1. Patience as Calming Temporally Charged Urges

Dolin and Baehr begin with the idea that we need patience in contexts where we want some desired end to be achieved in less time than it currently appears to us to be taking. While they focus on intellectual or epistemic ends, they note that their account of patience applies more broadly (Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 71). We want the new book we just ordered to arrive today. We want this boring meeting to be over now. We want this paper draft to be done already. The desire in question, however, must be fairly robust; a faint or fleeting “inner stirring” (Dolin and Baehr Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 66) will not, they contend, suffice to engage an individual’s patience. They therefore propose that patience is the calming of temporally charged urges. By ‘urges,’ Dolin and Baehr mean “desires that come with certain emotions, impulses, or both” (Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 66). These emotions can be positive or negative, and include frustration, anger, enthusiasm, and excitement (66-68). One may feel frustration, for instance, as one waits for the new book to snake its way through the postal system. The impulses in question go in two directions (Dolin and Baehr Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 68). On the one hand, there is the impulse to pull back—to quit or give up. One may experience an impulse, say, to simply stand up and walk out of the boring meeting. On the other hand, there is the impulse to plow ahead, to rush through. In one’s haste to finish the paper draft, for example, one might experience an impulse to skip noting all of the appropriate citations or running down related literature. As a virtue, Dolin and Baehr insist, these exercises of patience require skill, good motives, practical wisdom, and good judgment (Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 77).

We can thus see how Dolin and Baehr’s account of patience requires a mismatch between an individual’s urges and the time perceived to be needed to achieve a desired end. In conceptualizing patience as the calming of or resistance to such urges, Dolin and Baehr explicitly frame patience as a type of self-control (Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 71). Those familiar with the Aristotelian virtue tradition might at this point think, ‘But that makes patience sound more like continence than virtue!’ Continence is a state of character that Aristotle distinguishes from virtue: Those who act continently do the patient thing but, unlike the virtuous, must overcome contrary desires in order to do so. Although traditionally translated as ‘continent,’ the literal translation of the Greek word enkratēs is ‘self-controlled’ (Broadie and Rowe Reference Broadie and Rowe2002, 454). While Aristotle repeatedly notes in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) that those who act continently are certainly praiseworthy (NE 1145b9-10, 1150a35-38, 1151a28-29), he insists that the inner conflict they experience means that their character falls short of the excellence that is (full) virtue (NE 1151b35-1152a4). Unlike those who act continently, Aristotle argues that the virtuous experience no inner conflict about acting in accordance with virtue, because the desiderative and rational aspects of their character have developed in harmony.

Yet there is a tradition in the (non-Aristotelian) virtue literature of understanding at least some virtues—in particular, what are sometimes called the ‘virtues of self-control’—as requiring some kind of inner struggle. ‘Virtues of self-control’ is a term Eamonn Callan uses to refer to virtues that require a disciplining of the emotions (Reference Callan1993, 526). Courage and temperance are the paradigmatic virtues of self-control; Callan argues that patience belongs with them as well (Reference Callan1993). Even Aristotelian virtue theorists recognize that the virtue-continence distinction appears hardest to maintain in relation to these virtues. John McDowell, for example, acknowledges that “[v]irtues such as temperance and courage involve steadfastness in the face of characteristic sorts of temptation, and it can seem impossible to register that fact without regarding them as cases of continence” (Reference McDowell1998, 91).

Dolin and Baehr’s account of patience would seem to exemplify this ‘virtues of self-control’ view. They see patience as a corrective trait of character, and they draw on Philippa Foot’s suggestion that we see the virtues as “corrective, each one standing at a point at which there is some temptation to be resisted or deficiency of motivation to be made good” (Foot Reference Foot2002, 8, emphasis Foot’s). Thus, Dolin and Baehr propose that “[p]atience isn’t a matter of being unperturbed; it’s a corrective to temporally-charged urges” (Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 71). Since this is an idea that I will return to later in this article, it is worth noting that Dolin and Baehr’s employment of Foot does not accurately reflect her notion of virtue as corrective. Foot suggests that the virtues are correctives to human nature, and she explicitly rejects the idea that virtue requires struggle or conflict within each and every individual.Footnote ² Of courage and temperance, she says, “If human nature had been different there would have been no need of a corrective disposition in either place, as fear and pleasure would have been good guides to conduct throughout life” (Reference Foot2002, 9).

Despite retaining many familiar aspects of Aristotelian virtue, such as good motives and wise judgment, Dolin and Baehr’s account of patience departs sharply from the Aristotelian framework in explicitly understanding patience as a kind of self-control. For that reason, I do not assume an Aristotelian framework in examining their account; rather, I aim to take Dolin and Baehr’s account on its own terms. I argue that requiring conflicting urges is a problem for their account’s status as an account of virtue.

