Suppose that someone acts in a way we might normally describe as brave, but that they do so in pursuit of a bad purpose - for example, in carrying out a political assassination we consider to be without justification. Bravery is something we generally admire; we think of it as a virtue. In the example supposed, does this mean we allow that the assassin has shown himself to possess at least one of the virtues?
A way of avoiding this conclusion would be to say that the qualities of mind and conduct we call bravery are not bravery - or courage - when put to the service of a bad moral purpose. In that case, though, you wouldn't be able to say that soldiers can fight bravely in an unjust war, or that an individual can show courage in carrying out a daring criminal raid (and just to be clear here, I mean a raid for self-enrichment and nothing more, one without any redeeming moral qualities). I think this goes against the standard meaning of 'bravery' or 'courage' and I think we should uphold the standard meaning: we want to be able to characterize the qualities of mind and action those words refer to separately from a judgement about the character of the projects which individuals may act bravely in pursuing. It shouldn't contradict the meaning of the word 'courage' to say of someone that she could have put her courage to better use, or that he behaved bravely even though his enterprise in doing so was an illegitimate one.
This is the view, too, of Theodore Dalrymple. He is challenging the denial that Benazir Bhutto's assassins acted bravely:
for it requires [he says] great courage to assassinate someone in the middle of a large and volatile crowd favourable to that person, and above all then to blow yourself up just to make sure that you have succeeded.Dalrymple goes on to suggest a different way of blocking the unwanted conclusion that perpetrators of a morally deplorable act - here an assassination - might be possessed of any virtue. This is to claim that virtues can only be such when in the service of good ends. Used badly, they cease to be virtues. Thus, he writes:
[M]ost virtues... are virtuous only when exercised correctly, that is to say when in pursuit of laudable goals.The impulse to say this seems to me to embody the same mistake as the one that says that, used badly, courage is no longer courage. Dalrymple rightly insists that courage remains courage when misused, but he claims that it is then no longer a virtue. And the mistaken impulse, in my view, is to want to deny that there can be any good moral qualities in an evil-doer; such people must be all bad. But, with respect to very many of them, this is a psychologically uncompelling claim. Aside from the most saintly and the most psychopathic, people aren't either all good or all bad; and there's nothing abnormal in thinking that the perpetrators even of great wrong might possess some good qualities. They might have a virtue here or there - like (precisely) courage. But because they are lacking in, say, benevolence and are moved by greed, or lacking in humanity and moved by hatred, or whatever, their courage is 'packaged together' with other things in a way that produces bad results.
Two further reasons for scepticism towards Dalrymple's argument are these. First, I don't think there's any logical self-contradiction in saying something like: 'He had the virtue of courage but used it in a terrible cause'. Second, it would seem to follow from what Dalrymple says that a person can't have some virtues without having them all. Here's a woman who is, let us say, benevolent but timid. Throughout her life she does good work to the benefit of others, and far beyond the average of human generosity. However, faced with a threat of death if she would go to the rescue of someone in peril, she hasn't the courage to do it. Must we say of her that she wasn't really a benevolent woman? Why not just that she was that but, on the occasion imagined, her fear overwhelmed her benevolence?
People are complex in the qualities they possess and the extent to which they possess them, and in their weaknesses too. There seems no good reason to adopt a 'totalizing' approach to virtues, such that these can never exist except purely and in benign combinations with other virtues - and never in combination with moral failings, vices, bad purposes.