Maybe if moral virtues can be purchased they were never moral virtues to begin with?

Many moral vices naturally decline with age as physical senses and hormones dull and life loses novelty. It may be a comforting fantasy that we can somehow link our inevitable physical decline to a story of moral progress and assume that our accumulated wisdom would protect us from the folly of youth if we were somehow thrust again into our younger bodies.

But what if instead moral progress is about finding the right way of living? About spending more time with your kid than with a screen.

Maybe the virtue wasn’t in getting over the wall but finding yourself on the other side and choosing it because it is better? Society puts up walls all the time to prevent people from finding themselves on the wrong side of the wall. Nobody ever talks about the “grit” of the addict persistently dodging law enforcement to score their next fix.

Maybe the problem is society putting walls in the wrong place. If that’s true, does it really matter how you get over the wall?