Many of us don’t just want to do the right thing. We want to be a certain sort of person-- the sort of person who does good things out of habit. The Aristotelian tradition calls the habits of a good person “virtues.” 

Certain habits seem to be fairly important in the endeavor to become a good person. Humility and trust to listen to and learn from others; patience with ourselves and with other imperfect people; hope that we and our communities will become more just in the face of significant adversity—these all look pretty crucial to becoming good in our very nonideal world. But in the Aristotelian tradition, none of these habits enjoys the honorific “virtue.” The reasons for this, I think, are not very good. They trade on faulty assumptions about the good person being exempt from difficulties of material scarcity, political oppression, illness, disability, frailty. 

I’ll try to show that on the Aristotelian conception of virtue, habits like humility, patience, and hope can count as virtues. They deserve the honorific for people trying to become good while facing various forms of adversity and human frailty. We can learn more about the underrepresented virtues by reflecting on ordinary human experience of frailty and psychological and sociological scientific inquiry into what benefits people in adverse conditions.  

Dr. Anne Jeffrey is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Medical Humanities at Baylor University, as well as Affiliate Professor of Ethics at Baylor College of Medicine. Her research focuses primarily on moral development within a virtue ethical framework. She has also published on topics in philosophy of religion, metaethics, and political philosophy. She has written extensively on Aristotelian virtue ethics and her current monograph, Being and Becoming Good: on the Diversity of Human Goodnesses and Virtues (Oxford University Press) defends a revisionary version of Aristotelian ethics integrating insights from the social and biological sciences. In 2019-2021, she collaborated with Dr. Krista Mehari, Dr. Joseph Currier, Marie Chastang, and a community in Mobile, Alabama to create, implement, and test a virtue-promoting intervention—Empowered— for adolescents in a high-violence urban area through a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Empowered is currently being used and tested in a community in Venezuela. Her collaborative work at the intersection of ethics and psychology has appeared in venues such as Journal of Personality and Journal of Positive Psychology. Currently, Dr. Jeffrey is working on the love of enemy as well as on the philosophical questions underpinning the moral psychology of patience.