Logical Life Skills, Rational Cardinal Virtues

http://bigthink.com/errors-we-live-by/logical-life-skills-and-new-years-resolutions

Heres a higher-resolution picture of the history, logic, and language of New Years resolutions
of the less vice, more virtue variety.

1. Certain virtues and vices are neither religious relics, nor irrational; their logic is biologically
warranted.

2. The cardinal virtues predate cardinals and Christianity. Cardinal means chief priest (cardo,
Latin hinge, chief). Cardinal virtues are those life chiefly hinges on.

3. Virtues (virtus, Latin manly strength) are praiseworthy behaviors, or strengths or skills.

4. The four cardinal virtues justice, temperance, prudence, and courage were imported
into Christianity from rational Greek philosophy.

5. Thomas Aquinas (13th C) contrasted the natural cardinal virtues with

thesupernatural theological virtues faith, hope, charity. Even for Aquinas cardinal virtues
weren't for the afterlife, but for a better after-in-life.

6. Cardinal virtues = rational life skills.

7. Take temperance = self-command of appetites = moderation (not abstinence). Intemperance

(overindulgence or addiction) is punished not supernaturally, but scientifically biochemical
karma guarantees it.

8. Likewise, life without justice isnt rationally desirable (as every un-short-lived cultures
mythology shows, e.g., Greek Oresteia, American Westerns). Meanwhile, courage prevents
inertia in a risky world. And prudence is but reason enacted.

9. Whatever your supernatural inclinations, how on earth is that logic ignorable? Natures logic,
i.e., evolution, built us with capacities for self-control, social rules (aka morals), and justice.

10. Certain vices are deemed deadly sixth century on = lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath,
envy, and pride. Gluttony and sloth arent Ten Commandments inspired (originally
Ten Sayings, christened commandments in 1590).

11. Aristotle believed every virtue had two related vices, contextual deficiency or excess.
12. Whatever else religions do, they transmit norms and promote life skills. What are our secular
equivalents? Self-help? The norms of the arts? The norms of economics (promoting envy
and greed, chasing the ethical alchemy of private vices becoming public virtues)?

The freer we are, the more vital key virtues or logical life skills become. Only unskilled
reasoning ignores those vices that enable common empiricalimprudence,

Heres hoping you and your logical life skills flourish in 2016.

See also:

Platos pastry fixes scientific happiness confusion.

Our evolved rational self-command scripts and habits.

Better Behaved Behavioral Models

Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of
Peculiar Inventions