Category: Virtue Ethics
Epistemic status: My own views
It might take some time to figure out how to map the Stoic virtues to your life. Perceiving behavior in terms of the Stoic virtues is a skill. Learning to put on the virtue-glasses takes time. Some people want to bypass this process by coming up with a new set of virtues that resonate more than the canonical ones.
I recommend adopting the four canonical virtues. They provide an effective framework with a lot of prior art. As you read up on stoic practices and perspectives, having a shared set of virtues will ease understanding and communication. Great insights from “western” philosophical traditions will be easier to transfer to your own life.
But! I see no reason to limit yourself. I’m using a few “bespoke virtues”, alongside the canonical ones. If you have an extra virtue X that you strongly want to include along with the canonical ones, this post is for you.
If you don’t have any, that’s fine. I didn’t set out to look for mine, I’ve simply picked them up here and there. I wouldn’t recommend trying to theorize a set of bespoke virtues for yourself if you’re just getting started. It’s probably better to just pick up the canonical ones and then embody them!
But, in case it’s useful, here’s a post about how I’ve handled bespoke virtues in my life. Let’s start with some concrete examples.
Bespoke virtues of mine
My life changed after reading “Radical Honesty” by Brad Blanton. Radical Honesty means being open about my inner movements; trying to give people around me an accurate idea of what I think and feel. Being honest towards others is a good first step towards being honest towards myself. As I started sharing things rather than suppressing them, my level of shame decreased, and I became aware of a lot of patterns I had been avoiding.
Radical Honesty has been a tool of self-discovery, connection, and inner work. It has impacted my life for the better in a lot of different ways. Keeping up unusual levels of honesty is hard. I need to stay alert, constantly moving towards honesty in order not to forget myself and take the easy/short-term path of pretension and avoidance.
Radical Honesty is social Courage. It helps Wisdom by revealing assumptions for correction. It helps keep communication virtuous, avoiding optimizing for prestige and signaling. It’s a way to train myself to focus on virtue rather than status games, a boon for Sophrosyne.
Conscientiousness is the first virtue I adopted. This was before I even heard about Stoicism, about 10 years ago. I read an article about factors that have a statistical likelihood of increasing success. The top two factors were IQ and conscientiousness.1 I started training myself to become more conscientious.
You could argue that this kind of training is rather conscientious in itself and that I might have been born naturally conscientious. This perspective might hold some merit, but I’m still pretty sure I’ve managed to make my conscientiousness more consistent. I've also expanded it to cover more areas of my life than it originally did.
(Besides, I’m very skeptical of any claims about personality traits being fixed; this might be true in most cases, but I don’t think it holds up under the pressure of diligent explicit practice)2
When I adapted Conscientiousness as something I wanted to improve, I started taking more time doing things, giving myself room to do them thoroughly.
I had started working as a programmer at this point and started applying conscientiousness to programming. To this day, I spend the time needed to clean up and organize code right after I’ve written it.3 By putting in an effort to aim for high quality, I’ve improved my programming ability a lot.
Programming is only one area affected; I’m pretty sure Conscientiousness is something that infuses my entire life, improving it for the better. I think of conscientiousness as an aspect of Wisdom. It’s a fundamental capability that enhances most other functioning.
The final bespoke virtue of mine is Kindness. Kindness to me is a kind of low-key agape; sincere good intentions toward the people in my surroundings. I adopted the virtue of kindness as I realized that I’d been covering up social anxieties by trying to perform and impress. My level of impressiveness is not an important feature of social interactions; what’s important is my impact on the well-being of the group.
I try not to take responsibility for the feelings of others, in order to avoid codependent patterns, but I do make an effort to feel and express goodwill toward the people I interact with. Kindness is empathic Sophrosyne; behaving better towards others by sincerely wishing them well and letting my actions be directed by this impulse. There’s also an element of Justice to kindness, acting in ways that make (a small part of) the world a better place.
Integrating Bespoke vs Canonical
There is a common pattern to all my bespoke virtues. They start by me realizing some “potential for improvement” in a certain area, using a concept that makes the opportunity real to me in a day-to-day way. Then I go about practicing my newfound virtue, using sets of principles/practices (example) to build capacity.4
Over time, I realize that my newfound bespoke virtues are strongly related to the canonical Stoic virtues. When I realize the parallels, I gain the ability to start transferring approaches! Practices I’ve used with the canonical virtues can be adapted to the bespoke ones and vice versa. The same goes for mindsets, mental models and similar.
This way, bespoke virtues integrate with the set of canonical virtues, forming a coherent system. This far, my bespoke virtues haven’t been subsumed by the cardinal ones; instead, they stay on as a lens for my virtue glasses.
Picking Bespoke Virtues
After having written that bespoke virtues integrate with the canonical ones, I realized that I haven’t given you any selection criteria. If you pick “Hating green things” as a “virtue”, I don’t think it would integrate very well.
I’m not going to try to find a way to draw boundaries around this area of concept space.5 Instead, I’ll present a version of my friend’s heuristic: “Is this a character trait I would really respect if I saw it in another person?”.
I trust you to know more about your needs and life than I do, but feel free to comment if you have any questions.
Something like this: https://headstuff.org/topical/science/practical-psychology-conscientiousness-success/
Or maybe monks are born naturally wrinkle-free, calm, and happy?
This might sound like a rather low bar, but you’d be surprised. Taking 20-30min to tidy things up after you get things working is rare, in my experience. Making the names match the concepts, the abstractions clear-cut, and the code put into the right modules. If everyone did this, quality would improve over time, rather than degrading as with most software projects.
Sorry for this being a bit “how to draw an owl”, I’m trying to stay at a general level here, rather than jumping into practical examples as I do in most of my posts. As I said in my previous post: a good way to adopt stoic virtues and perspectives is by reading texts from stoic perspectives. But start by trying to embody virtue in your own life. “How to draw an owl”, for reference:
= defining it in a strict sense