The Virtuous, the Beautiful, & Margaret Thatcher.

That was one of Margaret Thatcher’s finest hours.  She had more than one.  I fell head over heels in love with her back then.  The passion has not faded with time.  If there are sons of Hercules, so also there are daughters.  As I have written in several Facebook posts, I would gladly have had her children. In honor of her passing, I offer this post. 

I have been enjoying an extended conversation about virtue with intrepid reader and friend, Miranda.  You can read it here.  One challenge that she posed goes like this:

Dr. Blanchard: Congratulations on your presentation and thank you, once again, for taking the time to respond to my questions. I have been trying to figure out why your description of virtue troubles me so much. It is not, I think, so much because I think you are using circular logic as it is that I am not sure your definition is particularly useful.

If someone was interested in becoming a virtuoso and they asked you what a virtuoso was, you might tell them a virtuoso was someone who played brilliantly. But what is brilliance? How does one go about playing brilliantly?

I suppose you could say that he might imitate another virtuoso, just as you might tell someone who was interested in being virtuous to imitate a virtuous man – but without having a more defined idea of what actually makes someone a virtuoso or a virtuous man, how would you really know that the person you copied was a virtuoso or a virtuous man?

…Some people have many virtues, along with many vices. Most people are a mix or virtue and vice. How do we know what criteria to use to determine whether or not we are actually following the example of a virtuous man? Is it all subjective?

If I understand the objection here, it goes like this: if virtue is what virtuous persons do and virtuous persons are persons who do virtuous things, then recognizing either the one or the other presupposes that we know what virtuous actions and virtuous persons are.  How do we gain that knowledge in the first place?  

I argue Platonically that virtue is an idea, or form, or realm in design space that we come to recognize in the same way as we recognize mathematical ideas.  If moral virtue is not as precise as mathematics, neither is there as much disagreement about it as is often supposed.  Even the vicious recognize what virtue is, for how else could they pretend to be virtuous? 

However, let me employ one more analogy.  What is health?  We come to know what it is when we recognize it in ourselves and in other people.  Plato’s Socrates distinguished between medicine, which restores health, and gymnastics which hones it to perfection.  If you asked for a precise definition of a healthy person and a healthy diet, regimen, etc., one that would tell you in advance which actions and persons are healthy, you are in for a disappointment.  The same food may be very healthy for one person and very unhealthy for another who is allergic to it.  An exercise that is very good for a healthy athlete may be injurious to someone with a torn muscle.  There are very vigorous debates about what things promote health and what things inhibit it.  That does not mean that health is at all subjective. 

I think that much the same is true of the virtues.  We come to know them the same way that we come to know what is healthy.  As evidence of this, I submit the example of Margaret Thatcher. 

I once had a photo of Thatcher walking with Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, and Francois Mitterrand.  These were the four that stood up to the Soviet Union during the most critical moment in the Cold War.  The Soviets had deployed short range nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe in the hopes of decoupling Western Europe from the United States.  Reagan moved to place similar weapons in NATO territory.  The left in Europe and the U.S. went to war (figuratively) to stop the deployment.  Of course there was no similar movement in the totalitarian bloc. 

Thatcher, Reagan, Kohl, and Mitterrand stood firm.  The direct result of that was the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was unique in so far as weapons were not only withdrawn but dismantled.  The indirect result was the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

I don’t know Kohl or Mitterrand well enough to judge but I submit that Reagan and Thatcher exemplified the virtues of prudence and courage, at the very least.  They judged correctly how to defeat the enemy without resorting to actual bloodshed.  They held the course in spite of enormous pressures.  If you want to know what virtue is, that would be it.