I really don't think that. If somebody's morbidly obese and they're smoking? Yeah, then I think they're putting too much stress on their heart. If I see somebody smoking who's pregnant? I feel judgmental about that. People who are thin? I don't presume anything about them until I know them.

I really wish we could leave the smoking out of this. It's really not an apt comparison. Because it is unequivocally not morally neutral, or a personal choice that only affects the individual. And I say this as someone who hasn't yet managed to kick the habit. Equating that to weight and diet choices is - well, replace smoking in your examples with eating unhealthy food and the passage reads a lot differently, doesn't it?

But people see someone thin and think Healthy! and they see someone not thin and think Unhealthy!

I am well aware of the relentless promotion of fad diets etc. but I don't think that most people think this.

Really? Because it sounds like you live in a different society than I do and I didn't think Bal'mer was that far off the grid. (Though okay, the junkie point probably has some validity.)

But when health is set up as a "virtue," there is no room for moral neutrality.

I think you're getting hung up on the word virtue automatically implying a moral judgment. To me, the word "virtue" is simply not loaded that way.

[eta: And maybe this feeds into the "you need to read the Bible to understand American culture" conversation over in Literary. I was raised in a VERY secular environment and have never read the bible outside of my Torah portion for my Bat Mitzvah, and so the virtue/sin dichotomy is waaaaaaay outside my frame of reference. I think it may be something you have to have grown up with.]

Because it sounds like you live in a different society than I do and I didn't think Bal'mer was that far off the grid.

I mean the people I'm around, my family, friends, doctors, colleagues which, obviously, isn't a representative cross-section of society. I know I'm lucky not to have had doctors who have had an issue with my weight.

And what I'm saying is that health does not make one a Good person, just as illness/lack of health does not make one a Bad person. You can't have one without the other, so the assignment of "good" to the state of being healthy does, in fact, make lack of health/illness "bad."

Health is morally neutral.

Health might be "morally" neutral, but it is unambiguously a Good thing.

Virtue has many closely shaded meanings. While it does mean moral excellence (as you put it), it also means "a commendable quality or trait" or a "beneficial quality."

I think Jessica is right to note that your objection to the moral implications of the word is not how we're using the word. To us it is not a moral judgment. It's just something that would be beneficial to do.

I can see how the word "virtue" pings because it does imply an opposite: "vice." I DO think that educating and encouraging healthier behaviors as better for you is needed. Not better in a judgmental sense, but better FOR YOU. Making fresh produce more available in supermarkets, distributing clean needles, educating about the dangers of eating disorders and making treatment available--that kind of stuff is not, to my mind, making a virtue out of healthy choices, but just enabling healthy choices to be made. And I want to do that in the sense of having my tax dollars go for those programs.

Ginger, so glad you decided to put Easter off until next weekend what with the tornado hitting Murfreesboro yesterday.

[link]

(Murfreesboro is about 30 miles SE of Nashville and right off I-24.)

I think you're getting hung up on the word virtue automatically implying a moral judgment. To me, the word "virtue" is simply not loaded that way.

I'm struggling with this one too. I can't make it work in my head that if one choice is virtuous, others are not implicitly non-virtuous. It simply is a value-laden word. And yet, there clearly are better and worse choices and saying so shouldn't be so fraught.

"beneficial". If you are using "virtue" as a synonym for "beneficial", why not say "beneficial"?

I'm with Teppy on this. If I had a shiny pound coin for every time I've heard a woman refer to her eating choices in terms of "sinning", I'd be able to buy myself an iPhone. That whole virtue/vice paradigm IS applied to food choices in the media, and in everyday conversation, all the time, framing food choices as moral choices. Not just "sensible" choices, or "healthy" choices, not just good in that specific sense, but moral choices. Advertisers make conscious use of this, both cashing in on the ideal of virtuousness and the seduction of sinfulness in relation to food. Desserts are "wicked" and "sinful" and "decadent" - this is very morally loaded terminology. Women who have broken their eating regimen say they have "been bad" - not "made a bad decision", generally, but "been bad". Or naughty, or wicked.

It is a specific linguistic tick that always irritates the hell out of me, because I think it's profoundly unhelpful.

vw, that purse is gorgeous!!!