Words Worth Noting - April 26, 2024

“As the classical writers knew – Aristotle knew it, Cicero knew it, Thomas Aquinas wrote of it with great insight – the virtues are interconnected. People are confused about this fact because a person who is full of vices might have some admirable qualities. As a man I knew who was sentenced to prison for embezzling put it, ‘You meet some of the nicest people in prison.’ But the interconnection of virtues doesn’t imply that we can’t possess even a particle of virtue unless we possess complete virtue. What it does imply is that there is no such thing as a person who fails in just one virtue. Anything wrong in one moral dimension does damage in the other ones too.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]