Virtue and Shadow Inseparability

Niebuhr argued that the most durable moral blindness is produced not by vice but by virtue. Vice is self-aware or at least capable of self-awareness—the person who lies knows they are lying. Virtue destroys the categories within which wrongdoing can be recognized. The person genuinely doing good has no internal mechanism for recognizing the harm that accompanies the good, because harm falls outside the frame of reference virtue has constructed. The virtue is not separate from the blindness. They are two aspects of a single moral structure, inseparable in the way light and shadow are inseparable. The builder's creative drive is genuinely virtuous and genuinely produces inability to stop long enough to ask whether the problem being solved is the right problem. The passion for shipping real things that solve real problems is genuinely admirable and genuinely prevents the builder from evaluating whether the problem is the most important problem or merely the most solvable one.