What Does It Mean to Be a Virtuous Person and How Is that Different From a Person of Good Character?
We live in a social media age where morality and ethics are demonstrated as virtue-signalling memes or thumbs-up emoticons — often without fact-checking or a reason given why the poster cares about the issue.
People are too quick to jump on the bandwagon and share a hashtag or graphic about a day of awareness without doing anything meaningful to affect progressive change. In their very next Instagram or TikTok story, they share a video about the Starbucks barista who got their name wrong on their coffee.
We need a virtue ethics shared by all.
What does it mean, to be a virtuous person and how is that different from a person of good character?
To understand the difference between character traits and virtue, think of an actor playing a character in a movie. The actor embodies the character’s attitude and personality traits so that the viewer believes the actor’s portrayal.
We can describe someone’s character (and behaviour) as kind, thoughtful, cooperative, curious, and so on. Conversely, we embody traits that can get us into trouble like rudeness, impatience, disrespect, or aggressiveness.
