THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF A RELIABLE ETHIC

No person escapes the ethics by which we all evaluate possible ways of life and personal characteristics as more or less valuable than the available alternatives. So you are not free to eschew ethics; you are free only to choose which ethic you will choose to institutionalise in your life and, thereby, impose on the world. The foundation of your ethics is the kind of person that you are choosing to be (see About Being a Person). The ethics of lying, for example, are different for someone choosing to be honest than they are for someone choosing to profit monetarily from her dealings with other folk. It is not my place to instruct anyone on what kind of person they should be, but one of my interests in VIOLENCE and SELF-OWNERSHIP is the possibility of being more self-owning and less violent than is normal for human persons. To this end, I start my formulation of a suitable ethic by trying to separate the rules that are necessary for any reliable morality from anything and everything that is not.
    To see why this is so consider a situation in which I want to get my sums right, I live in a community of folk who think that they are getting their sums right, but want 2+3 to equal 4 when they are paying others and 6 when others are paying them. This is incoherent and promotes conflict. I want to detoxify myself from this kind of thinking so that the rules I follow are self-owning. To reveal self-owning mathematical rules I put aside anything that is not necessary. This is because the reliability of a mathematical rule doesn't emerge from any contingency, such as someone's political authority or preferences, but from the cultural integrity which is necessary for maths to work at all. Such a rule doesn't tell me which numbers to add, divide or multiply, and it won't justify any output I'd like just because I like it; the very rule that enables me to be right also enables me to be wrong.
    The above analogy is intended only to illustrate what you are trying to do and why you are going about it by pursuing the necessary rules of self-owning ethics. I want to get my ethical 'sums' right. This is a skill - a matter of know-how which I need to learn - and what developing this skill needs is not some 'book of answers' (knowledge-that) but criteria by which any ethical evaluations can be tested for reliability (i.e., I want to know how to get my ethical 'sums' right). Only what is necessary for getting my ethical 'sums' right can do this. Nothing contingent is necessary. So my race, gender, preferences, socioeconomic status, nationality, habits, and so on, are irrelevant to reliably reasoning about the value of, say, cheating or being honourable as a way of life.

As far as I have been able to discover, there are just two rules that are necessary for a reliable morality.

Principle One: As with mathematics, only certain rules, structuring [giving form to] certain relationships, are necessary for morality because it is these relationships that give any culture the integrity from which the intended output reliably emerges. If certain rules are necessary to the ethic then these rules will apply impartially to all ethical performances; they won't change from performer to performer in the way of political preferences. Again the analogy with maths holds; if a rule of mathematics really does emerge from the necessary integrity of maths then that rule applies to every mathematical performance in whatever circumstances; the status or preferences of performers don''t come into it. If the rules necessary for a reliable ethic cannot logically include anything contingent, moral rules must also be universal; that is, they will imply impartially to all self-owning self-government regardless of the self-governor's race, status, gender, and so on. Thus the first measure of a reliable morality is that its rules are impartial.
    In actual practice, everyone believes that their reasoning is sound and that any reasonable person would agree with them anyway. This means that everyone already purports to be showing which reasons for performing are sound. So if, for example, you do x in a circumstance because you feel like it then you are implying that feeling like doing x as a sound reason for doing x in the circumstance. There is a kind of tacit law-making here, an implication that you are an ethical reliable performer - you are doing the right thing - and that any similarly reliable performer would be led by sound reasoning (like yours) to do the same thing in the same circumstances. The popular disclaimer to the effect that "I'm not making rules for anyone else" is just a way of avoiding this responsibility.

