Self-Restraint

What Self-Restraint means in a protective role

You are allocating rehearsal slots when someone calls your timetable “the work of a confused pigeon.” A wonderfully inconvenient slot is still free. You return to the agreed allocation rule instead of giving the insult a place in the schedule. The insult has not earned a vote on the timetable.

The temptation is attractive because the retaliation can look like routine procedure. Self-Restraint notices the private motive before it becomes a public decision. You can acknowledge your anger, take time where appropriate and give the relevant reasons their proper place. The feeling need not disappear for the action to be governed.

Self-Restraint gives…

People can rely more confidently on a process when an official’s irritation does not quietly alter its terms. Self-Restraint also protects your own judgment from having to invent respectable reasons for a choice made in anger.

Finding the balance

In ordinary life

A queue dispute

You preserve the agreed order after a rude comment instead of making the speaker wait as punishment.

A role boundary

You take a brief pause or ask an appropriate colleague to handle a decision when your anger is likely to distort it.

Nearby virtues, different work

Temperance

Temperance moderates the appetite for authority; Self-Restraint governs this immediate urge to use it punitively.

Composure

Composure collects the whole response under pressure; Self-Restraint specifically checks the harmful impulse.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Procedural revenge is a counterfeit of Justice: an unrelated penalty is dressed in the language of a fair rule. A defensible judgment can explain its reasons without reference to the insult.

How to cultivate Self-Restraint

• Name the urge privately before defending the proposed decision.
• Return to the criteria that applied before the provocation.
• Keep any response to the insulting behavior separate from unrelated entitlements.

Try it today

Recall a recent irritated moment. Identify what you wanted to do and which part would have imposed a needless cost on someone else. Choose a response you could justify without mentioning the insult; this does not require renewed contact.

Questions worth returning to

• Would I make the same decision if the remark had never been made?
• Am I inventing a formal reason for a private retaliation?

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. An error, not less common than it is contrary to the object of society—that is, to the consciousness of personal security—is leaving a magistrate to be the arbitrary executor of the laws, free at his pleasure to imprison a citizen, to deprive a personal enemy of his liberty on frivolous pretexts, or to leave a friend unpunished in spite of the strongest proofs of his guilt.

   Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, in Crimes and Punishments
   Chapter VI, Imprisonment

   Beccaria describes personal anger and friendship entering official decisions. His objection exposes the same corruption of purpose that begins when a role becomes a means of retaliation.

2. Now when I contemplated the origin of anger itself, I observed that, though different persons fell into it for different reasons, yet in nearly all of them was the idea of their being despised and neglected to be found.

   Fundanus, in Plutarch, Morals: Ethical Essays
   On Restraining Anger, section XII

   Fundanus finds perceived disrespect beneath many different provocations. Naming that motive helps distinguish an injured sense of importance from a reason to impose a cost.

3. I will first discuss the case in which he is personally concerned, for it is more difficult for him to act with moderation when he acts under the impulse of actual pain than when he merely does so for the sake of the example.

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

   Seneca distinguishes a decision about someone else’s wrong from one in which the decision-maker is personally hurt. Personal involvement makes the work of moderation harder.

4. But we admire that noble and generous resentment which governs its pursuit of the greatest injuries, not by the rage which they are apt to excite in the breast of the sufferer, but by the indignation which they naturally call forth in that of the impartial spectator; which allows no word, no gesture, to escape it beyond what this more equitable sentiment would dictate;

   Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
   Part I, section I, chapter V

   Smith distinguishes the injured person’s immediate rage from the response an impartial observer could endorse. The excerpt ends at his standard for words and gestures; the paragraph continues with limits on punishment.

5. And throughout our participation in the group process we must be ever on our guard that we do not confuse differences and antagonisms, that diversity does not arouse hostility.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   Chapter III, The Group Process: The Collective Idea (continued)

   Follett distinguishes difference from antagonism. A contrary account need not become a personal enemy before it has been understood.

6. What is this word that is so eager for utterance? To what is this tongue marching? What good will come of speaking now, or what harm of silence?

   Plutarch, Morals: Ethical Essays
   On Talkativeness, section XXIII

   Plutarch proposes questions to ask while a remark is still unspoken. The pause gives its purpose and likely effect a chance to influence the choice.

7. If you are dazzled by the semblance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being bewildered by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay.

   Epictetus, The Enchiridion
   Chapter XXXIV

   Epictetus proposes an interval before acting on an attractive impulse. In a protective role, the same interval can keep the immediate pleasure of a sharp response from deciding its outcome.

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