I am drawing somewhat for this understanding on my work on free will and conscious-influence (see this essay and this blog post), so the reader may wish to peruse that work at some point. Though I am also developing these concepts as separate outgrowths from that base.
I am not considering any sort of societal virtue ethic in this post. Though there are many such efforts ongoing and much valuable work being done on the development of a feasible virtue ethic, it seems to me that it is a quite distinct proposition to consider virtues as inner states rather than as something that can be reliably identified from an exterior perspective (which generally utilizes interpretation of actions that may or may not reflect the actual inner state of an individual).
The lists of virtues and corresponding vices used here are the so-called Catholic virtues/vices. This is both for convenience and because much of the work on the codification and development of these paired virtue/vice concepts was done with a specific focus on the inner (‘spiritual’) being of individuals. There is much of value to be found in such work, even for non-religious or anti-religious people. We should not neglect to harvest the fruits of the many thousands of dedicated and sometimes brilliant minds that have done ‘spiritual’ work regarding the human condition and the being of humanity, just because they did their work under the aegis of religious rule and within the confines of religious doctrine. My working lists are, respectively and with matching inverses (in no particular order or implied hierarchy), humility, patience, kindness, diligence, charity, temperance, chastity, and pride, wrath, envy, sloth, greed, gluttony, lust.
So, each individual has a distinct energetic state of being which has broad correspondence to the state of consciousness of that individual. The virtues and the vices are labels for specific identified states of being in an individual that tend to lead directly to certain types of outward behavior, but are first and foremost inner states of being. So temperance, for example, is an inner energetic state of moderation, as a specific willed choice, in response to a potential (but thus negated by temperance) state of gluttony.
I use this example advisedly, because all of the virtues are specific responses to their corresponding vice. It is the vices which are the ‘natural’ or primary states, which arise from the interaction of the consciousness with the bodily passions or urges or instincts or desires (or possibly with some dimension-state source of those forces/influences upon the consciousness), and the virtues which are formulated as an inverse or negating response to the potential or actualized being-state of the vices. As such, the virtues are both variable, in that they must be a matching inverse to the vice-state in question to be fully effective, and transitory, in that they need not be fully realized in an individual (energetically or in terms of ongoing field-state) except as a momentary negating response to the energetic vice-state or potential energetic vice-state which they are used to negate. Outwardly, we may speak of someone as being temperate in character, but the inner reality is not necessarily that they maintain an enduring temperate state of being. It would be wasteful and confining to do so; to limit the variability of the mind-being is to limit the potential of the self. Vices should be combated, but we need not maintain vigilance of being against a given vice unless that vice threatens to arise. Instead, a temperate person is one that has a temperate response to urges of gluttony—to the eventual case that they may not even feel the gluttony after a time but instead stop it from arising at all with their temperate response or pre-response (a flash being-state to the precursors of arising gluttony?).
Why then, if the vices are the ‘natural’ states, are they wrong? Why should they be combated, be negated energetically by an inverse virtue-state? Vices are wrong and should be negated because the consequences of indulging in vice are imbalanced and harmful to the individual (and often to others who come into contact with that individual). The being-state of each of the seven vices listed here is harmful to the individual. In different ways and this can vary by individual, but the harm to the self is always present. Gluttony has negative health impacts and over time limits conscious focus solely to the (ultimately unfulfilling) objects of consumption. Lust overdraws and generally wastes the energy resources of the body in a mostly meaningless pursuit of pleasure. Wrath transforms the being-state into a base state that is highly energetically inefficient and severely limits the intellect. Pride limits the ability to see and comprehend truth and the true state of one’s being, in that it imposes a false belief-image in the place of real perception (with simply enormous negative consequences over time). Sloth is a degenerative state that wastes the personal energies that it seems to be preserving, leading to a downward spiral that can be very difficult to break. Greed transforms the being of the person into one that is predatory upon the property and thus well-being of others. This is also self-limiting and harmful over time, though in a different way than is pride. Envy alters the perceptions so that one comes to define themself in terms of the state of others rather than of the state of oneself. And so on—these statements are just brief encapsulations of one negative aspect of the given vice. All of the vices are limiting to the being of the self in some way. All are harmful to the being of the self over time. Thus concepts, and specific negating energy states, of virtue have been developed over historical time to combat the harms of the vices.