2. Patience, Self-Control, and Stable Traits of Character

Perhaps the most agreed upon point in virtue theory—Aristotelian or otherwise—is that a virtue is understood to be a cross-situationally, cross-temporally stable trait of character. In explicitly framing patience as a matter of self-control whose exercise requires motivational conflict, I argue that Dolin and Baehr’s account fails to capture such a trait. Thus, whatever aspect of an individual’s psychology is captured by their account, it seems unlikely to be a virtue.

Consider the example of calming one’s temporally charged urge to walk out of the boring meeting. This calming is an exercise of synchronic self-control: the individual experiences occurrent motivational conflict and actively works in the moment to resist their temporally charged urge. They are being patient, according to Dolin and Baehr’s account. Now suppose that boring meetings are a monthly occurrence in our individual’s line of work—not exactly frequent, but nonetheless fairly regular. What happens when they find themselves repeatedly stuck in boring meetings that give rise to a temporally charged urge to walk out?

For one, our individual is likely to start anticipating the fact that they will experience such an urge before they actually experience it. ‘Here we go again,’ they might think to themselves as they walk into the meeting room. They can do this because the repeated exercise of synchronic self-control gives rise to self-knowledge, which allows our individual to anticipate motivational conflict. As Juan Pablo Bermúdez explains:

Bermúdez here highlights the “feelings of effort” that are involved in exercises of synchronic self-control. Because it involves active engagement with occurrent motivational conflict, synchronic self-control is effortful. The exercise of diachronic self-control, on the other hand, is less effortful than exercising synchronic self-control (Bermúdez Reference Bermúdez2021, 6268). Diachronic self-control involves the employment of strategies to avoid foreseeable motivational conflict. Once an individual can anticipate a potential motivational conflict it therefore makes sense for them to attempt to avoid the conflict via the less effortful exercise of diachronic self-control rather than wait for the conflict to materialize and exert more effort to deal with it synchronically.

Perhaps one morning, then, after seeing the meeting on their calendar for later that day, our individual decides to treat themselves at the coffee shop on their way to the meeting. At least then, they might reason, they will have something to look forward to. In the meeting later that day, armed with a latte and scone, they find that their experience of the temporally charged urge is significantly attenuated. After all, there is less rush to leave when there is this lovely scone still to finish.

It would be implausible to suppose that one trip to the coffee shop magically solves all of our individual’s problems with regard to these urges. They likely still exercise synchronic self-control, although now instead of attempting to directly calm their temporally charged urge, they might employ the indirect strategy of deploying their attention away from their urge and toward the coffee shop goods (see, e.g., Duckworth, Gendler, and Gross Reference Duckworth, Gendler and Gross2014). This attentional deployment proves a more pleasant, if still somewhat effortful, way of dealing with the urge, involving, as it does, the deliciousness of the latte and scone. Our individual is thus encouraged to try the coffee shop strategy again when the next meeting comes around.

After employing the strategy for several more meetings, our individual barely experiences any temporally charged urges at all, and if they do, such urges are easily dismissed by attending to their coffee shop goods.Footnote ³ Moreover, as our individual consistently and successfully exercises diachronic self-control, the longer they go without actually experiencing a temporally charged urge in a meeting. After a while, they cease anticipating an urge on meeting days, since the longer they go without experiencing one, the less reason they have to anticipate it. By this point, however, going to the coffee shop has likely started to become a habit, part of their meeting-day routine. Plus, they have good reasons to continue doing so: quality coffee, delicious baked goods, and so on.

Things might have gone differently for our individual, of course. Perhaps they do give in to their temporally charged urges during one of those early meetings and actually do get up and walk out. That would clearly be a case of impatience. The point of the example, however, is to show that, as Matthew Haug argues, the cultivation of synchronic self-control does not result in a stable trait of character through which the individual excels at synchronic exercises of self-control (Reference Haug2021). The effort involved in its exercise means that an individual is unlikely to develop consistency. Instead, they are likely either to lapse into giving into the temporal urges, or if they really are committed to not acting impatiently, to begin employing other, more efficient, means of self-regulation (Haug Reference Haug2021). Yet as we have seen, Dolin and Baehr define patience in terms of synchronic self-control. And they explicitly exclude these more efficient means of self-regulation from their account, calling indirect strategies like attentional deployment an “escape from a need for patience” (Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 77). In being restricted to the exercise of synchronic self-control, Dolin and Baehr’s account fails to capture a stable trait of character and, thus, is not an account of a virtue of patience.Footnote ⁴

It looks like patience would, on Dolin and Baehr’s account, efface itself: the better one gets at exercising patience, the less one will actually exercise it, as one transitions from synchronic to diachronic exercises of self-control (see Bermúdez Reference Bermúdez2021, 6269). One might point out that there are elements of character that fade to the background, so to speak, the ethically better one becomes; shame is one well-known example.Footnote ⁵ I do not deny that there are such elements of character; my point is simply that they are not virtues (for Aristotle on shame, see NE 1128b10). If one consistently and repeatedly experiences shame without modifying their values, decisions, or actions, then something is going awry. We can say something similar about patience: If one is able, based on prior experience, to anticipate the emergence of a temporally charged urge and yet does nothing to head it off, instead putting oneself in the more precarious position of having to exert synchronic self-control, this would seem to belie the practical wisdom and good judgment that Dolin and Baehr want to retain in their account of patience.