A universal rule is impartial between performers but partial between performances. The same rule that justifies my belief that 2+3=5, for instance, thereby justifies another's belief that 2+3=5. A moral rule that justifies me lying to another in a circumstance similarly justifies another lying to me in the same circumstance. If I think that my lying to another is justified in a circumstance, but that having another lie to me in a similar circumstance wouldn't be, then you are thinking partially [politically] rather than morally (it is analogous with my believing that 2+3=4 when you are paying another and 6 when another is paying me). So a test of impartiality is to imagine how I would evaluate a performance if the rôles of myself and those my performance affects were reversed. If I conclude that it would be valuable for me to, say, tell a lie to get an advantage, and I want to know whether or not you are thinking morally rather than politically, then I need only to ask myself whether or not I would hold your lie to be valuable to me if it was someone else telling the lie at your expense.

Principle Two: Millennia of politics have clearly shown that (a) not respecting persons, (b) respecting a P moiety¹ of persons more than a not-P moiety, and (c) deferring to the performances of P-moiety persons, are all ethically unreliable because they contribute both to inself-owningity and to the compulsive human violation of integrity. This suggests that a reliable ethic for being-with others as a self-owning person would have to prescribe an equality of respect for all persons. To accord with a true articulation of what it is to be a person in the world, and of the function of ethics in this project, this equality would have to account for the fact that ∙ all persons are different and ∙ the character of ethics precludes having equal respect for all performances (the job of an ethic is to evaluate differences; an 'ethic' which prescribes equal respect for both honest work and cheating, for example, isn't doing its job). There is no equality of fact between persons; we all have different characters, strengths, weaknesses, and so on. So this can be done only if there is a common aspect of being a person in the world that is equally valuable to all persons regardless of their many contingent differences. A fact which meets this criterion - and the only fact which meets this criterion - is the cultural/natural integrity whereby persons evaluate possibilities in the world in terms of a permeate project. This is the integrity which is specifically violated by politics (which values some person above others on the basis of contingent differences such as social status, race, and gender), and the violation of which is experienced by persons as wrong. On the basis of this fact, I conclude that a second test of a reliable morality is that it prescribes an equal respect for the cultural/natural integrity of all persons. This measure extends the first by interpreting impartiality as an impartiality of respect; we evaluate the performance while respecting the performer.

Respect is the skill of treating a fact, which has value for [is relevant to the welfare of] someone or something, as (1) valuable and (2) under the ownership of that person or thing. I respect a bird's nest, for example, when I treat it as valuable property of the bird even if the bird itself has no concept of property and no culture by which it evaluates its nest as valuable. So respecting the cultural/natural integrity of persons entails treating it as both valuable and as their property even if they don't.
    This measure does not require that I respect everyone's projects or performances equally. The difference between respecting persons and respecting performances matters not only for the being-useful-towards of an ethic but because, under dichotomy, the alternative to political partiality is often said to entail an uncritical acceptance of everyone's beliefs, performances, and projects - including their lies, superstitions, prejudice, cultural self-aggrandisement, and violence. The flaw in this is easily discovered by asking myself how respect for persons would be served by treating the projects of, say, a thief as worthy of the same respect as those who work for their material possessions. The answer is that it is not; reliable ethics require that I treat the cultural/natural integrity of the thief with respect, not that I evaluate her performance as a thief as being equally valuable as other possibilities that were open to her.

1. It is a feature of non-moral (i.e., political) thinking to dichotomise all possibilities into an 'upper class' and 'lower class' moiety (see VIOLENCE and SELF-OWNERSHIP ¶9). Where I need to refer to an instance of this, violence-disposing, logic, I distinguish the supposed upper class a 'P' and the supposed lower class as 'not-P'.

The issue facing persons is that of how we should live our lives and what cultural characters we should thereby actualise for ourselves. Each person is settling this issue by means of a way of life that emerges from a personal ethic. This means that if I choose to be-towards less violence and more self-ownership in my life than is normal then I need to renovate my personal ethic. The specific project, in this chapter, will be that of doing this. This project will have the same fundamental structure [integrity] as any other human project. In this case:

In this project, the four input facts can be evaluated as true or false. All other aspects of the project are exercises of moral and logical skill [knowing how]. So none of these is either true or false; they are simply more or less valuable, suitable, and reliable. Note also that the value I put on self-ownership does not entail that self-ownership is valuable or that you should value it as I do. All that I am claiming is that if my analyses of violence and self-ownership are broadly accurate then I should be able to generate a personal morality being-useful-towards being less violent and more self-owning. If, like me, other human persons value being less violent and more self-owning then the personal morality generated by this project could be-useful-towards that end.

