Livre d'Or

None of this makes exercise a moral imperative for anyone else, of course

As a virtue ethicist myself, I don't quite know where this comes from. Is it that you think there are other ways in which to develop physical excellence, and that exercise is the path for you to develop physical excellence but other ways might be better for other people? In which case what might these other ways be?

Or is it that you think that developing physical excellence is not a moral imperative for other people as it is for you? In which case I would question whether you really are a virtue ethicist. For as I understand it, if a virtue is a virtue it is so objectively; something cannot be a virtue for some people to develop but not for others. Everyone has a moral imperative to develop all the virtues as much as they can.

(Depending on your position on the unity of the virtues, that might be tautologous. I'm not sure where I stand on the unity of the virtues. Aristotle was big on it and when in doubt I often tend to defer to him, just as he was generally right about so much, but still I'm not entirely sure. Anyway.)

One thing I do think is that there are some virtues which are, as it were, cardinal virtues: the ones on which the others depend. Lewis identified courage as one when he wrote it was 'not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point'.

But if courage is the form of every virtue at the testing-point, then before the testing-point (and in building readiness for it) the form of virtue is discipline: forcing oneself to do what one knows one ought to, though one doesn't want to, though it is hard, though one would rather not, though it gives one no pleasure now nor later.

One's attitude to exercise, I often think, is a barometer of one's discipline: if one commits to exercise and does so through thick and thin, regardless of how one may be feeling at the time, that is symptomatic of a generally good discipline, of keeping oneself under control and not allowing one's ephemeral feelings of pain or pleasure, readiness or tiredness, tranquillity or frustration, to rule one's life, but instead of simply doing one's duty to improve oneself in every dimension, whether one enjoys it or not.

And if one has committed to, and maintained, discipline in things such as exercise (and its equivalents in the spheres of the intellectual, social, spiritual, and so on virtues) then one will be better-placed to display courage when one finds oneself in the crucible and the heat is coming up from below, and one finds out once and for all whether one is silver or slag.