None of this is to say, of course, that Dolin and Baehr have failed to locate an ethically important aspect of an individual’s psychology. After all, elements like shame are recognized to have crucial roles in moral development (see, e.g., Burnyeat Reference Burnyeat and Sherman1999; Jimenez Reference Jimenez2021). For many of us, developing excellence at navigating the temporal world may very well start with the calming of temporally charged urges, yet it seems quite unlikely to end there. What Dolin and Baehr identify would seem to be a developmental stage on the way to virtue. And indeed, they appear to acknowledge that the cultivation of patience as they understand it could lead one to achieve a different state of character altogether: “If their character has become so reformed that they never have temporally-charged urges to rush or quit […] then they aren’t patient but rather ‘beyond patient’ or ‘beyond the need for patience’…” (Reference Dolin, Baehr and King2025, 71). That one could reform one’s character such that one is no longer patient and instead beyond patient further supports my contention that this account captures a developmental stage rather than a virtue.

My focus in this section has been on Dolin and Baehr’s account of patience. But the fact that the cultivation of synchronic self-control does not result in a stable trait of character whereby one excels at synchronic exercises of self-control is a general point about human psychology. We thus get our first lesson regarding articulating accounts of individual virtues: Attempts to define any (putative) virtue in terms of the exercise of synchronic self-control are likely to be unsuccessful, because they will fail to capture a stable trait of character. Consistent exercise of synchronic self-control is unlikely not merely because the exercise of synchronic self-control is effortful and therefore demanding. Rather, it is because the successful cultivation of synchronic self-control gets one access—via the ability to anticipate motivational conflict—to more efficient means of self-regulation. Exercises of diachronic self-control are more efficient than exercises of synchronic self-control; reliance on habit is more efficient than exercising diachronic self-control (Bermúdez Reference Bermúdez2021, 6269). For an individual who is committed to cultivating a particular aspect of their character, then, it is practically rational to minimize their reliance on synchronic self-control and instead increase their reliance on habits. As Bermúdez puts it, the employment of more efficient means of self-regulation “frees us to focus on what we actually care about” (Reference Bermúdez2021, 6269).

3. Patience as Response to Slower-than-Desired Progress

On Miller and Furr’s account, “[t]he virtue of patience is a cross-situational and stable disposition to react, both internally and externally, to slower than desired progress toward goal achievement with a reasonable level of calmness, and with the typical absence of persistent desires which oppose calmly progressing toward goal achievement” (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 15). Like Dolin and Baehr, then, Miller and Furr also begin with the idea that we need patience in contexts where we want some desired end to be achieved in less time than it currently appears to us to be taking. Yet they propose a different sort of mismatch than the one in Dolin and Baehr’s account. Instead of temporally charged urges, the mismatch that Miller and Furr require is between the individual’s desire regarding the pace of progress toward their goal and its perceived pace: On their view, one exercises patience only in situations where one’s progress toward one’s goal is taking longer than one wants it to take (Miller and Furr Reference Miller and Furr2024, 7).

On Miller and Furr’s account, patience will not efface itself like it does on Dolin and Baehr’s. This is because Miller and Furr do not require the individual to experience temporally charged urges, and because they explicitly take a “broadly Aristotelian” approach to virtue (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 2). They maintain a distinction between continence and virtue by requiring that any experience of such urges be fleeting (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 10).Footnote ⁶ Moreover, they acknowledge that no matter how virtuous one is, there will be times when the world will impede one’s progress toward a goal: even the most virtuous among us will sometimes find themselves stuck in traffic, or having to wait in a line when they would rather not. Thus, unlike Dolin and Baehr’s account where there is the possibility of someone being “beyond patience,” there will always be at least some occasions for patience, as Miller and Furr understand it. Nevertheless, I contend that requiring a mismatch between one’s desire and the perceived pace of progress toward one’s goal is problematic for an account of the virtue.

In defense of restricting the scope of patience to slower than desired progress, Miller and Furr use the example of an elementary school teacher and the circumstances under which their “patience will be tested” (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 6-7). If their students’ behavior—talking out of turn or not following instructions—is slowing down the teacher’s progress toward their goal—of finishing the lesson or getting the classroom back in order—then that will call for an exercise of patience. “However,” Miller and Furr insist, “if the teacher has one of these goals but does not view the students’ behavior as slowing down attainment (or has no goal that is being impeded by the students’ behavior), then it is not clear to us how patience would be involved” (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 7). I agree with Miller and Furr that patience is involved when progress toward one’s goal is slower than desired, but I want to argue that patience can also be involved in cases that lack such mismatched desire.

