Ideal and Virtue
Given the complexity of putting ideals into practice, and resolving conflicts between them, it is not uncommon to see them reduced to dogma. One way to avoid this, according to Bernard Crick, is to have ideals that themselves are descriptive of a process, rather than an outcome. His political virtues try to raise the practical habits useful in resolving disputes into ideals of their own. A virtue, in general, is an ideal that one can make a habit.
Read more about this topic: Ideal (ethics)
Famous quotes containing the words ideal and/or virtue:
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Do thou, then breathe those thoughts into my mind
By which such virtue may in me be bred
That in thy holy footsteps I may tread:
The fetters of my tongue do thou unbind,
That I may have the power to sing of thee
And sound thy praises everlastingly”
—Michelangelo Buonarroti (1474–1564)