Virtue Should Be Easy

We all love stories of heroically difficult acts of virtue: the reckless forgiveness of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, the courageous companionship of Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings and the death-defying stunts of the Avengers are all striking as much for their difficulty as for their stakes.

Our admiration for difficult acts of virtue makes perfect sense; it is the essence of expertise to do difficult things that other people cannot do, or can only do with great difficulty. One of the things that makes Tom Brady’s throws so impressive is that we cannot make them.

However, this impressiveness can lead to an easy error, which assumes that moral acts are better if they are harder. For example, someone might think that it is more morally valuable to fight off drunkenness as an alcoholic than as someone who does not have trouble staying sober. But this view is wrong, and understanding why it is wrong requires that we understand several principles about moral philosophy. And, moreover, without these fundamental principles, moral philosophy becomes eminently un-practical, and directed at all of the wrong things. So, today, I will outline some of these principles to help you avoid these disastrous moral errors!

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The first question we need to ask ourselves is why we want to be moral in the first place. Classically, this question had a two-fold answer. The first was based in the Aristotelian observation that human beings are made to be happy, and that happiness comes from pursuing excellence in all of our activities and capacities. To the extent that we achieve this excellence, which came to be called “virtues,” we were happy, fulfilled, well-off people. This makes Aristotelian ethics eminently practical, because Aristotle is not convinced by some idea of goodness that is divorced from our own natures. The question is not actually “how do I achieve as much goodness as possible,” because that is often outside of our control and ability to know. Rather, the question is “what kind of person am I to be?”

In classical Catholic ethics, this is all acknowledged, but there is more to it, for the simple reason that ethics were not invented by ourselves, but given to us by God.1 God created our nature, our moral intuitions (to a limited degree), and even revealed some of the things we could not figure out on our own.

This makes ethics a question, not just of how to life-hack ourselves to happiness, but also a question of having a healthy relationship with God himself. We now treat our natures, not just as our responsibility, but as a gift we received. This means that the Aristotelian aspect is not removed, only transcended. The moral life is still a question of who I am called to be. It is just clearer who called me in the first place. Happiness is not only my business anymore; it is the business of He who made it possible for me to be happy.

Aristotle famously argued that the goal of morality is to become a virtuous person, and defined the virtuous person as the person who acts rightly with ease. The reason for this goes back to the purpose for moral living: we are trying to become the right kind of person. And, undoubtedly, being able to do an act easily entails a greater expertise and skill at that act than being able to do it only with difficulty. I can make a three-point shot, but only with a lot of concentration, practice and at least a few mulligans. Steph Curry could probably make a three-pointer blindfolded with near-perfect accuracy.

So here’s the question: who is the better basketball player? And, even if we both made the shot, who made it better?

The answer to the first is obviously Steph. And I think the answer to the second is also, pretty obviously, Steph. His shot comes from a consistent process, is more certain to have gone in, and was, I guarantee, done with more technical perfection.

To take this to the moral field, it should be clear that moral acts that are right and done easily are better than acts that are right and done only with difficulty. The person who does the right easily has the requisite virtue more fully than the person who does the right thing only with much struggle. The first person can almost be said to be “more skilled” at virtue than the other person.

Since moral philosophy is about becoming the right kind of person, you should, in fact, want your moral choices to be easy! It should be easy to choose the good! To say that a moral choice is greater when it is difficult would be a little bit like saying that Tom Brady’s greatest moment as a quarterback came early in his career, when he found reading defenses and passing touchdowns to be really, really hard.

But, of course, that is not true. It is not the difficulty of Tom Brady’s performance for Tom Brady that makes it valuable, but the capacity to which it is able to correspond to what he should be doing as a quarterback.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Tom Brady doing things that are objectively more difficult is more impressive than things that are not so. But it is not the difficulty that makes the act valuable. It is the qualities that the act has itself: the order, dexterity and coherence of Tom Brady’s hypothetical play still make it impressive even if Tom has found it to be easy for years.

Similarly, while it is true that certain heroic acts of virtue will be more difficult by the nature of their circumstances, they do not cease to be heroic if the saint who enacts them finds them to be easy. Rather, it is still more impressive, more valuable if an act that requires a high level of virtue can be done with ease.

If you are still not totally convinced, maybe this will help. Consider two husbands, both of whom have an ex-girlfriend approach them and ask them to leave their respective wives. One is grossed out, angrily tells off the ex-girlfriend immediately and does not give it a second thought. The other is sorely tempted, feels the pull and struggles with his decision for hours before finally deciding to stick with his wife and not destroy their marriage.

Both men made the same morally right decision. One man found it easy and one man found it hard. If difficulty makes an act more virtuous, then the sorely tempted man was the more morally praiseworthy of the two of them. But which of the two would you rather be? And, if you were in the wife’s position, who would you rather be married to?

Of course, nobody makes it through life without being sorely tempted. None of us are born the man or woman that we ought to be, and can only become so through great difficulty. My argument does not imply that we should put down people who have a hard time doing the right thing but do it anyways. Instead, we should encourage them for making a step towards real virtue and try to help them get there.

Virtue is hard. It requires a tremendous amount of practice and perfection of the will. But our goal is not that we would do morally difficult things well. Our goal is that we would do the right thing, always, easily.

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