If Youth Knew, If Age Could 16 — Take Some Time: Virtues and Virtuous Habits
Dr. Herb Silverman is the Founder of the Secular Coalition for America, the Founder of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and the Founder of the Atheist/Humanist Alliance student group at the College of Charleston. He authored Complex variables (1975), Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt (2012) and An Atheist Stranger in a Strange Religious Land: Selected Writings from the Bible Belt (2017). He co-authored The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (2003) with Kimberley Blaker and Edward S. Buckner, Complex Variables with Applications (2007) with Saminathan Ponnusamy, and Short Reflections on Secularism (2019), and Short Reflections on American Secularism’s History and Philosophy (2020).
Here we talk about habits, virtue, and happiness.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Virtue seems mostly like a habit. Then we call long trends in behaviour in someone a character trait. It seems like this to me. So, virtue starts with the habituation of ethical conduct.
There are consequences to a certain behaviour. Good results become consequentially good, tautologically. Bad results become consequentially bad, but come from antecedent behaviour, inescapably.
