What is personal virtue?

Answer 1

This is the fundamental question of the philosophical doctrine of ethics. The question is what principles of right and wrong action should you use to decide upon your own actions. For most persons, this means doing what is approved of by other people. However, in some cases the socially acceptable behaviour is disquieting. The most egregious example is the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. Many people in Germany and other Nazi controlled countries went along with the apparently acceptable idea that it was right to mistreat the Jews, because their notion of personal virtue was based on what everybody else seemed to be doing.

For many people this is unacceptable. As a result they have made an attempt to ground the principles by which they will act on other bases. Religion provides answers for some, since the principles of religion transcend those of transient social norms. But although most religions provide ethical guidance, their advice is sometimes specific to the cultural norms of the time they were formulated. And religion provides little guidance as to which advice is general and which is specific--it is all divinely ordained. Must all Christian women follow St. Paul's instruction not to cut their hair? Is it ethically wrong according to Jewish or Muslim thinking to eat pork?

Philosophy has tried over the years to look for reasoned principles on which ethical decisions can be based--principles which are not dependent on the customs of a particular time. The Golden Rule provides one such principle. The philosopher Immanuel Kant provided another in The Categorical Imperative.

Answer 2

living in accord with our highest state of consciousness.

We continuously create our reality by our choices, moment to moment, creating and maintaining harmony by following our conscience and acting for the highest good.

Personal integrity takes courage.

We are being courageous in living according to our conscience when it would be easy to hide from others that we are not following our conscience. It is easier to slide down the hill of life, maintaining or digressing in our current state of consciousness, than to follow the hard climb up the path of what we know is right. The reward for continually upgrading our personal integrity is that we become more conscious of our harmonious, self-effulgent nature.

Through living with personal integrity others notice that we can be trusted; we become a trustworthy friend, an asset to our world family.