Too little
The permanent temporary office
“Leave the delegation with us; everyone knows to ask me now.”
Convenience and appetite turn an exceptional arrangement into a personal claim on decisions.
Temperance
Resist extending your influence merely because an opportunity allows it.
Readiness to moderate appetites rather than let them dominate judgment.
Temperance moderates appetite so that it does not dominate judgment. In public responsibility, the appetite may be for attention, influence or the satisfaction of being indispensable. A useful coordinating role can become an excuse to gather decisions that do not need your permission. Temperance keeps the extent of authority answerable to its purpose.
Temperance gives authority that leaves room for other people’s judgment
During the flood, the council gave your committee temporary authority to coordinate urgent repairs. The immediate emergency has passed, but ordinary decisions keep arriving for your signature. The approval trays now hide the notice saying TEMPORARY. It is pleasant to discover how many things apparently need you. At the scheduled review, you distinguish the remaining repair work from decisions that can return to the usual teams and recommend handing those back. The tower becomes shorter. The council can still find its chair.
Finding the balance in Temperance
A committee chair must decide whether to keep influence gained through a temporary flood-response delegation.
A fitting response
Authority proportioned to purpose
“Which work still needs the delegation, and what should return to ordinary responsibility?”
The review preserves necessary coordination while giving back powers whose purpose has passed.
Pursued too far
Withdrawal disguised as restraint
“Close the desk and leave the remaining work to someone else.”
A display of restraint abandons responsibilities that still need a proper handover.
A genuine emergency may require closer coordination for a time. Its purpose, scope and end still need examination; temporary usefulness does not prove permanent entitlement.
What Temperance makes possible
Public work becomes less dependent on access to a single person. Ordinary teams regain room to exercise judgment, while the committee can attend to the remaining tasks that actually need coordination. A clear handover also lets the public see who is responsible after an exceptional arrangement ends.
Temperance in ordinary life
The group organizer
Let another member handle a task without requiring every small choice to return to you.
The credit impulse
Notice when the desire to be indispensable is making a simple handoff unnecessarily complicated.
Nearby virtues, different work
Humility
Humility recognizes that others may know or do something better. Temperance moderates the desire to hold the decision anyway.
Diligence
Diligence cares for the responsibility that is yours. Temperance prevents care from becoming an appetite to own everyone’s work.
Temperance and its counterfeits
Elegant neglect
Calling inaction restraint counterfeits Temperance when an accepted responsibility is simply abandoned. Moderate appetite while doing the work that is yours.
The indispensable helper
Volunteering for every decision can counterfeit Temperance’s thoughtful service while securing personal control. A helpful handoff should let others act.
How to cultivate Temperance
Name what the role is meant to accomplish and which decisions belong elsewhere.
Notice the pleasure of being needed before allowing it to set the scope.
Give temporary arrangements a clear occasion for review.
Try it today
Return one ordinary choice to the person best placed to make it, with the information they need.
Questions worth returning to
- Is this oversight necessary, or merely satisfying?
- What would let the work continue well without my constant presence?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those intrusted with its administrations, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.
George Washington · Farewell Address · 17 September 1796, distribution of powers
Washington connects personal appetite for power with the erosion of institutional limits. The temporary chair’s review asks which decisions properly belong to the role, even when keeping them would be convenient.
First, Sir, permit me to observe that the use of force alone is but temporary.
Edmund Burke · Speech on Conciliation with America · House of Commons, 22 March 1775
In a speech for conciliation with the American colonies, Burke questions the durability of coercion. A temporary power may secure immediate compliance while doing little to build a service that can work through others’ judgment.
The substitution of force for persuasion, among its other disadvantages, has this further drawback, from our present point of view, that it lessens the conscience of a society and breeds hypocrisy.
John Morley · On Compromise · Chapter V
Morley argues that enforced conformity can replace honest judgment with an appearance of agreement. A committee chair who gathers unnecessary authority should consider what happens to the candor and initiative of the people working under the delegation.
It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention, however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it safe or salutary to tie up their own hands.
John Stuart Mill · Considerations on Representative Government · Chapter III
Mill opposes paternal control in his argument for participation in government. A committee chair’s good intentions do not settle whether taking over another person’s decisions is justified.
You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him. Opinion and force belong to different elements.
John Morley · On Compromise · Chapter V
In an argument for toleration, Morley distinguishes outward submission from changed belief. A committee chair should not mistake the absence of objections for colleagues’ considered agreement.
The particulars of your plans I neither know nor seek to know. You are vigilant and self-reliant; and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints nor restraints upon you.
Lincoln gives Grant room to exercise the judgment entrusted to him while the surrounding letter still states a concern about avoiding disaster and offers support. Restraint here sustains another person’s responsibility rather than abandoning one’s own.
Division of labor does not mean cutting up every business into minute fractions; it means the union of such operations as are fit to be performed by the same persons, and the separation of such as can be better performed by different persons.
John Stuart Mill · Considerations on Representative Government · Chapter XV
Mill distinguishes coordinated public work from needless fragmentation. Temperance in a temporary office similarly assigns decisions where they can be well made, instead of treating either total control or total withdrawal as the answer.
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Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.