Adopting Rational Virtues to Achieve Your Goals

If building a better life for yourself according to a rational standard is a proper goal, then the behaviors that enable you to achieve that goal are virtues.

May 28, 2025

Author’s note: This is chapter 6 of my book Reason for Living: A Rational Approach to Living Your Best Life (Reason for Living Ltd., 2025). The book is a guide to using reason to identify your values, achieve your goals, and live a flourishing life.

“Virtue is an active condition.” —Aristotle1

If building a better life for yourself according to a rational standard is a proper goal, then the behaviors that enable you to achieve that goal are virtues. A virtue is a behavior by which you achieve a moral goal, which by this standard means a behavior that is ultimately good for your life. In short, values are the things we act to gain or keep, rational values are those that are actually good for us in the long term, and virtues are the means by which we achieve rational values and thereby live well. Virtues are both a means to achieving and living a good life, and a key part of being the kind of person you want to be.

This concept of virtue goes back to the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle and the Stoics. For thousands of years, thinkers such as Saint Augustine have advocated a different concept of virtue—one based on sacrificing your life, punishing yourself for the supposed sins of others, and spending your life in service to others and/or to God. This conception of “goodness” contradicts rather than supports your achievement of a eudaimonistic, flourishing life. Although later thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas reintroduced ancient Greek reason-based philosophy into European society, the Augustinian self-abasing concept of virtue has continued to dominate moral thinking and teaching. To this day, many people think that being virtuous means sacrificing your life, values, or well-being for others. (A sacrifice is a net loss—the surrender of something valuable in exchange for something that is worth less to you. Sacrifice is not giving up a lesser value in exchange for a greater one; that’s an investment.) Because we are using reason and not tradition to define virtue, we will reject this sacrifice-based conception and instead return to the earlier meaning of the word—not because the Greeks said so but because there is a great deal of evidence to support their conclusions.2

Many behaviors can be good but aren’t always. A good example is being kind to others. Being kind to people who deserve kindness makes you feel good about yourself and serves your values, assuming you value human life (which, as we’ve seen, a rational person does). Understandably, many people call kindness a virtue, and it is virtuous to be kind to people who deserve it. But does that mean kindness is always a good thing? Is it good to be kind to evil people? Does someone who assaults his partner, murders people, or rules over a country as a dictator deserve your kindness? Augustine and those who follow his ideas would say yes (if they’re being consistent), but the original virtue ethicists such as Aristotle would say no. Is it good for your life and in line with your rational values to be kind to evil people? Or is there evidence that supports the idea that we should be kind to people who deserve it but not to those who don’t? If so, can we derive a specific principle and a corresponding virtue from that evidence?

The Universal Virtues

There are some behaviors that are always good. Just as there are universal values, there are also universal virtues. These are behaviors that will always serve your life and the life of any person who practices them—if they are practiced consistently. As we’ve seen, indiscriminate kindness does not meet this standard. Why, then, is it good to be kind to deserving people? It is good, in part, because of the virtue of justice, which means: treating others as they deserve to be treated, based on their actions and on the content of their characters. That concept already has baked into it the idea of rewarding those who have acted in a life-serving manner. Kindness is virtuous when it’s just. Injustice is never virtuous, even when it’s intended as kindness.

It’s worth noting that virtuous behavior will always, in the long run, benefit other people around you as well, directly or indirectly. This is a consequence of the fact that, when you use reason, you discover that it is in your best interest to surround yourself with others who live flourishing lives, for you to treat others justly, and for you to produce values that help others. But rational ethics differs from traditional ethics in that virtues are behaviors that are rationally good for the person practicing them, not behaviors that involve giving up some portion of your life or values for someone else’s supposed benefit.

The 20th century philosopher Ayn Rand reintroduced the Aristotelian concept of virtue and built it into her evidence-based system of philosophy. By assessing each of the seven universal virtues she identified, we can see how each always promotes human life and helps keep one’s mind connected to reality. They are:

Rationality
Productiveness
Pride
Independence
Honesty
Justice
Integrity

You will notice that many of these have already come up in this book, but let’s look at each one in more depth to understand why it is always a life-serving behavior to practice and how it applies to success in all spheres of life.

Rationality

The first three universal virtues correspond to the three universal values. Accordingly, rationality corresponds to reason. This book is about applying the virtue of rationality—of keeping your mind connected to reality—to every area of life, but for the purposes of this chapter, let’s consider an example from the business world.

