[Vision2020] The Virtues Come First

[melyndahuskey at earthlink.net]

I have serious qualms about the Virtue Project, despite my admiration for
virtue generally, and my surprise at appearing to share an opinion with
Phil Nesbit, for whom my admiration is limited.  I'm sorry to disagree with
a number of fine people--Linda Pall, Nick Gier, and others.

 The reductive structuralism implied by trolling world religions and making
a list of qualities which can be found in many of them is troubling to me. 
How do we define the qualities in the list?  How do we distinguish between
a virtue and a socially or personally desirable behavior?  To choose one
example from the several lists on the Virtues Project website, why is
"cleanliness" a virtue in family life?  Cleanliness is absent from other
lists of virtues on the same page.  And is cleanliness really a *virtue*? 
Is it a moral behavior to seek cleanliness?  Are clean people better than
dirty people?  Is assertiveness a virtue distinct from, say, courage or
truthfulness?  (According to the OED, assertiveness in this particular
sense is first attested in 1975--rather a short time for a universal virtue
to have staked its claim on all of humanity.)

 Moral development research, at least as I read it, does not strongly
support the model Popov offers--what I think of as the "bag of virtues"
approach.  It's a "quick fix" approach, which I think confounds
Aristotelian assumptions (we become by doing) and neo-Platonic language
theory (words make things real), without any real depth of inquiry.  If we
are going to invest city money in the development of civic virtue, I'd want
us to have a more theoretically coherent program with clearer outcomes
designed.  There are such programs, typically directed at teaching
particular communication and participation skills (the Public Conversations
Project, for example, or Difficult Issues Forum).  They might also be more
effective in addressing civic concerns--ongoing ideological conflict, for
example, or a general decline in civility.

 Melynda Huskey