Stoic Ethics

Stoicism is the Greek philosophical system founded by Zeno of Citium c.300 BC and developed
by him and his successors into the most influential philosophy of the Hellenistic age. It views the
world as permeated by rationality and divinely planned as the best possible organization of
matter. Moral goodness and happiness are achieved, if at all, by replicating that perfect
rationality in oneself, and by finding out and enacting one's own assigned role in the cosmic
scheme of things. The leading figures in classical, or early, Stoicism are the school's first three
heads: Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes and Chrysippus...

No formal philosophical writings of the early Stoics survives intact. .. Nevertheless, the system has been
reconstructed in great detail, and, despite gaps and uncertainties, it does live up to its own self-
description as a unified whole. It is divided into three main parts: physics, logic and ethics.

The tremendous influence Stoicism has exerted on ethical thought from early Christianity through
Immanuel Kant and into the twentieth century is rarely understood and even more rarely appreciated.
Throughout history, Stoic ethical doctrines have both provoked harsh criticisms and inspired enthusiastic
defenders. The Stoics defined the goal in life as living in agreement with nature. Humans, unlike all other
animals, are constituted by nature to develop reason as adults, which transforms their understanding of
themselves and their own true good. The Stoics held that virtue is the only real good and so is both
necessary and, contrary to Aristotle, sufficient for happiness; it in no way depends on luck. The virtuous
life is free of all passions, which are intrinsically disturbing and harmful to the soul, but includes
appropriate emotive responses conditioned by rational understanding and the fulfillment of all one's
personal, social, professional, and civic responsibilities. The Stoics believed that the person who has
achieved perfect consistency in the operation of his rational faculties, the "wise man," is extremely rare,
yet serves as a prescriptive ideal for all. The Stoics believed that progress toward this noble goal is both
possible and vitally urgent.

Table of Contents

1. Definition of the End

2. Theory of Appropriation

3. Good, Evil, and Indifferents

4. Appropriate Acts and Perfect Acts

5. Passions

6. Moral Progress

. Definition of the End

Stoicism is known as a eudaimonistic theory, which means that the culmination of human endeavor or
‘end' (telos) is eudaimonia, meaning very roughly "happiness" or “flourishing.” The Stoics defined this
end as “living in agreement with nature.” “Nature” is a complex and multivalent concept for the Stoics,
and so their definition of the goal or final end of human striving is very rich.

The first sense of the definition is living in accordance with nature as a whole, i.e. the entire cosmos.
Cosmic nature (the universe), the Stoics firmly believed, is a rationally organized and well-ordered
system, and indeed coextensive with the will of Zeus, the impersonal god. Consequently, all events that
occur within the universe fit within a coherent, well-structured scheme that is providential. Since there is
no room for chance within this rationally ordered system, the Stoics' metaphysical determinism further
dictated that this cosmic Nature is identical to fate. Thus at this level, "living in agreement with nature"
means conforming one’s will with the sequence of events that are fated to occur in the rationally
constituted universe, as providentially willed by Zeus.

Each type of thing within the universe has its own specific constitution and character. This second sense
of ‘nature' is what we use when we say it is the nature of fire to move upward. The manner in which
living things come to be, change, and perish distinguishes them from the manner in which non-living
things come to be, change, and cease to be. Thus the nature of plants is quite distinct from the nature of
rocks and sand. To "live in agreement with nature" in this second sense would thus include, for example,
metabolic functions: taking in nutrition, growth, reproduction, and expelling waste. A plant that is
successful at performing these functions is a healthy, flourishing specimen.

In addition to basic metabolism, animals have the capacities of sense-perception, desire, and
locomotion. Moreover, animals have an innate impulse to care for their offspring. Thus living in
agreement with a creature's animality involves more complex behaviors than those of a plant living in
agreement with its nature. For an animal parent to neglect its own offspring would therefore be for it to
behave contrary to its nature. The Stoics believed that compared to other animals, human beings are
neither the strongest, nor the fastest, nor the best swimmers, nor able to fly. Instead, the distinct and
uniquely human capacity is reason. Thus for human beings, "living in agreement with nature" means
living in agreement with our special, innate endowment—the ability to reason.

