will to power. Are virtues objective features of human nature, or cultural constructs that vary across time and place? MacIntyre argued that virtues are relative to "practices" within a tradition — but this raises the question of which traditions are right, and how we adjudicate between them. Action guidance: When you face a difficult moral decision, virtue ethics says: "do what the virtuous person would do." But this doesn't tell you what that is. If you're not already virtuous enough to know, the advice is empty. Utilitarianism and Kantianism at least give you a procedure (calculate, universalise). Virtue ethics gives you a character ideal with no instruction manual. Moral luck: Aristotle acknowledges that flourishing requires external goods — health, wealth, friends, good fortune. But if flourishing depends partly on luck, then virtue isn't sufficient for the good life, and people who are unlucky through no fault of their own are condemned to a lesser moral existence. This seems unfair, and it means that virtue ethics — unlike Kantianism, which says the good will has unconditional worth regardless of circumstances — can't guarantee that being a good person makes you well-off. The situationist challenge:
Empirical psychology has questioned whether stable character traits even exist. The Milgram obedience experiments showed that ordinary people will administer apparently lethal electric shocks when instructed by an authority figure. Studies of helping behaviour show that people who just found a coin are far more likely to help a stranger than those who didn't. The Stanford prison experiment suggested that giving people roles of authority transforms their behaviour within days. These results suggest that behaviour is driven by situation rather than character — which would undermine the entire foundation of virtue ethics. If there are no stable character traits, there's nothing for the theory to be about. The virtue ethicist's response is sharp: these experiments show how rare genuine virtue is, not that it's impossible. Most people haven't done the sustained work of developing stable dispositions. A trained firefighter doesn't freeze in a crisis — their response to danger has been habituated through thousands of hours of practice. A concert pianist doesn't lose their skill because of a bad mood. Genuine virtue — deeply habituated through years of deliberate practice — is exactly the kind of disposition that resists situational pressure. The situationist data diagnoses the problem that virtue ethics was designed to solve: most people don't have stable virtuous dispositions, which is precisely why the theory emphasises that developing them requires sustained, intentional effort. The fact that virtue is rare doesn't mean it's impossible — it means it's an achievement, not a default.
"I know what the right thing to do is. I just can't make myself do it. What's wrong with me?" Utilitarianism and Kantianism would say: nothing's wrong with you, just try harder — calculate better, will more strongly. Virtue ethics says: something is wrong, and it's not that you lack willpower but that you haven't developed the habit. Knowing the right thing and doing the right thing are different skills. The first is intellectual. The second is practical — it requires a trained disposition, built through repeated practice. This is why "knowing what's right" is insufficient without the habituated character to act on it. Social media complicates this. Platforms are designed to engage your lower impulses — outrage, comparison, validation-seeking — and to weaken the higher ones (patience, sustained attention, genuine connection). Every hour spent scrolling is an hour practising the dispositions the algorithm rewards: reactivity, superficiality, and self-presentation. Virtue ethics says: you become what you practise. If you practise reactivity, you become reactive. If you practise attention, compassion, and honest expression, you become attentive, compassionate, and honest. The medium is not neutral. It trains character, for better or worse.
Virtue ethics captures something the other theories miss: character matters . The kind of person you are — your dispositions, your practical wisdom, your developed capacity for good judgment — is ethically fundamental. You can't reduce ethics to rules or calculations because ethical life is a practice , and practice develops character. In IDM terms, virtue ethics operates primarily in the immanent modality — grounded in lived experience, in practical engagement, in the felt sense of what a situation requires. Phronesis is the closest concept in the Western canon to the IDM's integration of thinking and feeling as guides to choice. Aristotle almost has it.
But virtue ethics can't explain why certain traits are virtues — it appeals to "flourishing," which it defines circularly. It lacks the structural principles (symmetry, continuity) that would ground the virtues in something deeper than cultural convention. And it lacks the path-of-right-action framework that would explain how character develops through the compounding of wise choices over time. The IDM says: virtue is the trail you leave when you walk the path consistently. Courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom are not arbitrary character ideals — they are the natural consequences of making choices that serve relational integrity over time. Virtue ethics is right that character matters. It just can't explain why. The IDM can.
Discussion Questions
1. Is Aristotle right that phronesis (practical wisdom) can only be developed through experience? Are there shortcuts? Can you develop practical wisdom through reading, simulation, or vicarious experience — or does it genuinely require living through difficult situations? 2. Make your own list of virtues — the character traits that you think are genuinely important for living well. How does your list compare to Aristotle's?
Are the differences cultural, personal, or philosophical?
3. The circularity objection says virtue ethics defines virtue in terms of flourishing and flourishing in terms of virtue. Can this circle be broken? How? What would an independent account of flourishing look like? 4.
Social media culture often seems to value performance of virtue (public declarations of the right values) over possession of virtue (actually having the character traits). How would Aristotle evaluate this? What's the difference between signalling virtue and being virtuous?
