Essayist: The historical figures that we find most engaging are very rarely those who are morally most virtuous. What...

Emil-Kunkin on July 29, 2022

Hi Skraps17,

These statements are both about moral virtue. We are told that admired figures are rarely morally virtuous, and that since people who we most want to emulate are those whose characteristics we admire most, we do not admire moral virtue.

This argument (while not fully valid) does not need conditional logic to make sense. In fact, most arguments do not have to use an If X then Y structure. The job is not to link statements and diagram them, but to understand what the conclusion is, and how the premises support it. In this case, the first sentence supports the conclusion by showing that people we admire are not virtuous, which feeds into the idea that we must not be virtuous, since we admire people whose lives we want to live.