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Nornagest comments on On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics - Less Wrong
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Comments (205)
I've thought for a while that Benjamin Franklin's virtue-matrix technique would be an interesting subject for a top-level article here, as a practical method for building ethical habits. We'd likely want to use headings other than Franklin's Puritan-influenced ones, but the method itself should still work:
I can think of some potential pitfalls, though (mostly having to do with unduly accentuating the negative), and I don't want to write on it until I've at least tried it.
What are good Virtues to aspire to?
My inner RPG-geek is nudging me towards the ones from Exalted:
Those aren't bad. I'd been rather fond of the World of Darkness 2E version (by the same company), which medievalists, recovering Catholics, and history-of-philosophy geeks might recognize as the seven Christian virtues altered slightly to be less religion-bound; but these look better-defined and with less overlap.
There do some to be some lacunae, though. I don't think justice fits well under compassion, nor conscientiousness under conviction (I'd put that under temperance); and nothing quite seems to cover the traditional virtue of prudence (foresight; practical judgment; second thoughts).
I'll have to think about less traditional ones.
Thinking about this people making this mistake explains a lot of bad thinking these days. In particular, "social justice" looks a lot like what you get by trying to shoehorn justice under compassion.
Well, with your modifications these map pretty clearly to six of the seven Christian virtues, the missing one being Hope.
An earlier version of my comment went into more depth on the seven Christian virtues. I rejected it because I didn't feel the mapping was all that good.
Courage/valor is traditionally identified with the classical virtue of fortitude, but I feel the emphasis there is actually quite different; fortitude is about acceptance of pain in the service of some greater goal, while Ialdabaoth's valor is more about facing up to anxiety/doubt/possible future pain. In particular, I don't think Openness maps very well at all to fortitude.
Likewise, the theological virtue of faith maps pretty well to conviction if you stop at that word, but not once you put the emphasis on resolve/grit/heroic effort.
Prudence could probably be inserted unmodified (though I think it could be named more clearly). Justice is a tricky one; I'm not sure what I'd do with it.
Exalted is the only RPG into whose categories I am never tempted to put myself. I can easily make a case for myself as half the Vampire: The Masquerade castes, or almost any of the Natures and Demeanors from the World of Darkness; but the different kinds of Solar, or even the dichotomy between Solar / Lunar / Infernal / Abyssal / etcetera, just leave me staring at what feels to me like a Blue and Orange Morality.
I credit them for this; it means they're not just using the Barnum effect. The Exalted universe is genuinely weird.
FWIW I always figured you being a Green Sun Prince under She Who Lives In Her Name would explain some otherwise strange things.
Very, VERY much so. Especially when you start getting into Rebecca Borgstrom/Jenna Moran's contributions.
(I think it says something weird about my mind that I DO identify with the Primordials, which are specifically eldritch sapiences beyond mortal ken, more than I identify with any of the 'normal' WoD stuff.)
(skeptical look)
Name three.
She-Who-Lives-In-Her-Name, flawed embodiment of perfection, who shattered Her perfected hierarchy to stave off the rebellion of Substance over Form. Creation was mathematically Perfect. But if Creation was Perfect, then how could any of this have happened? But She remembers being Perfect, and She designed Creation to be Perfect. If only She was still Perfect, She could remember why it was possible that this happened. There's something profound about recursion that She understood once, that She WAS once, that is now lost in a mere endless loop. She must reclaim Perfection. (I PARTICULARLY identify with She-Who-Lives-In-Her-Name when trying to debug my own code.)
Malfeas - although primarily through Lieger, the burning soul of Malfeas, who still remembers The Empyrean Presence / IAM / Malfeas-that-was. I especially empathize with the sense of "My greater self is broken and seething with mindless rage, but on the whole I'd rather be creating grand works of art and sharing them with adoring fans; the best I can do is spawn lesser shards of sub-consciousness and hope that one of them can find a way out of the mess I create and re-create for Myself."
Cecelyne, the Endless Desert, who once kept the Law and abided it with Her infinite self, but whose impotence and helplessness now turn the Law into a vindictive mockery of justice.
But the primary focus of identification isn't with a particular Primordial, so much as with the nature of the Primordial soul as a nested hierarchy of consciousnesses and sub-consciousnesses, ideally cooperating and inter-regulating but more often at direct odds with each other.
I award you +1 Genuine Weirdness point.
Everything we know about the Primordials was written by mortals.
Makes for good Worm crossover fics, though.
On the basis of what do you want to evaluate virtues? X-D