If you raise a puppy well you get a well-behaved dog. If instead you, for example, encourage it when it nips at you because it's cute, when it becomes a dog you get a biter. Once a dog has developing a biting habit, you can't get rid of it. You can arduously discourage it, but it will never entirely forget the behaviour.
Likewise, although unlike a dog a man can use willpower to overcome how he was raised, it's much easier if he's raised to be virtuous in the first place.
The design constraints of a prudent life are to cooperate with cooperators and to not sacrifice the long term for the short term. However, it isn't necessary that the man have a distant time horizon. As long as he was raised to habitually choose the long-term and cooperative choice, he in fact doesn't need to think at all.
The difficulty is that humanity is inherently evil and nobody would willingly raise a boy to be more virtuous unless the alternative was certain death.
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