In the 1990s, riding high on a wave of successes in areas as diverse as record stores, airlines, and banking, Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, decided to launch Virgin Cola, a product intended to compete with one of the world’s most popular soft drinks: Coca Cola. Launched initially in the United Kingdom, it performed fairly well there, so Branson decided to take the product to the US market. He did so in his typically showy style, driving a tank through Times Square over a mountain of Coke cans. Coca Cola got the message and retaliated with a UK marketing campaign that wiped out Virgin Cola’s core market practically overnight. Now, Virgin Cola is but a dim memory.

How did Branson respond to this failure? Did he try to ignore what had happened and relaunch the failed product? Did he act resentful about it? No. He listened to the signal that reality was sending him and learned a lesson from the experience. He later summarized that lesson: “We had a great brand. But Coke had a great brand. The taste of [Virgin] Cola was maybe marginally better, but it was neither here nor there. What I learned from that was only to go into businesses where we were palpably better than all the competition.”3

I, too, have experienced the painful consequences of failing to acknowledge reality—all of us have. In high school, I had a small group of friends who understood and shared my interests and way of thinking. Together, we were the “weird kids” who kept to ourselves, talked about strange things such as outer space and time travel, and didn’t do “normal” things such as play sports or listen to new music. But I resented being one of the “weird” kids. I wanted to be liked, respected, and successful, which—I thought—meant being accepted into the “normal” social circles.

So I tried to deny reality in a few different ways. For one, I tried to change myself in order to be accepted by “cooler” people. A few times, I partly “succeeded” and got into those groups only to run into personality clashes and conversations to which I couldn’t contribute. I tried to ignore the fact that I wasn’t like those people, expecting reality to bend to my will. It didn’t, which led me to get more and more depressed as more and more of these “friendships” went sour.

In my anger and depression at being rejected by others, I fantasized another kind of reality denial: being able to change everyone else to be more like me. Needless to say, unhealthy fantasies did nothing to attenuate the damage to myself—they merely turned depression and hurt into anger and resentment. In the end, therapy was the only thing that saved me from that spiral of self-destructive thoughts and behavior.

If evidence is telling you that your thinking isn’t lined up with reality, listen to it. It does no good to keep chasing a bad business idea, or to stay in a relationship that you know is fundamentally broken, or to go ahead with a plan that the evidence suggests is flawed. Reality is what it is—we’re stuck with it for better or worse. But reality is also our ally, constantly giving us helpful signs which rational people follow to succeed in life.

Each of the other virtues that follow is, in some way, an application of reason (in other words, an instance of being rational). A crucial part of rationality is thinking clearly and carefully about your values, your decisions, and the world around you each day; such clear thinking is vital if you want to survive and thrive.

Productiveness

The virtue of productiveness corresponds to the second universal value: purpose.

You are alive and able to read this book right now in part because of your own productive efforts and in part because of the productive efforts of others. You have worked to earn money and sustain your life, and others have produced the goods and services that enable you to flourish (as opposed to merely surviving).

Human flourishing depends on and requires productiveness. As we discussed earlier, people survive and thrive by using our minds to produce things. Someone produced the food and drink you consume; the books you read, and the films and TV shows you watch; the electricity you use and the equipment that generates it; the building you live in and the materials it was built with; the roads, airplanes, and railways you use to get around and that companies use to deliver all the goods you use and enjoy; and so on. Everything that enables our modern, comfortable standard of living has to be produced by someone (even if it’s made by a machine, someone designed, built, and used that machine for a productive purpose, and someone must actively maintain it).

Before civilization, early humans had to produce their own survival essentials on a subsistence basis. They had to hunt or scavenge their own food, find their own water, make their own fires to heat their camps, build their own shelters to protect themselves from the elements, and fashion their own garments to keep their bodies warm and safe. Those who didn’t do these things died.

Civilization—especially agriculture—changed virtually all of that. Brilliant innovators made food production exponentially more efficient, making it possible for one farmer’s labor to feed hundreds or even thousands of other people. These innovations freed many people to do other productive things, like pottery or metalwork, the products of which they could trade with the farmers for food. Soon, people started to use precious stones and metals as units of exchange—money—so that trade could happen even if, say, the potter and the farmer didn’t both want each other’s products at the same time. One could give the other money, which the other could then trade with a third person for whatever value that person produced. Money was the means by which people were able to produce for each other across an entire society, multiplying their productive potential enormously.

