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What makes a person truly virtuous is to behave in accordance with moral principles. Kant presents an example: suppose that you come across a needy person in the street; if your sympathy leads you to help that person, your response does not illustrate your virtue.
Part of training in practical virtue ethics is to come to see the coincidence of one's enlightened self-interest and the practice of the virtues, so that one is virtuous willingly, gladly, and enthusiastically because one knows that being virtuous is the best thing one can do with oneself. [7]: I
Good moral character is an ideal state of a person's beliefs and values that is considered most beneficial to society. [1] [2]In United States law, good moral character can be assessed through the requirement of virtuous acts or by principally evaluating negative conduct.
Aristotle defines virtuous character in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics: "Excellence of character, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius discusses these in Book V:12 of Meditations and views them as the "goods" that a person should identify in one's own mind, as opposed to "wealth or things which conduce to luxury or prestige". [11] Suggestions of the Stoic virtues can be found in fragments in the Diogenes Laertius and Stobaeus.
A virtuous person seeks friendships that resemble the relationship he has with himself. A virtuous person has integrity, and wishes what is actually good for himself, for his own sake. In this way he is like a genuine friend to himself, for a friend wishes for a friend what is good for the friend.
The term "cardinal virtues" (virtutes cardinales) was first used by the 4th-century theologian Ambrose, [1] who defined the four virtues as "temperance, justice, prudence, and fortitude". [2]
Such a virtuous person, if they can come into being, will choose the best life of all, which is the philosophical life of contemplation and speculation. Aristotle claims that a human's highest functioning must include reasoning, being good at what sets humans apart from everything else.