"higher virtue" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when you are referring to an elevated moral or ethical quality. For example, "He exemplified a higher virtue by helping his fellow citizens during the pandemic."
Discrimination was a higher virtue than effusiveness.
Debt is bad, prudence a higher virtue than profit.
However, Stanton believed there was an even higher virtue for women to develop; namely, self-development.
And redemption most times comes to each of us through circumstances of life, not really through any higher virtue.
For a people that lives by self-government, care for the spirit of the laws is a higher virtue than neighborliness.
Keynote Speaker New Jersey Governor Christie, however, would have none of this "love" nonsense, insisting that "respect" was a higher virtue.
Suddenly the military is a bastion of the higher virtues -- selflessness, duty and honor.
For some, no doubt, that is the meaning of our time, but this is a novel that signals higher virtues, without evincing them.
But the best way to defy the terrorists is to celebrate the higher virtues of our plural, multicultural, society that is welcoming of all faiths and none.
Like armchair quarterbacks everywhere, he also obviously enjoys the struggle and the strategy, the physical clash and mental calculation aspects of the game he likes to endow with higher virtues.
It's currently being roundly felt up by randy critics wearing the filmic equivalent of beer-goggles, but fools crying "Oscar!" don't detract from what is a very nifty comedy-thriller embodying the higher virtues of 1970s cinema.
