Ossorio: "Could you talk about what is a virtuous person? Why is there not some virtue in doing the right thing? Couldn’t doing the right thing eventually lead to just doing what’s right because you’re participating with others in an almost right way?"

What’s a virtuous person?

Audience: It doesn’t require doing the right thing. Maybe it requires attempting to do the right thing, wanting to do the right thing.

Ossorio: Look. Virtue is associated with character. When you’re talking virtue, you’re talking character. You’re not talking skills. You’re not talking this, that, and the other. You’re talking about character. Now in order to talk about virtue, you have to have some ideal of character. Somebody whose character is of the right kind is virtuous -- of the right kind in certain designated ways.

Remember somewhere there is a list of virtues. I don’t know what they are, but there is that list. Now the particular one in question with Sonja was moral virtue. [Pete is referring to Sonja Holt’s presentation earlier in the day on "The Competence Paradox in Moral and Ethical Judgment."]

Remember what she said. If it comes from your character, that behavior is virtuous. If you routinely do that, you have that virtue in your character. If you do it for some ulterior motive, then you’re not really doing this, so there’s no issue of that being virtuous that way. What the ulterior motive is may lead you to talk about some other virtue, but not this one. Even if the ulterior motive is such a respectable-sounding thing as wanting to do the right thing.

Audience: If you have not been in such a circumstance where the virtue in question is something you could readily exercise, but you have that character of being the sort of person who certainly would do that if it were called for, then you’re virtuous without having done the right thing.

Ossorio: That’s true. On the other hand, if you want to claim that in fact for a given somebody, you’re going to get asked "Well, how do you know?" The best evidence is the behavior. But you’re right, if the occasion for it never arose, you could be virtuous that way without ever having shown it. After all, the guy standing by the pond five minutes before he saved the kid, what evidence could you have had?

Audience: Saving the kid didn’t make him virtuous. He already was virtuous.

Ossorio: No. That’s right.

Audience: I think there are also problems that get going with some of the politically correct pressures that there are on people...

Ossorio: Yeah. That just supplies a whole lot of ulterior motives.

Audience: Right. And sometimes somebody may be doing it just plain straightforwardly out of character and virtue, but feel compelled to describe it according to a perceived formulation.