The human commitment to politics is a big part of both our violence and our inself-ownership. I cannot do away with ethics altogether, so an apolitical (i.e., moral) ethic is necessary. There are three families of moral culture which may serve: two performance-centred and one performer-centred.
    The performance-centred moralities are ∙ procedural (that I ought to perform in ways that are fair, good, respect others, and/or are otherwise my duty to perform) and ∙ consequentialist (that I ought to perform in ways that I believe will output the most valued consequences). Procedural moralities describe valuable procedures in terms of performing in conformity with rights, justice, respect for persons, and so on. Consequentialist moralities evaluate performances in terms of their estimated usefulness towards desired or desirable outcomes; they narrate that valuable performances are those which are most likely to result in valuable consequences either for the performer or for everyone.
    Performer-centred moralities ['virtue ethics'] assert that (a) how I perform both inputs to and outputs from who I am, and (b) being a valuable self (i.e., the kind of person from whom valuable performances flow) is the relevant point of personal morality. So what I ought to do is use my power of self-actualisation to try to become a valuable person - knowing that a valuable person is one who habitually performs in a valuable manner.

What generates the distinction between these three families of moral culture is the way in which the rules that they outputs can clash. Where a procedural morality may, for instance, urge me to respect the rights of others, even if doing so threatens to result in a less valuable output than would otherwise be possible, a consequentialist morality would urge me to disrespect the rights of others if that promises to have a more useful outcome.
    None of the above cultures describe what the case is according to some discovery of facts. They prescribe what a case ought to be according to some concept of value, and they all assume the same logical connection between what is valuable (the input value) and what I ought to do about it (the rule-set). This connection reflects the universal human assumption - which is necessary to being a person in the world - that some performances and/or characters are more or less valuable than others and that the more valuable should prevail over the less valuable (i.e., that I ought to perform/prefer what is valuable to that which is less valuable). The differences between them emerge from how each is being-useful-towards the actualisation of valuable possibilities and bad. In consequentialist ethics, for example, the end [output] justifies the means even if the means are cruel, unjust, dishonest or whatever. In procedural ethics and virtue ethics, however, the end does not justify the means if the means are vicious, unfair, violate rights and so on.

The criteria for selecting a moral culture that is suitable for my project are just those justifying the adoption of any instrument for any purpose. First, the culture should be reliably useful-towards the project for which is has been selected. Second, it should be one which as many interested parties as possible can use to their advantage. On the basis of the above considerations, I evaluate a virtue morality as the most suitable for someone who is intending to be less violent and more self-owning than is usual.

The Culture of Virtue. A virtue is an ability that enables the person who uses it to reliably achieve some value. Virtue ethics are cultures which narrate that persons should cultivate virtues. Cultivated virtues are habits such as those being-useful-towards being a good cook or poker player. A moral virtue is any cultivated virtue being habitually input to, and output from, the project of being a valuable person. If kindness is a moral virtue, for instance, then performing kindly is a valuable habit that can be cultivated. More importantly, performing kindly would give you a kindly character and having a kindly character would be your reason for performing kindly; performing kindly because you are kind would become a way of life. Moral virtues may or may not clash with other cultivated virtues. The virtues of a good cook, for example, are quite compatible with being kind; the virtues of an ambitious businesswoman may not be.
  Virtue morality is an ethical culture which narrates that persons should cultivate moral virtues. What counts as a virtue is defined by the input value of the culture. For my specific project, being habitually less violent and more self-owning as a person would be virtuous. Applying a culture of virtue to this project would acknowledge that I was born with various strengths and weaknesses but argue that, regardless of my natural or social inheritance, I can and should cultivate habits which are reliably being-useful-towards actualising the possibility of being less violent and more self-owning. Working out what those habits would be is part of the project.

