Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T21:01:01.348Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Patience and Courage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Eamonn Callan
Eamonn Callan
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Suppose your friends had to ascribe a single vice to you in large measure, along with any virtues that could be coherently combined with that salient vice. Suppose further that the vice had to be either cowardice or impatience. Which would you choose?

I believe almost everyone would choose impatience without hesitation. There are sound moral as well as purely self-regarding reasons for despising cowardice, and to that extent our preference would be reasonable. If we say that a man who is a coward is also compassionate, we know that his compassion cannot be relied upon in any circumstances where it must contend with fear, and if he has a sense of justice, that will be useless if oppression has to be resisted. We cannot even expect him to pursue his own good whenever he perceives that to be hazardous, and so even the self-regarding virtues are corrupted by his dominating vice. On the other hand, a pronounced impatience may seem to be compossible with abundant virtue. Those who are just but cannot patiently endure tyranny are perhaps the most formidable threat to tyranny, and people who boldly go out to seize their own good often fare rather better than those who patiently await its arrival.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 266 , October 1993 , pp. 523 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Lovibond, Sabina, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 199Google Scholar; Cf. Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), 53.Google Scholar

2 Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 332.Google Scholar

3 E.g., Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, (London: Routledge, 1952), 105.Google Scholar

4 Michael, 152–158.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 466.

6 Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 93.Google Scholar

7 Michael, 448–450.Google Scholar

8 Phillips, D. Z., Through a Darkening Glass (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 102.Google Scholar

9 Kundera, Milan, Life Is Elsewhere, trans, by Kuzzi, Peter (New York: Knopf, 1974), 78.Google Scholar

10 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 219–220.Google Scholar

11 Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, ‘The Two Faces of Courage’, and ‘Virtues and Their Vicissitudes’ in Mind in Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 399–329Google Scholar; and Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, ‘The Advantages of Moral Diversity’, Social Philosophy & Policy, 9, no. 2 (1992): 38–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Rorty, , ‘Virtues and Their Vicissitudes, 316–317.Google Scholar

13 Rorty, , ‘The Two Faces of Courage’, 308–310Google Scholar; ‘Virtues and Their Vicissitudes’, 318–324.Google Scholar

14 Rorty, , ‘The Two Faces of Courage’, 301–302.Google Scholar

15 Rorty, , ‘The Advantages of Moral Diversity’, 38–62.Google Scholar

16 Rorty, , ‘Virtues and Their Vicissitudes’, 323.Google Scholar

17 Geach, Peter, The Virtues (Cambridge University Press, 1977), 151.Google Scholar Geach is quoting Chesterton, though he does not tell us where Chesterton said this.

18 Levi, Primo, If Not Now, When? trans. by Weaver, William (London: Michael Joseph, 1986), 140–141.Google ScholarPubMed

19 Auden, W. H., ‘Anger’ in Angus Wilson et al., The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: William Morow, n.d.), 84–85.Google Scholar

20 I am very grateful to Margret Buchman and Pat White for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.