:Prudence:
"Is this Court living in Accord with Prudence?"
"As a living human being, are you operating in accord with Prudence?"
"Is the living man in charge of the Juris of this court in accord with Prudence?"

JURISPRUDENCE. The science of the law. By science here, is understood that connexion of truths which is founded on principles either evident in themselves, or capable of demonstration; a collection of truths of the same kind, arranged in methodical order. In a more confined sense, jurisprudence is the practical science of giving a wise interpretation to the laws, and making a just application of them to all cases as they arise. In this sense, it is the habit of judging the same questions in the same manner, and by this course of judgments forming precedents. 1 Ayl. Pand. 3 Toull. Dr. Civ. Fr. tit. prel. s. 1, n. 1, 12, 99; Merl. Rep. h. t.; 19 Amer. Jurist, 3. (Bouvier's 1856)

PRU'DENCE, n. [L. prudentia.] Wisdom applied to practice.
Prudence implies caution in deliberating and consulting on the most suitable means to accomplish valuable purposes, and the exercise of sagacity in discerning and selecting them. Prudence differs from wisdom in this, that prudence implies more caution and reserve than wisdom, or is exercised more in foreseeing and avoiding evil, than in devising and executing that which is good. It is sometimes mere caution or circumspection.
Prudence is principally in reference to actions to be done, and due means, order, season and method of doing or not doing. (Webster's 1828)

Prudence makes perfect: the Basel Committee proposals for the overhaul of the 1988 Accord. This philosophy is enshrined in the three pillars of the new Accord:
* Pillar 1 comprises a set of mandatory capital charges intended to yield a reasonable minimum capital requirement.
* Pillar 2 describes the process by which banks, in conjunction with their supervisors, assess the buffer they need over and above the Pillar 1 requirement to support other risks.
* Pillar 3 ensures that banks [courts] disclose sufficient information to allow the wider market to judge the credibility of their capital plans. source

Whether a species of prudence is regnative?
Objection 1. It would seem that regnative should not be reckoned a species of prudence. For regnative prudence is directed to the preservation of justice, since according to Ethic. v, 6 the prince is the guardian of justice. Therefore regnative prudence belongs to justice rather than to prudence.
Objection 2. Further, according to the Philosopher (Polit. iii, 5) a kingdom [regnum] is one of six species of government. But no species of prudence is ascribed to the other five forms of government, which are "aristocracy," "polity," also called "timocracy" [Cf. Ethic. viii, 10] "tyranny," "oligarchy" and "democracy." Therefore neither should a regnative species be ascribed to a kingdom.
Objection 3. Further, lawgiving belongs not only to kings, but also to certain others placed in authority, and even to the people, according to Isidore (Etym. v). Now the Philosopher (Ethic. vi, 8) reckons a part of prudence to be "legislative." Therefore it is not becoming to substitute regnative prudence in its place.
On the contrary, The Philosopher says (Polit. iii, 11) that "prudence is a virtue which is proper to the prince." Therefore a special kind of prudence is regnative.
I answer that, As stated above (47, 8,10), it belongs to prudence to govern and command, so that wherever in human acts we find a special kind of governance and command, there must be a special kind of prudence. Now it is evident that there is a special and perfect kind of governance in one who has to govern not only himself but also the perfect community of a city or kingdom; because a government is the more perfect according as it is more universal, extends to more matters, and attains a higher end. Hence prudence in its special and most perfect sense, belongs to a king who is charged with the government of a city or kingdom: for which reason a species of prudence is reckoned to be regnative.
Reply to Objection 1. All matters connected with moral virtue belong to prudence as their guide, wherefore "right reason in accord with prudence" is included in the definition of moral virtue, as stated above (47, 5, ad 1; I-II, 58, 2, ad 4). For this reason also the execution of justice in so far as it is directed to the common good, which is part of the kingly office, needs the guidance of prudence. Hence these two virtues--prudence and justice--belong most properly to a king, according to Jer. 23:5: "A king shall reign and shall be wise, and shall execute justice and judgment in the earth." Since, however, direction belongs rather to the king, and execution to his subjects, regnative prudence is reckoned a species of prudence which is directive, rather than to justice which is executive.
Reply to Objection 2. A kingdom is the best of all governments, as stated in Ethic. viii, 10: wherefore the species of prudence should be denominated rather from a kingdom, yet so as to comprehend under regnative all other rightful forms of government, but not perverse forms which are opposed to virtue, and which, accordingly, do not pertain to prudence.
Reply to Objection 3. The Philosopher names regnative prudence after the principal act of a king which is to make laws, and although this applies to the other forms of government, this is only in so far as they have a share of kingly government. source

