The four cardinal virtues: fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice; provide a compass to navigate moral decision in a morally opaque landscape. These virtues have been espoused and developed for thousands of years, guiding decisions of men, chiseling away foolishness, revealing character.

How does one etch these virtues into character? A stoic might say: conscious repetition of action within specific situations of one’s life experienced. These situations experienced are mixed with a variance of additional ingredients with their own accord, providing pressure motivating one’s behavior away from the virtuous track held in one’s mind and heart. Emotions, capitol vice, & fear all threaten to steer a man’s path from virtue at any given moment of decision. Maintaining this course is the challenge of the stoic virtue ethicist, operationalizing his compass of cardinal virtue into action during moments of emotional duress. This means he must identify when he is overcome with fear/self-serving desire and choose action counterpoise to what he feels in that moment. If self-serving emotion can strongly influence one’s track from a plotted course of virtue; could it also entrench one to stay the course of virtue? If so, what emotion would more coherently entrain one to the virtuous path?

Reality appears to be oriented into polarized duality: man & woman, yin & yang, positive & negative, light & dark, good & evil, hot & cold, service to self & service to others; energy in the form of coiled force oscillate between the poles creating magic action that is life experience in 3rd density reality. If this is so, then how is virtue, vice, and one’s emotional states organized within this dualistic context?

All virtues are downstream of the frequency of unconditional love & all capitol vice(sin) is downstream of fear. If this premise is true, then the stoic philosopher can relax his relentless effort to apply the blueprint of chosen virtue to every situation clouded by self-serving emotion; he can instead focus on attuning to the frequency of unconditional love and guide his actions from that start point. Each choice/action guided by the frequency of unconditional love will naturally flow through the downstream channels of cardinal virtue and manifest as virtuous behavior. Antithetically, all choice/action downstream from the frequency of fear will naturally flow through the channels of capitol vice(sin) and manifest behavior as such.

With this understanding, the stoic philosopher can then singularly focus on feeling unconditional love as a start point of choice/action and confirm the action as virtuous with the ethical compass that is the four cardinal virtues after the fact. This changes the function of cardinal virtue from present moment compass to after the fact measuring tool. From my perspective, a much more time appropriate function of cardinal virtue given the complexity of application.