Thought of the Day 03.16.10

People are often confused about virtues, and one of the most common confusions is mistaking a necessary component of some virtue for an obstacle to is. Here’s what I mean.

We all believe in the virtue of courage, but people often mistakenly think that courage is the absence of fear when in fact courage is precisely the virtue of doing something you are afraid of. If there is no fear, there can be no courage.

Similarly, many people wrongly believe that obedience is based on agreement. But the reality is that agreement precludes obedience because you are merely doing what makes sense to you rather than what you have been instructed to do by some authority. Only when you disagree can you rightly be said to obey.

Yet again, when people think of forgiveness, they commonly think that forgiving is the same as saying that the person didn’t do anything wrong. But forgiveness is actually a firm declaration that wrong has been done. Without a wrong, there can be no forgiving.

Thus, virtues are usually not the absence of problems, but the right response to them.