While it is a commonplace that our leaders should act prudently and should promulgate and follow prudent policies, what this actually means has varied over time. Prudence has undergone numerous changes both in conceptualization and in valence. It has been treated as a virtue (in both Christian and pagan senses), and in some circles it remains enumerated among the virtues; however, others have treated prudence as a skill, or as a faculty. In correlation with its changes in valence, prudence has had a shifting relationship with morality: at some points it was understood as a defining feature of moral behavior, while for many twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors it represents an alternative to morality, a calculus of decision that might yield results inimical to the dictates of morality.
