A Study of the 8 Virtues (by way of ponies)

I originally explored this idea in a 2011 blog post. To my knowledge, neither Lauren Faust nor Richard Garriott ever read it, so now I have to revisit it in 2026.

We’ll start here: what do beloved children’s cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and foundational computer role-playing game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar have in common?

In the 1980s, cartoons were about selling plastic toys, and computer RPGs were about spinning violence into experience points and gold. Eventually someone came along and said, hey, what if we did those things and the characters learned to be nice to each other?

In Ultima IV, you didn’t win by killing the most monsters or absconding with the most princesses. You played as the Avatar, and your job was to set an example for all the denizens of Britannia by being the paragon of everything good and virtuous. Lord British devised the Eight Virtues via a complex system involving Three Principles, color theory, adventuring classes, secret words, and a hot air balloon. By taking various actions in the game, or by refraining from them, the Avatar became the personification of all Eight Virtues and led the people of Britannia into a new age of enlightenment.

Twenty-some years later, Friendship is Magic struck gold and scored massive widespread appeal beyond its target audience of 7-year-old girls. Part of the winning formula was characters with surprising complexity who were easy for viewers to like and latch onto. Each character is granted one of the Elements of Harmony, represented by a jeweled tiara.

Exploring morality is nothing new in fantasy or in children’s media. But there’s something special about the way these two settings sliced things up into easily recognizable portions, each of which can be explored independently. Two settings with wildly different characters, narrative goals, and audiences—what common ground do they cover? What conflicts arise from having such cleanly defined moral frameworks? What does it mean to be a good person/pony?

In Ultima the Virtues are derived from the Three Principles of Truth, Love, and Courage. We begin in the place of their absence.

Pride sits at the absence of the Three Principles. Excess pride is destructive, and counterproductive for a journey of self-examination. Pride’s opposite is Humility, which sits independently of the Three Virtues without embodying their absence. Rather, Humility is the point from which the Three Principles are able to take root. The Avatar demonstrates Humility by not seeking glory or wealth for his actions, but by pursuing the Virtues for their own sake.

Humility isn’t one of the Elements of Harmony. “Be humble” is not as easy a concept as “be nice” or “be honest.” Pride is a good thing, in its measure; it’s as important to get a sense of satisfaction from one’s talents as it is to resist boasting about them.

Valor is founded on the Principle of Courage, and is the test of one’s ability to act in accordance with their convictions. In Ultima IV this means standing your ground against monsters. Fleeing from peril is cowardly, and therefore unvirtuous. Living in an RPG world, the Avatar naturally upholds the Virtue of Valor in his pursuit of all that precious EXP and gold.

Courage is a big part of the ponies’ lives, as they face their share of adventures and danger. However, it doesn’t play an active role in maintaining and upholding friendships. Facing your fears to stand up for your friends is more properly an act of loyalty, and so is explored elsewhere amongst the Elements of Harmony.

The Principle of Love begets the Virtue of Compassion: empathy for one’s fellow man. Compassion would be on anyone’s list of virtues, and it’s hard to ever justify being cruel. The Avatar proves his Compassion in Ultima IV by refraining from killing townsfolk and by giving to beggars. When a foe demonstrates their lack of Valor by fleeing, it is Compassionate to let them go.

The Equestria equivalent is the Element of Kindness. This is a world where everyone is nice to everyone else pretty much all the time, so it can be difficult to pinpoint a true act of Kindness from the background “good vibes” radiation. The pony who carries this Element has great empathy for animals and other creatures, thereby demonstrating Kindness in directions other ponies may overlook.

Interestingly, this Element is “ignored” more than the others. Because the other Elements have negative applications and can therefore create conflict, the only way this particular character can “be bad” is to forgo Kindness completely. This happens when she becomes so frustrated or terrified that she explodes in a comical burst of anger. Because being unkind is so out of character for any pony, the one who is supposed to be extra super nice has a hair-trigger built into her personality.