I evaluate a virtue morality, as the most suitable culture for a violation-recovering personal morality (although not, I suspect, for social morality), by a difference of degree only. There is nothing magical about virtue morality such that adopting it will somehow immunise my reasoning against my own addiction to politics. It is just that, as a vehicle for my own attempted detoxification from politics, as a means of living a more self-owning life, virtue morality seems a degree more reliable than the other ethics, for four main reasons:
•    My performances actualise a character by actualising possibilities that are valuable to that character. Only a morality of virtue addresses this circularity directly, and only virtue-talk acknowledges that cultures are an instrument for actualising a certain kind of character. The performance-centred ethics reduce all ethics to a social function. But ethics are not just cultures which determine social performances; they also and especially determine who we are [our character] and the significance of our lives. Because being a person in the world is a project which settles the only issue which I have to settle (i.e., what way of life to live and, thereby, what kind of person I am being) I hold that these two outputs of morality matter more than its social function. My ethics primarily serve the project of being who I am in the world; they output my character and the significance of my life. Only a performer-centred morality seems fully sensitive to this fact.
•    The ease with which consequentialisms serve politics makes them unreliable for my purpose.
•    Virtue morality seems to offer the best ground on which clashes between duties and consequences can be resolved. For example, procedural ethics urge me to tell the truth even if the consequences promise to be disastrous. Consequentialist ethics, on the other hand, urge me to lie if that promises the most profitable outcome. Virtue morality would urge me to be a valuable person and to intelligently balance duties and outcomes on a case-by-case basis, in the most valuable way I can, because that is what a valuable person would do. This promises to be far more relevant to performing self-owningally as a person in the real world than does choosing either of the conflicting performance-prescribing ethics.
•    The performance-centred ethics imply that persons were somehow made to serve value; only the performer-centred morality properly avows that values were invented by persons to serve the project of being persons in the world.

Where both procedural and consequentialist ethics primarily urge me to perform in certain ways, virtue morality addresses my life-value directly by urging me to choose being a certain kind of person and let my performances flow from and back to that. This is more radical than other ethics in the literal sense of addressing the input value which is the real root [radix] of all ethics. Virtue morality does not, however, flip-flop from 'doing' to 'being' under some strained 'faith versus works' dichotomy; I cannot, for example, be honest without performing honestly. The morality simply acknowledges that my character and performances are integrated and that similar performances can be more or less valuable according to the character which motives them. This specifically relates moral virtue to self-ownership. So say, for example, that I have a surplus of food, I learn of someone else who is hungry and I share some of my surplus with her. To the recipient of my giving it is unlikely to matter why I share my surplus; a hungry person doesn't care whether I am being genuinely caring, showing off, stroking my ego, on a tax dodge, earning Brownie Points with my god/goddess/guru, or whatever. She is just happy to fill her belly. So, from an performance-centred point of view, it is good/valuable to perform the right/valuable act for whatever reason. From an performer-centred point of view it is still good to do right, but it is better [more valuable] to do right because that is what a valuable person does. In this case, for instance, giving is a virtue because it actualises a valuable possibility both for the recipient and, if done for the right reason, for my cultural character. All ethics address my performances, but my life-value does not just inform my performances but also my reasons for performing. The performer's reason for giving some of his surplus to someone in want is not addressed by ethics that address only his performances. Virtue morality addresses not only my performances, both procedurally and in terms of probable outcomes, but also specifically addresses my reason for performing as I do. To be a virtuous person, in terms of virtue morality, is to be one who is normally [habitually] generous for the right reason - with the right reason being that of being-towards the kind of person who normally does what valuable persons do. This does not contradict performance-centred moralities, and a morally virtuous person is more likely to be giving, in any case, than is someone normally vicious who gives only in hope of a profitable return of some kind. But, under a virtue morality, the most valuable object of a personal morality is not just to be good or do good, but to integrate both. To 'be' is always to be something or someone; and being a person, in particular, is something I do - a skill that I perform. So being virtuous heals the artificial dichotomy between doing and being by being-towards the kind of person who is skilling himself in the rôle of performing the kind of valuable acts that only valuable persons can perform. It is about developing and practising the skills of being a valuable person. This means that a giving person, for example, is not only normally disposed to give to others (the virtue is stable by being habitual) but also reliably successful at doing so fairly, rationally, and to good effect.

