Why Strength of Character Is Needed to Lead a Good Life (from The Time of Our Lives, 1970; The Great Ideas Online no. 40)

Their wordsHow can the individual cope with bad fortune? The commonsense answer is, in a word, by strength of character.

Their wordsBased on the common-sense truism that you can often have too much of a good thing, temperance consists in the will-power to resist the kind of good fortune that makes an excess of such goods available.

Their wordsWhat is required to make the moral choices we ought to make in order to work for the end we ought to seek -- a whole life that is really good because it involves all the things that are really good for a man, all of them in the right order and proportion -- is moral virtue, which is nothing but a habitual disposition to prefer a good life to a good time, to choose what is really good in the long run over what is apparently good here and now.

Their wordsThe remedy is medical not moral. What is called for is the recommendation of some form of psychotherapy, not hortatory remarks about virtue or a good moral character.

Their wordsBut when the medical problem is solved the moral problem remains. The removal by therapy of an incapacitation for making the right choices does not automatically confer the power of making them.

Their wordsFinally, let it be said, as emphatically as possible, that these dispositions of character and of mind, which are virtuous insofar as they are employed in making a good life, cannot be formulated in rules or guidelines for action.