Soon, some powerful people started taxing these productive individuals. In many cases, they took by force from those who create values—sometimes in order to provide security or other services, but often to pay for lavish lifestyles (by the standards of the time) that they hadn’t earned through their own productive effort. Aside from the more complex economies of ancient Greece and Rome, this was mostly how things worked for several thousand years, until about 1700. Then, a period of rapid technological advancement—the Industrial Revolution, caused by the rediscovery and widespread embrace of reason and science—led to huge diversification in the ways people could produce value for others. Suddenly, new technology made it possible to offer all manner of new goods and services, from machined textiles to intercity trains, and from coal-fired stoves to luxury furniture.

But productiveness is about more than simply making things. Imagine that your job involves tedious manual labor on an assembly line—a job that most people would consider tolerable at best. The fact that your job involves making things, in and of itself, does not make it a productive endeavor in the full and complete sense of the word. Rather, the virtue of productiveness is “the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability.”4 It is production with purpose, in service of the ultimate goal of sustaining and enhancing your rational values—and thereby your flourishing life. In other words, the assembly-line job—which many people might consider horrible and soul-killing—may or may not embody the virtue of productiveness in your life; it depends on whether and to what extent the job aligns with your rational values and interests.

Let’s consider two very different examples. David and Christina both work the same assembly line, doing the same tasks in the same factory. They both make the same amount of money (which is not very much), but it’s enough to get by. For David, the job is pure misery. He hates it, it bores him, and he resents the factory owner for not paying him more (despite the fact that David agreed to the salary before he was hired). In contrast, Christina loves her job and shows up to work every day friendly and energized. How can this be?

David has no clear plan for his life and has never taken the time to carefully consider his values or what sort of work might support them, whereas Christina is in veterinary school and is working in the factory to pay her bills until she graduates. (Let’s assume that she chose a career in veterinary medicine for rational, life-serving reasons.) David doesn’t really know why he’s working at the factory or what his alternatives might be, whereas Christina has a clear, life-serving goal in mind, and she knows exactly why and how the factory job fits into her long-range plan. Now, we’re beginning to see how the exact same job can be a virtuously productive endeavor for one person but not necessarily for another.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, technology continued expanding the ways in which human beings can produce and trade values. Today, you can find jobs online, you can work through freelancing websites, and you can produce value for people by doing something as simple as making videos and putting them on YouTube. Unfortunately, it can also be extremely hard to find a market for thoughtful, life-enhancing products and services in today’s culture, and that’s a deeper problem that we will discuss more in chapter 9. But the fact remains that we enjoy a huge range of ways to be productive in today’s world.

Practicing the virtue of productiveness earns you the food on your plate every day, which someone else had to produce; it gives you experience and confidence that make you a better person in myriad ways; and it earns you the ability to look in the mirror and be proud of the person you see looking back at you, which leads us to our third universal virtue.

Pride

Pride corresponds to the third universal value: self-esteem.

Pride is a word about which many people are confused, largely because people use it to refer to several different—and even contradictory—concepts. When people say “I’m proud of my country,” most mean that they strongly admire that country, they’re glad they were born there, and they want others to know how wonderful they think it is. When people say “he’s too proud to admit his mistakes,” they mean “he’s too stubborn and irrational to admit his mistakes.” These are two very different meanings of the word, and they’re both completely different from the proper, reality-based conception of pride.

Pride is the self-respect and satisfaction you experience when you hold yourself to your own highest standards, living by your rational virtues and achieving your rational values through your own effort. (This doesn’t mean that you can or should try to do everything alone; people you value can help and support you, just as you rationally help and support those you value.) Pride properly pertains to your moral choices, not to things over which you had no control, such as your nationality. If you chose to move to a country you admire, or if you do something to improve the country you live in, that’s worthy of pride, but simply being born there is not, because there was no personal choice involved. Pride is only about the moral choices you make. It cannot apply to things other people did, or to accidents of nature or history.

Note also that pride does not have any relationship to non-moral choices, such as which flavor of ice cream you prefer or what color shirt you choose to wear. In other words, pride is a moral concept, and morality pertains only to that which is both volitional and which enhances or damages human life; any issue which does not involve both considerations is not the province of morality.