A Vocabulary of 'Better' and 'Worse'. Various cultures provide us with various ways of talking about differences. New Zealanders, for example, use a vocabulary of metres, centimetres, and kilometres, for discoursing about differences in length or distance. Americans use a vocabulary of inches, feet, yards and miles. All human cultures of measure - ethical, mathematical, scientific, economic or whatever - are instituted communally. The differences between, say, shorter and longer distances, good apples and rotten apples, well-played games and those that are badly played, performances that are fair or unfair, and so on, are all real, but they can be expressed only once we institute vocabularies for ∙ discoursing about them and ∙ formalising a shared measure of the differences between them. These vocabularies enable us to evaluate and talk about differences - and that is all that they do. They do not commit us to believing that centimetres or inches are real, only that the differences they quantify are. I can measure differences by weight, length, colour, breaking strain, or whatever, but I cannot find the scales of measure (the grams, centimetres and so on) among the differences; I can find lengths of string, but I cannot find bits of length in string.
    A vocabulary of difference matters for ethics because comparative [relational] characteristics, such as those of good and evil or beauty and ugliness, are not discovered in objects but in the differences between certain performances, attitudes, things, and relationships, and others. I cannot, for example, point to any quanta of kindness or cruelty in an act. Nor can I lay the kindness of a performance against any measure of goodness built into the constitution of the world. But I can point to differences between performances, I can know that the differences are real, and it is the differences that I measure when I compare performances with each other - not that a performance is good or bad but that any one performance is more or less valuable than a possible other or others in a context where more than one is possible. If the supposed goodness 'in' a performance is elusive, but the differences between more or less valuable performances are both accessible and can be compared with each other, then it makes sense that the basic object of moral evaluation is neither good nor evil but the differences between better [more valuable] and worse [less valuable] states of affairs.
    A comparative vocabulary helps to clarify and simplify my morality because my actual choices are seldom between a clear good or clear evil. They are, rather, nearly always between a limited range of possibilities, none of which is clearly right or wrong but which are nearly always more or less valuable [better or worse] in comparison to the others. To do good, on a logic of difference, is just to choose only from among the more valuable of such possibilities as are actually open to me; I do not have to pursue or achieve some abstract ideal or essential good, an accessible better is enough. Once a comparative measure is institutionalised, the comparative 'better' and 'worse' and superlative 'best' and 'worst' can take over the task of narrating 'good' and 'evil' without implying any thingish status for values.

A personal morality which satisfies my input value, and the basic principles of reliable morality, is that of cultivating a habit of treating integrity, in all its forms, as prima facie valuable; not that I should never violate any integrity (which would be impossible) but that I should institute a habit of performing as if respect for integrity was good, caring for integrity was better than good, and violating integrity was worse than good.
    This morality makes sense not only because integrity is valuable but also because it directly addresses the habit, of violating integrity, which I have found to be both the source of human violence and inimical to self-ownership. In effect, the morality renovates my moral default standard. A default standard is the rule that applies in the absence of any special justifications for doing otherwise. In parentocentricity, being-towards status by violence is the default standard, and I assume a right to violate what I can unless someone else can either stop me or show me that I shouldn't. A morality of prima facie respect for integrity reverses this logic by favouring the value of integrity rather than the value of its violation. Thus, for a renovated morality, the input value would be that of integrity in all its forms. The rule emerging from this value would be that I ought to respect integrity. Respect for integrity would be the default standard, a base-line measurement of adequate value ('good'), nourishing integrity would be a better [more valuable] than the default while violating integrity would be worse [less valuable].