Above I mention that the vices arise from the interaction of the consciousness with influences from the body. This is so, but vice as such is more than that. It is an amplification, or over-amplification, of a natural physical state (or social-interaction-state) and its generally appropriate momentary response into an enduring energy state that imposes an inappropriate pattern of being upon the self. Hunger, for example, is a state of the body that should be met with nourishment, thus eliminating the physical hunger-state and so too the need for further nourishment. In order for the body to communicate this to the consciousness, however, which takes place within a field-state of energy, the basic bodily need for nourishment must be communicated to the consciousness in energetic form. However that takes place (which is well beyond the scope of this post), an energy pattern 'hunger' is imparted to the consciousness as an influence upon it, demanding a response. A proper response is a temperate one, which is simply to meet the exact nourishment needs of the body and then move on to other things. The beginnings of gluttony may initially arise partially because the consciousness itself is in a constant state of flux/learning/growth and also because communication between the body and the consciousness is itself unintelligent and susceptible to interruption or misinterpretation or any number of other problems. There is no clear internal manual or guidance for how the consciousness should respond to the need-influences of the body. (This problem has been sought to be solved by external training/teaching in such things as theories of virtue and vice, such as the one I am developing here. With some success, but also many failures. A better solution is for the individual to make mistakes and learn and grow [to experiment] and consistently attempt to become better, internally and as an individual. Though perhaps the best solution is some combination of those two approaches.)
Beyond that precursor confusion which can often lead to gluttony, the vice of gluttony itself is a consciously chosen state of being that over-meets the hunger-need, with excessive food eaten (or things consumed, physically or mentally) or by maintaining the being-state of consumption longer than necessary. It is pleasurable or satisfying for the consciousness to assuage the hunger of the body, appropriately so as it incentivises one to meet the needs of the body for nourishment, but the consciousness indulges in gluttony when it seeks to amplify or extend that pleasure-satisfaction-state well beyond the point where the hunger-needs of the body are met. To the detriment of the body over time because of over-nourishment, but also and more critically to the harm of the being-state of the consciousness-self from the many cascading negative effects of indulging in the energetic being-state of the vice of gluttony. Similar problems arise with the other vices, though there are some categorical differences. Gluttony, lust, and sloth are usually vices that arise because of over-amplification of need-responses from the body, but pride, envy, and wroth are vices that usually arise from over-amplification of need-responses from the mind (with greed somewhere in the middle), which are generally stimulated in response to social interaction with other people (or just other beings or the environment or even the perceptions of the self) rather than more direct need-influence communicated by the body. Social-interaction vices will be somewhat different to explain, but I think my detailed explanation here with the example of gluttony is sufficient for the reader to understand my points. In all cases a state of vice is a conscious choice (which choices can become habitual and eventually defining aspects of character) to maintain a being-state of consciousness that is enjoyable or seems to meet a need, but that is also an unbalanced or mismatched state that diverges from reality and real responses, to a greater or lesser extent, to the detriment of the self over time. Vice warps the mind—it alters perceptions and responses and sends growth and learning down false paths.
Virtues also alters the mind, if kept as enduring states or even just if utilized momentarily in response to vice-urges, but the virtues tend to alter the mind in a positive way and to encourage adherence to true perceptions and judgments over time. Virtue, if pursued honestly and correctly, helps lead to the perception of reality as it is rather than as one might wish it to be. Over time this will help reduce errors of choice and the many (very many) false judgments that arise from the many false mental paths taken under the influence of the deceits of vice. Humility fights and can negate pride and the false perceptions that pride engenders. Patience limits and can eventually eliminate wrath (excessive anger) because anger itself arises in response to focus on specific events and compressed time—the patient response is to enter a state of broader evaluation of events over time with greater perspective and to judge whether the anger is excessive or not. Kindness and good-feeling toward others, whether merited or not, negates the state of envy in oneself by rather directly replacing a negative feeling with the positive inverse. Diligence combats sloth by maintaining an active state of being and guarding against the waste or siphoning off of personal energies. Charity as a being-state negates greed toward the objects of charity as a direct inverse. Temperance moderates the urges to gluttony and helps one to perceive it for the wrong choice that it is. Chastity limits the harms of ongoing lust by restricting any focus on sex to specific times/places/people and encouraging the sex focus to be about a shared joy between partners rather than a rut-urge-fulfillment of the individual.
These outright negations or alleviating responses occur because in some way (or many ways) the virtue is an energetic inverse of the vice. Just now I have described some virtues as direct inverse-negation energy states to the energy states of the vice and other virtues as limiting or channeling the vice, but in truth virtues are not easy to define or encapsulate and can be either thing, or both. Ideally, a vice is a distinct state of energy that can be negated by the inverse state of the corresponding virtue, and one can develop such capabilities, but life and the perceptions of the consciousness are generally much more muddled than this talk of precise energy-state inversion. Thus I have suggested, in some descriptions above, that virtue is not a negation of being (though it can be a negation of the choice of vice), but rather an ongoing learning response of one's needs and choices and the consequences therefrom. This is so for each of the virtues. So kindness is not just an outright energetic negation of envy but also a moderation of the imbalanced response that envy is. Envy is a vice, but the perception and evaluation of potentially unfair socio-economic differences between oneself and others is not a vice. Kindness as an energy-negation of the state of vice should not also negate the underlying real issue that may lead to the vicious state of envy. Etc.
[Joseph Jones, 03 June 2022]