"See!" continued the laughing scout, as he pointed toward the remainder of the party, who, in obedience to the signal, were already approaching; "this is music which has its
natural virtues; it brings two good rifles to my elbow, to say nothing of the knives and tomahawks.
Rather, what is important is that the society believes that justice is a
natural virtue that is intrinsically valuable and that this belief is backed up by faith in a providential deity.
Anselm Muller, "Aristotle's Conception of Ethical and
Natural Virtue," in Was ist das fur den Menschen Gute?
Finally, hoping to offer an account of the virtues needed for human flourishing today, Michael Lawler and Todd Salzman encourage dialogue between
natural virtue ethics deriving from the Aristotelian tradition and Christian virtue ethics deriving from following Jesus Christ.
A
natural virtue is grounded in our approval, that is, the moral sense's approval, of some naturally occurring motive.
Defining justice as a
natural virtue or admitting the goodness of human beings would solve this problem.
Producers have wised up to the fact that promoting goods by extolling their
natural virtue is a good marketing ploy.
However it seems wrong to argue that the idea of solidarity or mateship in itself should be celebrated as some kind of
natural virtue. The ultimate paradox of mateship is that it is precisely the unvirtuous nature of the activity which it undergirds that provides the social impetus to describe mateship as a virtue.
The position he seeks to overturn is that the reception of Aristotle enabled scholastics to develop a secular basis for political theory, derived from the concept of man as a political animal; thus, justice, understood as serving the common good, became a
natural virtue. In opposing this view, M.
[100] He acknowledged the Stoic definition of "
natural virtue" as deriving simply from natural qualities of body and mind, but he hastened to add that this
natural virtue counted for little in human society, for, as Aristotle had argued, a servant could be endowed with every kind of moral virtue and still not be noble because of his menial social status.
In the course of exploring this thesis, Whiting argues that Aristotle's distinction between the agathos (the good person) and the kaloskagathos (the fine-and-good person) corresponds to his distinction between
natural virtue and authoritative virtue, in which the authoritatively virtuous agent is responsible for his own fate in a way in which the naturally virtuous agent is not.