The Four Stoic Virtues

• (Practical) wisdom: Navigating complex situations in the best available fashion
• Courage: Doing the right thing, both physically and morally, under all circumstances
• Justice: Treating every human being - regardless of his or her stature in life - with fairness and kindness
• Temperance: Exercising moderation and self-control in all spheres of life

The four virtues: as is well known, there are four virtues in Stoic philosophy: practical wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. There are several definitions of them in the Stoic canon, but perhaps the most compact and informative ones are found in Cicero’s De Inventione (On Invention): “Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature, and moderation, and reason. … It has then four divisions — prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Prudence [i.e., practical wisdom] is the knowledge of things which are good, or bad, or neither good nor bad. … Justice is a habit of the mind which attributes its proper dignity to everything, preserving a due regard to the general welfare. … Fortitude [i.e., courage] is a deliberate encountering of danger and enduring of labour. … [And] temperance is the form and well-regulated dominion of reason over lust and other improper affections of the mind.” (II.53-54) The reasons the virtues are deeply interconnected is because it makes little sense to try to use them separately. Consider: courage is not just physical bravery, but rather the moral courage to stand up for what is right. But how does one know what is right? That falls under the domain of the virtue of justice. Then again, as Cicero clearly says above, practical wisdom (prudence) is the virtue that tells you what is good, what is bad, and what is neither, surely pertinent knowledge to exercise justice. And it takes all three to practice temperance about one’s own passions, because one has to know the difference between good and bad, have the courage to act on it, and do so with the general welfare in mind. You simply can’t have one without the others.

...another widely held Stoic teaching, i.e., the unity of the virtues. Zeno held that virtue is practical knowledge (phronêsis) in various forms. When phronêsis deals with what is owed to others it is justice (dikaiosunê); when it deals with what should be chosen it is moderation (sôphrosunê); when it deals with what must be endured it is courage (andreia).