In contrast to Miller and Furr (Reference Miller and Furr2024), I consider a teacher who listens calmly and with genuine interest while the first-grader tells their long, convoluted story about how they chose what cereal to have for breakfast that morning to be acting patiently, even when none of their goals are being impeded by the story telling.Footnote ⁷ Let us assume that the teacher’s desired goal here is something along the lines of, ‘Making my student feel heard,’ or ‘Letting my student know that their thoughts and experiences are important.’ Miller and Furr, in disagreeing that this is patience, would argue that the teacher is acting from some other virtue, such as compassion. I certainly would not deny that the teacher is also being compassionate here; it is widely agreed that the virtues do not operate in isolation. Yet a crucial aspect of the teacher’s excellence in this situation, I contend, is their understanding and acknowledgment of the amount of time it takes for the aforementioned goals to be achieved, as well as their ability and willingness to grant such goals the appropriate amount of time they need. In other words, the teacher’s excellence is manifested (at least in part) by the fact that she does not perceive progress toward her goal to be proceeding too slowly, because she recognizes that the goal achievement is proceeding at an appropriate pace. And it seems apt to characterize this willingness to let the story run its course as a manifestation of patience.

One thing that this example suggests is that our desires regarding the pace of goal attainment can influence the kinds of goals that we choose to pursue. For instance, we sometimes decline to take up certain goals simply because attaining them would take longer than we would like. And we often frame this in terms of patience. We tell ourselves, or maybe admit to friends, ‘I do not have the patience for that.’ This is not to claim that all decisions not to pursue time-intensive goals are impatient, of course. But it certainly seems that, in some cases at least, my refusal to pursue a particular goal simply because it would take longer than I would like is itself a manifestation of impatience. Our desires regarding the pace of goal attainment thus play a role in our goal selection, and not merely with regard to an already chosen goal. Such goal selection is neglected in Miller and Furr’s account.

Perhaps Miller and Furr can accommodate this in terms of potential mismatched desires: If I pass on pursuing a particular goal because I know it will not be accomplished as quickly as I would want, then perhaps they can say that I am in that case choosing impatiently. This brings to the fore another problematic aspect of the account, however: Miller and Furr define patience in terms of a very specific type of response, namely, calmness. Certainly, calmness is a key characteristic of a paradigmatically patient person. But in the case of potential mismatched desires, one seems able to make the impatient decision to forego pursuing a particular goal quite calmly. In order to accommodate this decision as an instance of impatience, then, it looks as though Miller and Furr would have to say that the decision somehow exhibits an unreasonable amount of calmness (see Reference Miller and Furr2024, 16). But this does not sound quite right, either. If anything, it is the decision itself, not the calmness with which it is made, that is unreasonable.

Furthermore, defining patience in terms of a calm response makes it difficult for Miller and Furr’s account to accommodate the idea that patience has its limits. Patience, they note, “typically does not require being calm forever” (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 16). There comes a point when enough is enough. “If you are stuck behind a car that is not moving when the light turns green because the driver is looking at his phone,” Miller and Furr suggest, “it is not a failure of patience if you politely honk your horn after 20 seconds have gone by” (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 16). The qualification of “politely,” however, makes clear that this is not an end to responding calmly; rather, it marks an acknowledgment that continuing to wait would be inappropriate. Indeed, it would be quite strange if, upon realizing that they had been calm for long enough, our patient person began laying on the horn and shouting, as if it were the calmness, and not the time, that had run out. We thus have reason to doubt the adequacy of defining patience solely in terms of a (reasonably) calm response.

4. Developing Patience

As Miller and Furr nicely highlight, virtue is something that an individual achieves (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 10). If we think about how an individual develops patience, beginning in childhood, we see that a significant part of that development is a matter of getting one’s desires to align with one’s rationality and temporal reality. Consider, for example, how young children are often quite impatient when they first start playing board games like Candyland. They simply do not like waiting their turn. But they tend to outgrow this fairly quickly and most learn to enjoy playing board games with others. In such cases, their ability to remain calm while waiting has increased. But their desires have also changed; they have adjusted their expectations of how long things take. A main reason why they are able to calmly wait their turn and have fun playing the board game, then, is because it is no longer taking longer than they want it to for their turn to come around.

This developmental perspective suggests that there are at least two ways for an individual to resolve their impatience: they can change their response to their desire that things proceed more quickly, or they can change the desire itself. If they get themselves to respond calmly to the desire that things proceed faster, then according to Miller and Furr’s account, they are being less impatient and more patient. But suppose they go the latter route and modify their desire. Now they no longer want things to proceed faster, so they have nothing to be agitated about; they can easily stay calm. They are therefore no longer impatient. But since goal attainment is not proceeding more slowly than they want, they are not being patient either, according to Miller and Furr. What was an instance of impatience has become a situation to which patience and impatience do not apply.

