Vice is the opposite of virtue. The modern English term that best captures its original meaning is the word vicious, which means "full of vice." In this sense, the word vice comes from the Latin word vitium, meaning "failing or defect".
One way of organising the vices is as the corruption of the virtues. A virtue can be corrupted by nonuse, misuse, or overuse. Thus the cardinal vices would be lust (nonuse of temperance), cowardice (nonuse of courage), folly (misuse of an virtue, opposite of wisdom), and venality (nonuse of justice). See: The four virtues.
The Christian vices
The Christian vices would be blasphemy (faith betrayed), unforgiveness (hope betrayed), apostasy (nonuse of piety), and indifference (scripturally, a "hardened heart"), the betrayal of perfect love: charity.
Harmony of vices
Since virtues might be said to harmonize, so that every virtue requires all the virtues to some extent, vices also might be said to harmonize; i.e. every vice requires other vices to some extent. If this is the case, the presence of one vice in an individual might be evidence of others.
Popular usage
The term vice is also popularly applied to various activities considered immoral by some; a list of these might include the use of alcohol and other recreational drugs, gambling, recklessness, cheating, lying, selfishness. Often, vice particularly designates a failure to comply with the sexual mores of the time and place: sexual promiscuity, homosexuality.
Behaviors or attitudes going against the established virtues of the culture may also be called vices: for instance, effeminacy is considered a vice in a culture espousing manliness as an essential element of the character of males.
While vice presidents have used their votes chiefly on legislative issues, they have also broken ties on the election of Senate officers, as well as on the appointment of committees in 1881 when the parties were evenly represented in the Senate.
Of the fourteen vice presidents who fulfilled their ambition by achieving the presidency, eight succeeded to the office on the death of a president, and four of these were later elected president.
Vice presidents represented their presidents' administrations on Capitol Hill, served on the National Security Council, chaired special commissions, acted as high level representatives of the government to foreign heads of state, and assumed countless other chores — great and trivial — at the president's direction.
Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding and coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.
Vices are usually pleasurable, at least for the time being, and often do not disclose themselves as vices, by their effects, until after they have been practised for many years; perhaps for a lifetime.
The question of virtue or vice, as already remarked in a previous section, has also been, in most minds, a question of degree; that is, of the extent to which certain actions should be carried; and not of the intrinsic character of any single act, by itself.
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