Like Compassion, Honesty is an essential part of any virtuous toolbox, and stands on the Principle of Truth. Telling the truth is such a universal good that it’s one of the earliest things we teach children—and yet it’s one of the hardest to consistently uphold in our adult lives. It’s far easier to hold yourself to standards of Honesty in games like Ultima IV where telling the truth means picking the proper option off the menu. The Avatar proves his Honesty by not taking things that aren’t his, and by not cheating the blind reagent vendors. A dishonest player can run around with full sacks of magical groceries, but they’ll never win the game that way.

Honesty is the only Virtue which corresponds 1-to-1 with an Element of Harmony. The pony in charge of this Element does have cause to be dishonest, but she’s always uncomfortable doing so, and it never benefits her in an appreciable way.

What I find especially interesting about Honesty is the contrast between the characters chosen to personify it. In Ultima IV Honesty is the realm of mages, and Truth is the Principle connected with Intelligence. In RPG terms, this means combatants who are physically frail but magically versatile. In Friendship is Magic Honesty was given to the strongest and most physically capable pony of the bunch. The concept of “don’t lie, it’s not nice” is applicable in so many different directions that it works with just about any character archetype. That isn’t true of the other Virtues.

Where Courage meets Love is the Virtue of Sacrifice: the giving of oneself, by coin or blood, to the benefit of another. It’s, ah, never explained how giving blood (that is, hit points) helps the sick and needy. Presumably Britannia is ahead of the curve on blood transfusions. The concept is simple, though: greed is evil, and it is virtuous to share what you have in abundance.

Friendship is Magic puts an interesting spin on the concept, because the most generous pony is also the greediest and most vain. She is constantly seeking and amassing wealth, and isn’t above taking advantage of her friends in pursuit of that goal. However, she is never selfish. She is in a constant state of making promises and doing favors, and on multiple occasions has shown up to help do things she finds distasteful.

The contrast here is that Britannia is a world where pain and want exist, and Equestria isn’t. In the former, Sacrifice is exemplified by acts of charity. In the latter, Generosity means offering services or giving gifts. Selflessness takes on a different shape depending on what’s in demand for the setting, be that blood and gold, or pies and dresses.

Honor is the joining of Courage to Truth. When Britannians speak of Honor, they are speaking of classical chivalry: swearing oaths, completing noble quests, and all that noble knightly gubbins. I’ve always held it to be ill-defined as a Virtue, since there’s such great overlap with Honesty and Valor. It was, however, the Virtue I most often chose for myself. Selecting Honor as your primary Virtue made you a paladin and, well, I’ve sort of always had a thing for paladins.

Chivalry obviously has no place in Equestria. We might define Honor in a broader sense as demonstrating truth through actions rather than words: following rules, keeping promises, setting a good example for others to follow. The closest Element we get, after disqualifying Honesty, is Loyalty. But man,
that pony is as far away from a paladin as you can conceivably get.

Justice is Truth tempered by Love, and is held in high regard by Britannia’s system of law. Without Love, the pursuit of Truth may well lead to tyranny. Wrongs must be righted, but not by exacting vengeance. This Virtue is better defined in the lore than Honor, but it has a hard time fitting into gameplay. The Avatar is never tasked with standing in judgment of another person, and he functionally achieves Justice in much the same way he achieves Honesty and Honor.

Friendship is Magic tackles issues of fairness in much the same way as it tackles issues of bravery: they tend to crop up as broad elements of an adventure rather than as aspects of one particular pony’s personality. Conflicts in Equestria are always resolved in the fairest way possible, and transgressions are always cheerfully forgiven. There are mentions of being exiled, thrown into dungeons, and exiled and then thrown into a dungeon in the place you were exiled to—but no indication these things actually happen to anypony.

