What virtue is undersupplied today?

I recently wrote a short piece on moral imagination and have been thinking about virtue ethics generally. This is all a little abstract. A more specific question might be: what virtue is undersupplied today?

I like this question because it feels less daunting/more tractible than evaluating or constructing a ‘comprehensive’ moral framework. Instead, just describe one trait you’d want to ratchet up in today’s society. Why is it important? If we had more of it, what good would it do for the world? And, how could we cultivate more of it?

I’ll start. I think vision is in short supply today. The ability to formulate a normative, opinionated perspective on what should exist—as applied to the world, to our work, to our relationships, and to ourselves. If San Francisco were 10x ‘better’ what would that look like? Better in what ways, specifically? If carbon removal is ‘on track’ by 2030, what does that look like? How would we know, help me picture it? If this friendship I already care about became even more multi-dimensional and thrilling, what would that look or feel like? What’s the next version of myself? What’s she like, and how do I work towards her?

Why is vision important?

There are at least a few reasons. In some basic sense, having to articulate a vision for something is a useful mechanism for raising our collective aspiration. It shifts our attention away from merely cataloging today’s deficiencies (which can be a very useful exercise, but often conversations get stuck here) and shifts our attention towards imagining what could be possible. Having to articulate what a great future version of something looks like forces us to work through what we care about, why we’ve chosen one endpoint over another, and what that implies about what actually matters to us. And in the best cases it forces us to start thinking about how we’d get there.

I’d argue that the mere exercise of coming up with a perspective on what should or could be increases the likelihood it actually happens. At the individual level, visualizing yourself succeeding at doing something is a tested technique commonly used to increase performance of elite athletes—visualizing ourselves doing something makes it seem more possible to do that thing. But most big visions—say for a country or a company—require many people rowing together in the same direction. Realizing a big vision requires both velocity and force. At the collective level, having to describe a vision in a compelling, motivating way increases the likelihood that we’ll convince others to join in—to work alongside us to manifest that future.

Why is it in such short supply today?

You know, I’m not sure the answer to this question matters so much, but I do feel compelled to call out that I think my generation in particular—millennials—have some real make-up work to do here. And it matters that we do the makeup work—because our generation is increasingly finding ourselves in leadership positions, whether in governments, companies, or families.

I think culturally, many millennials were sold a vexed bag of goods (and this isn’t at all a dig at my parents who are amazing—I think it was standard culture at least in many parts of the country). To our credit, we’re a hard working generation—give us something and we will run at it. Unfortunately though, I don’t think many of us gave much thought about what we were running towards. We’re the generation that burnt out working crazy hours in banking and consulting jobs after undergrad (guilty!). And while I’m sure some of us were genuinely interested in banking, most of us were interested in the gold star we’d get from it. Personally, we got married, we bought the house, we had the babies. Many of us are now getting to the part of the ladder where we’re saying: hey wait a minute—what do I actually care about, or think, or want to be? What game am I playing here? Of course to some extent this is a story familiar to every generation—the quarter or mid life crisis. But I get the sense that us millennials were especially trained on the Pavlovian gold-star rewards system, and didn’t do much to question that. And to be clear, until ~5 years ago I’d put myself squarely in that category, and while I have made progress here I am still very much learning how to think for myself about which directions to head in. Which is all to say—while this may not be our ‘fault’ it is very much our problem. And, in my opinion, we are absolutely capable of recovering from it with a bit of resolve and practice.

How do we cultivate more of it?

Okay, so how do we do that? I’ll suggest at least a few places to start:

1. Demand more from ourselves. Let’s force ourselves to more regularly formulate normative perspectives of what ‘should be’ at different ‘altitudes’ in our lives. In general, when you find yourself assuming the position of critic, push yourself to follow that up with—OK, if this problem were fixed, what would that look like, what does “great” look like here? Here are some prompts that I’ve found generative for myself in case they spark something for you:

   1. [Self] Draft/sketch your obituary. What do you hope people say about you and the life you led? What does that tell you about what you should do more/less of in your life today?

   2. [Relationships] Pick a relationship you care about, and try to picture what the “twice as good” version looks like. Sometimes it can be helpful to borrow from other relationships (existing or historical) you love and admire.

   3. [World or work] On any topic you’re interested in, pretend you’re in charge of solving the problem. What’s the future world you’re moving everyone towards? What’d you do to solve it? (Example: Pretend you’re mayor of SF, or president, etc.)

2. Demand more from others, especially from our leaders. If you asked me to describe the vision for America that the last few administrations have had, I couldn’t do it. It’s very possible I just haven’t been paying enough attention, but I’m not sure a simple cohesive vision exists—and if it does, it’s not in an accessible place or format (I once tweeted asking about this and came up empty). Is it not kind of crazy that we don’t demand that our political leaders more clearly describe where they want us to be at the end of their term? In layman’s terms, describe this to me—I want to know, get me excited about your vision, so that I want to help.

3. Cultivate this muscle in young people. Let’s build the muscle of “what should the world look like?” “how would you fix it?” it the next generations. Regularly asking kids and young people to formulate perspectives on direction or end-points—helping them earnestly think through this for themselves versus superimposing our own—seems worthwhile for humanity long-term.

You could reasonably argue that not everyone in society needs to have vision at every ‘altitude’, that’s probably true. But the prompt for this note is what virtue is undersupplied today, and I think the world would very likely benefit from more vision. The ability to formulate bold, creative perspectives on what’s possible helps us raise our collective aspirations and increases the likelihood we might actually achieve them.

Thanks to Jacob Trefethen for wonderful chats on this topic, and for accompanying me down the virtue ethics rabbit hole generally.