You want to become a better person. But how? Should you try to become a well rounded person by developing all of the virtues and avoiding all of the vices? Or should you focus on what you are best at and hone the extremities of your personality into instruments for good?
Prerequisites: None.
Originally Written: April 2017.
Confidence Level: Interesting and useful to think about.
Everyone is unique.
One facet of this universal uniqueness is that everyone has a distinctive collection of character traits.
Let’s look at two techniques to understand and manage these character traits.
The first technique begins with a list of virtues and vices. You compare your character traits with this list of virtues and vices. You notice that there are some virtues that you are better at and some that you are worse at. Similarly, there are some vices that you are more prone to and some that you are less prone to.
You wish to improve your personality and are willing to put some effort into doing so. To accomplish this, you attempt to develop the virtues that you don’t have and to suppress the vices that you do have. Your goal is to have all of the virtues to at least some degree and only minimal influence from the vices. Someone who has accomplished this is a well-rounded person.
Some of the differences in human personalities are clearly more ethical than others, such as cruelty vs. kindness. Other differences, such as introversion vs. extroversion, seem to be completely independent of ethics. They extend along axes perpendicular to the classical virtue vs. vice dichotomy. It is not clear how a well-rounded person should develop these attributes, even though these may be an important part of her identity.
The second technique believes that most character traits cannot be classified as virtues or vices. Instead, it makes more sense to understand your character traits as typical or atypical. Your typical traits largely reflect the community that you are a part of. Your atypical traits make you distinctively you. In certain situations, an atypical trait is useful and is then a powerful virtue. In other situations, an atypical trait is harmful and is then a terrible vice. Your virtues are your own vices since they are the ways in which you are most distinctive from them rest of your community.
If you believe in this second paradigm, you could still attempt to become well-rounded by working to enhance the traits that describe you the least and diminish the traits that describe you the most. This doesn’t necessarily make you a better person – it just makes you more typical for the society. Instead, this paradigm suggests another strategy to manage your distinctive traits. You can emphasize and work on developing the traits that you already have and neglect the traits that you don’t have. While enhancing these traits, you also learn how to put yourself in more situations where these traits are virtues and learn how to use these traits virtuously in situations where they could become vices.
The real world is somewhere between these two paradigms. Some character traits are clearly virtues and some are clearly vices. Many traits are virtuous in some situations and vicious in other situations. Laziness could be valuable if it encourages you to find effort-saving innovations. Hope could be detrimental if it prevents you from fleeing abusive relationships. Virtues may be good only most of the time and vices may be bad only most of the time.
Even in this more ambiguous world, the two strategies discussed above remain. You could gather all of the virtues and expel all of the vices or you could hone the extremities of your personality into instruments for good.
The figures below show visual representations of these two strategies for four randomly generated ‘individuals’. A collection of character traits is arranged in a circle, with virtues clustered towards the top of the circle and vices clustered towards the bottom of the circle. The individual’s aptitude for each of these traits is shown as a distance from the center of the circle.
The black shape on the left of each row shows the individual’s inherent aptitude towards each trait.
The blue shape in the center shows what her personality would become if she pursued the first strategy. All of the virtues are enhanced and all of the vices are repressed. The individual’s traits have smoothed out as a result of her efforts which focus on missing virtues and prominent vices. The blue shape represents how she would become a well-rounded individual.
The red shape in the center shows the result of this individual pursuing the second strategy. The differences between the things that she is apt at and the things that she is inept at have grown. Since she is both learning to enhance the extremities and to use them for good, so these extremities are not just getting longer – they are also curving upward. Both the center and right figures in each row also show the inherent aptitude as a reminder of where this individual began.
Which technique is better?
The answer is not immediately clear. A well-rounded person’s worst vices are not as bad as the honed person. She has developed more virtues, but her best virtues aren’t as well developed. The well-rounded person conforms more to a better version of society, while the honed person has maintained more of and enhanced her distinctive identity. There are obviously intermediate strategies. Even if you typically followed the second strategy, it might be better to suppress your innate cruelty than to enhance it while looking for circumstances where it is beneficial. The question shifts to: “To what extent should I pursue each of these strategies?” but remains unsolved.