2. Theory of Appropriation

The Stoics developed a sophisticated psychological theory to explain how the advent of reason
fundamentally transforms the world view of human beings as they mature. This is the theory of
‘appropriation,' or oikeiôsis, a technical term which scholars have also translated variously as
"orientation," “familiarization,” “affinity,” or “affiliation.” The word means the recognition of something
as one’s own, as belonging to oneself. The opposite of oikeiôsis is allotriôsis, which neatly translates as
“alienation.” According to the Stoic theory of appropriation, there are two different developmental
stages. In the first stage, the innate, initial impulse of a living organism, plant, or animal is self-love and
not pleasure, as the rival Epicureans contend. The organism is aware of its own constitution, though for
plants this awareness is more primitive than it is for animals. This awareness involves the immediate
recognition of its own body as “belonging to” itself. The creature is thus directed toward maintaining its
constitution in its proper, i.e. its natural, condition. As a consequence, the organism is impelled to
preserve itself by pursuing things that promote its own well-being and by avoiding things harmful to it.
Pleasure is only a by-product of success in this activity. In the case of a human infant, for example,
appropriation explains why the baby seeks his mother’s milk. But as the child matures, his constitution
evolves. The child continues to love himself, but as he matures into adolescence his capacity for reason
emerges and what he recognizes as his constitution, or self, is crucially transformed. Where he previously
identified his constitution as his body, he begins to identify his constitution instead with his mental
faculty (reason) in a certain relation to his body. In short, the self that he now loves is his rationality. Our
human reason gives us an affinity with the cosmic reason, Nature, that guides the universe. The fully
matured adult thus comes to identify his real self, his true good, with his completely developed,
perfected rational soul. This best possible state of the rational soul is exactly what virtue is.

Whereas the first stage of the theory of appropriation gives an account of our relationship toward
ourselves, the second stage explains our social relationship toward others. The Stoics observed that a
parent is naturally impelled to love her own children and have concern for their welfare. Parental love is
motivated by the child's intimate affinity and likeness to her. But since we possess reason in common
with all (or nearly all) human beings, we identify ourselves not only with our own immediate family, but
with all members of the human race—they are all fellow members of our broader rational community. In
this way the Stoics meant social appropriation to constitute an explanation of the natural genesis of
altruism.

3. Good, Evil, and Indifferents

The Stoics defined the good as "what is complete according to nature for a rational being qua rational
being" (Cicero Fin. III.33). As explained above, the perfected nature of a rational being is precisely the
perfection of reason, and the perfection of reason is virtue. The Stoics maintained, quite controversially
among ancient ethical thought, that the only thing that always contributes to happiness, as its necessary
and sufficient condition, is virtue. Conversely, the only thing that necessitates misery and is “bad” or
“evil” is the corruption of reason, namely vice. All other things were judged neither good nor evil, but
instead fell into the class of “indifferents.” They were called “indifferents” because the Stoics held that
these things in themselves neither contribute to nor detract from a happy life. Indifferents neither
benefit nor harm since they can be used well and badly.

However, within the class of indifferents the Stoics distinguished the "preferred" from the “dispreferred.”
(A third subclass contains the ‘absolute' indifferents, e.g. whether the number of hairs on one’s head is
odd or even, whether to bend or extend one’s finger.) Preferred indifferents are “according to nature.”
Dispreferred indifferents are “contrary to nature.” This is because possession or use of the preferred
indifferents usually promotes the natural condition of a person, and so selecting them
is usually commended by reason. The preferred indifferents include life, health, pleasure, beauty,
strength, wealth, good reputation, and noble birth. The dispreferred indifferents include death, disease,
pain, ugliness, weakness, poverty, low repute, and ignoble birth. While it is usually appropriate to avoid
the dispreferred indifferents, in unusual circumstances it may be virtuous to select them rather than
avoid them. The virtue or vice of the agent is thus determined not by the possession of an indifferent,
but rather by how it is used or selected. It is the virtuous use of indifferents that makes a life happy, the
vicious use that makes it unhappy.