ETHICS AND PRUDENCE PATRICK J. COFFEY This paper will make some clarifications about the reasoning process of normative ethics (henceforth referred to as ethics) and prudence and the relation existing between them. Ethics is taken as a type of impersonal or disinterested reasoning which terminates in general prescriptions about morally appropriate human behavior. Prudential reasoning is taken as a personal process which terminates in appropriate human choice. In large part the study presumes a traditional natural law framework for doing moral philosophy. In that sense the study may be understood as a kind of metaethical analysis of prudence and ethics in "traditional" natural law theory. 1

PRUDENCE
Although the term prudence is now often used without a moral meaning to signify a self-interested action performed intelligently, 2 it has been used traditionally to name the principal virtue through which a person becomes moral. Prudence also has been used to signify the actual reasoning process a person uses in making him/herself moral. In its most complete sense prudential reasoning is part of a person's practical moral wisdom. This study considers prudence in this latter and broad sense.

Man's moral foundation is relational and is situated in the very core of each person's being. The subject or internal term of the relation is a set of basic human inclinations which are incarnated through a particular person's history and culture. The objective or external term is a network of goods which can fulfill these basic human inclinations. If, in accord with traditional natural law morality, one admits that inclinations to know and to choose unconditional good and unconditional truth are at the very core of the subjective set of man's basic inclinations, then the Divine is present to human beings as both source and final end, 3 and prudential reasoning is a process of human knowing and loving whose ultimate term is the Divine Itself. 4 How does this process function in everyday living?

The prudential process may be understood to develop in two interrelated phases. Prudential people form their own general moral philosophy of life in one phase. They attempt to express this philosophy of life in choices, in the second phase, thereby making themselves morally good. 5 The philosophical phase has a kind of priority over the concrete phase, since it is a norm that is concretized in a prudential choice. Prudence is personal in both phases, but it is usually more personal in the second, as a person actually commits him/herself to choice and action with all the affective involvement which that entails.

In the first phase of prudence a person responds to the Divine by making an honest effort to determine the general directions his/her life should take insofar as these are indicated by his knowledge of what he or she is as a "being in the world". This is true, because outside of religious contexts which are not the issue in this study, a person is considered to be fully moral, to be a person of good conscience, only if he or she has critically thought through the code of morality functioning in his/her environment. 6

In developing a moral philosophy of life a person usually develops a network of moral guidelines [e.g. X Commandments]. These indicate in general ways the courses of action that one particular person, living in a definite moment of history ["conform not to your age"], should follow or refrain from following as he or she goes about achieving his/her human destiny [predestination by God's will]. Since the structure of man and the universe in which he or she lives in is developing, and because a person's knowledge of those structures is open to modification and clarification, the content of the prudential person's moral philosophy of life is also open to modification and clarification.

Much of the second phase of prudence is an attempt to determine in the situation the course of action that best concretizes one's moral philosophy of life. The process of discovery accompanying that effort is dialectical. The person performing it considers both the general norms making up his/her moral philosophy and the concrete existential context in which the prudential action will be exercised. In many cases this dialectic may not be very overt, perhaps not even noticeable. Two reasons account for this: either the relation between a person's norms and the concrete context is so clear that the prudential course of action becomes immediately apparent upon observation; or the remembrance of a deliberation made previously, in a similar situation, makes the appropriate course of action in the immediate moment readily discernible.

The dialectical process of prudence becomes manifest, however, in those contexts where one is unclear about the choice he or she should make to foster best his/her moral philosophy of life. When the dialectical deliberation is effective it will at least eliminate some possible, but immoral, options from being chosen in the pertinent situation. In any case, the significant point here is that the dialectical reasoning of prudence will always permit the prudential person to make his/her choices in the least capricious way possible. 7 In so doing, the prudential person's choices will be rational: and thereby fitting, responses to the Divine call which is the very core of that person's being.

In addition to being the process which allows one to determine the practically wise course of action for the situation, the prudential dialectic may urge a person to make some changes in the set of guidelines that make up his/her moral philosophy of life. This is true because in the cognitive element of the prudential dialectic a person may gain a deeper insight into the nature of the world or he or she may become more knowledgeable about his/her human condition.