This changes the traditional human default standard by institutionalising a universal value (that of all integrity generally) which, when encultured as a virtue morality, outputs a rule urging me to cultivate the habit of treating integrity as prima facie valuable and violation as a prima facie disvalue. This doesn't rule all violence as wrong but as in need of adequate justification; not that I must never violate any integrity, nor that I can violate whatever I like unless I have an overriding reason not to, but that I should not violate even my own property and personhood unless I have clearly adequate justification for doing so.
    The only adequate justifications of violation, allowed by a respect for the value of integrity, are those which, on a comparative scale of the possibilities open to me, actualise more value than the alternatives by being-useful-towards as much value for as little violation as is within the skills that an integrity-respecting [virtuous] person would cultivate. Not that I should never violate integrity, nor that I should always strive to maximise value, but that I should habitually predispose myself towards value and against violation, and should always aim for as little violation of integrity as is compatible with actualising value. So say, for example, that a human child and dog both run into the path of my car as I am travelling down the road. To simply brake would be to risk hitting both of them, and to swerve away from one is to swerve towards the other. If I put a dog in peril, by swerving to avoid a human child, I am enacting an ethic by which, for all persons in all situations, it is better [more valuable] to be the kind of person who would normally risk a dog to save a child than it would be to become the kind of person who would habitually risk a child to save a dog or to whom it doesn't matter one way or the other. I believe this to be reasonable, valuable, and impartial, even though it is implicitly political and I would prefer to eschew all politics if I could. For my belief to be justified there must be some integrity-respecting way of comparing the value of different integrities. As it happens there are two aspects of integrity which, together, enable me to do this.

• The quantitative aspect pegs value to amount. By this measure a tree is more valuable than one of its branches and two trees are more valuable than one. So, according to this measure, I would need greater justification for cutting down two trees than I would to cut down one tree, and greater justification for cutting a tree down than for cutting off a couple of its branches. I would similarly need greater justification for harming an animal, which has a central nervous system and can experience pain, than I would for harming a tree which does not have a central nervous system and so doesn't experience pain.
• The qualitative aspect attaches value to the significance that an integrity has for the only foundation which value has (i.e., the permeate projects of persons). It terms of this measure, a tree with scientific or rarity value, cultural or religious significance, for instance, would be more valuable than, say, a plantation trees being cultivated for their timber. The qualitative measure is justified just so long as it is ∘ integrated with the quantitative measure and ∘ comparative - not that some integrity is valuable and some is not but that, measured against each other by the quantitative-qualitative scale which counts all integrity as valuable, all integrities are more or less valuable than others.

