Fortitude

What Fortitude means in a protective role

As a door supervisor, you refused entry to someone who had repeatedly shoved other guests. A review now names you as the petty official who spoiled the evening. It is still being shared days later. You give a factual account through the venue’s review process, consider any new evidence and keep doing the work without making the critic pay. You had expected the job to involve a queue. You had not expected to acquire a comments section.

An unpopular decision can remain defensible, and a defensible decision can still need correction in light of new facts. Fortitude sustains the protective purpose while criticism makes it unpleasant. It resists the wish to abandon that purpose just to regain approval. It also leaves the critic’s treatment governed by relevant conduct rather than by how much the complaint hurt.

Fortitude gives…

Fortitude helps protective work continue through the loss of goodwill that some decisions bring. It makes accountability possible without making every complaint a command to reverse course. Support, rest and handover can help that work last beyond one person’s reserves.

Finding the balance

In ordinary life

An unpopular rota

You continue a fair, agreed routine while making space for specific problems people identify.

A difficult stretch

You arrange rest or a handover so the worthwhile task can continue without demanding limitless personal endurance.

Nearby virtues, different work

Courage

Courage faces fear in making the choice; Fortitude bears the adversity that may persist afterward.

Humility

Humility keeps criticism available as information; Fortitude keeps discomfort from deciding the issue by itself.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Stubbornness is a counterfeit of Fortitude when protecting your own decision matters more than the people and purpose behind it. Steadfastness can include correction.

Retaliation is a counterfeit of Fortitude when making the critic suffer is presented as standing firm. Continuing the work does not justify an unrelated penalty.

How to cultivate Fortitude

• Recall the people and purpose the decision was meant to serve.
• Separate a relevant objection from the discomfort of being criticized.
• Use support, rest or a handover to sustain the work rather than proving limitless endurance.

Try it today

Recall a modest decision someone disliked. Identify one defensible reason to keep it and one fact that would justify changing it.

Questions worth returning to

• What still makes this decision defensible?
• What new fact would change my account, and what merely makes it uncomfortable?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. But most people when they are abused do not consider whether the abuse really belongs to them properly, but look round to see what abuse they can heap on the abuser, and, as wrestlers get smothered with the dust of the arena, do not wipe off the abuse hurled at themselves, but bespatter others, and at last get on both sides grimy and discoloured.

   Plutarch, Morals: Ethical Essays
   How a Man May Be Benefited by His Enemies, section VI

   Plutarch’s wrestling image catches the diversion from considering a criticism to trading insults. Bearing the first discomfort can keep a useful question from disappearing in retaliation.

2. Now, for your part, do not have a supercilious look indeed, but keep steadily to those things which appear best to you,

   Epictetus, The Enchiridion
   Chapter XXII

   Epictetus addresses someone mocked for beginning a philosophical life. The excerpt holds together freedom from a superior manner and persistence in a considered commitment.

3. But it takes a brave and resolute spirit not to be disconcerted in times of difficulty or ruffled and thrown off one's feet, as the saying is, but to keep one's presence of mind and one's self-possession and not to swerve from the path of reason.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   Book I, XXIII, section 80

   Cicero describes steadiness when difficulty threatens to unsettle a person’s judgment. Bearing the disturbance leaves room to continue a considered course.

4. Passion soon cools, whereas reason is always consistent:

   Seneca, Minor Dialogues, Together with the Dialogue on Clemency
   On Anger, Book I, XVII

   Seneca distinguishes a dramatic first impulse from a purpose that can last. Sustained effort needs reasons that survive the fading of excitement or indignation.

5. Yet, in spite of all this, Anne had reason to believe that she had moments only of languor and depression, to hours of occupation and enjoyment.

   The narrator, in Jane Austen, Persuasion
   Chapter XVII

   Anne discovers sources of engagement in Mrs Smith’s difficult circumstances. The novel gives this particular person an unexpected resource; it does not make cheerfulness a duty for everyone who suffers.

6. so anyone can compute his progress in philosophy by his continuous and unceasing course, by his not making many halts on the road, and then again advancing by leaps and bounds, but by his quiet and even and steady march forward guided by reason.

   Plutarch, Morals: Ethical Essays
   On Progress in Virtue, section III

   Plutarch values a steady course over repeated bursts of effort. Continuing through ordinary difficulty can be less visible than a grand beginning and more useful to the purpose.

7. discover how much more is to be hoped from frequency and perseverance, than from violent efforts and sudden desires; efforts which are soon remitted when they encounter difficulty, and desires, which, if they are indulged too often, will shake off the authority of reason, and range capriciously from one object to another.

   Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
   The Rambler, No. 108. SATURDAY, MARCH 30, 1751.

   Johnson contrasts frequent, sustained effort with desires that vanish at difficulty. His example is learning during the intervals of a busy life, rather than waiting for uninterrupted conditions.

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