This renders the relationship between patience and impatience puzzlingly discontinuous. Recall Foot’s understanding of virtue as corrective to human nature: humans tend to go astray in certain ways, and the virtues are correctives to those tendencies (Reference Foot2002, 8-11). This means, as Rosalind Hursthouse points out, that “to each virtue there corresponds at least one vice” (Reference Hursthouse1980, 59). Indeed, the Aristotelian framework frequently acknowledges at least two vices associated with a particular virtue: the Aristotelian “triadic schema”Footnote ⁸ situates virtue between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency. A virtue and its corresponding vice(s), then, stand in particular relationship to one another: virtue is corrective to those tendencies that have the potential to lead to vice (Hursthouse Reference Hursthouse1980, 59). Virtue is a disposition to get things right with regard to its domain; its corresponding vices are dispositions that go wrong in some way with regard to that same domain (Hursthouse Reference Hursthouse1980, 68-69).

Miller and Furr want to adhere to the triadic schema (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 17-19). Yet on their account, patience will only be corrective to some kinds of impatience, and not others. For example, one might think that many of us live in a consumer culture that actively cultivates impatience in large part by enticing us to want everything now. Here, the impatience seems to stem less from an inability to respond calmly and more from the ubiquitous desire for instant gratification. My aim as someone immersed in such a culture should not ultimately be to respond calmly to the fact that I want everything faster and sooner, but to reject the cultural incentives to want everything so quickly in the first place. Yet revising one’s desires in this way would not, on Miller and Furr’s account, be a cultivation of patience, since patience, on their view, is restricted to contexts in which one wants things to proceed more quickly. It could only be the cultivation of some other virtue(s), perhaps temperance in this case. Impatience, then, no longer stands in particular relationship to patience; we have lost the Aristotelian triad.

Moreover, when it comes to goal pursuit, and the fact that each of us has only so much time in this life, it would often be quite nice if we could attain our goals more quickly, all things being equal. It might be too strong, for instance, to say that an individual (virtuous or otherwise) waiting in the lobby of a high-rise desires the elevator to arrive sooner, but they would of course find it pleasant if the elevator happens to be there waiting as soon as they push the button. Something similar could be said about the elementary school teacher discussed earlier. While they may be happy to listen to their student’s story, they also likely would not mind if the student managed to wrap it up with fewer tangents. These examples suggest a certain degree of continuity between situations where goal progression is in line with one’s desires and situations where it is going more slowly than one wants, such that we ought not to assume that patience only applies to the latter.

Just as goal selection is neglected in Miller and Furr’s account, then, so too is the fact that patience is not merely a matter of responding calmly, but also of desiring correctly. That is why I take that teacher who spends the time to genuinely listen to their student to be acting patiently: The teacher’s selection of that goal, their understanding of the time such a goal takes to be attained, and their willingness to grant the goal that time is itself an achievement that allows for that teacher’s excellent responsiveness.

5. Drawing Lessons from Miller and Furr’s Account

From this examination of Miller and Furr’s account of patience, we can draw some additional lessons regarding the development of accounts of individual virtues. One lesson is that virtue theorists need to attend to the ways in which virtue, or lack thereof, affects an individual’s goal selection and avoidance. By defining patience solely in terms of already determined goals, I have argued that Miller and Furr’s account misses something significant: We can manifest patience and impatience through our decisions about which goals to pursue or reject. This is true of other virtues as well. Courage, or lack thereof, informs one’s decisions about which risks to take on and for what ends, for instance, and generosity shapes one’s aims with regard to giving. This point about goal selection is particularly important for any ‘broadly Aristotelian’ account of virtue to accommodate. There is widespread acknowledgment within the Aristotelian tradition that virtue of character plays a significant role in goal selection, with a considerable literature on what Aristotle scholars refer to as ‘the goal passages’ (see, e.g., Moss Reference Moss2012), in which Aristotle makes some variation of the claim: “virtue makes the goal correct, and prudence makes the means to it <correct>” (NE 1144a9, trans. Irwin Reference Irwin2019).

Another lesson is that virtue theorists may want to be wary of defining a virtue in terms of one specific kind of response.Footnote ⁹ In defining patience as a (reasonably) calm response, Miller and Furr’s account has difficulty accommodating the idea that patience has its limits—in particular, that one can stop waiting because it is no longer reasonable to continue doing so, while nevertheless remaining calm. Consistently excellent responsiveness is central to our understanding of virtue, and so theorists will have to spell out, to some extent, what such excellence looks like. It would probably be hard, for instance, to develop an account of generosity that does not involve some kind of giving (see, e.g., Miller Reference Miller2018). But flexibility and creativity in responsiveness are also central to our understanding of virtue (see, e.g., Russell Reference Russell2009, 229; Swanton Reference Swanton2003, 161). While standing firm might be the most paradigmatically courageous response, we also know that, sometimes, the courageous thing to do is to walk away. Virtue theorists should thus strive to spell out the excellent responsiveness of virtue in ways that do not unduly restrict the potential variety of virtuous responses.

