We take a virtue every week from Ben Franklin’s list of virtues, and the students develop a practice in their lives related to that virtue. This week we’re reading Aquinas, and the virtue they’re practising is silence. Each student reflects on their attitude to silence, their relationship to silence and how they could create more silence in their lives. At the end of the week, they get together in small groups with another student facilitator and they discuss what they did to bring more silence into their lives, or temperance, or cleanliness, or honesty, depending on the virtue. The idea is to take what they’re learning about the texts and create habits, modes of being, that they can build on long after they’re in college.

It’s a bit more difficult asking them to practise vice on a university campus. We read Baudelaire’s The Bad Glazier and Get Drunk, and we talk about those poems. I don’t ask them to practise vices; I suppose they do that on their own.

However, I do ask them to not only think hard about what filial piety means in Confucius, but what would it mean to behave in such a way that you expressed reverence for your parents and your ancestors? What would it mean to practise that? That bodily experience, that time-based experience, enriches their intellectual understanding and, I hope, enriches their lives.

People often ask me, ‘Why do we need philosophy to lead a better life?’ And I have to think back to my beloved teacher, Richard Rorty, who, when asked these kinds of questions, would say, ‘We don’t. Plenty of people lead very good lives without philosophy. You don’t need philosophy to lead a better life; it’s just professional hubris to think you do.’

However, philosophy can be useful for some people insofar as it helps you to develop habits of reflection on what you would otherwise do automatically. This can lead to a better life. In other words, you pause; you think about the reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing. Wittgenstein sometimes said that philosophy can be therapeutic in that sense – you examine your life, your goals, your desires. And there are conflicts.

Every year, I ask my students: who is your moral hero? This surprises them; many of them have never thought about that question. I ask them to write down the answer and send it to me, so they don’t have to say it out loud in front of everyone. I took this idea from Elizabeth Minnich, a great public philosopher in the United States, who has been doing this with her older students in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I’ve been doing this exercise for years, and I was really surprised when the students said: my mother, my father, my grandparents. Overwhelmingly, the categories that were chosen most often for moral hero by my students were parents or grandparents. I told the students that this was unthinkable for my generation. I’m 64. When I was in college, the idea was that you would say your parents are your moral heroes – well, I love my parents, but I would never say that.

And the students were very insulted. They said: ‘That’s because our parents are better than your parents.’ One student told me, ‘My mother is a rebel, and I’m just like my mother. I’m a rebel.’ And I said: ‘She’s really convinced you to be a conformist and think you’re a rebel.’

Through these conversations, the students begin to reveal what they value in another person at the level of morality. A few things come to the fore. Generosity is one. Another is the capacity to overcome suffering – the capacity to survive suffering.

This is extremely interesting, because this virtue and vice course is built on a narrative arc. We start in the ancient world, where virtue is tied to a certain kind of strength, or even good luck and health, and by the end of the course, virtue is tied to having suffered. Being a survivor gives you a certain moral status, especially in the United States. Being a survivor elevates you today, whereas in the ancient world it was tough luck to have had to become a survivor but it wasn’t the key to moral elevation.

Christianity is a big piece of this puzzle. But in the United States, over the last 40 years or so, the notion has developed that if you’ve suffered, you’ve learned something important about morality. You’ve survived. That becomes a moral category. You’re not a victim; you’re a survivor. The survivor is ennobled in much of popular culture in the United States. In the class, we talk about that; we examine that and try to understand if that’s something that seems sensible.