The Judgment of Enough: Stopping under Good Fortune as an Exercise of Practical Wisdom

Preprint (not peer-reviewed). Aristotle and his interpreters have long recognised that success can corrupt. This paper asks a narrower question: what is involved in deciding to stop, or not to extend, a pursuit that is going well, and can that decision be understood as a distinct exercise of practical wisdom? I argue that it is a decision of a distinctive kind: when a pursuit prospers, its own measures invert, so a decision to stop needs a criterion that does not come from the pursuit's feedback; the judge who applies the criterion is also exposed to the conditions that impair judgment; and the criterion is whether continuing endangers the sustainability of virtuous activity, set out as a four-part test concerning exposure and reversibility, the share of luck, aims beyond the pursued good, and the source of the decision. The claim of novelty is limited and stated as such. Use of AI: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Anthropic) was used to support literature searches and verify bibliographic information. All information provided by the AI tool was independently reviewed by the author, who retains sole responsibility for the sources, scientific content, interpretations, evaluations, and conclusions presented in this work.