Abstract

Despite the modern recovery of virtue theory in ethics, conceptions of temperance remain largely unexamined. This dissertation examines certain interpretive threads of temperance as a virtue beginning in classical philosophy and moving through early to medieval Christian conceptions. Contemporary notions of temperance are compared and contrasted to these historical conceptions. Aristotelian and Thomistic accounts of temperance within a theory of moral virtue are particularly rich and influential in the development of the normative statement of temperance offered in this dissertation. ;While contemporary views of temperance occasionally note its general relevance to the experience of emotion, this dissertation elaborates upon the work of temperance as an essential part of the effort to include emotion in the moral life. In present-day studies of the psychology of emotion, cognitive theories have reasserted the classical conception of emotion as consisting of both physiological and psychological elements of human personhood. Temperance is the primary virtue in the moral agent's effort to appropriately include the entirety of the emotional experience in moral deliberation. ;Within the particular context of the clinical practice of medicine, the care ethic argues for the inclusion of morally appropriate emotions in deliberation. The thesis that temperance will help engage and include emotion in clinical moral deliberation is exemplified in this dissertation by a brief analysis of the life and teachings of physician William Osler . The concerns of the care ethic to emphasize emotion in moral deliberation and the analysis of how the virtue temperance responds to certain elements of the experience of emotion combine in this dissertation to offer clarity and richness to clinical moral deliberation