natural virtue — (esp. among the scholastics) any moral virtue of which a human being is capable, esp. the cardinal virtues: justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude. Also called “classical virtues.” Cf. theological virtue. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language.
Socrates argued that the four virtues (the “classical” or “natural” virtues) are actually four aspects of a single virtue that he called practical wisdom. This idea has been called the thesis of the “unity of the virtues.” Socrates’ main reason for holding that the virtues are unitary was that the difference between courage, say, and an apparently similar disposition such as foolhardiness, is knowledge. That is, a person of courage knows when to act boldly; a person without such knowledge will act boldly when he shouldn’t. So
boldness + knowledge = courage, and
boldness – knowledge = foolhardiness.[1]
And that, too, makes the difference between any one of the other virtues and its counterfeit (e.g., prudence and timidity). But knowledge (practical knowledge of when and how to act) is unitary, so the virtues are one.
Aristotle argued that practical wisdom is modeled in the more specific practical knowledge of the athlete or soldier or musician in action. Practical wisdom, Aristotle argued, is not entirely natural but flows from a cultivated or trained “second nature.” The action of a good musician, for example, is not natural in the sense that it flows from his animal nature; nor is it thoughtful in the sense that the musician takes thought or deliberates about what he does. Rather, his action flows from a disposition trained by thought and deliberation, a “second nature.” In the context of action, the musician does not take thought but acts directly from his previously formed second nature. So Aristotle thought that practical wisdom might be developed by training and education, depending to a goodly extent on the resources of one’s culture, though he recognized that such moral development is a boot-strap operation; in a sense, one has to be wise in order to become wise, for moral education is wasted on the foolish. A teacher can give out illustrations and examples, but a student must be ready to recognize the essence of the matter on his own.
Socrates argued that each of the four classical virtues has a counterfeit, and also that virtue as such—as unitary practical wisdom—has a counterfeit. A counterfeit, as the word indicates, is something that appears to be the real thing and that is mistaken for the real thing by those who are not prepared to recognize the difference.
A vice, then, is an imitation of a virtue because it appears to its practitioner as good. Any sort of action deliberately done is considered by the one who acts to be virtuous (i.e., conducing to happiness). If he did not effectively believe this, he would not do it, for it is the nature of human beings that they always act for the sake of what they consider to be good.[2]
Practical wisdom is the wisdom necessary to lead a good life, a life that is worth living for a human being. As Socrates puts it in his Apology, the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. It follows from this that the life worth living is the examined life. This suggests that practical wisdom is the wisdom needed to examine one’s life. But how does one go about examining one’s life? You cannot hold it out in front of you and turn it over and over like an object. You’re in the middle of it, living it, and you can’t view it objectively as a god standing outside of time.
Socrates’ practice is to avail himself of his membership in a human community. At every opportunity, he undertakes to learn from others in conversation. He always questions them about what they are doing and asks them to give an account of it, on the assumption that they know what they are doing. Human beings are such that they always act for the sake of what they consider to be good. Thus, any account of what one is doing must finally indicate some path to some higher good and therefore some conception of what a human being is such that the good can be thus attained. Bringing these conceptions into noetic light and examination in the very course of their practical effect is the Socratic means of leading the best life.
[1] In the Protagoras, Socrates characterises courage as self-confidence plus knowledge, and mere foolhardiness as simply self-confidence. Thus, he says, all courageous people are self-confident, but not all self-confident people are courageous. The idea is that without knowledge, self-confidence is wasted or wrongly applied and so cannot contribute to a good life and so is not, of itself, a virtue.
[2] A person may, momentarily, give up on the question of what is good and say to himself, “Well, it’s really all relative.” But such a state must quickly pass, for a person must go on making practical decisions. And such decisions require some conception of what is humanly good if they are to have any coherence. A person may attempt to rid himself of the reflective thought that always addresses the issue of goodness. Taking drugs or alcohol, or compulsively pursuing some diverting, highly engaging activity are typical measures. Or, more commonly, one may attempt to make of oneself a mere component of some system larger than oneself, such as some economic or social system. The paradox of such self-manipulation or self-objectification, though, is that it involves an on-going, effective, high-level strategy to avoid thinking about what one is doing. One has to take thought and avoid taking thought simultaneously. It looks logically impossible. We give it the common name of self-deception. Leading such a self-deceived life is the antithesis of leading the examined life, and its only alternative.