What we present as virtues are often vices in disguise, reshaped and relabeled by self-love to serve our own interests. Generosity, loyalty, and courage frequently trace back to pride, fear, or the desire to be admired rather than to any disinterested good.
Self-love (amour-propre) is the hidden engine behind behavior, so skilled at disguise that it deceives even the person who harbors it. We cannot fully know our own motives because the faculty we would use to inspect them is itself invested in flattering us.
Apparent moral achievements can be re-examined as instruments: we confess small faults to persuade others we have no large ones, and we praise others largely to be praised in return. Viewing conduct through the question 'what does this get the actor?' exposes transactional structure beneath social grace.
People often appear virtuous only because the occasion or temptation to be otherwise has not arrived; fortune and situation expose qualities that stable comfort left untested. What looks like settled moral strength may be the absence of pressure rather than the presence of resolve.