The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom,
justice, courage, and moderation. Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-
wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness. Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair
dealing. Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and
industriousness. Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.
Similarly, the Stoics divide vice into foolishness, injustice, cowardice, intemperance, and the rest. The
Stoics further maintained that the virtues are inter-entailing and constitute a unity: to have one is to
have them all. They held that the same virtuous mind is wise, just, courageous, and moderate. Thus, the
virtuous person is disposed in a certain way with respect to each of the individual virtues. To support
their doctrine of the unity of virtue, the Stoics offered an analogy: just as someone is both a poet and an
orator and a general but is still one individual, so too the virtues are unified but apply to different
spheres of action.

4. Appropriate Acts and Perfect Acts

Once a human being has developed reason, his function is to perform "appropriate acts" or “proper
functions.” The Stoics defined an appropriate act as “that which reason persuades one to do” or “that
which when done admits of reasonable justification.” Maintaining one's health is given as an example.
Since health is neither good nor bad in itself, but rather is capable of being used well or badly, opting to
maintain one’s health by, say, walking, must harmonize with all other actions the agent performs.
Similarly, sacrificing one’s property is an example of an act that is only appropriate under certain
circumstances. The performance of appropriate acts is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition of
virtuous action. This is because the agent must have the correct understanding of the actions he
performs. Specifically, his selections and rejections must form a continuous series of actions that is
consistent with all of the virtues simultaneously. Each and every deed represents the totality and
harmony of his moral integrity. The vast majority of people are non-virtuous because though they may
follow reason correctly in honoring their parents, for example, they fail to conform to ‘the laws of life as
a whole’ by acting appropriately with respect to all of the other virtues.

The scale of actions from vicious to virtuous can be laid out as follows: (1) Actions done "against the
appropriate act," which include neglecting one's parents, not treating friends kindly, not behaving
patriotically, and squandering one’s wealth in the wrong circumstances; (2) Intermediate appropriate
actions in which the agent’s disposition is not suitably consistent, and so would not count as virtuous,
although the action itself approximates proper conduct. Examples include honoring one’s parents,
siblings, and country, socializing with friends, and sacrificing one’s wealth in the right circumstances; (3)
“Perfect acts” performed in the right way by the agent with an absolutely rational, consistent, and
formally perfect disposition. This perfect disposition is virtue.

5. Passions
As we have seen, only virtue is good and choiceworthy, and only its opposite, vice, is bad and to be
avoided according to Stoic ethics. The vast majority of people fail to understand this. Ordinary people
habitually and wrongly judge various objects and events to be good and bad that are in fact indifferent.
The disposition to make a judgment disobedient to reason is the psychic disturbance the Stoics called
passion (pathos). Since passion is an impulse (a movement of the soul) which is excessive and contrary to
reason, it is irrational and contrary to nature. The four general types of passion are distress, fear,
appetite, and pleasure. Distress and pleasure pertain to present objects, fear and appetite to future
objects. The following table illustrates their relations.

Table of Four Passions (pathê)

Present Object Future Object

Irrationally judged to be good Pleasure Appetite

Irrationally judged to be bad Distress Fear

Distress is an irrational contraction of the soul variously described as malice, envy, jealousy, pity, grief,
worry, sorrow, annoyance, vexation, or anguish. Fear, an irrational shrinking of the soul, is expectation of
something bad; hesitation, agony, shock, shame, panic, superstition, dread, and terror are classified
under it. Appetite is an irrational stretching or swelling of the soul reaching for an expected good; it is
also called want, yearning, hatred, quarrelsomeness, anger, wrath, intense sexual craving, or
spiritedness. Pleasure is an irrational elation over what seems to be worth choosing; it includes rejoicing
at another's misfortunes, enchantment, self-gratification, and rapture.

