Denise Vigani

ABSTRACT This article examines three recently proposed accounts of a virtue of patience, all of which agree that patience is goal-oriented and temporal. Josh Dolin and Jason Baehr’s (2025), and Christian Miller and R. Michael Furr’s (2024) accounts conceptualize patience as requiring some kind of mismatch between an individual’s urges or desires and the perceived amount of time it takes to achieve a desired end. I argue that requiring a mismatch creates problems for both accounts and defend an understanding of patience as consistent excellence in acknowledging and responding to the appropriate time needed to achieve a desired outcome (Vigani 2017). This latter account does not require any mismatch of an individual’s desires or urges, and thus, I contend, avoids the problems of the other two. It is, however, significantly revisionary of our everyday understanding of patience. Rather than being problematic, I argue that this revisionary understanding is especially informative regarding what is involved in the cultivation and maintenance of patience. Examining these accounts deepens our understanding of the psychology of patience, particularly with regard to an individual’s goals and desires. It also allows us to draw out some general lessons for developing accounts of individual virtues.

In his ethics, Aristotle draws a controversial distinction between virtue and a different state of character called “continence.” The continent are those who act in accordance with virtue, but who must overcome contrary desires in order to do so. The intellectual and desiderative capacities of the virtuous, by contrast, are in harmony, such that the virtuous experience no inner conflict with regard to acting in accordance with virtue. Maintaining this distinction between acting from virtue and acting continently, however, seems particularly challenging in the case of the virtues of self-control—for Aristotle, that includes courage and temperance. Many have thought that, when it comes to self-control, acting continently is as good as it gets—that what it is to exert self-control just is to overcome contrary desires. In this chapter, the Aristotelian distinction between acting from virtue and acting continently is defended by focusing on a different virtue of self-control, namely patience. The resulting view supports John McDowell’s developmental understanding of acting continently as characteristic of those who are on their way to acquiring virtue. Whereas this developmental view raises some significant questions regarding the extent to which one should understand continence as a settled state of character in its own right, it does emphasize the ways in which individuals have (some amount of) control over their own characters.

Some philosophers have argued that Aristotle’s view of habituation gives rise to a ‘paradox of moral education.’ The inculcation of habit, they contend, seems antithetical to the cultivation of virtue. I argue that this alleged paradox arises from significant misunderstandings of Aristotle’s view. Habit formation need not be at odds with the development of the kinds of intelligent, reflective capacities required for virtue. Indeed, Aristotle seems right to insist on an important role for habit in the cultivation of virtue. I suggest that habit formation is part of the story of how the virtuous come to see the world aright.

ABSTRACT In the contemporary philosophical literature, ideal virtue is often accused of setting a standard more appropriate for saints or gods than for human beings. In this paper, I undermine divinity-infused depictions of the fully virtuous, and argue that ideal virtue is, indeed, human. I focus on the virtuous person’s imperviousness to temptation, and contend that this imperviousness is not as psychologically implausible as it might seem. I argue that it is a virtuous person’s subjective construal of a situation that silences reasons in favour of acting contrary to virtue. That silencing, however, is not the whole story when it comes to their practical reasoning. Practical reasoning can, and often does, continue beyond silencing, particularly in the search for what Bernard Williams calls ‘constitutive solutions’. The upshot is a view of the virtuous as less god-like and more human—who will sometimes have to figure out what the virtuous response to a situation is, and who can still care deeply about the central concerns of human existence, including their life, health, loved ones, and life projects, even if those things will never provide them with a reason to act contrary to virtue.

The analogy between virtue and skill is well-known from the ancient Greek ethical tradition, and in Intelligent Virtue, Julia Annas makes a compelling case for its continued relevance to contemporary theory. Yet scant attention gets paid to the kind of skill to which virtue is most appropriately analogized. An insufficiently nuanced view of skill, I contend, renders the analogy less illuminating than it otherwise might be, and prevents virtue ethicists from making optimal use of the analogy. In this paper, I argue that embodied skill provides a particularly apt analogy for Aristotelian virtue in several important respects, and that it successfully captures the central features of Annas’ view while excluding skills that are problematically disanalogous to virtue. Moreover, I suggest that the refined analogy can help clarify some issues regarding deliberation, decision, and actions done on the spur of the moment.

Over several articles, John McDowell sketches an analogy between virtue and perception, whereby the virtuous person sees situations in a distinctive way, a way that explains her virtuous behavior. Central to this view is his notion of silencing, a psychological phenomenon in which certain considerations fail to operate as reasons in a virtuous person's practical reasoning. Despite its influence on many prominent virtue ethicists, McDowell's ‘silencing view’ has been criticized as psychologically unrealistic. In this article, I defend a silencing view of practical reasoning. I argue that the phenomenon of silencing has a narrower scope than is typically acknowledged. As a result, the view does not require the virtuous to be detached, unfeeling, or unpalatably stoic. Furthermore, I offer a psychologically plausible interpretation of McDowell's claim that the virtuous see situations in a distinctive sort of way. The salient fact at which the virtuous arrive in their view of a situation should be understood, I argue, in terms of subjective construal.

Aristotle’s account of courage in the Nicomachean Ethics leaves readers with several unresolved issues. In this paper, I draw out three: 1) questions regarding the scope of the virtue; 2) the extent to which, or even if, the courageous experience fear; and 3) if—and if so, how—Aristotle’s distinction between virtue and continence might hold in the case of courage. I argue that there are good reasons to extend the scope of courage beyond the battlefield and risk of life and limb, that Aristotle does not acknowledge the possibility that the courageous experience fear when exercising courage, and that the distinction between continence and virtue can, indeed, hold in the case of courage.

The debate between motivational judgment internalism and motivational judgment externalism focuses on whether a moral judgment is sufficient for motivation, or if an additional conative state is required. It is clear from the literature that internalists and exernalists have different intuitions regarding moral judgments. Most individuals, however, seem to hold a mix of internalist and externalist intuitions. My aim in this paper is to offer an approach to the issue that can account for this mix of intuitions. Drawing on the work of psychologist Augusto Blasi, I suggest that a shift in focus from conative states to moral identity may be worthwhile. I argue that Blasi’s ‘self model’ can provide a straightforward story about moral judgments and motivation that makes sense of our mix of intuitions while accounting for many of the longstanding concerns of the debate between internalism and externalism.

There are significant challenges to developing a neo-Aristotelian account of a virtue of patience. First, on an Aristotelian understanding, virtue is both instrumentally good and good in itself. Yet exclusively instrumental views of patience are pervasive in the philosophical literature. Furthermore, these instrumental views present patience as more like a psychological skill than a virtue of character. Skills, however, can be misused. If patience is to be a virtue, its account must entail goodness in its possessor. Finally, there is the challenge of specifying a field, or sphere of concern, for patience, given the diversity of phenomena that we tend to attribute to it. I propose a thin account of a virtue of patience that, I contend, can meet these challenges.