When the ethical has become firm in a person’s character, we call it virtue. The simplest virtue is rectitude, being upright. That means doing what your own relations demand.

What must I do to be virtuous?

In an ordered community, this is not hard to say. A person does what his role as a father, a craftswoman or a citizen gives him to do. Everyone knows it. He has it before his eyes.

Isn’t that too little?

To some, mere rectitude seems too little. They want to be something special. They look for the exception. But often this is only vanity. Someone who talks a lot about virtue easily talks into the void.

When do we need great virtue?

In a developed order, special virtue shows itself only in special situations. For example, when duties really clash. In the past, in times without order, this was different. Then the good depended more on single heroes. That is why the ancients praised the virtue of Hercules.

The right measure:

We can see single virtues as a mean between two faults. Aristotle taught this. Courage lies between cowardice and recklessness. Thrift lies between stinginess and wastefulness.

Summary: Virtue is the ethical as a firm character. Its basic form is rectitude: doing what your duties bid. In ordered times, we need great virtue only in real conflicts.

§ 516. The relations of the individual within the relationships into which the substance particularizes itself constitute his ethical duties. Ethical personality, that is, subjectivity that is permeated by substantial life, is virtue. In relation to external immediacy, to a fate, virtue is a comportment toward being as something not negative and thereby a peaceful repose within itself; – in relation to substantial objectivity, the whole of ethical actuality, it is, as trust, a deliberate acting on its behalf and the capacity to sacrifice itself for it; – in relation to the contingency of relations with others, first justice and then benevolent inclination; in which sphere, as in its comportment toward its own existence and corporeality, individuality expresses its particular character, temperament, etc. as virtues.

§ 516. The relations of the individual within the relationships into which the substance particularizes itself constitute his ethical duties. Ethical personality, that is, subjectivity whose entire individuality is permeated by substantial life, is virtue. In relation to external immediacy, to a fate, virtue is a comportment toward being as something not negative, and thereby a peaceful repose within itself; – in relation to substantial objectivity, the whole of ethical actuality, it is trust, a deliberate acting on its behalf and the capacity to sacrifice itself for it; – in relation to the contingency of relations with others, first justice and then benevolent inclination; in which sphere, and in its comportment toward its own existence and corporeality, individuality expresses its particular character, temperament, etc. as virtues.

§ 434. These relations of the individual with respect to his substance constitute his ethical duties. As an individual, identity with the whole of the family is, on the one hand, his natural substantiality. On the other hand, however, he ought to make it possible for himself to have a rank and place in the substance as a whole; he ought to cultivate himself in general, and is actually something only to the extent that he is recognized as a particular co-worker in the universal work, and actually works at it.

§ 435. Ethical personality, that is, subjectivity whose entire particularity is permeated by its substantial life, is virtue; in relation to external immediacy, to a fate, a comportment toward a being, something not negative, and thereby a peaceful repose within itself; – in relation to substantial objectivity, the whole of ethical actuality, trust, a deliberate acting on its behalf, and the capacity to sacrifice itself for it; – in relation to the contingency of relations with others, – first justice and then benevolent inclination; in which sphere subjectivity expresses its particular character, temperament, etc. as virtues.

Those properties, however, that are truly ethical, in that in them the particular or negative appears purely taken up into indifference, may be called ethical properties, and only then virtues, when they individualize themselves anew in a higher energy and, still within absolute ethical life, become as it were their own living shapes, like the virtues of an Epaminondas, a Hannibal, a Caesar, and a few others. As such energies they are shapes, and hence not absolute in themselves, no more than the shapes of the other organic formations are, but rather the stronger emergence of one side of the Idea of the whole.