Gods and Virtue

“In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.” - Mary Wollstonecraft

André Comte-Sponville, in his fantastic book A Small Treatise on The Great Virtues, explains that “virtue” means excellence. Everything has the potential to be virtuous. A knife’s virtue would be to cut well, for example. For humans, virtue or excellence includes the classic virtues of honesty, compassion, mercy, prudence, etc. 

Are the gods always virtuous? Some people that I highly respect think so. However, on this point, I disagree. 

To begin, I’m a hard polytheist. I hold that the gods share the characteristic of being autonomous beings with their own personalities. They make their own choices, just as we do, in keeping with their values.

This ability to make choices leads to my next point, virtue and vice result from reason. An unconscious act might be good, but it’s not virtuous. Virtue is a conscious choice. It might be due to years of practice to the point that it becomes a reflex, but it’s still the product of reason, for we can choose vice over virtue.

Another point is that most Pagans don’t see the gods as perfect. They’re more powerful and more knowledgeable than humans. They also create a sense of awe. However, perfection isn’t part of their nature, for nothing is perfect. 

The gods cannot always be virtuous when one adds all this up. Autonomy means they must have the freedom to decide whether to act virtuously. If they don’t have freedom, then they aren’t autonomous. And since the gods have the capacity for reason and the freedom to choose, they can choose whether to act with virtue or vice. Finally, since the gods, like everything, aren’t perfect, this also means that they may make a choice of vice rather than virtue.

Are some gods consistently virtuous in the human sense? I believe that some are. Some humans choose virtue more often than vice, so we should expect that some gods do the same. However, it’s equally likely that some gods choose vice over virtue.