Temperance

What Temperance means in a protective role

You have been asked to organize the sign-in table for a club outing. By lunch your draft procedure includes permission slips for borrowing a pencil. You notice the moment when making everything pass through you became more interesting than helping people arrive. You leave the pencils in a jar and keep the simple check the outing actually needs. The pencils cope remarkably well with self-government.

Authority can be gratifying: people wait for your answer and your arrangements become the shape of their day. Temperance brings that pleasure within judgment. It helps you choose enough structure to serve the purpose, then leave other people room to act without your continual permission.

Temperance gives…

Moderating the appetite to direct can make a group easier to join and less dependent on a single gatekeeper. It also leaves attention available for the responsibilities that genuinely require it.

Finding the balance

In ordinary life

A meeting you chair

You guide the discussion toward its purpose without making every contribution an invitation for your verdict.

A temporary role

You hand back the keys and decisions when the agreed responsibility ends.

Nearby virtues, different work

Self-Restraint

Self-Restraint stops a particular retaliatory impulse. Temperance moderates the broader appetite for directing and controlling.

Prudence

Prudence judges which arrangements serve the task; Temperance makes you less attached to unnecessary authority.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Control for its own sake can be a counterfeit of Temperance: an organizer mistakes elaborate regulation for a well-governed appetite to direct. More checkpoints can look diligent while primarily feeding the organizer’s importance.

How to cultivate Temperance

• Give each requirement a purpose you can explain to its user.
• Notice which permissions exist mainly because you enjoy granting them.
• Define when a temporary responsibility ends.

Try it today

Review one small arrangement you control. Remove an unnecessary approval step if it is yours to change and no useful protection depends on it. Explain the simpler route to the people using it.

Questions worth returning to

• What purpose would be lost if this permission step disappeared?
• Do I welcome competent action that happens without me?

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. The great majority of people, however, when they fall a prey to ambition for either military or civil authority, are carried away by it so completely that they quite lose sight of the claims of justice.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   Book I, VIII, section 26

   The appetite for authority can crowd out its purpose. Cicero names that displacement directly: seeking office and serving justice can come apart.

2. Cruel punishments do a king no honour: for who doubts that he is able to inflict them? but, on the other hand, it does him great honour to restrain his powers, to save many from the wrath of others, and sacrifice no one to his own.

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

   Seneca refuses to treat the capacity to inflict a penalty as an achievement. The use of power earns its worth through the judgment that restrains it.

3. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

   John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
   Chapter I, Introductory

   Mill contests coercion justified solely by a person’s supposed benefit. His argument helps expose the point at which concern becomes an appetite to control another adult’s choices.

4. Hence free-will is not caprice or whim or a partial wish or a momentary desire. On the contrary freedom means exactly the liberation from the tyranny of such particularist impulses.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   Chapter VIII, Who Is the Free Man?

   Follett describes freedom as more than permission for each passing desire. Her larger argument connects freedom with shared life; here restraint frees conduct from a momentary impulse.

5. Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen.

   Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius
   Book VI, section 30

   An emperor warns himself against being remade by his own office. The surrounding list turns him toward simplicity, inquiry and service rather than the pleasures of rank.

6. If, therefore, you stop at this, you will keep the measure; but if you move beyond it, you must necessarily be carried forward, as down a precipice; as in the case of a shoe, if you go beyond its fitness to the foot, it comes first to be gilded, then purple, and then studded with jewels.

   Epictetus, The Enchiridion
   Chapter XXXIX

   The shoe that grows beyond its fit becomes an image of excess. The practical purpose of a thing supplies a measure that ornament and appetite can obscure.

7. Again, it is a false idea of utility, which would seek to impart to a multitude of intelligent beings the same symmetry and order that brute and inanimate matter admits of;

   Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, in Crimes and Punishments
   Chapter XXXVIII, False Ideas of Utility

   Beccaria objects to treating people like material that can be arranged into perfect symmetry. A wish for order can exceed what humane administration should try to control.

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