In practice

Module 04 · Lesson 04 / 04 · 15 / 45

Running the Compass

The virtues rarely conflict. When they appear to, one of them is being misread.

Loop stage

Choose

You ask which virtue this moment is asking for, and commit.

prohairesis — chosen purpose

Virtue

Wisdom

What is actually true here, and what is up to me?

sophia / phronēsis

The idea

In use, the compass is fast. Four questions, in order, taking under a minute once the habit is in: what is true, what do I owe, what am I avoiding, where is the line. The order matters — starting with courage produces bravado, and starting with temperance produces paralysis.

Apparent conflicts between virtues are common and are usually diagnostic. When courage and justice seem to pull opposite ways, one of them is almost always being run wrong: "courage" that requires humiliating someone is not courage, and "justice" that requires you to stay silent is usually comfort with a better name.

The genuinely hard cases are real, and the tradition does not pretend otherwise. The compass does not remove them. What it does is guarantee that you have looked at all four faces of the decision before you commit, which is more than most decisions get.

Why this matters

A decision procedure you can actually run under pressure is worth more than a better one you cannot. This one is four questions and fits on a card.

It also converts vague moral discomfort into a locatable problem. "Something about this feels wrong" is unactionable; "this fails the justice question" tells you what to change.

And it catches the specific failure this whole department is designed to prevent: a technically excellent, perfectly composed decision that is quietly self-serving.

Read at your level

How to run it, and where it breaks.

Practice

Write the four answers in four short lines. Long answers mean you are building a case rather than checking a decision.

The justice line is the diagnostic one. If it is blank or generic, you have not run it — "everyone will be fine" is not an answer, and it is where self-serving decisions escape.

When courage and temperance conflict, resolve in order: decide whether to act on courage, then set the size on temperance. Reversing the order lets a proportion argument cancel an obligation.

When justice and self-interest conflict, note that the doctrine has already decided this. If you find yourself building a sophisticated argument for why this case is different, that construction effort is itself the answer.

Keep a short record of decisions run through the compass and revisit them a month later. Not to score outcomes — to check whether the reasoning was honest, which is the only part you can assess.

Primary text

Quoted from translations whose copyright has expired, and glossed rather than left to speak for itself. The translator is named because the wording is theirs, and some of the modern misreadings begin in a translator's choice.

Meditations III.12
“If thou workest at that which is before thee... expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature... thou wilt live happy.”
Long's rendering. Note the location of the satisfaction — in the present activity, not in its result. That is the whole compass in one sentence.

Practice · Virtue compass

One real situation, four readings. Choose which virtue you think is primary here, then read all four — the disagreement between them is the lesson.

You have discovered a serious error in a project your team shipped last month. It has not yet caused visible harm and probably will not for several weeks. You did not make the error; a junior colleague did, and they do not know. Raising it now means a difficult conversation with your director, a likely delay to work you are being judged on, and exposure for someone who is already struggling.

Which virtue leads here?

Run it

Take a live decision and write four short lines, one per virtue, in order.

Check the justice line specifically. If it is generic, you have not answered it.

Revisit one compass decision from a month ago and assess only the honesty of the reasoning, not the outcome.

Run all four questions on the decision you have been putting off. Ten minutes, four lines, then act on what the justice line says.

Sit with this

Which of the four questions do you habitually skip?
When have you used a virtue as cover for what you already wanted?
What does your last hard decision look like if you assess only the reasoning and ignore how it turned out?

Where you stand

UntouchedFinished is not mastered. Mastered is not merely opened. Review timing stays on this device for now.

Practice: finish the lesson practice above first
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Take this with you

The Four Virtues

Four questions. What is actually true here. What do I owe the other people. What is the hard right thing I am avoiding. Where is the line. Run them in that order and you will rarely be badly wrong about what to do — though you may still be frightened of doing it, which is a different problem and the subject of the next several modules.

The drill

Four questions, one decision

Take one real decision you are currently avoiding. Answer all four questions in writing, in order, in under ten minutes. The time limit is deliberate — this is a field instrument, not an essay.

01Wisdom: what do I actually know here, and what am I supplying? Strip it to the camera line first.
02Justice: who else is affected, and what do I owe them that I have not been counting?
03Courage: what is the hard right action I am currently routing around?
04Temperance: where is the line, and does my proposed response go past it?

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In this series

More in this path

Back to The Four Virtues →The Stoic hub →The Institute →

This is philosophy education. It is not therapy, counselling, or medical advice, and it does not diagnose or treat anything — the historical link between Stoicism and cognitive therapy is a fact about intellectual history, not a licence. It is also not emergency or disaster preparedness. The pressure it trains for is ordinary and recurring: the hostile email, the diagnosis, the argument at eleven at night. If you are struggling with your mental health, a qualified professional in your own country is the right call, and philosophy can sit alongside that rather than in place of it.