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Good morning. We ask soldiers to make extraordinary sacrifices: to lay down their own lives and be prepared to take others. We realise they’re going to see awful things, and risk frightening things: but we forget the trauma of doing terrible things. And when they come home, they can often feel like nobody wants to know. We expect our soldiers to uphold high standards: this summer, a report from the Commons defence committee exposed widespread bullying and sexual harassment in the armed forces, including shocking evidence of rape and of sex for advancement. Yesterday the Defence Secretary said, ‘It’s time to fix the culture of the army.’ When Aristotle wrote his classic description of virtue, he began with courage – the courage of a soldier. The qualities of a soldier became a template for his whole account of what virtue entails. Centuries later, Machiavelli criticised Aristotle for being unrealistic. Machiavelli said ‘Forget virtue and standards – focus on the way people actually behave and how they can be manipulated.’ That tension – between the idealistic standards we demand, and the cynical behaviours people may actually exhibit – has existed ever since, in the military, in Parliament, and everywhere else. But see how this debate is transformed when we recall the word virtue originally means power. We tend to assume virtue means renouncing some of our power in order to be noble. But that’s because we’ve become fixated on individual character. The point about military virtue is that it’s collective. The military cultivates incredible solidarity: it expects soldiers to lay down their lives for one another. How can they do that if they’re tyrannising and exploiting each other behind the scenes? Jesus faced the same difficulty of getting his followers to think as a collective. Just before he went to the cross, James and John approached him and asked for the two best thrones in his coming kingdom. Jesus was devastated. At the moment of truth, his disciples were jettisoning the power of solidarity for individual perks. When St Paul describes the power of a group of believers, he talks about a body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you.’ It’s like a football team: if each player’s showing off and trying to win the game on their own, it’s useless. When you discover what it means to be one body, you realise what power truly means. Virtue isn’t simply avoiding misbehaviour: it’s realising the power of collective action and how to foster it. The choice isn’t between noble ideals and cynical realities – it’s between collective power and wasteful self-indulgence.