A final general lesson we can draw is that an account of virtue should attend to the ways in which virtue develops in a person. This includes accommodating the fact that the cultivation of virtue involves the cultivation of our desires. To return once again to Foot’s notion of virtue as corrective, one reason that we humans need the virtue of patience is because our desires regarding the pace of goal attainment tend not to be reliable guides to good conduct. In many cases of impatience, our lack of calmness is unreasonable precisely because the underpinning desires are themselves unreasonable. Just as the courageous have cultivated their feelings of fear and confidence, one might think, the patient have cultivated their desires regarding the pace of goal attainment. This is not to claim that the virtuously patient person will never want things to proceed more quickly. My objection to Miller and Furr’s account has not been that it misses the mark entirely, but rather that it defines patience too narrowly. One way in which the account is too narrow is that it fails to capture the developmental point that a significant part of cultivating patience—and other virtues—is getting our desires to align with our rationality and (temporal, in the case of patience) reality.

The cultivation of our desires is just one aspect of the development of virtue, of course. The larger point is that it is important for an account of virtue to be attentive to the ways in which virtue develops.

6. A Neo-Aristotelian Account of Patience

Finally, let me turn to my neo-Aristotelian account of patience. I argue that patience is consistent excellence in acknowledging and responding to the appropriate time needed to achieve a desired outcome (Vigani Reference Vigani2017, 333). This account follows Aristotle’s method of individuating the virtues according to the objects to which they are responsive. The objects Aristotle identifies are the kinds of things that just about any human would need to respond to—that is, the kinds of things about which one is likely to have to make a choice, and about which one can choose either well or badly (see Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum, French, Uehling and Wettstein1988). This yields a decidedly different approach to patience than Dolin and Baehr’s and Miller and Furr’s. In framing virtue as consistent excellence in responsiveness to the object(s) in its field (Swanton Reference Swanton2003, 19), ethical excellence thereby involves acknowledgment of both our limitations and our abilities—in the case of patience, to shape the temporal aspects of the world to our liking. Virtue thus understood is not only a guiderail that prevents us from going off track, nor does it only kick in when things are not going our way. Rather, virtue is also (pro)active; its excellence lies, in part, in doing what we can with what we have (NE 1101a1-6). This preserves the flexibility and creativity in responsiveness that is central to our understanding of virtue.

The neo-Aristotelian account also reflects Aristotle’s commitment to virtue entailing goodness in its possessor (NE 1097b2-5); Miller and Furr’s account refrains from commitment on this point (Reference Miller and Furr2024, 15). On the neo-Aristotelian account, any desired outcome that a virtuous person has is one that is informed by virtue; it will not, therefore, be contrary to patience or any other virtue. Moreover, that patience is a matter of the appropriate amount of time recognizes that the virtue has a role to play in goal selection as well as in goal progression. I have previously argued that there is no appropriate amount of time for bad ends (Vigani Reference Vigani2017, 338). But there is another significant implication: a certain amount of time may be appropriate to some goals simply in virtue of their goodness. That the virtue of patience on the neo-Aristotelian account shares the same field as its associated vices—impatience, in the case of deficiency, and the vice of excess, which might be thought of as excessive passivityFootnote ¹⁰—means that the account maintains the continuity of the Aristotelian triadic schema and can accommodate the developmental aspects of the virtues of character that I argued for above. The individual immersed in consumer culture, who works to moderate their desires to want everything and want it now can thereby grow in both patience and temperance.

Like Miller and Furr’s account and in contrast to Dolin and Baehr’s, patience on the neo-Aristotelian account is not a matter of synchronic self-control. Cultivating patience will thus not efface itself. The account also maintains the Aristotelian distinction, discussed above, between virtue and continence. The need to overcome urges or desires to respond in ways that are contrary to virtue would, on the neo-Aristotelian account, be evidence that one falls short of excellence in some way—which is not to say, it should be emphasized, that one is thereby vicious, or an ethically terrible human being, or even unpraiseworthy. But the account does adhere to the Aristotelian insistence that the rational and desiderative aspects of a virtuous character be in harmony.