A goal of Christianity is to try to make people become like Christ. To become like Christ, we will have to become perfect in all of the virtues. If this sounds impossible, that’s because it is – without the grace of Christ. Becoming perfect in everything initially suggests well-roundedness: if we have to learn all of the virtues eventually, we might as well get started on all of them now. But we could also argue in the opposite direction. We will eventually have to become superlative at all of the virtues, so we might as well start by learning to become superlative at some.
We can also consider how each of these strategies fare in different societies.
The job market encourages people to take the second strategy. Most people develop specialized skills either through schooling or through experience that gives them a comparative advantage in their career. Doctors learn organic stamp collecting, engineers learn how to look stuff up in tables, welders learn to locally blast metal with fire, and people in customer service learn to take sass. The job market ignores any skills that are not relevant to your career. Honing the extremities of your personality into instruments for profit is a much better strategy than trying to become a well-rounded employee. The job you receive focuses your efforts on the extremities of your personality, reinforcing your commitment to the second strategy.
People need jobs that put them in situations where the extremities of their personalities are virtuous or useful. The belief that anyone could serve in any position would be destructive both to the person in that position and to everyone around them. A society based on the second strategy needs an effective mechanism for sorting people into their respective positions. The job market uses a decentralized series of resumes and interviews to try to find good matches for people and jobs. Although this system certainly doesn’t always make the best choices for the people involved, it would be difficult to develop a better way to match highly specialized people to positions.
Churches and volunteer organizations are much more likely to be organized in a manner consistent with the first strategy. They care less about individual differences when choosing positions and often encourage people to fulfill responsibilities for which they have little natural aptitude. Part of this is done out of necessity: local volunteer organizations often have fewer people to tap into than businesses in the job market. Part of this is also an effort to give their volunteers virtues and experiences that they would otherwise completely lack. These organizations look for and develop well-rounded people.
I will not answer to what extent you should pursue each of these strategies. I usually prefer the second one, although callings and assignments in my church sometimes push me towards developing virtues I have purposely neglected into fledgling talents. Eventually, we will get the opportunity to become skillful at using all of the virtues and rejecting all of the vices. Which route you take to get there is up to you.
Appendix: Code to Generate Images
I generated the images myself, using the following code written for Matlab / GNU Octave. It takes a collection of random numbers, and then shifts and smooths or exaggerates them.
% Initial Conditions
N = 100;
R = 2*rand(N,1); % Choose N random points
T = linspace(0,2*pi,N)'; % Positions around the circle
dT = T(2) - T(1);
RA = CyclicMovingAverage(R,3); % Smooth out the randomness some
T(end+1) = T(1); RA(end+1) = RA(1); % This makes the boundaries clearer
F = figure;
polar(T,RA,'k');
% Well-Rounded
RA2 = CyclicMovingAverage(RA + sin(T),3); % Shift everything upwards and smooth.
RA2(RA2 < 0) = 0;
hold on;
polar(T,RA2,'b');
% Honing Extremities
RA3 = RA.^3; % Cube the result to make it more dramatic.
% Bend the extrema towards the top by shifting T.
T1 = T; T1(T > 3*pi/2) = T(T > 3*pi/2) - 2*pi; % It will be easier to have some of these negative.
T2 = -atan(T1 - pi/2); % Function to use.
T3 = T + 3 .* RA3 .* T2 .* dT;
polar(T3,RA3,'r');
axis auto
text = findall(F,'type','text'); delete(text);You will also need this function:
function RA = CyclicMovingAverage(R,n)
% Calculates the moving average of R.
% Each element of RA is the average of the elements of 2n+1 elements of R,
% evenly spaced on each side.
% This is cyclic: the ends are averaged together.
% R is a vector. n is an integer smaller than half the length of R.
L = length(R);
RA = zeros(L,1);
for I = 1:L
r = R(I);
for J = 1:n
IJp = mod(I+J-1,L) + 1;
IJm = mod(I-J-1,L) + 1;
rp = R(IJp);
rm = R(IJm);
r = r + rp + rm;
end
RA(I) = r/(2*n+1);
end
end