtues like Courage, Gratitude, and Forgiveness are more or less universally attractive and respected. Research has shown that across times, places, and cultures, people tend to agree that it is better to be courageous than to be cowardly, better to be grateful than ungrateful, and better to forgive than to hold grudges.

So it's time to rehabilitate virtue. But perhaps the word "virtue" is now stuck with meaning simply generic goodness. So I've come up with another, more descriptive word: Superhabit. A superhabit is a virtue in the classical sense of the word, a good habit that makes you good, and more particularly, one of a very specific set of habits that make life easier, more effective, happier, and healthier.

Tomorrow I'll write about the difference between regular habits and superhabits. Meantime, I realize that this is perhaps one of the more controversial posts of this series, so please feel free to raise any concerns or questions in the Comments below.