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eigenvirtues

17 Jul 2026 - 06 Aug 2026
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    • Apparently just made this term up but I'm astonished if I'm the first. I'm not even sure what sense of virtue I am decomposing. The prototype for this abstraction was forgiveness, which is more of an act than a virtue, or maybe a stance?
    • Yeah actually I hate the idea, something too reductive about it. Factoring the unfactorable. I guess you can do this as long as each factor is itself infinite.
    • OK let's see if there are earlier usages of the term eigenvirtues Ask Claude
      • The term "eigenvirtues" doesn't appear in any literature I'm aware of — you may indeed have coined it, or at least it's obscure enough that it hasn't entered any corpus I was trained on.
      • A few things worth unpinning here:
      • What decomposition are you doing?
      • "Eigen" in the mathematical sense (eigenvalues, eigenvectors) implies you're decomposing something into basis components — directions that are invariant under some transformation. So eigenvirtues would be something like: the irreducible components of virtue space, where other virtues are linear combinations or projections.
      • This raises the question: invariant under what transformation? Eigenvectors only make sense relative to a matrix/operator.
      • The forgiveness problem
      • Forgiveness is interesting as a prototype because it decomposes into distinguishable components that often come apart:
      • Releasing resentment
      • Behavioral reconciliation
      • Moral re-crediting of the person
      • Cessation of punishment
      • These can vary independently. If forgiveness is a compound, what are its "eigen" components?
      • Which sense of virtue?
      • Are you decomposing:
      • Aristotelian virtues (stable character dispositions)?
      • Virtue as moral praise-worthiness?
      • Something more like psychological stances or attitudes?
      • The stance framing seems most tractable for decomposition. What was your actual intuition when the term arose?
    • patience would be another I guess. But what am I getting at? Is Virtue part patience and part something else
    • intelligence – a pseudo-virtue? Or something of a mimetic competitor to virtue? As well as its obvious necessary as an aspect of V.
    • humility which seems to overlap a bit with patience. Not the same thing but dependent upon each other so might as well be.
    • gratitude hm these are basically stances, aren't they? Or families of stance, qualities of stance.
    • 4A as resonant. "Agreements" are not exactly virtues but pretty close?
    • Surely there have been attempts by various theologians from all religions to try to list the aspects of god and goodness, the most basic components. Ask Claude
      • The theological tradition you're gesturing at is real and rich:
      • Directly relevant attempts:
      • The Divine Simplicity debates — whether God's attributes (omniscience, omnibenevolence, etc.) are genuinely distinct or aspects of one thing
      • Aquinas on the unity of virtue — whether the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance) are truly separable or mutually entailing
      • The Platonic question in Meno and Protagoras: is virtue one thing or many?
      • Kabbalah's Sefirot — literally an attempt to decompose divine qualities into a structured basis set with relationships between them
      • The Aquinas point is sharp: he argued the virtues are unified through prudence/phronesis — practical wisdom is the operator, and the other virtues are its expressions. That's almost an eigenvector claim: prudence is the transformation, virtues are invariant directions under it.
      • Your list so far: patience, compassion, forgiveness, intelligence-as-pseudo-virtue
      • The "pseudo-virtue" framing for intelligence is interesting — it might be more like a multiplier on other virtues rather than a basis vector. Evil intelligence is possible; evil patience is harder to construct.
      • What's the operator you're implicitly using? Something like: what remains when you subtract situation-specificity?
    • Huh the ones I came up with are all kind of female-coded, let us not neglect the more manly (if unfashionable) sorts of virtues
      • strength
      • courage
      • wisdom
      • honesty, righteousness
    • cleverness (? maybe a bit suspect here)
    • More meta
      • creativity / imaginativeness
      • attentiveness
        • ok that sounds out of place but I think it encapulates part of Buddhist teaching, what it is, how to cultivate it
    • Actually none of this does the term justice, they aren't factors as much as aspects, which contain the whole and reflect the other aspects. Not a decomposition, but why would you want that, just for the sake of a clever term?
    • Any pantheon of gods could be mined for more. What about The Zoas