As a result, the neo-Aristotelian account does not require a mismatch between one’s desires and the perceived pace of goal attainment. But as I noted with regard to Miller and Furr’s account, even the most virtuous among us will on occasion find themselves stuck in traffic or having to wait in line when they would rather not. The neo-Aristotelian account needs to be able to accommodate this very human experience, and I contend that it can. In earlier work I argued that the neo-Aristotelian account of patience is not a matter of developing a fondness for waiting (2017, 336-337). To expand on that point: Even in cases where they want things to proceed more quickly, a patient person can recognize that a certain amount of time is nevertheless appropriate to the situation. Crossing midtown Manhattan at rush hour is going to take a while, regardless of what one wants, and it is doubtful that anyone—virtuous or otherwise—wants it to take as long as it does. For a patient person, their desire to get to their destination more quickly does not change the fact that the thing to do here and now, let us suppose, is to sit calmly on the bus while it makes its way through the traffic. I can agree, then, with Miller and Furr that a virtuously patient person could want things to be proceeding more quickly without that desire constituting a reason for them to act impatiently or otherwise contrary to virtue.

Indeed, the fact that a virtuous person does not take themself to have reason to act contrary to virtue does not entail that they cannot have rich affective responses to the situation at hand (see Vigani Reference Vigani2019). Perhaps the patient bus passenger finds themself frustrated at the lack of societal investment in public goods. This frustration will not constitute for them a reason to act impatiently—to berate the bus driver, for instance, who is simply doing the best they can given the conditions. But it could very well constitute a reason for them to pay more attention to their local electoral candidates’ positions on public transportation. Moreover, the neo-Aristotelian account of patience can accommodate a patient person’s calmly getting up and leaving once the wait has become excessive. Upon realizing that they are fairly close to their destination and can walk faster than the bus is currently going, perhaps our patient passenger calmly decides to get off and walk the rest of the way.

One might worry, however, that the neo-Aristotelian account renders patience too expansive. After all, we live in time; we cannot escape it. Does this mean that everything the virtuous person chooses to do is an exercise of patience? An affirmative answer seems at risk of turning patience into a strange kind of über-virtue. I concede that the account does grant patience a wider scope than we tend to see in our ordinary usage of the term. Yet there are reasons to think that this does not thereby make patience into an über-virtue.

When we think about an exercise of virtue, we tend to think of a situation that calls for excellence—hence Dolin and Baehr’s focus on situations in which an individual ‘needs’ patience and Miller and Furr’s consideration of cases that might ‘test’ one’s patience. But the objects to which the virtues are responsive are present in many situations that are not nearly so demanding. We assume personal risk and make ourselves vulnerable to the actions of others every time we get behind the wheel of a car, for example, yet we do not tend to think of our daily commute as an act of courage. At the same time, we can easily recognize that texting while driving is rash and we empathize with the fear that many new drivers feel, so it is not as though courage is irrelevant to driving. It is just that appropriately feeling fear and confidence in relation to the personal risk one faces in their daily commute is the kind of thing most of us fairly-decent-but-certainly-not-fully-virtuous folk tend to be pretty good at. Thus, an excellent response in that situation is not going to distinguish the fully virtuous from the ordinary, fairly decent human being. But of course, if we can get it right, the fully virtuous can, too.

What this example suggests is that the Aristotelian method that I adopt in individuating the virtues by their objects yields virtues of character that, in some ways, have a broader scope than our ordinary usage of those virtue terms tends to attribute to them. This raises interesting questions regarding what we ought to consider an ‘exercise’ of virtue. But it also means that patience will not be an outlier in this regard and thus is not at risk of assuming an outsized status compared to the other virtues of character within the neo-Aristotelian framework. And as I argue in the next section, the broad scope of this understanding of patience gives us a lot of information about how to develop and maintain the virtue.

7. A Revisionary Account of Patience

Let us return once more to Foot’s understanding of the virtues as corrective to human nature. Our human experience of fear is prone to false positives; while there are good evolutionary reasons for this (LeDoux 2022), it tends not to lend itself to ethical excellence. Hence Foot’s claim, noted above, that fear is not a reliable guide to good conduct. This is why, she claims, humans need to cultivate courage. Similarly, our judgments of and feelings about time tend not to be reliable guides. To take just one example, humans are prone to what is known as ‘the planning fallacy,’ a tendency “to underestimate the time required to complete a project, even when they have considerable experience of past failures to live up to planned schedules” (Kahneman and Tversky Reference Kahneman and Tversky1979; cited in Buehler, Griffin, and Peetz Reference Buehler, Griffin and Peetz2010, 2). The planning fallacy can contribute to stress, feeling rushed, and other emotions and impulses toward impatience (Fenton Reference Fenton2017). One idea, then, is that the virtue of patience serves as a corrective to, among other things, this human tendency. To be clear, it is not that patience corrects for individual instances of the planning fallacy, or only operates once an individual gets to the point of feeling stressed or rushed. Rather, the idea is that the cultivation of a reliable appreciation—both cognitive and emotional—of the appropriate amount of time needed to achieve a desired outcome is corrective to, among other things, the human tendency to commit the planning fallacy.

