Virtue

Virtue is an activity of the soul and is synonymous to happiness. There are two kinds of virtue: intellectual and practical. I believe that both of these types of virtue work best hand-in-hand, but most of the time they are separate things. People are either intellectual or practical. For example, growing up, you see your parents driving all the time -- I mean, they used to take you every where, didn't they? Often times, you see children trying to drive their parent's car because they see their parents do it so often that they "know" how to drive, but have never done it, so they don't know how to drive. They have the intellect of "make the car move when the light is green and make it stop when the light is red or you're at the stop sign," but they don't know how to actually make the car move or stop because they have never experienced doing it before. This seems to be an ideal example in the fact that these two go hand-in-hand. You've seen your parents do that all the time so you grow up learning how to drive; as soon as you get your learner's permit, you get to experience driving for yourself. Then you have both the intellect and the practicality of driving.
But virtue also has it's vice. Virtue is "the golden mean" between virtue and vice. Too much or too little is a vice while virtue is perfectly in between. I thought the question of lying and honesty was an interesting topic to think about because honesty is virtuous in certain situations. To use the example we used in class, "Do I look fat in these pants?" If you say yes, you're being completely honest, but that wouldn't be virtuous because you would hurt their feelings. If you say no and you let them go out in those, you lied and that's not virtuous. So just don't answer the question. In class, we went from yes and no to "those pants are not your color" which never did answer the question. So in this case, not answering the question is virtuous?