The soul of the virtuous person, in contrast, is possessed of three good states or affective responses
(eupatheiai). The three ‘good states' of the soul are joy (chara), caution (eulabeia), and wish (boulêsis).
Joy, the opposite of pleasure, is a reasonable elation; enjoyment, good spirits, and tranquility are classed
under it. Caution, the opposite of fear, is a reasonable avoidance. Respect and sanctity are subtypes of
caution. Wish, the opposite of appetite, is a reasonable striving also described as good will, kindliness,
acceptance, or contentment. There is no "good feeling" counterpart to the passion of distress.

Table of Three Good States

Present Object Future Object

Rationally judged to be good Joy Wish

Rationally judged to be bad --- Caution

For example, the virtuous person experiences joy in the company of a friend, but recognizes that the
presence of the friend is not itself a real good as virtue is, but only preferred. That is to say the company
of the friend is to be sought so long as doing so in no way involves any vicious acts like a dereliction of his
responsibilities to others. The friend's absence does not hurt the soul of the virtuous person, only vice
does. The vicious person’s soul, in contrast, is gripped by the passion of pleasure in the presence of, say,
riches. When the wealth is lost, this irrational judgment will be replaced by the corresponding irrational
judgment that poverty is really bad, thus making the vicious person miserable. Consequently, the
virtuous person wishes to see his friend only if in the course of events it is good to happen. His wish is
thus made with reservation (hupexhairesis): "I wish to see my friend if it is fated, if Zeus wills it." If the
event does not occur, then the virtuous person is not thwarted, and as a result he is not disappointed or
unhappy. His wish is rational and in agreement with nature, both in the sense of being obedient to
reason (which is distinctive of our human constitution) and in the sense of harmonizing with the series of
events in the world.

The virtuous person is not passionless in the sense of being unfeeling like a statue. Rather, he mindfully
distinguishes what makes a difference to his happiness—virtue and vice—from what does not. This firm
and consistent understanding keeps the ups and downs of his life from spinning into the psychic
disturbances or "pathologies" the Stoics understood passions to be.

6. Moral Progress

The early Stoics were fond of uncompromising dichotomies—all who are not wise are fools, all who are
not free are slaves, all who are not virtuous are vicious, etc. The later Stoics distinguished within the
class of fools between those making progress and those who are not. Although the wise man or sage
was said to be rarer than the phoenix, it is useful to see the concept of the wise man functioning as a
prescriptive ideal at which all can aim. This ideal is thus not an impossibly high target, its pursuit sheer
futility. Rather, all who are not wise have the rational resources to persevere in their journey toward this
ideal. Stoic teachers could employ this exalted image as a pedagogical device to exhort their students to
exert constant effort to improve themselves and not lapse into complacency. The Stoics were convinced
that as one approached this goal, one came closer to real and certain happiness.

Excerpts from David Sedley's entry on Stoicism in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (General Ed.
Edward Craig)

Stoicism

Stoicism is the Greek philosophical system founded by Zeno of Citium c.300 BC and developed by him
and his successors into the most influential philosophy of the Hellenistic age. It views the world as
permeated by rationality and divinely planned as the best possible organization of matter. Moral
goodness and happiness are achieved, if at all, by replicating that perfect rationality in oneself, and by
finding out and enacting one's own assigned role in the cosmic scheme of things�The leading figures in
classical, or early, Stoicism are the school's first three heads: Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes and Chrysippus...

No formal philosophical writings of the early Stoics survives intact. .. Nevertheless, the system has been
reconstructed in great detail, and, despite gaps and uncertainties, it does live up to its own self-
description as a unified whole. It is divided into three main parts: physics, logic and ethics.