Pride is the emotional reward for practicing and achieving your rational values. Achieving it is hard work—it requires putting your values consistently into practical action, which in turn requires doing the hard work of figuring out your rational values. Character building is hard work. Behaving justly is hard work. Holding yourself to ethical principles is hard work. To the extent that you succeed at these things, pride is one of your just rewards—and one of the most valuable.

The first thing I ever published in print was a short book about the history of Britain’s “new towns,” a group of planned settlements built after World War II to meet the housing demand created by the postwar baby boom. I can remember the immense pride I felt at seeing a physical book I had made in front of me for the first time. Looking back now, I’m still proud of the fact I produced that book at that time in my life, even though it now seems like a baby step compared to what I’ve done since. As I write the first draft of this paragraph, I have drafted about 60 percent of Reason for Living, and I’m already feeling more pride looking at what I’ve created here than I did when I got the first copy of Britain’s New Towns: A Photographic Journey in the mail.

The point here is that the intensity of the pride you feel in an achievement is often proportional to the work you put in, but merely working hard on something isn’t the cause of pride. Rather, the extent to which you properly feel proud is the extent to which your achievement reflects and serves your rational values. Putting together Britain’s New Towns was really hard work—I had to travel up and down the country getting photographs and information for it—and the result was, in retrospect, an okay-ish book that promoted my personal values of history, construction, design, and transportation in a simple, surface-level way. Reason for Living, on the other hand, communicates and advocates my deepest values—reason, science, civilization, creativity, and productivity, among others—in far greater detail. This book has taken many times more effort to produce than Britain’s New Towns did, but it’s earned me exponentially more pride. Pride is the recognition not only that you are your own highest value but that you have earned self-esteem by working to be the best you can be. Britain’s New Towns wasn’t an instance of me achieving my full potential, and I knew it. This book, I believe, is.

As exhilarating as the experience of real pride is, the emotional sensation is not the entirety of the reward. Pride also enhances your self-esteem. If you write a good book, and you’re proud of that book, it proves to you—on a subconscious and a conscious level—that you’re capable of writing a good book, and that you’re intelligent and rational enough to understand the ideas in that book and to manage the process of creating it. It gives you an impetus to write an even better one next time. Just like the three universal values we discussed last chapter, the three corresponding virtues all support, enhance, and depend on each other.

Rationality helps you be productive, and being rational is a source of pride. Productiveness gives you pride and the chance to practice your rationality. Pride gives you confidence in your rationality and productiveness, helping you practice both more fully.

Now we will discuss the other four virtues, all of which interdepend on each other and on the first three in the same way.

Independence

Independence is the virtue of recognizing and acting in accordance with the fact that it is solely your responsibility to sustain yourself, to identify and live by life-serving moral principles, to set and pursue rational goals, and to judge others according to your own rational standards.

Note, however, that independence does not mean “complete self-sufficiency.” It does not mean being Robinson Crusoe, inefficiently catching all your own food and building your own shelter. Rather, it means using your mind to identify your standards and to produce values to sustain your life whether directly or through trade with others. Trading the values you create with other productive people voluntarily, for mutual benefit, is part of being an independent individual. That is how people created the world of abundance we live in today.

When former US president Barack Obama infamously told American entrepreneurs, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” he failed to acknowledge this critical distinction.5 Sure, those entrepreneurs used roads and banks and post offices and all sorts of other services to build their businesses. But they did so by voluntary agreement—except when the government gave them no choice in the matter. A businessman can choose which bank he uses, but he can’t choose which road system to use because there is only one road system, and it’s controlled exclusively by the government. Don’t fall into the guilt trap of thinking you owe “the system” for something it gave you no choice but to use.

As you can see, it’s impossible to be totally independent in our current society, because there are some areas in which you are denied the choice of whom you deal with. But you always have the freedom (and the critical need) to be independent in your thinking. Even if the law prevents you from running a certain business, living in a certain place, or even choosing whom you marry, you can still choose what values you hold and by what standard you evaluate new ideas and information. (We will discuss how to choose the media you consume to encourage independent, rational thinking in chapter 9.)

