In The Walking Dead, that frontier spirit is a useful virtue to have.
To the extent that Google has done its business on the premises of enlightenment ("Universally accessible and useful") and virtue ("Don't be evil"), its research for the future shares a questing optimism — and a reverent isolationism — with the studious faiths of the past.
In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he distinguishes among virtues useful to others, virtues useful to oneself, virtues immediately agreeable to oneself, and virtues immediately agreeable to others.
But it need not impart any particular substantive knowledge to the statesman (so competing philosophies could all be useful in shaping virtue: Anaxagaorean influence on Pericles, an eclectic mixture of Stoicism, Academic skepticism, and Platonism on Cicero; Stoicism on the younger Cato).
Consequentialists can of course portray punishment as useful partly in virtue of its expressive character (see Lacey 1988; Braithwaite & Pettit 1990): but a portrayal of punishment as a mode of moral communication has been central to some recent versions of retributivism.
It is always useful to explore virtue to understand how and why it exists, as well as how it can make the world a better place.
The weak and well-meaning King Louis XVI (who had taken up locksmithing, out of a belief in the virtues of "useful" craft and trade) got talked into fleeing toward the border of the Austrian Netherlands, where loyalist troops waited.
The thing can also effect genuinely useful change by simple virtue of its celebrity, and this embarrasses the powers that be, as in the Hackney housing story, so it will be really interesting to see what else happens.
He spent his leisure, which was considerable, turning locks on a private forge (he had a touching faith in the virtue of useful labor), when he wasn't hunting in the forest, and in that respect — his passion for the chase — he couldn't have been a stranger to desire.
