Contemporary Accounts of Patience (and Other Virtues)

ABSTRACT This article examines three recently proposed accounts of a virtue of patience, all of which agree that patience is goal-oriented and temporal. Josh Dolin and Jason Baehr’s (2025), and Christian Miller and R. Michael Furr’s (2024) accounts conceptualize patience as requiring some kind of mismatch between an individual’s urges or desires and the perceived amount of time it takes to achieve a desired end. I argue that requiring a mismatch creates problems for both accounts and defend an understanding of patience as consistent excellence in acknowledging and responding to the appropriate time needed to achieve a desired outcome (Vigani 2017). This latter account does not require any mismatch of an individual’s desires or urges, and thus, I contend, avoids the problems of the other two. It is, however, significantly revisionary of our everyday understanding of patience. Rather than being problematic, I argue that this revisionary understanding is especially informative regarding what is involved in the cultivation and maintenance of patience. Examining these accounts deepens our understanding of the psychology of patience, particularly with regard to an individual’s goals and desires. It also allows us to draw out some general lessons for developing accounts of individual virtues.