Sadly, far too many people let this crucial freedom slip through their fingers and allow other people to do their thinking for them. Consider the type of person who likes a popular musician or sports team largely or entirely because other people do, or the type who fits his views to those of whatever political party he supports rather than making his own decisions on each issue by his own rational, evidence-based standards. Consider also the inveterate contrarian who hates a popular band because they’re popular (I often see this with highly skilled bands that achieve widespread popularity, such as Queen or Muse) or opposes by default the popular view on any issue. Neither populism nor contrarianism are compatible with independent thinking.

The consequences of intellectual dependence manifest throughout one’s life. We’ll miss out on great art if we only listen to popular music and watch popular movies (or refuse to). We’ll hold incorrect ideas about reality if we try to conform to political, social, or religious ideologies instead of seeking to understand which ideas correspond to reality. Imagine a man who meets a girl who would have been a perfect match for him—except that she’s an immigrant, and he believes she doesn’t belong in the country because his political party told him so. Because of this second-handed belief, he never talks to her, and he loses out on happiness because of his reality-evading ideology.

Individuality and independent thinking are essential parts of human life and flourishing. Both require sometimes working together with others in common cause—it is often in our best interest to form voluntary partnerships, groups, and alliances with others who share our values. But we can’t live fully human lives unless each of us uses our minds independently to identify our own rational values and to set our own priorities.

Honesty

Imagine that you have a friend who is being abused by her boyfriend (assume that you’ve verified this and know it’s true). Your friend comes to stay at your house while she figures out how best to end the relationship. The next day, her abuser comes to your house and asks “Is she here?”

Should you tell him the truth?

We’re often told as children that “you should never lie,” but it’s not as simple as that, as this example suggests. We all know that the good and right thing to do in a situation like this one is to protect your friend from further harm—but the traditional conception of honesty, which requires us to never lie, directly clashes with what we know to be right in this case. Therefore, for honesty to be a universal virtue (in other words, for it to always be the right thing to do), it must mean something other than “never tell lies.” Figuring out what it really means is key to knowing when we should tell the truth and when we shouldn’t.

Honesty is about adherence to the truth. The common mistake is defining it in terms of others rather than oneself—of focusing on telling the truth rather than acknowledging and acting in accordance with the truth. The real meaning of honesty is: refusing to pretend that the facts are other than they are.

In any case, in order to be honest, we must ask: What are the relevant facts I need to acknowledge and act in accordance with? In the example above, the most relevant facts are:

Abusing another person for any reason is always wrong.
Your friend has an inviolate right to her own life and, by extension, she has a right to live free of force.
Your friend’s abuser has no right to know where his victim is or what she’s doing—and he certainly doesn’t have a right to intimidate you into giving him information that will enable him to inflict further harm on her.

When we take these and other relevant facts into account, it becomes clear that, when the person who is abusing your friend asks “Is she here?,” the honest response—the response that acknowledges and is consistent with all of the relevant facts—is: “No, she isn’t—and go away.”

Refusing to fake reality includes refusing to encourage other people to fake it. When someone or something creates a situation in which you know that telling the truth will violate someone’s rights or otherwise cause harm—which means that someone has faked reality—honesty requires that you lie. Of course, it’s sometimes difficult to know whether our words or actions will cause harm; helpful actions can sometimes seem hurtful, and hurtful actions can sometimes seem helpful. For example, gently telling a friend that he has a major character flaw will almost certainly cause him to feel bad in some way—but if you genuinely care about him, and if he’s a good person overall, then your decision to initiate a difficult and painful conversation about his behavior isn’t harming him—it’s helping him.

The principle is to always accept, acknowledge, and act in accordance with what you know (or have good reason to believe) is the truth. There are several respects in which this conception of honesty will help you succeed in life:

Honesty helps us identify our own bad ideas. Remember Virgin Cola, or my efforts to make myself “cool” at school? An honest person doesn’t shy away from admitting he got something wrong or that it’s time to try a different approach.
Honesty helps us handle difficult conversations. Ask yourself honestly: Do I need to share this unpleasant news right now, or should I wait for a more appropriate time? Conversely: Do I need to be more direct in order to help the person I’m talking to understand the reality of the situation, even if it might hurt her feelings in the short term?
Honesty helps us have better relationships. How many arguments have you had with someone you love that could have been avoided if one of you had acknowledged a fact about your relationship openly at an earlier time? If you or the other person is unhappy, recognize and discuss the problem together. If the other person isn’t honest enough to do that with you, admit to yourself that that is a problem, too.
Honesty helps us identify when we should and shouldn’t work or associate with someone. Is there something about a person that makes you morally uncomfortable? Is the person you’re trusting with something important actually deserving of that trust? If you know of a problem, honesty requires you to acknowledge it and act accordingly.