Chapter Eleven
Ethics as Effective Choice
Where We Stand
The last three chapters gave you the Western canon's three great attempts to ground ethics. Each captured something real. Each ultimately fails.
Utilitarianism
(Chapter 8) captures something true: consequences matter. The results of your actions in the world — who is helped, who is harmed — are ethically relevant. But utilitarianism requires what is structurally impossible: calculating the total consequences of an action across all affected parties, across all time. It demands omniscience. It operates entirely in the omniscient mode — evaluating actions from an external, God's-eye viewpoint that no actual agent has access to. And when it tries to do without omniscience (as rule-utilitarianism and preference-utilitarianism do), it collapses into either empty generalisations or unexamined assumptions about what counts as a "preference."
Kantian ethics
(Chapter 9) captures something true: the form of your will matters. Acting from duty, according to principles you could will to be universal — this is a genuine ethical insight. But Kant gives us form without ground. The categorical imperative tells us to act on universalisable maxims, but it can't tell us which maxims to universalise. It's an empty structure — a magnificent logical scaffold with nothing to stand on. It operates in the transcendent mode — pure formal principle, disconnected from the embodied, relational reality in which actual choices are made.
Virtue ethics
(Chapter 10) captures something true: the character of the agent matters. Being courageous, temperate, just, and wise is genuinely better than being cowardly, self-indulgent, unjust, and foolish. But virtue ethics can't explain why certain traits are virtues and others are vices except by circular appeal to the "flourishing life" — and what counts as flourishing is precisely what's in question. It operates in the immanent mode — grounded in lived experience and practical wisdom — but it lacks the formal rigour to generate principles that extend beyond the particular community whose practices define its virtues. Each theory captures one modality. None captures all three. The utilitarian sees the world from outside (omniscient). The Kantian legislates from above (transcendent). The virtue ethicist practises from within (immanent). Each is right about its own modality and wrong to claim that modality is the whole of ethics. The IDM's claim is that ethics, properly understood, requires all three modalities held together — distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable. This chapter presents what that looks like.
Ethics and Morality: A Crucial Distinction Before going further, we need a distinction that the standard canon blurs.
Morality is a code of behaviour that applies in a particular context. The moral code of a religious community, the code of conduct of a corporation, the traffic laws of a country, the norms of an online forum — these are all moral codes. They are specific to a group, a time, a place, a situation. They simplify the complexity of ethical reasoning into heuristics that most people can follow most of the time. "Don't steal." "Drive on the left." "Don't type in all caps." These are moral rules.
Ethics
, in the IDM's usage, is something deeper: the study of the principles from which moral codes are derived. Ethics is to morality as physics is to engineering. Physics gives you the laws; engineering applies them to specific situations. Ethics gives you the principles; moral codes are their application. Why does this distinction matter? Because moral codes go out of date. As cultures change, as new situations arise, as technology transforms the conditions of life, the old heuristics stop working. When they stop working — when people start suffering under rules that no longer fit — you need to go back to the underlying principles and generate new heuristics. If you don't have access to the underlying principles, all you can do is argue about which outdated rules to keep and which to discard. That argument never resolves, because without shared principles, there's no shared basis for adjudicating between competing rules. This is precisely the situation your generation is in. The old moral codes — inherited from religious traditions, from 20th-century political ideologies, from institutional norms designed for a different world — are visibly failing. People can feel that the rules don't work anymore. But they have no access to the deeper principles from which better rules could be generated. So they argue endlessly about the surface level (is capitalism good or bad? is this or that policy right or wrong?) without ever reaching the foundations. The IDM provides those foundations.
What Ethics Is About
If ethics is the study of the principles of effective choice, then the first question is: what do we mean by "effective"? We don't mean "getting what you want" — that's strategic thinking, not ethics. We don't mean "following the rules" — that's morality, not ethics. We mean something like: choosing in a way that maintains and enhances the integrity of the interaction between self and world. Recall from Chapter 3 that the immanent modality — interaction, relation — is more fundamental than either existence (omniscient) or creation (transcendent).
This means that the integrity of interaction is the foundational concern. An effective choice is one that preserves and enriches the quality of the relational process between the chooser and everything the choice affects. An ineffective choice is one that damages that relational integrity — that breaks the connection, garbles the signal, collapses the between-space where genuine meeting occurs. This is not a vague aspiration. It can be made precise. And the precision comes from the concept of comparison.
The Six Concepts of Comparison
To evaluate a choice — to compare a good choice with a less-good one — you need the apparatus of comparison itself. What does it take to compare anything at all? The IDM identifies six concepts that are required for any comparison, period. You cannot think about comparison without already assuming all six: Sameness and difference. Any comparison begins with noticing what is the same and what is different between two things. Perception itself is the detection of difference — edges, contrasts, changes. If everything were identical, there would be nothing to perceive and nothing to compare. Content and context. What you're comparing (the content) exists within a situation you're not currently comparing (the context). The painting is the content; the wall is the context. The action being evaluated is the content; the situation in which it occurs is the context. Subject and object. There is someone doing the comparing (the subject) and something being compared (the object). Without the distinction between perceiver and perceived, the notion of comparison doesn't arise.
