Introduction: Three reasons we need the virtues
Introduction to achieve our specific perfection – at every level – in our action. In other words, the aim of rational activity is the good of the person as a whole integrated system that includes a variety of inclinations; it is not the good of the reason itself.
Three reasons we need the virtues Now we can see how this works out in the doctrine of the virtues. Virtues are dispositions by which we appropriate our specific good effectively.
The other animals do not need virtues because their desires direct them spontaneously to their specific perfection. But because our specific perfection involves reason, it can only be attained through rational choice, and our desires alone do not suffice for fully rational choice. Why not?
There are three reasons, each of which exposes the need for a certain type of virtue if we are to attain our good as discerned by reason. The first reason is that the sensory desire is by its nature aimed at only a part of our good, the part that we share with the lower animals. It can therefore come into conflict with what reason discerns as good for the person as a whole integrated system. As a result, 'When . . . someone has to deal with the objects of the sensory desire, he needs, in order to do this well, a kind of tendency or completeness in the sensory desire that will enable it to obey reason easily. That is what we call virtue' (DQVirtGen rep.).
Temperateness is the virtue that perfects the sensual part, and courage is the virtue that perfects the aggressive part.
So the sensory desire needs virtue in order to follow reason easily and reliably. The will, however, does not. Its very nature is to be a rational desire: that is, to incline to whatever reason presents to it as a good.
Nonetheless, even rational desire is not sufficient for us to lead the life of reason, because it is aimed only at our individual good (DQVirtGen rep.). But our individual good is open-ended in a certain crucial way: part of the human good is to live in society, but life in society requires certain relations to other people that go beyond narrow considerations of our individual perfection (even if they don't actually contravene our individual perfection). The will therefore needs to be perfected by justice, by which an individual conforms her own pursuit of the rationally apprehended good to the larger good of the community, whose well-being and institutional integrity provide the context in which she can pursue her own good. xiv