Honesty, along with all the virtues, is an element of rationality; it’s a particular form of keeping our minds in touch with reality.

Justice

Nowadays, we tend to associate the concept of justice with law courts, but it’s actually a much broader concept. Justice is the virtue of making accurate judgments about a person’s character—including your own—and acting accordingly.

Many people have negative feelings when they hear the word “judge” in a moral context. This may be because people use the word in different senses, which makes it easy for positive and negative connotations or usages to become conflated. A professional judge is someone who fills a vital role in a free society, but we speak of a “judgey” person to mean an arrogant, self-righteous individual who passes unwarranted and unfair judgments on others. A key part of the virtue of justice is to recognizewhen we don’t have enough information to make moral judgments objectively or when no such judgment is warranted. One reason moral judgment has a bad reputation is that many people judge others without enough information or on the basis of information that is not morally relevant—for example, based on how they speak or where they’re from rather than on a detailed knowledge of their characters.

But contrary to the popular idea that we shouldn’t judge others, it’s proper and necessary to judge ourselves and others according to a rational, evidence-based standard. If we don’t, we risk two serious consequences: (1) We will fail to reward good, virtuous people, and (2) We will fail to properly condemn wicked, evil people.

There’s an important difference between moral and non-moral judgments. A moral judgment is a judgment that some aspect of a person’s character or volitional behavior is either compatible with or contradicts the principles of rational morality. Certain choices—such as those that undermine honesty, integrity, or one of the other universal virtues—should always be subject to moral judgment. But there are many other cases in which a given action may or may not warrant moral judgment, depending on the context. Because morality rationally pertains only to that which is volitional and either enhances or damages human life, the question of whether a given action is subject to moral judgment often hinges on a person’s context of knowledge and on his or her reasons for taking that action. To begin to see how and why this is true, we can look at an example case in which the same action could be moral, immoral, or not subject to moral judgment at all.

Because justice is an extremely complex concept, it’s helpful to start with a simple example to make our standards as clear as possible. Imagine Susan doesn’t drink soda. Her reason could be as simple as: To her, it doesn’t taste good. If that’s all there is to it, then Susan’s choice to avoid soda is not a moral choice at all—it is volitional but, in and of itself, it doesn’t damage or enhance her deeper values or say anything about her moral character. However, if Susan chooses not to drink soda because she has well-founded concerns about its effects on her health, then that is a positive moral decision. (If she does drink soda because she enjoys it but only in strict moderation such that it has no negative effects on her health, that, too, is a positive moral decision—she is still actively monitoring and protecting her health.) If Susan knows that too much soda is bad for her but chooses to drink a lot of it anyway, thereby consciously ignoring what she knows to be good for her, then her choice becomes a negative moral decision for a number of reasons—one being that she is evading a fact she knows to be relevant to her values and is therefore acting dishonestly.

Finally, we can imagine one more alternate scenario in which Susan chooses to avoid soda not because of its well-established effects on her health but because an authority figure (perhaps a parent, teacher, or religious leader) told her that she must avoid soda and she followed that instruction without using her own mind to evaluate it. (Several major belief systems maintain such prohibitions.) In this case, Susan’s decision is a negative moral decision because she is second-handedly accepting values handed down to her by someone else.

You may be thinking: “This is all very complicated. How can something as simple as drinking soda be a complex matter of morality, or maybe even not a matter of morality at all?” For starters, you only need to consider such questions to the extent that they affect your values—in this case, only if you have a close relationship with the person or if his or her choice directly affects your life and values. But also, although practicing the virtue of justice in our moral judgments may seem hopelessly complex, a proper understanding of justice greatly simplifies its day-to-day implementation and enhances our ability to make fair evaluations of ourselves and others. Most traditional conceptions of justice necessitate hugely convoluted, imprecise, and internally inconsistent dissections of difficult issues precisely because such conceptions of justice are not rooted in rational morality.