These six concepts — sameness, difference, content, context, subject, object — form the minimal vocabulary needed to talk about comparison. And since ethics is fundamentally about comparing choices (this one versus that one, better versus worse, effective versus ineffective), any adequate ethical framework must be expressible in this vocabulary. This is a strong constraint — and a productive one. It tells us exactly what language is available for constructing ethical principles. And it turns out that within this language, two principles emerge as fundamental.
The First Principle: Symmetry
Symmetry is a sameness of content where there is a difference of context . Read that again. It's a precise definition, and it does a lot of work. A square has symmetry because its shape (content) stays the same when you rotate it 90 degrees (change of context). A law is fair because the treatment of a person (content) stays the same regardless of their race, gender, or wealth (difference of context). A friendship has integrity because the care between you (content) stays the same whether you're together in person, on a video call, or travelling in a foreign country (difference of context). Symmetry, in this sense, is not an arbitrary aesthetic preference. It's a structural feature of any relationship that has integrity. And it shows up everywhere in ethics — often in forms we already recognise, even if we haven't named them with this precision.
The Golden Rule
— do unto others as you would have them do unto you — is a symmetry principle. The content (the treatment) should be the same; the context (who is agent and who is recipient) is different.
Kant's categorical imperative
— act only on maxims you could will to be universal law — is a symmetry principle. The content (the maxim) should be the same; the context (which specific agent is acting on it) varies across all possible agents.
Equality before the law
— every person receives the same legal treatment regardless of identity — is a symmetry principle. The content (legal treatment) is the same; the context (the specific person) differs.
Integrity of communication
— the message I intend (content in my subjective context) should be the same as the message received (content in your subjective context). If I mean to express care but you perceive a threat, the symmetry has been broken. The content changed across contexts. That's a communication failure — and in the IDM, all ethics is ultimately about the integrity of communication between self and world. The symmetry principle, stated as an ethical imperative: choose in such a way that the content of your choice — its meaning, its intention, its effect — is preserved across all relevant contexts. Don't act one way when observed and another way when unobserved. Don't apply rules to others that you wouldn't apply to yourself. Don't claim values publicly that you abandon privately. These are all symmetry violations, and they are the bread and butter of what we recognise as ethical failure.
The Second Principle: Continuity
Continuity is a sameness of content where there is a sameness of context — or more precisely, a proportional relationship between changes in content and changes in context.
Where symmetry is about preservation across difference , continuity is about proportionality across change . Small changes in context should produce small changes in content. Large changes in content should only come from large changes in context. Walking down a street in New York, you pass hundreds of strangers. Your relationship to each of them is essentially zero — no connection, no interaction. If one of them suddenly pulled a knife on you, the relational state would jump from zero to life-threatening in an instant. That's a radical discontinuity — a huge change in content (relational intensity) for an infinitesimal change in context (one footstep's difference in position). We recognise this as a crime, not because it violates a rule (though it does), but because it violates continuity — it ruptures the fabric of relational process in a way that prevents any appropriate response.
Continuity is about the integrity of process over time . A friendship that ends abruptly without explanation is a continuity violation. A company that fires employees without warning or transition is a continuity violation. A government that changes its laws overnight without process or preparation is a continuity violation. In each case, the damage is not just to the specific people affected but to
the trustworthiness of the relational process itself . If the channel can be arbitrarily disrupted — if the floor can drop out from under you without warning — then the entire basis for trust collapses. And without trust, no cooperation, no community, no civilisation. The continuity principle, stated as an ethical imperative: choose in such a way that the change you introduce into a relational process is proportional to the preparation and consent of the participants.
Don't create sudden, drastic changes in people's relational conditions without their knowledge and capacity to respond. Don't build systems that can be interrupted or disrupted catastrophically. Don't make promises and then vanish. Symmetry violations are what we typically call unfairness — treating the same thing differently in different contexts. Continuity violations are what we typically call violence — creating discontinuities in relational process that prevent response and adaptation.
Why Two Principles, Not One
Standard ethical theories tend to operate with a single master principle: maximise utility, follow the categorical imperative, cultivate virtue. The IDM says you need two — symmetry and continuity — and that they are irreducible to each other. Symmetry without continuity gives you rigidity. If the only concern is sameness across contexts, you get inflexible rules that can't adapt to changing circumstances. The rule works today but not tomorrow; forcing it to remain the same regardless is itself a kind of violence to the situation. Continuity without symmetry gives you drift. If the only concern is smooth transition, you can gradually slide from justice to injustice without any clear point of violation — the boiling frog again. Each individual change is small enough to seem acceptable, but the cumulative effect is devastating. Together, symmetry and continuity provide mutual correction. Symmetry prevents drift by requiring that the essential content be preserved. Continuity prevents rigidity by requiring that changes be gradual and proportional. A system governed by both will be stable enough to trust and flexible enough to evolve.