Four cardinal virtues
What relevance do the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance have for today?
Being virtuous is not the same as virtue-signalling
I wanted to share my thoughts on character and virtue that I believe are missing in contemporary debate and dialogue. I’m drawing a lot from antiquity, especially the Greek thinkers and also the bible, which is a mix of Hebrew wisdom and also hellenized thinking, fused with mindset of Christ in the letters of St Paul. My goal is to critique contemporary society but also to offer something more nourishing for the soul that we can aspire to, both in how we relate to others and how we view our own thoughts and actions.
Why the four cardinal virtues matter today
If I’m spending time weighing up the potential consequences of an action, I will be using prudence. To act with righteousness, even if it costs me personally, or harms my reputation, is to embrace justice. Keeping going in spite of it being painful, dull, slow and far from certain is to have fortitude. Avoiding gossip, keeping a sound mind, and refraining from jumping in with my opinion on a subject, rather than listening, is to show prudence. Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
The beauty of these virtues is that they naturally overlap, complement each other, and form a well-roundedness of character. We don’t often talk about character or virtue. And of course, cardinal represents something of great importance. This can be for the good, or also in the negative, when speaking of a grave error. Virtue entails not doing something to look good, but in many cases, pleases God as an act of submission or obedience.
Prudence seems to be conflated with good financial management. The former UK chancellor, Gordon Brown talked a lot of prudence in managing the economy but ended up accumulating large public deficits ahead of the 2007 financial crisis, giving little room to act when things went wrong. More broadly, prudence is about wisdom, which is the use of your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgements. It takes a lot of thought and input from others when seeking to understand the potential consequences of a course of action. Being prudent means listening to others but also taking responsibility for a decision that ends badly.
In antiquity, Plato gave his views on justice by devising a thought experiment of the perfectly just man who was scorned and his reputation in tatters. Everything was taken from him except his justice. His point is that for us, justice is to be desired in the absence of any external rewards, and being fair towards those we may not like is why we see the statue of Lady Justice outside courthouses as being blindfolded so as not to show favour. Justice is not the same as kindness, either, as it can mean a righteous punishment for a crime or infraction, hence Lady Justice also weilding a sword. Moreover, justice is for its own sake and is of great intrinsic worth.
When it comes to fortitude, where do we see architypes of courage and strength? Take for example, that most political leaders are more informed by focus groups and lobbyists rather than guiding principles. It takes real moral courage to proceed with an idea or policy that is based upon sound principles and to suffer the hue and cry of an angry social media mob, hence why cancel culture is so toxic, as it seeks to end the career of someone who chooses to swim against the current. The more fortitude we have in more individuals, the better society can push back against censorship and the creeping groupthink that considers all social interactions to be power relations between oppressor and oppressed.
Finally, temperance has mainly been associated with movements that sought to deal with problems of alcohol abuse. “Everything in moderation” tends to be a good practise. That phrase applies to a lot of things in life that bring few benefits: social media, TV, junk food and consumerism, to name a few. Self-control seems to be more about getting a beach body for the summer, whereas we are going deeper by aspiring to something that is beneficial for the soul. Additionally, acting with discretion is sorely lacking in contemporary discourse, when people who don’t agree with each other stoop to apply labels such as hate crimes or ad hominem attacks on the character of a person they often know very little about. This behaviour betrays a lack of wisdom. Developing sound-mindedness as part of the virtue of temperance is an antidote to belligerence.
The perfectly functioning state (purely abstract?)
In a later part of Plato’s The Republic, he brings in our four famous classical cardinal virtues as his guiding principles for the perfectly functioning state, which espouses “…the qualities of wisdom, courage, self-discipline, and justice.”[1] We shouldn’t need to think of this as purely abstract. Every act of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance helps to make these qualities a concrete reality. You don’t have to be an activist to make a better world.
Someone exercising the four cardinal virtues is being:
Wise (Prudence)
Just (Justice)
Brave (Fortitude)
Sober (Temperance)
To finish, I will bring in another great thinker from antiquity; St Paul. He was willing to die for his faith in Christ, and did so in the end, thus being a true exemplar of our four cardinal virtues. He encourages us to think differently in Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
[1] Plato, The Republic (London, Penguin Classics, 1987), Part V, Book IV, 138.