*****

The world is an ideally good organism, whose own rational soul governs it for the best. Any impression of
imperfection arises from misleadingly viewing its parts (including ourselves) in isolation, as if one were to
consider the interests of the foot in isolation from the needs of the whole body. The entire sequence of
cosmic events is pre-ordained in every detail. Being the best possible sequence, it is repeated identically
from one world phase to the next, with each phase ending in a conflagration followed by cosmic
renewal. The causal nexus of 'fate' does not, however, pre-empt our individual responsibility for our
actions. These remain 'in our power', because we, rather than external circumstances, are their principal
causes, and in some appropriate sense it is 'possible' for us to do otherwise, even though it is
predetermined that we will not.

At the lowest level of physical analysis, the world and its contents consist of two coextensive principles:
passive 'matter' and active 'god'. At the lowest observable level, however, these are already constituted
into the four elements earth, water, air and fire. Air and fire form an active and pervasive life force called
pneuma or 'breath', which constitutes the qualities of all bodies and, in an especially rarefied form,
serves as the souls of living things.

The world is a physical continuum, infinitely divisible and unpunctuated by any void, although
surrounded by an infinite void. Its perfect rationality, and hence the existence of an immanent god, are
defended by various versions of the Argument from Design, with apparent imperfections explained away,
for example, as blessings in disguise or unavoidable concomitants of the best possible structure...

Stoic ethics starts from oikeisis, our natural 'appropriation' first of ourselves and later of those around us,
which makes other-concern integral to human nature. Certain conventionally prized items, like honour
and health, are commended by nature and should be sought, but not for their own sake. They are
instrumentally preferable, because learning to choose rationally between them is a step towards the
eventual goal of 'living in agreement with nature'. It is the coherence of one's choices, not the
attainment of their objects, that matters. The patterns of action which promote such a life were
systematically codified as kathekonta, 'proper functions'.

Virtue and vice are intellectual states. Vice is founded on 'passions': these are at root false value
judgments, in which we lose rational control by overvaluing things which are in fact indifferent. Virtue, a
set of sciences governing moral choice, is the one thing of intrinsic worth and therefore genuinely 'good'.
The wise are not only the sole possessors of virtue and happiness, but also, paradoxically, of the things
people conventionally value - beauty, freedom, power, and so on. However geographically scattered, the
wise form a true community or 'city', governed by natural law.

***

Ethics, the authentically Socratic core of Stoic philosophy, was the discipline which described how
happiness could be achieved. It presupposed physics, which supplied an understanding of the world's
rational structure and goodness and of the individual's place in it.

There was less agreement about how the three parts related to each other. One favoured model
compared philosophy to an orchard in which logic was the protective outer wall, physics the soil and
trees, and ethics the fruit. Posidonius favoured the analogy to a living animal, in which logic was the
bones and sinews, physics the flesh and ethics the soul. These and other analogies probably agreed in
making ethics the ultimate aim and crowning achievement of philosophy. The value of physics and logic
was in a way instrumental - to acquire the understanding which would make a happy life possible. But
that understanding, a perfected rationality, was itself so integral to the Stoic conception of happiness
that to call it instrumental may be to underestimate the true unity of Stoic philosophy.

Cosmology and theology

The Stoic world is a living creature with a fixed life cycle, ending in a total 'conflagration'. Being the best
possible world, it will then be succeeded by another identical world, since any variation on the formula
would have to be for the worse. Thus the Stoics arrive at the astonishing conception of an endless series
of identical worlds - the doctrine of cyclical recurrence, according to which history repeats itself in every
minute detail....
By 'god' the Stoics meant, primarily, the immanent principle governing the world, variously also
identified with 'creative fire', with 'nature' or with 'fate'. Second, the world itself was also called 'god'.
But - characteristically of Greek religious thought - this apparent monotheism did not exclude
polytheism. Individual cosmic masses were identified with individual gods: for example the sea and the
air were linked with Poseidon and Hera respectively, and the remaining traditional gods were likewise
assigned specific cosmic functions. By means of allegorical rationalization, Stoic theology incorporated
and interpreted traditional religion, rather than replacing it. Etymology (sometimes highly fanciful) was
one tool used in this process....

