Adler On Virtue and Vice Adler On Virtue and Vice These two words as used in everyday speech have acquired strange and even wrong meanings. Most people think that there are many virtues and vices, and that is possible for a person to be virtuous in certain respects, though not in others. It is possible to have one or another of these intellectual virtues without having all of them.
Moral virtue is acquired and formed by repeated morally good acts.
But an individual who possesses the basis of moral virtue to any degree may commit morally wrong acts without losing his or her moral virtue. The habit may be weakened by such wrongful actions, if they are committed too frequently, just as it may be strengthened and fortified by repeated morally good acts. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the only sound, practical, and undogmatic moral philosophy in which the pivotal notion is habit. It is a moral philosophy without rules. For our own good, our own happiness, we have to be temperate and courageous, and for the happiness of others, we have to be just in our habitual actions toward them.