Community and Virtue

Adams makes the claim that social roles and affiliations are morally significant. I agree with this stance and would like to add support to Adams' claims.

From this viewpoint, one is able to make the claim that without human interaction, virtue does not exist. I would argue this as true. I do not believe that animals are able to exhibit virtue, they may act in ways that the untrained thinks has some sort of virtuous connection, but I believe this is false. Namely because animals are fully connected to nature, and with that connection is a constant threat of survival. That is where mating and survival of the fittest come into play. All animals have failed at transcending the threat of survival that nature poses besides humans.

Higher reasoning capabilities allowed humans to consistently improve upon their means to produce food, attain water, and build shelters, marginalizing the threat of survival against the human species. These advancements could not have been accomplished unless there was a level of cooperation amongst the individual agents. The cooperation was most assuredly spawned from the reasoning that, 'if I work together with other humans, I will limit the threat of survival posed against me by nature'.

Before such an occurance took place, I would hypothesize that there was no virtue simply because if there is a constant threat of survival imposed by nature, virtue cannot develop. This is shown through all other species of animals who upon failing to marginalize the imminent threat of survival imposed by nature, have also failed to develop complex social and communal structures that are not based off of biological traits such as who is the fittest.

While this does not prove that social roles and affiliations are necessary for virtue develop, I think that it does provide insight on how virtue cannot exist without community, specifically community that does not structure itself according to biological factors. As virtue has no connection to what is biological or physical, it is a construct of intellectual reasoning. So, other constructs that formed out of intellectual reasoning (faulty or not), such as religion or politics, could share a possible link and could be cojoined to where the statement of, "I'm a christian" does have virtuous or vicious connotations or meaning.