The world, then, is itself divine, and is from first to last providentially planned and governed by an
immanent intelligence. This thoroughgoing teleology owed much to Plato's Timaeus, but also to his
Phaedo, where Socrates had been portrayed as advocating a teleological physics, while admitting his
own incapacity to develop one. We can here glimpse one of the many ways in which Stoicism sees itself
as working out in full technical detail what was already implicit in the thought and life of Socrates.

Since the world is god, in his most manifest form, there is no distinction in Stoicism between proving the
existence of god and proving the perfect rationality of the world. These proofs, most of which are
variants on the Argument from Design, generated massive controversy between the Stoics and their
critics (see especially Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods II-III). � any imperfections are either merely
apparent (for example, wild beasts, which encourage the virtue of courage in us), or inevitable
concomitants of the best possible structure (for instance, an example borrowed from Plato, the fragility
of the human head). Sometimes localized sufferings are justified by the greater good they serve, even if
it is not always evident what that good is...

****

Epicurus proposed a method for identifying the genuinely natural human value: consult a new-born
baby. Inarticulate infants, and for that matter irrational animals, cannot possibly have been infected yet
with the norms of society, and their actions tell us, louder than any words, that their sole motivation is
the acquisition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Stoic ethics responds by adopting the same
starting point but questioning the Epicurean analysis of infant behaviour.
The highly influential concept which the Stoics introduced to facilitate their own analysis is oikeisis,
variously translated as 'appropriation', 'familiarization', 'affiliation' or 'affinity'. Literally, this is the
process of 'making something one's own'. An animal's oikeisis is its natural impulse or inclination
towards something which it regards as belonging to it.

A creature's first oikeisis, Stoics argue, is towards itself and its own constitution, a priority which it
displays by making self-preservation its dominant goal. Far from pursuing pleasure, it courts pain in order
to preserve and develop its natural constitution, as when we see a toddler repeatedly fall in striving to
walk, and an overturned tortoise struggling to regain its upright position. As the human child develops,
its oikeisis is extended beyond itself: it treats its parents and siblings as belonging to it, and cares for
them accordingly, in much the same way in which it already cares for itself. In due course this same
other-concern is extended to cover a wider range of people, albeit in increasingly diluted measure. At an
extreme it takes in the entire human race.

Oikeisis is a continuum, stretching from the instinctive self-preservation of the new-born infant to the
other-regarding conduct which is equally natural in rational adults. Where most ancient ethical systems
struggled to explain altruism as an extended form of self-interest, there is no such tension in Stoicism,
where others already fall within the ambit of our natural affection in much the same way as we ourselves
do. This rationally extended sense of what belongs to us does not yet amount to moral goodness, but it
is its indispensable basis. Goodness lies in our understanding and collaborating with the ideally rational
world plan. It is no wonder that our natural oikeisis towards the rest of the human race should be what
grounds the project of completely integrating ourselves into that plan.

Oikeisis is an affinity founded on the shared rationality of the entire human race. The doctrine thus
helped to foster Stoic cosmopolitanism and other widely admired humanitarian stances. Seneca, for
example, reminded his readers of their moral obligations even to their slaves. Conversely, however, the
oikeisis doctrine also encouraged a hardening of attitudes to non-rational animals, with which humans
were judged to stand in no moral relation at all.

The indifferents

Perhaps the most characteristic doctrine of Stoic ethics is that virtue alone is good, vice alone bad.
Everything else traditionally assigned a positive or negative value - health or illness, wealth or poverty,
sight or blindness, even life or death - is 'indifferent'. By making this move, the Stoics authorized the use
of the word 'good' in a distinctly moral sense - a usage which is still with us, although they themselves
bought it at the high price of simply denying that the word, properly understood, has any other sense.

The inspiration of this doctrine is undoubtedly Socratic. In various Platonic dialogues, Socrates argued
that most things traditionally called good - typified with largely the same examples as the Stoic
'indifferents' - are in their own nature intermediate between good and bad. If used wisely, they become
good, if unwisely, bad. Hence wisdom is the only intrinsically or underivatively good thing....

