Nobility

What makes a truly beautiful person? Most people would include a person’s values and ideals in that definition, and just like a few bad decisions can hide someone’s superficial beauty, no one is going to know how beautiful your ethic system is if you never show it off to the world. People who come across as elevated, noble people seem to have a very strong grasp on what they believe in and carry that through their daily lives.

The question is, then, how does one teach him or herself this sense of nobility? It’s a large concept and could be seen as a larger benefit from your work in the other virtues combined. This is true to some degree, but your own sense of nobility is something that is well worth your repeated self-reflection throughout your life. In fact, as you experience more and change over time you will hopefully grow and improve in this area—at the very least your flavor of this virtue will change.

There are two parts of this virtue, one is having a strong, meaningful set of values and ethics, and the other is making these ideas you have evident and valuable to others. On the most basic level, having strong morals doesn’t mean you abide by them, and perhaps less obviously, practicing strong morals doesn’t always improve the lives of others. The goal of this virtue, and hopefully one of the leading goals of your life, is to live in such a way that benefits and improves the lives of those you love, and makes your inclusion in the lives of others a blessing as often as possible. In order to accomplish this handily, you will have to frequently go back and forth on these too goals and ask yourself: "how complete and noble is my value system?" "How well do I live up to my own standards?" "How much are others (and myself) really benefiting when I practice these standards?" If you don’t question yourself and the things which you believe in, then you are in danger of blindly doing that which seems to make best sense to you while justifying the pain you cause to others or yourself.

The first part, evaluating your own personal value system, is personal enough that I don’t want to give too many specifics on how you should judge those things you believe in. I will make a few points, however. For one, it is popular to think that the ideal "do what you will, just as long as you don’t hurt anyone" is naïve and foolish. Maybe doing whatever you want is foolish, but "just don’t hurt anyone" is actually a pretty good place to start. In fact, naïve as that viewpoint may be, imagine how little we would have to complain about if everyone actually lived by that standard! Now, include yourself in part of that equation of avoiding causing others pain, and you’ll find that you’re actually well on your way to finding a good starting place for an entire ethics system. In fact, you should probably revisit this idea as you begin to add more specifics to your ideology and to what you believe one’s proper behavior should be.

My last point I would like to make is that the things which we wish to believe in don’t always necessarily make the best basis for a good or right decision. We human beings want to reaffirm our own goodness and tend to diminish our own false or improper motives from our own eyes (in our defense, I must add that we do tend to go a little crazy or depressed if we don’t do this sometimes). Do your best not to let your own need to justify your actions poison your values. It’s better to do something you don’t believe in than to praise or justify your own poor behavior.

After considering your own value system, the next step would be to judge how well you follow this system and evaluate how well it actually benefits your own life and the life of those around you. Judging how well you live your own values seems like it might be a piece of cake, but it can be more difficult than could be expected. One major problem lies in that we are our own creators of this system and it is so easy to twist or bend the rules to put our own behavior in the best light possible—or to rewrite them completely as needed. You need to permit yourself to see your own failures or you can do nothing to change them or improve upon them. The other problem lies in the fact that many of us are not practiced in self-evaluation. I constantly advocate this activity throughout this site, but it is hard to overstress the importance of building the habit of self-reflection if you want to improve upon yourself.

Judging how well your value system improves the lives around you seems like it should be easy as well—you can simply ask them about it if you’re close enough to them, right? This becomes difficult, however, when the question is mired in the complexity of our relationships and the necessity of looking out for our own good. Some people won’t open up to you on this subject, and it’s hard to draw the line on taking care of yourself and taking advantage of others. The fact is you’re never going to get this right all the time, so this is a topic you will have to revisit over and over again. If you’re not used to thinking in these terms you might need to use some tools (or get some help from others) to make better decisions in these areas. You need to think about the consequences of your actions and whether or not any harm done to them could have been avoided or whether the whole situation could have been handled in a better way.

Finally, perhaps the most important part of making the aesthetic side of nobility apparent is making your own nobility available to others. This means being reliable and, well, available to those around you. This could mean overcoming a sense of shyness, making more time for others, becoming more aware of their needs, or revaluating your ethics system so that it includes others more often—or makes your potential good more apparent in their lives. You should try to live a life so that anyone would benefit if they had a copy of your cell-phone number in their list of contacts.

Note: It is possible to live too much for other people and ignore your own needs too much. I encourage you in this article, too fervently perhaps, to look outwards since it seems that most of us need more encouragement to look this way than vice-versa. Don’t ignore your own needs and health, however, in your desire to make others happy or to be "likable".