W
hy is vice bad? Without thinking too hard about it, there’s a common idea in the modern world that things that have traditionally been labeled as vicious are so called simply from bigotry, or the disordered desire to control the lives of others, or to maintain the status quo of power. While there may be specific cases in which something like these criticisms could be argued, in general what is meant by vice is that which is in general destructive to the inner peace of the human soul, and the outer peace of human society. Thus drinking to excess is a vice not because others don’t want you to have fun, but because such excess has a strong tendency to cause unhappiness in both the drinker and those around them, for reasons internal to the relationship between drinker and drink.
If vices are so bad, then, why then do people indulge in them? Clearly, there is some good being attained — usually an obvious and short-term one. Generally, what makes something a vice is that the more obvious, but lesser good is put before the greater, but less clear good. This disordering of goods is basically the principle moral challenge that afflicts the human race, and each of its individuals.
People’s lives are often hard, and they will frequently participate in “vices” to get them through their difficult days. Telling people to stop engaging in their vices is often not very helpful, and we can get pretty snappy about these things. “It’s the only good thing in my life”, we say. "If I get rid of these little pleasures, all there will be is boredom and suffering left over."
There’s a paradox here — that these “little pleasures” are often holding us back from better things. The moral claim that must be made is that, somehow, we get “more” when we have “less”. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to see the causal connection between the vice and the peace that is lost because of it. Many things make us lose our peace of mind, and it’s often easier to point to specific external occurrences rather than interior habits, which operate principles on tendencies, rather than concrete causation.