This indicates a kind of scientific reasoning to be at the core of the prudential process. In being prudent a person moves from his/her general guidelines, achieved through a quasi-inductive process, to a specific determination and expression of those norms in concrete action. But the very dialectical process that was used for making the concrete determination is, at the same time, a validation procedure for the norms.

The fact that one's general action-guides are subject to falsification implies that a person's prudence and personal moral status are measurable more by a person's integrity and effort to act ethically than by the kind of action he or she performs. In brief, the mystery of moral goodness may well be a mystery in which the "providence" of prudence is truly a participation in something much larger, namely in a providence which is Divine. 8

Despite the fact that any instance of personal moral goodness is situated within a mystery, the structure of prudence shows that substantive ethical judgments would be useful to the prudential process. As noted earlier, a person exists prudentially because his/her choices result from an honest effort to choose values fitting for a human being in his/her moment of history. [A man can choose values fitting the temporal/spatial/cultural/contextual terrain, or fitting the transcendent/eternal truth.] Consequently, the prudential process is by its very nature open to "expert" information on the rightness and wrongness of human action. Moreover, in the process of being prudent in today's world a person is called upon to make moral judgments on the behavior of other people. [Judge not lest ye be judged.] In our present culture, for example, a prudential person must decide whether he or she favors the pro-life side or the pro-choice side of the abortion issue. [There is no question of deciding, except to accept the Truth, which has never changed in the teachings of morality and love of life by the Church.] The person who makes this kind of decision from data which includes ethical expertise would seem to be in a better position to make a choice which actually fosters human values than the individual having no access to ethical expertise. Prudence then can use ethics. Indeed prudence demands that ethical knowledge be sought and, when discovered, that it be promulgated effectively. [Is it ethical or prudent to pay protection money to organized criminals, knowing that they are doing harm to others.]

ETHICS

Similar to the prudential process, the method of ethics may be understood to proceed in two stages. The task in the first stage is to determine both an ideal model of man and the basic standards for making general practical judgments on the morality of human action. The task in the second phase is also two-fold. It is necessary in this phase to develop a realistic model of man that is directly relevant for people living in a given culture or, if appropriate, in a given sub-culture. [Or better, a universal or Catholic model of man applicable in every culture.] Actually formulating the prescriptions directly relevant to people living in a given culture or sub-culture is also the work of the second phase of ethics.

Regarding the first phase of ethics, a viable ideal model of man can be determined by cross-referencing data, on the make-up of basic human inclinations and the values related to them that is available from a variety of sources which investigate or report on the general nature of the human condition. Included among those sources would be many excellent philosophies drawn from traditional natural law morality along with the biographies of those people in human history who have been acclaimed for their moral perfection (e.g., most Christian saints). These sources reveal certain basic relationships pertinent to man as man. Among those relationships are: a source and basis for man's being and man's need to relate to a higher power [Is the Judge there as a representative of God's Justice?]; man's need to self-realize by acquiring intrinsic goods such as knowledge of truth, beauty and friendship; man's need to possess goods such as food, shelter, clothing and health which are necessary for human life. Although the forms in which these relations are expressed may differ among cultures, and although people in some cultures may not recognize some of man's basic relations, cultural anthropology does not falsify the information about man's general needs and values that are provided by philosophy, history and biography. This is true because cultural differences can be explained by factors such as ignorance or man-made institutions, with their inbuilt limitations (e.g., capitalistic or socialistic economies), and these factors are not incompatible with the concept of the ideal moral man [False. Catholicism, Community and Distributism are inseparable from the contextual support needed for the development of ideal moral men.] described above.
The schema of significant relations present in the ideal moral man provides a standard for measuring the rectitude of human action because they indicate in general ways the kinds of actions a person would either perform or refrain from performing if his/her actions accorded perfectly with human values. He or she would, for example, act in ways which were positive responses to the source of his/her being rather than to some idol. In accord with this, and the value pertinent to human dignity, he or she would always treat self and others as ends, and not as means. In accord with those two directives and the relationship involving physical and psychic welfare, he or she would always act in ways which showed a significant regard for the welfare goods of both self and others.
The model of the human condition in the second phase of ethics would describe the "nature" of man actually present in a given culture or subculture, with all their general characteristics and limitations. This second model may be developed through a process of cross-referencing, similar in form to the process used for developing the first model. In the second model, however, the relevant data on human relationships comes from the social and behavioral sciences, contemporary literature and, to some extent, from information provided by the media.

