The Value of Virtue - By Joel Bryant

We don't need to measure our progress by how much our virtues differ from our ancestors. Courage and integrity are always contemporary. They don't need to be reformed to reflect can be made to define them. Doing so serves. We need to examine virtues to appreciate their value and to discover their relevance. It's healthy therefore to ask, "What is integrity? Or what does it mean to be courageous?" But to deny their efficacy is imbecility.
Thus, it's also important that we distinguish virtues from values, though both are volatile. They result from one group's ability to christen behavior. In this regard, they find their relevance in the praise or penalty imposed. In examining virtues, we also challenge their relevance.
We don't simply ask, "What does it mean to be courageous or virtuous?" We further propose, "Are these virtues valid for our world?" Ethically, however, we forget that virtues are transcendent. They may be more evident in one era yet they are timeless. Their relevance rests on their efficacy, historically and philosophically.
Moreover, virtues unlike values aren't democratic. They may be interpreted so, but they exist independently within every soul. This centering gives each the right to judge the other. That's why morals are celebrated and censured together. Yet the practice of each nurtures the ethical. Ideal virtues prove our capacity to achieve the extraordinary --values don't. Values can be annulled and denied their efficacy. They can be celebrated at breakfast and abandoned at lunch.
Values ornament life and are often derivatives of virtues whose value eludes. They are trendy and arbitrary styles of living, but not the substance of life, which is what virtues are. Virtues fuse life giving it moral clarity and ethical continuity. They are the continuum that connects historically. They are contiguous because they withstand all attempts to be overturned.
When ignored --all are punished-- actor and innocent alike. Virtues reveal the law of consequences and help us to understand its relationship. One age may reject them but another will cite this rejection as the cause of decay. We don't need to measure our evolution by how far we've traveled from traditional mores. Virtues are always vogue.
They are eternally contemporary. We may debate their character or define their scope. But we err when we deny their efficacy. To be progressive is to value virtues as essential. Like air and water, we should not pollute them and expect to retain the quality of life purity provides