I’ve been catching up after the winter storm in Texas, and I didn’t quite catch up enough to post last Sunday. So, today, I’m going to take a short detour and talk about excellences of mind and the traditional virtues.

Some people have asked me why I don’t use the more common language of “intellectual virtues.” It’s true: The term “intellectual virtue” has caught on, and there are many different lists and typologies of intellectual virtues, each of which has something to commend its way of approaching excellences of mind. But I prefer “deliberative excellence” instead of “intellectual virtue.”

Let’s start with virtue. Obviously, I don’t dislike the word all that much: After all, this site and my philosophical mission is called live your virtue! But when we’re talking details, excellence is better at conveying what we’re striving for than virtue. This is largely because the term virtue sounds like a state of character that one achieves once and for all. As in, I’m virtuous now. What’s next? While it’s true that excellence can be achieved on particular occasions, in general, if you want to be an excellent cook or guitar player, it takes more than one good performance. Rather, it takes ongoing commitment to a particular kind of practice of an activity, guided by reason and striving for standards intrinsic to the activity itself. A bonus in my choice of terms is that excellence is a much better all-around translation of the Greek term aretē, which has traditionally been translated “virtue.”

I prefer the term deliberative for a simple, practical reason: It’s more practical. Seriously: When we hear the word “intellectual” we tend to think of things like “the life of the mind,” abstractions, “ivory tower” sorts of ideas, and the like. Of course, abstract thought may well be a worthy pursuit, but I’m taking a cue from Aristotle on excellences of mind. These particular excellences are appropriate for purely intellectual pursuits, but one of the key features of Aristotle’s ethics is the role of practical reason in our lives, and practical reason is the application of reason to our decisions and actions. By and large, the same excellences that enable us to think critically about purely “mental” pursuits also allow us to determine how to act in and with the world. To capture that practical side and keep the abstract side, too, I like the term deliberative excellence.

In reflecting on Aristotle’s way of conceptualizing excellences of mind, it occurred to me these excellences can be organized by analogy with the traditional Greek virtues of wisdom, courage, and moderation. Thinking of them like this sheds some interesting light on how these excellences work together to produce Plato’s “harmony,” the virtue called justice.

We’ve been focused on deliberative humility, which is actually about moderation in belief-formation. There’s another side to moderation, which we’ll take up in the next post, but we can also map the major excellences of mind onto the traditional virtues. Think, for instance about courage: What does courage mean in deliberation? How do we enact courage in our belief formation?

And what about wisdom? What does “love of knowledge” mean for our deliberative practices? And if justice is the harmony produced when all the parts of us are doing their proper jobs, as Plato argues, then what is justice in our believing lives?

Next up: Deliberative moderation’s other half