An evidence-based conception of justice gives rise to a “master question” that, with practice, we can use to quickly and rationally frame any given issue. That master question is: “Is this an issue of morality?” In other words: “Is this an issue that concerns volitional actions which either enhance or damage human life?” If the answer is “yes,” then justice requires moral judgment of the person or people taking those actions if we have enough information to judge objectively and if such judgment is a good use of our time and energy, given our other values. (It may not be just to voice our judgments if doing so would create some other disharmony in our rational hierarchy of values). If the answer to the master question is “no,” then no moral judgment is necessary or appropriate.

Most dominant philosophies and religions teach us to avoid judging others (“judge not lest ye be judged”). But objectively judging others (and ourselves) is essential to living well because we cannot maintain good self-esteem, build healthy relationships with others, or treat others fairly if we do not consistently hold ourselves and others to rational moral standards. To reiterate, when I advocate “moral judgments,” I exclusively mean objective, evidence-based moral judgments—those that include an honest assessment of all relevant facts and all of your relevant knowledge. Your moral judgments inform not only whom you buy from but also whom you work with, whom you socialize with, and what ideas you accept or condone in your interactions with others. As Ayn Rand explains,

Since men are born tabula rasa [as “blank slates”], both cognitively and morally, a rational man regards strangers as innocent until proved guilty, and grants them that initial good will in the name of their human potential. After that, he judges them according to the moral character they have actualized. If he finds them guilty of major evils, his good will is replaced by contempt and moral condemnation. (If one values human life, one cannot value its destroyers.) If he finds them to be virtuous, he grants them personal, individual value and appreciation, in proportion to their virtues.”6

The fact that it’s sometimes necessary to morally judge others doesn’t mean you have to (or should) go around announcing everyone else’s flaws (real or imagined). That would be rude, and it would be non-objective because fairly judging another person requires a great deal of contextual knowledge about him—knowledge that we can’t possibly have about every person we meet. This brings us to another critically important aspect of justice: the difference between morally judging others’ individual actions and judging others’ characters on the whole. A single bad (or even evil) act doesn’t wholly corrupt a good person’s character unless that single act is truly heinous. Conversely, a single good act is not sufficient to redeem an evil person. Good people can (and do) make morally bad choices; bad people can (and do) make morally good choices. A person’s moral character is set by the sum of his moral choices, both in terms of the importance or severity of those choices and in terms of their frequency. In other words: In all but the most extreme cases, in order to fairly judge another person’s character, we must know a great deal about the pattern of moral choices that he or she has made over a long period of time.

In the course of our interactions with others, we should make moral judgments only insofar as they are both well-supported by evidence and necessary toward the end of protecting or enhancing our rational values. When we buy something from a store, we don’t need to (and rationally shouldn’t) pass moral judgment on the store clerk unless he behaves in a particularly good or bad way in the course of serving us. But if a person we know well consistently exhibits dishonest behavior, justice requires that we condemn that person. Likewise, if a person in your life is virtuous and good, that person deserves your respect.

It’s also vital that we hold ourselves to the same standard of moral judgment. We should respect and reward our own virtuous behavior, and we should acknowledge and work to correct our own bad decisions.

Our moral judgments should always be independent and based on our rational values, even if they clash with the dominant cultural values or laws where we live. (Here, we are referring exclusively to our moral judgments themselves, not necessarily other actions that may follow from those judgments. For example, knowingly breaking an unjust law is rarely advisable because, in most cases, doing so would damage your rational values more than it would enhance them.) In every place in the world, there are many unjust things that are perfectly legal, some of which should be and some of which should not be.7 At the same time, there are also many just things that are illegal in many places, which should never be the case and which shows that every society has a legal system that is unjust to some extent. For example, it’s unjustly illegal in many places to enter into same-sex marriages or even to go into business without government permission. In other words: Whether something is just and whether it’s legal are related but ultimately separate considerations.

Being just consistently will help you live a flourishing life in the long run, even if it sometimes makes things harder in the short run. By dealing only with people who consistently act well by your rational moral standards, you protect yourself from dealing with frauds, thieves, and people who will harm your image by association. You might occasionally end or avoid relationships that might have seemed beneficial in the short run, but you’ll protect yourself in the long run, and you’ll have the pride of knowing that you did the right thing.

Integrity

Integrity is the virtue of consistently putting your rational principles into action—of never compromising on them. It means keeping your values and your actions integrated. It means standing up for the life-serving principles you have rationally chosen to hold and applying those principles consistently throughout your life, never knowingly endorsing (even tacitly) anything or anyone that violates them.