When the second model is developed, a dialectical process similar to the one used in prudence becomes operative. The function of the dialectic in ethics is to reduce the standards of the ideally ethically acting person to a formula that is practically realizable in the pertinent culture or subculture that provides the basis for the second model. [The poor magician asked Christ to show him his tricks for making it look like he was healing the sick...]

Limitations or constraints in the pertinent culture or subculture may make what is morally realizable in those groups fall short of the behavior of an ideally ethically acting person. If we grant, for example, that our economic institutions are interwoven in a highly complex network which fosters exploitation as well as service, then it seems that the ideal ethical standard directing people to treat themselves and others as ends, and never as means only, could not be fully realized in America today. Despite this limitation, however, it would still be reasonable, thereby ethically significant, to determine the least exploitative ways that Americans should use prescriptions in their business operations.

Ethical prescriptions, similar to the norms in an individual's personal practical wisdom, are also subject to falsification. The model used in forming a direct ethical prescription is subject to development and change as the people whom their portray develop, or as the knowledge of that group is made more precise in the mind of the ethician.

[I am an island of life living in a cultural sea of death. Is the law inside that bar the law of the land, or the law of the sea?]

ETHICS AND PRUDENCE

If the analysis in the preceding sections has merit, then the relationship between prudence and ethics has been sharpened. That may now be highlighted in summary form by describing how prudence and ethics are united, though clearly different.

Prudence is a highly personal process which terminates in concrete action. This process is ultimately a positive response which a person makes to the Divine source of his/her being. The response is expressed by the honest effort the prudential person makes to understand him/her self and to act concretely in a rational manner in accord with that understanding. A person's prudential character, i.e., his/her moral goodness, is ultimately set within the context of a mystery, as the Divine term in the relation forming that goodness is essentially incomprehensible in human categories of interpretation.

Ethics, on the other hand, is a process which terminates in knowledge. [The fruit of the tree of knowledge is death.] It attempts to make known in general ways the relations which should obtain between human value and human action. The ethical procedure is scientific. [population statistic based scientism, applying to no one in particular.] It uses empirical data in its deliberations and requires the ethician [Priest] to assume a disinterested and impersonal attitude. [This is a different faith, a lack of faith, an error of the Reformation.] Ethical conclusions may be changed, [This is the error of moral relativism.] as they are open to development and further clarifications.

Ethics and prudence are united by their reference to human value. The prudential person directs him/her self to foster human value and the very raison d'etre of ethics is to make known in general the ways in which human value can be fostered. Since ethics serves prudence, and because prudence entails a reference to the Divine at its core, prudence and ethics are united ultimately by reference to the same Divine being.

Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

NOTES
1. Cf. Odon Lottin, Principes de morale (Louvain: Editions Mont Cesar, 1946) for an excellent presentation of traditional natural law morality that includes an analysis of both prudence and ethics.
2. Marcus Singer, for example, uses this connotation of the term in his Generalization in Ethics (New York: Knopf, 1963). Louis Katsoff makes a distinction between the prudential and any form of the moral in his Making Moral Decisions (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1955).
3. Cf. Gerard Smith, Natural Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1951), pp. 102-103.
4. "Now the first principle in practical matters, which are the object of the practical reason, is the last end, and the end of human life is happiness or beatitude." Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae , I-II, q. 90, a. 3, cf. Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas , Anton Pegis, ed. (New York: Random House, 1945), Vol. II, p. 744.
5. Cf. Josef Pieper, Prudence (New York: Pantheon, 1959), p. 25.
6. Cf. William Frankena, Ethics , second edition (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1973), pp. 7-8.
7. For a list of the integral parts of prudence used traditionally by Thomists to explain how prudence functions, cf. Michael Murray, Problems in Conduct (New York: Holt, 1963), pp. 11-16.
8. "Now among all others, the rational creature is subject to divine providence in a more excellent way, in so far as it itself partakes of a share of providence, by being provident both for itself and others." Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae , I-II, q. 91, a. 2, c.; cf. Pegis, op. cit., p. 750.
9. Charles Fay, "Human Evolution: A Challenge to Thomistic Ethics", International Philosophy Quarterly , 2 (1962), 50-80, makes a good case for the point that cultural factors qualify inclinations in a way that is morally significant. source