Friendship and Making Decisions

Josef Pieper on Prudence

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

In doing research for my fourth book, I have been reading Josef Pieper’s book, The Four Cardinal Virtues, which I highly recommend to you. It’s dense, but insightful.

He begins with a rigorous study of the mostly forgotten concept of prudence. My rough paraphrase of Pieper’s description of prudence would be “making the right decision at the right time based on a clear perception of reality.” And he notes that it’s the foundation of all the other cardinal virtues.¹ Pieper goes into great detail about how to make right decisions, the necessary mental conditions, the importance of seeing reality clearly, the role of memory, and so on.

But what really struck me was when he said the following:

The imperative of prudence is always and in essence a decision regarding an action to be performed in the “here and now.” By their very nature such decisions can be made only by the person confronted with decisions. No one can be deputized to make them. No one else can make them in his stead.

Perhaps this reveals too much about my own underdeveloped virtue of prudence, but there have certainly been times in my life when I have felt ill equipped to make an ethical decision, when my grasp of reality, memory, or inner reasoning has failed me. And I have needed to rely heavily on the prudence of others. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I “deputized” them. But in some sense I exercised the virtue of faith (as Piper describes it in another book, Faith, Hope, and Love) to trust in people who I knew to be prudent.