Rev Dr Giles Fraser - 31/08/2026

Available for over a year

I have often been way more nervous of other people virtues than their vices. Generally speaking, most people’s vices are fairly humdrum – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth. OK, people can do bad chasing these. But if you want real nasty, start with their virtues. Because it’s often in the name of what people see as right and good that they do the most terrible things. A very small example of this caught my eye in the papers over the weekend. “Under-7’s football axed over violence” read the headline. Apparently, 750 children did not take part in football matches over this last weekend, the matches having been cancelled by the Scottish FA, because parents have been beating each other up on the touchline as they support their kids. Love of one’s children is obviously a good thing. But what is in itself a virtue can become something pretty horrible when it is used as a pretext for punching another parent in the face because their child has tackled yours. As I said, this is a small example. Another example is constantly there in the sort of rubbishy action movies that I love to distract myself with. Almost invariably, they start with something horrible having happened to the hero, in the name of which he – mostly he – justifies some bloody rampage against the baddies, and indeed justifies our enjoyment of it. “If you let my daughter go, that’ll be the end of it. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you” to quote Liam Neeson. And he does. But by the end of all his epic carnage, perhaps we ought to wonder if the genial looking Neeson hasn’t become one of the baddies himself. History demonstrates that cruelty is often justified in the name of justice. Hidden within our virtues, our love of family or country for instance, terrible things can lurk unsuspected. Our virtues can be dangerous breeding grounds for vice because we don’t generally question our virtues. People sometimes criticise church goers as self-righteous and morally superior. And that indeed can be present in all of us. But the reason we have a confession of sins in our services is precisely to warn even the most outwardly moral that we have hidden resources of nastiness, often nestling in the places we least expect it. Lots of people have pointed this out – from Jung to Nietzsche to Adam Smith who warned that “Virtue is to be more feared than vice”. But my favourite quote is from that great moral philosopher Elizabeth Taylor: “People with no vices usually have some pretty annoying virtues.”