Well, my point was that many people confuse strengths with virtues.

For instance, I used to think that an intelligent man would necessarily be a good man, because he could see that honesty is the best policy, and his self-interest would be enlightened self-interest. It finally came to me that, reasonable as I thought that opinion was, in practice there's lots of intelligent scoundrels.

"Decisiveness" is considered a virtue lately, but as Mr. Vonnegut said recently, psychopaths are very good at decisiveness. And courage.

I thiink I should have said something like "goodness" instead of "virtue." I believe "virtue" originally was connected more to strength & power than decency, & still is in some uses.

clint