How Virtue Fell Under Suspicion

In the second book of the Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus press Socrates with a challenge that has never quite been answered. Strip a just man of every reward of justice, they propose, and heap those rewards instead upon an unjust man clever enough to seem just; then ask which of the two lives is the better. The thought experiment assumes precisely what it sets out to test: that a virtue practiced for its good consequences is not the same thing as a virtue practiced for its own sake. Michael Moriarty, whose Disguised Vices is the third and most ambitious volume of a trilogy on early modern French thought, observes that the classical rescue of virtue only sharpens the difficulty it means to resolve. To answer Glaucon by saying that justice is to be chosen because it benefits and completes the just man is, as Moriarty notes, to reopen the very door the argument was meant to close: this argument can be “seized on by the cynical critic,“ for what could be more in one’s interest than one’s own happiness? The suspicion that our virtues are something other than they appear is not a modern heresy. It is coiled inside the oldest philosophical defense of virtue itself.

The title draws directly from a maxim, "Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés [Our virtues are most often only disguised vices]", which appeared as the epigraph to the 1678 edition of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes. To his credit, Moriarty treats this not as a witty aside but as the culmination of a profound intellectual tradition spanning antiquity, patristic theology, medieval scholasticism, and the fierce religious controversies of early modern Europe. The work stands as a towering achievement as a history of moral philosophy and early modern French intellectual thought not because it attempts to tame the sharp aphorisms but because it situates them in the middle of one of the most enduring and corrosive suspicions in Western ethics: that what we praise as virtue is frequently nothing more than vice in elaborate disguise. This is the terrain of Disguised Vices. Moriarty organizes his inquiry around a deceptively straightforward set of questions: Under what conditions does a morally praiseworthy action truly reflect virtue in the agent? When, and why, might we suspect that apparent virtue is driven by hidden vices such as self-love (amour-propre), vanity, fear, habit, or unconscious passions? The investigation begins with classical antiquity and builds toward the Grand Siècle, where these tensions reached a dramatic pitch amid Jansenist rigorism, courtly culture at the dawn of the absolute state, and emerging secular moral psychology.

The opening chapter establishes the ancient foundations with Aristotle as the benchmark. For him, virtue is a stable disposition (hexis) involving deliberate choice, not mere emotion. It represents a “good love of self“ directed toward the noble rather than base pleasures or external honors. Motive may disqualify virtue. Eudaemonic self-love, properly understood, aligns with reason and the pursuit of what is best in oneself. The discussion in Book III of the Ethics admits virtuous courage even when emotional spiritedness (thumos) is at work in a man, but however valiant the act, if the end is not toward the noble (dia to kalon), it is not virtuous, for a thing is defined by its end. Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch extend this framework, distinguishing authentic virtue from its counterfeits, such as the thrasonic glory-seeking that mimics courage or the calculated restraint that passes for temperance. The Stoics notably insist on the unity of the soul, and so for Seneca, who especially aimed his moral critique at the decadence of Imperial Roman society, men have a proclivity toward self-deception that unnaturally partitions the soul and directs it away from right reason (orthos logos). Moriarty carefully avoids teleological flattening here; he highlights internal tensions in these systems (reason versus passion, appearance versus reality) and appeals to universal norms that later Christian writers would seize upon in their engagement.