Virtues and Social Identity

This chapter is concerned with interpreting and analyzing the virtues that are necessary to rebuild or reconstruct the social fabric, ethos, or socio-ethical identity of Nigeria, the practices of excellence that go to the core of the functioning of a nation as a pluralistic community geared toward optimum human flourishing. This declaration may be misconstrued to mean that our interest in virtues is limited to community well-being. But concern for the national wellbeing is simultaneously a concern for what the individual person can do and be if such a person is not limited. Our discourse of virtue ethics in this chapter assumes that every individual has been endowed by God (gods) with certain gifts to bless his or her community or nation, and the community and the nation need to help the individual to fully realize these potentials.

We will try to use this connection between virtue and community well-being to ground a standard of citizenship moral behavior. According to this standard, the pursuit of a citizen's social life or work is grounded in the person's useful conception of the identity of a person-in-community. The new ethical social life that I am advocating in this book consists in the efficient pursuit of one's values that define what needs to be in the context of a community. It is a notion of self-identity and national well-being (precisely, the socio-ethical identity of Nigeria) that recognizes and embraces connectedness and accents virtues and self-esteem.

When self-identity is properly understood and handled, it dovetails into selfesteem or sustenance of self-esteem and it bleeds into virtues. For people will value their self-identity only to the extent that they continue to believe in the esteem they enjoy from such an identity. “For esteem will rule people's lives only so far as they can continue to believe in the possibility of estimable or virtuous behavior and only so far, therefore, as there are at least some individuals who offer persuasive examples of virtue.” Self-identity dovetails or becomes tangential to esteem when the person seeking to act out of self-identity presupposes reindentifiability (wants a recognizable name) and desires the honor and approval of others.