Virtue in the Absence of Fellowship. One problem with trying to recover from my own addiction to the permeate mythos is that, at the present time, I neither have nor know of any integrity-respecting community of self-owning persons with which to engage and/or from which to seek support in recovering. There is no 'Alcoholics Anonymous' for recovering addicts of permeate mythology. Another problem is that I can expect other persons to make my attempts at being self-owning expensive. Those who don't care have always been happy to leave those who do care to clean up their mess, and those who value violence have always treated any attempt at being decent as a weakness to be exploited.
    I cannot solve these problems, but a renovated virtue morality should help me deal with them because such a morality obliges me only to do the best I can with what I have got, and the best I can do with what I have is decrease the quantity and quality of integrity that I violate while being-towards actualising the most value. Parentocentricity conditions me to absolve myself from my responsibility for myself by becoming an effect of other folks' performance; I am, for example, absolved from being honest if everyone else is lying. I do not, however, do the best I can by violating my own integrity in order to respect the integrity of a community addicted to the violation of integrity.
    Both self-ownership and respect for my own integrity commend to me the virtue of making myself into my own rôle-model. Renovated virtue morality is being-useful-towards this just so long as I choose being-towards a self-owning person living a self-owning person's life in the real world. What matters to virtue morality is not whether others 'keep their side of the bargain' because virtue makes no bargain. Virtue morality promises neither penalty nor reward, not an easy life nor a hard one, neither success nor failure. It is irrelevant to the virtuous life whether others appreciate my efforts or just go on being normal. It does not matter whether being virtuous makes me happy, whether a God notices, or if there turns out to be some kind of karmic mechanism that rewards virtue. All that matters is that, having discovered the value of integrity, I take responsibility for what I know by doing my best to treat integrity as valuable. Let others do what they will. I am who I am, I do what I do. What I do is what I can do, and what I can do is enact my own understanding of what is and is not valuable. Whether that changes everything or nothing, a little or a lot, it is enough.
    Because human persons violate our own integrity through our addiction, we cannot depend on ourselves for our own self-validation. We are thus co-dependent on the violated integrity of others for a counterfeit of that validation; we need others to accord with our preferences, and feel unsafe otherwise, so we recruit and are recruited by others to protect and bolster our own self-deception. Virtue morality, however, helps me keep my responsibility focussed where it matters most and where my addiction conditions me to most turn away from it - i.e., on what I am doing with my potentiality for being who I am in the world. An important aspect of this endeavour is that, although success is valuable, it is not all that matters; the ongoing value of being-towards a valued possibility is itself a virtue. There is, for example, little value in being a mathematician if I cannot be relied on to get my sums right. But if I value being a mathematician then there is virtue in being-towards getting my sums right even if I do keep going wrong and have to keep correcting myself. A virtue morality not only makes success more likely, through insisting on persistence, it also makes mistakes more forgivable. So there is serious and valuable being-towards here. I do expect a virtuous mathematician to strive for success with some success; while virtue isn't perfection, the virtuous mathematician, like the virtuous lover, builder, or person, should make less mistakes, and recover from them faster, with practice over time. One of the virtues of being a virtuous person is staying committed to the virtues which make excellence possible even though we all periodically fail to do as well as we could. I expect this of a mathematician, a builder, a lover, a doctor, and the mechanic who services my car. I ask no more or less of myself.

All of this accords with my own understanding that morality is not best being-useful-towards perfection (which is impossible to achieve in any case, and is tempting only because of my parentocentric bias towards god-playing) or some kind of personal 'growth' (the end of all growth is only death). The point of any culture, including discourse, maths or science, is the actualisation of valued possibilities. The point of morality [the evaluative ethics of personhood] is the actualisation of valuable personhood. The moral default is goodness as a standard of adequate personhood, but caring about goodness is not a recipe for either success [political value] or happiness [preference value] in this world. No one who has paid attention to reality needs the Rule of Conservation to confirm that goodness-in does not equal happiness-out. If I set myself up to live a good life in this world then I do so at some cost to myself and without any guarantee of success, happiness, or reciprocity. There is no evidential support for the pious hope that there is some system of reward and punishment in the universe that 'balances the moral books' and will 'pat me on the back' for being a good boy. On the contrary, it is evident that caring is a nuisance and recovering from an addiction is a struggle. Indifference is more effective than goodness at delivering happiness because indifference is a death-copying state. And death, which is the end of value, is also the end of the disvalues, such as pain, despair and discomfort, which cause us unhappiness.
    If a death-like state is what I want, if I do not want to be self-owning enough to care about any integrity (including my own) and want only to be rich, happy, important, contented, or uninvolved, then recovering from my addiction to violation is not the right way to go about that - some sort of drug, secular or religious ideology, busy lifestyle, or other distraction, would be more reliable. If I do care about my integrity, enough to want to recover from my addiction to its violation, then the culture of virtue reminds me that there are no soft options, no excuses, and no one to deceive but myself. If I am tempted to be dishonest when no one is watching, when no one cares, no one would know and none be harmed, then virtue talk reminds me that I am watching, I care, I know and I would be harmed. No one else is listening to my justifications. I am plaintiff and defendant, judge, jury, prosecuting attorney and defence counsel. I do not have to live, and I do not have to live well or strive for a meaningful life. But if no one but me is listening to my lies then all of the normal human excuses for not actualising the value of my personhood seem rather pointless.

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