As Dolin and Baehr’s and Miller and Furr’s accounts make clear, on our everyday understanding we tend to think of patience as particularly relevant in cases where we want things sooner or faster. Understanding patience as corrective in the manner I just outlined thus points to one way in which the neo-Aristotelian account is revisionary of our everyday understanding. The choices that we make in situations that we might not intuitively consider patience-relevant—such as making plans regarding how long various projects might take, how many projects we might be able to take on within a certain window of time, and so on—affect and/or contribute to many situations that we do commonly recognize as patience-relevant.

For example, if my morning commute takes 10 minutes if and only if I hit every green light, then, in leaving myself only 10 minutes to get to work, I am setting myself up for impatience. When I hit that first red light, I realize that I am starting to fall behind schedule, and I can feel the time pressure start to build. In leaving the bare minimum amount of time to get to work, I have put myself into a situation that tends to foster temporally charged urges toward impatience. While, on our everyday understanding, we might not say that I am being impatient unless and until I start laying on my horn in a desperate attempt to get the cars in front of me to move faster, on the neo-Aristotelian account, if my failure to leave more than the bare minimum amount of time is the result of a lack of appreciation for the appropriate amount of time, then there is a sense in which I am exhibiting impatience in making the decision not to leave more time for my commute.

This might strike readers as a radically revisionary understanding of patience, but I contend there is a worthwhile payoff: Understanding patience in this way draws attention to the impact that our individual choices have in facilitating or undermining our patience and thus how, through the choices we make, we have (some degree of) control over our own characters. It also gives us a lot of information about what is involved in cultivating and maintaining patience, including, among other things: an awareness and appreciation of how long things generally take; an ability and habit of anticipating potential obstacles to the achievement of our desired outcomes (see discussion of the ‘Inside-Outside Model’ in Buehler, Griffin, and Peetz Reference Buehler, Griffin and Peetz2010); a habit of building in a margin of error when we can; a willingness to consult others when we are not sure how long something might take or what obstacles might present themselves; an appreciation for when remaining calm or waiting longer is appropriate and called for and when it is not, and, just as importantly, why it is (in)appropriate in that situation. Instead of focusing on specific contexts where one might ‘need’ or ‘test’ patience, the expansive scope of the neo-Aristotelian account pushes us to consider the cultivation and maintenance of patience across one’s life as a whole.

8. Drawing Lessons from the Neo-Aristotelian Account

That an account of virtue would be revisionary of our everyday understanding is unsurprising. Accounts of virtues are developed with an eye to specific theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical aims. This demands a level of precision that we do not see in ordinary usage: In everyday contexts, for instance, we are quick to attribute character traits based on limited instances of behavior—as in cases of the fundamental attribution error—and to attribute problematic behavior to an excess of virtue (rather than an excess of traits), such as when we claim that someone is too generous or too honest (for discussion, see Hursthouse Reference Hursthouse1999, 10-14). This is not a call to start policing everyday language! But it does mean that one may face challenges when trying to communicate an account of virtue to a broader audience. At the very least, virtue theorists will want to be mindful to point out the ways in which an account departs from ordinary usage. It also raises some questions that theorists may want to consider when developing accounts of particular virtues.

First, how important is it to capture (certain aspects of) our everyday understanding? Different theorists might answer this question differently, depending on their specific aims and theoretical framework. Someone intent on building a more empirically operationalizable account, for instance, might prefer to build their account from behaviors and attitudes that more closely track everyday understanding, while someone working within an established ethical tradition—Aristotelian or Kantian, say—may be less concerned with tracking everyday understanding and more concerned with fidelity to the ethical framework.

Another question is: How revisionary is too revisionary? Heather Battaly, for instance, has argued for an analysis of honesty as a trait, that might fail to be a virtue and even sometimes be a vice (Reference Battaly2024). There may come a point when an account departs so radically from our everyday understanding that it might make sense to use a different term altogether. But we must also acknowledge that different approaches and traditions will take the understanding of a virtue in different directions. Patience—as a prominent virtue in the Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim traditions—is a good example of this (see, e.g., Jeffrey and Pawl Reference Jeffrey and Pawl2025; Bronk et al. Reference Bronk, Swanson, Whitney, Balkaya-Ince and Schnitker2025). Accounts that depart from our ordinary understanding in various ways can often be fruitfully put into dialogue with one another.

My hope is that this examination of some recent accounts of the virtue of patience yields a better understanding both of this particular virtue and of the general project of articulating accounts of individual virtues. Even among accounts that agree that patience is both goal-oriented and temporal, many points of disagreement and questions remain. Exploring these issues in relation to the specific virtue of patience can enhance our understanding of the moral psychology and development of virtue more generally, thereby contributing to more fruitful engagement in this area of interdisciplinary scholarship.Footnote ¹¹