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Epictetus comments on Psychological validity of the "Seven deadly sins"? - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: InquilineKea 17 March 2015 01:25AM

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Comment author: Epictetus 17 March 2015 06:25:07AM *  6 points [-]

Dante's Purgatory has a number of discourses on the seven deadly sins that clarify a few things.

It's emphasized that the objects of the seven deadly sins aren't necessarily bad--quite the contrary. Self-love is a good thing, but taken to excess becomes pride. Friendly competition can inspire and drive you to do better, but that's also the road to envy. There's nothing inherently wrong with food, lovin', or material goods, until you overindulge and let them warp your life.

So he [Virgil] began: "Never, my son, was yet
Creator, no, nor creature, without love
Natural or rational--and thous knowest it.

The natural cannot make an erring move;
The other may, either by faulty aim
Or else by too much zeal or lack thereof.

When to the great prime goods it makes full claim,
Or to the lesser goods in measure due,
No sin can come of its delight in them;

Purgatory, Canto XVII, lines 91-99

I'm curious: to what extent do the "seven deadly sins" cover the most common reasons why people engage in self-defeating behavior? Are there any major omissions in the list of "seven deadly sins"? If you were to make a list of "X deadly sins", which sins would you include?

They settled on seven deadly sins to parallel the seven virtues. I think that self-hatred and some other issues relating to depression aren't properly represented, probably on account of depression being poorly understood. A lot of that stuff is put under the umbrella of sloth. It's probably worth adding some distinctions along these lines.

Comment author: seer 18 March 2015 12:21:09AM 7 points [-]

They settled on seven deadly sins to parallel the seven virtues.

I believe it was the other way around, the seven virtues were created to parallel the seven deadly sins. In any case seven was a number with religious significance, e.g., seven days of the week.

Comment author: Nornagest 18 March 2015 12:27:21AM *  2 points [-]

There's a couple different lists of seven virtues floating around in Christian tradition. One was created to parallel the seven deadly sins, and works well in that role but less well as a typology of virtue. The other's a slightly clunky melding of the New Testament virtues of faith, hope, and love (or charity) and the much older cardinal virtues (originally Platonic) of prudence, justice, temperance, and courage (or fortitude). That works fairly well as a typology of Christian virtue despite some overlap, but does a much worse job of paralleling the deadly sins.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 17 March 2015 10:09:04PM 1 point [-]

There's nothing inherently wrong with food, lovin', or material goods, until you overindulge and let them warp your life.

It's basically relatively stable self-regulatory mental (and partly physiological) circuits feedbacking out of control in environments not suited for them. Problem being that we create and game these environments in modern society. On the risk of repeating myself I will point out that this is agains a case of Unfriendly Natural Intelligence.

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