Spirituality contains all Three Principles. It’s a nebulous sort of inner-peace-y Virtue without its own set definition in the lore. It’s perhaps more properly thought of as the sum of all other Virtues, rather than a Virtue unto itself. In game terms, the Avatar achieves Spirituality by praying at the shrines of the other Virtues—an action he takes many times over the course of the game, thereby growing Spirituality naturally as he pursues his embodiment of all the others.

The mystical, loosely defined pony equivalent is the Element of Magic. Where the Virtues of Britannia are presented as a complex web of dependencies, the Elements of Harmony are independent entities except for Magic, which is a “secret Element” that explicitly appears only when the other five are gathered together. Naturally, the pony who carries this Element is our main character.

Okay, so “Spirituality” and “Magic” are both kind of cop-outs. Isn’t it interesting, though, that these fictional morality systems need a formless “sum of all good things” as their capstone? Perhaps there is some instinctual understanding that having a moral center is more than just adhering to a set of rules, and that being virtuous is more than simply checking words off of a list. There’s something useful in the mortar, and not just the stone.

Loyalty means never abandoning your friends, even when doing so would benefit you. Tests of Loyalty come into play when a pony is given the choice between her friends and something else she wants. Friendship is Magic constantly sets the ponies up to step outside their Element in extreme circumstances, but the Loyalty pony is most likely of them all to resist temptation. That said, she’s also the most likely to lie or cheat or say something rude, so maybe it’s a wash.

How strange that Britannia doesn’t regard Loyalty as a Virtue. It almost looks like it’s tied up with Honor, if you squint, but there aren’t any points in Ultima IV where you could choose betrayal even if you wanted to.

Personally, I think Justice is much better defined as Truth + Courage (that is, applying judgment fairly, without regard for emotional appeal), which frees up space for Loyalty as Truth + Love (the ability to keep your words and deeds as an act of respect), and jettisons the otherwise hollow Honor entirely. I’m not saying this makes me smarter than Lord British, but then, I’m not the one who programmed a moral framework in which offering exact change was the most cosmically righteous act a person is capable of performing.

And now we’ve come full circle. Just as Humility has no defined place in upholding magical friendship, neither does Laughter embody any aspects of the Three Principles. In fact, I don’t think there’s anyplace in all of Britannia where the subject is even addressed.

---

Neither avatars nor ponies have a monopoly on designing a fictional setting around a moral framework. Where they stand apart from the rest is the way conflicts arise from the Virtues/Elements themselves, rather than from the evil forces which stand in opposition. This isn’t Star Wars, where the good guys beat the bad guys by proving that good-guy-magic is stronger than bad-guy-magic. And it’s not a mid-00s action RPG, where good and evil are presented as equal routes, and which flavor of super attack would you like?

No, these two worlds are on a side. Their message is that being good is aspirational, that specific characteristics define good actions, and that holding all of these at once is hard. In the opening scene of Ultima IV you’re asked to resolve moral dilemmas which have no right or wrong answer, but which reveal something about your nature. (“A mighty knight accosts thee and demands thy food. Dost thou Valiantly refuse and engage the knight, or Sacrifice thy food unto the hungry knight?”) We are taught the Virtues, while important, can stand against one another. That’s why upholding all eight is such a heroic feat, and why the Avatar is such a special dude.

The Elements of Harmony rarely stand opposed to one another. Rather, each individual Element creates situations which place stress on the ponies’ friendships. Generosity causes one pony to make promises she can’t fulfill, while Honesty causes another to have trouble keeping secrets, and Kindness prevents a third from sharing opinions for fear of hurting anypony’s feelings. They aren’t Virtues which, once mastered, lead to perfect enlightenment; they’re guidelines which, like all things, can lead to complications.

That’s a lot of nuance for a game released on two 5.25-inch floppies, or for a cartoon written for 7-year-olds. You see? There’s less of a gulf between candy-colored ponies and epic globe-spanning fantasy adventures than you realized.