Ms. Rand was an ardent atheist who considered the cross a symbol of how "a man of perfect virtue" sacrificed himself for a bunch of losers.
The dream is that Oprah is such a specimen of perfect virtue that she will create consensus wherever she walks.
8. Whether divine moral perfection should be understood as perfect goodness, perfect virtue, or an optimal combination of goodness and virtue, depends upon whether the correct theory of morality is consequentialist, deontological, or mixed (that is, a mixture of core elements of consequentialist and deontological moral theories).
Following (and adapting) Aristotle, virtue ethicists draw a distinction between full or perfect virtue and "continence", or strength of will.
Moreover, to possess, fully, such a disposition is to possess full or perfect virtue, which is rare, and there are a number of ways of falling short of this ideal (Athanassoulis 2000).
I grew up feeling that for black people only perfect virtue would do.
"It is as though with Dostoyevsky he could drop the appearance of perfect virtue he felt he had to keep up before the English public".
Without divine assistance, perhaps perfect virtue is unachievable, but in that case we cannot be obliged to realize such a state if there is no God.
And as for divine law, it prescribes also other, non-social actions that belong to the relations between man and God but leaves those actions of perfect virtue to the realm of supererogatory counsel.
Protagoras finds what looks like an inconsistency in the poem, but Socrates introduces distinctions (foreign to the text of the poem) that allow him to read Simonides as supporting the Socratic views that (1) it is difficult to acquire perfect virtue and (2) no one does wrong voluntarily.