Imagine you work at a company, and that the managers or executives of that company take an action that directly violates your rational principles. This happened for some people when Disney worked closely with the government authorities in Xinjiang, China during the production of Mulan (2020). According to reports, the government bodies Disney worked with and publicly thanked in the film’s credits were involved in the mass internment and forced re-education of the Uighur minority in that region.8 Assuming your principles include (as they rationally should) that individuals who have not initiated force against others have a right to live freely, then if you worked at Disney at the time, you would have faced a choice: Sit by and support the violation of your principles by continuing to work there and staying silent, or jeopardize your career and opportunities there by speaking out and/or resigning.

How do you practice integrity in this situation? The first step is to recognize that there are no contradictions in a rational value hierarchy. Your career is a value to you because it enables you to achieve many of your other rational values. If it is significantly working against those values, it is no longer good for your life. In practice, this means that your continued sanctioning of the company’s activities will erode your self-esteem because you will know that your work is not only directly supporting the destruction of human life but also morally supporting organizations and ideas antithetical to life and freedom. Your decision to stay may also cause others who have integrity to negatively judge you, which will further damage your self-esteem and potentially close off beneficial relationships. Ultimately, the decision to evade the knowledge that your work is supporting evil risks beginning a pattern of more (and worse) evasion in the future.

On the flip side, leaving your job or speaking out may reduce your income and prospects in the short term, but in the long term, it will give you enormous pride in your moral stature and bring you the respect of people whose respect is worth having. It may also create opportunities for you in the form of publicity and new contacts; in almost every crisis lies an opportunity for growth. Moreover, a new job that is more in line with your rational values is more likely to involve working with people whom you’ll like and respect. Whatever you do next, you’ll be able to do it sound in the knowledge that you’re consistently upholding your principles.

Integrity means living all of your rational values and virtues consistently and standing up with a principled defense when they are attacked. It means refusing to compromise on your ideals. Sometimes, it can involve putting your career, friendships, and other values on the line, but in the long run, it’ll help you live a life you can be genuinely proud of.

Achieving Harmony

All seven universal virtues depend on and integrate with each other. For example:

You cannot practice rationality if you do not have the self-esteem to believe that you have an efficacious rational mind.
You cannot be productive if you don’t use reason to identify and achieve rational goals.
You cannot be just if you are not honest about other people’s characters (and your own).
You cannot achieve pride without doing all of these things, and pride further magnifies all of the other universal virtues.

You can construct similar sentences using any two of the seven universal virtues. These virtues will never contradict each other, but you will encounter situations in which they apply to different extents or in different ways. For example, if a person you don’t know and will never meet again voices an opinion you disagree with, the virtue of rationality can help you see that it’s not worth your time or effort trying to argue with him, and that it does not violate your integrity to ignore him. A good exercise to see how the virtues interrelate and support each other is to imagine different scenarios and evaluate how each virtue might apply.

Here are a few important questions to consider when evaluating how to apply the seven virtues in a given situation:

Now that we’ve started to see how these seven virtues can enable us to thrive in life, let’s turn to the question of how to apply them in the realm of finding or creating productive work that supports our deepest rational values.

This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2 Chapter 6, Joe Sachs translation (Indianapolis: Focus, 2002), 29. ↑
A full defense of the Aristotelian concept of virtue is beyond the scope of this book, but for recommended reading on this, see Appendix B. ↑
“Virgin: Richard Branson,” NPR, January 30, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/01/30/511817806/virgin-richard-branson. ↑
Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), 29. ↑
J.D. Tuccille, “You Own a Business? ‘You Didn’t Build That,’ Says Obama,” Reason, July 17, 2012, https://reason.com/2012/07/17/you-own-a-busines-you-didnt-build-that-s. ↑
Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), 54. ↑
The proper function of a legal system is only to protect people from the use of force by others, not to protect them from injustice in general. For example, failing to reward virtue with respect is unjust but is not properly a legal matter. However, using force to stop people from competing with your business is unjust and should be illegal, but many corporations legally lobby governments to do exactly this. ↑
Dr. Ewelina U. Ochab, “Why Is Disney Under Fire Over Mulan?,” Forbes, October 22, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2020/10/22/why-is-disney-under-fire-over-mulan. ↑