Virtue?  The philosopher James Laidlaw once observed that, "Ethics should be understood as the way that freedom unfolds within a specific social world, within the social relationships of that world."  Taken at face value, Laidlaw's words seem to reduce ethics to a function of the moment, or moments, that constitute a particular, or peculiar, cultural or social world.  Put another way, ethics are situational, specific to the time but not necessarily to any other time.

        Sometimes this works; sometimes it does not.  Although most of us like to think that we have some core ethical values which we will likely never violate, we almost always abridge them.  At heart, we're deeply pragmatic beings.  Moreover, regardless of religion, living pragmatically has, over the millennia of humanity's existence, seemed the best way to sustain the human species (as well as the countless other species that live on the planet).

        Yet as a student whom I have been supervising as he worked on a thesis about humanism this past academic year eventually realized, pragmatic or not, without acknowledging some dimension of transcendence in reality, even if we live flourishing lives, and millions of us do, in the end we are really doing little more than surviving, to live as long as we possibly can:  life's richness crumbles in the face of its intractable end.  And there is no final point.

       And we may never know, really know, how we've been good.