Sean Virgil J.

Auxtero
IR258
Virtue Ethics
When I was in senior high school from a different university, our professor asked us to
choose what virtue we would like to have. Among the virtues are patience, beauty, courage,
and fairness. Majority of us decided to choose most of it except beauty. Some of my classmates
explained that having patience can make us emotionally strong; some of them decided to
choose courage for the reason that it is the ability to make things done regardless of how hard
it is; and some of them explained that fairness can have all the virtues provided. Our professor
was in tremor when none of our class decided to choose beauty. Why do we need beauty in the
first place? Why is it even necessary to make our judgements based on its beauty? How about
such actions, even does not fall under the idea of beauty, but still beneficial? He explained it
later on that beauty, as a virtue, is not limited to its idea of physicality, symmetrically, or even
its subjective idea. Beauty, on the other hand, is not limited to a thing’s physicality that satisfies
the eyes. Beauty as a virtue, therefore, can enlighten man’s mind necessary to appreciate your
environment and not only bounded to external output.
Man’s ability to think does not warrant a limitation. It is the very practice of every
human person that makes him a person. Virtue, itself, leads man to happiness. By being happy,
it does not necessarily mean that you are doing “good”. There are some scenarios that you are
eating the food you want, it makes you happy. However, it is not about how you achieve your
goal to be happy, but the question would be: does eating unhealthy food makes you happy
even if you know the fact that eating unhealthy food may affect your health? In this
perspective, even if a thing makes us happy, we cannot still have the assurance that we are
doing “good”.
It must have a balance of understanding and reason for us to reach such ethics. Failing
to follow the balance of, an emotion, for instance, this would lead to either excess or deficiency
rather than virtue. That is, instead of being healthy, an individual decided to eat unhealthy food
just because it made him happy. But the paramount question, however, did he really make
himself happy by the idea of good, or did he just follow his wants rather than needs?
It is now important to know that it must have a balance. It does not necessarily mean
that eating unhealthy food is bad and should warrant unethicality, but by the means of having a
control to it and making reasonable to do.