Although being healthy does not make you happy, Zeno maintains, the natural thing to do in ordinary
circumstances is nevertheless to stay healthy and avoid illness. We should not try to suppress this natural
instinct, because to be happy - the ultimate goal to which we all aspire - is to be totally in tune with
nature. Therefore the proper way to start out is to respect the preferences which nature dictates, opting
where possible for affluence, high civic status, family values and other 'natural' desiderata. As you
progress, you will learn when to vary the formula. It may be that in special circumstance the right way for
you to fit in with nature's plan is to be poor, or sick, or even to die. If you understand why one of these is
the rational and natural thing for you, you will embrace it willingly, and thus further rather than hinder
your project of perfect conformity with nature. But barring such special circumstances, the natural
values to adopt coincide on the whole with the ordinary values of society.

This leads, in typical Stoic fashion, to a terminological jungle of epithets for the 'indifferents'. The 'things
which accord with nature' (ta kata physin), such as health, have a positive, albeit non-moral, 'value'
(axia), and are therefore labelled 'preferred' (proegmena), which means that in normal circumstances we
should opt for them, they are 'to be taken'. The 'things which are contrary to nature' (ta para physin),
such as illness, earn a contrary set of technical terms: 'disvalue' (apaxia), 'dispreferred' (apoproegmena),
'not to be taken' (alepta).

The linchpin of Stoic ethics is the way in which it legitimizes a familiar scale of personal and social values,
while denying them any intrinsic worth. Their value is purely instrumental, because they are the subject
matter of the choices by means of which we progress towards true moral understanding. We might
compare the relative 'values' of, say, illness, fame and eyesight, in Stoic eyes to the relative values of
cards in a card game. Learning how to choose between these, and even to sacrifice cards of higher value
when the circumstances dictate, is an essential part of becoming a skilled player. But these choices
matter only instrumentally: It would be absurd to compare the value of an ace to the value of being a
good card-player. In Stoic eyes it is an equally grave error - although unfortunately one of which most
people are guilty - to rank wealth or power along with moral goodness on one and the same scale.
The things which are naturally 'preferred' can be encapsulated in rules: honour your parents, take care of
your health, cultivate friends, and so on. From the start � moral progress. What a precept prescribes is
a kathekon (plural kathekonta), a 'proper function' or 'duty', and many Stoic treatises were devoted to
working out detailed lists of kathekonta. A kathekon is defined as 'that which, when done, has a
reasonable justification': for a rational adult, what is reasonable and what is natural should coincide.

There are two main types of kathekonta: circumstantial and non-circumstantial. Circumstantial
kathekonta, that is, those prescribed only in very special circumstances, include such abnormal acts as
self-mutilation, giving away your property, and even suicide (something of a Stoic obsession, inspired by
Socrates' willing death). Non-circumstantial kathekonta are, despite their name, not prescribed in
literally all circumstances, since to each non-circumstantial kathekon (for example, looking after one's
health), there is opposed a circumstantial one, (for example, in very unusual circumstances, getting ill).
Rather, they are 'non-circumstantial' because they are what, other things being equal, you should do as a
matter of course, and not as a response to your present circumstances.

Goodness

Kathekonta are 'intermediate' patterns of behaviour - that is, available to everybody, wise and non-wise
alike. Yet in advertizing them the Stoics regularly referred to the conduct of the 'sage', the idealized wise
person whom they always held up as a model, despite admitting that the criteria for this status were so
tough that few people, if any, ever attained them. What was possible for everybody, they insisted, was
progress towards this state of wisdom, and that is why they stressed the continuity between the proper
conduct of the non-wise and the ideally good conduct of the wise. When you actually become wise and
virtuous, what are outwardly the very same kind of kathekonta which you were already habitually
performing are suddenly transformed by your new state of understanding, earning themselves the name
'right actions'.

Alongside this continuity in moral progress, there is also the sharpest possible discontinuity. One of the
most notorious Stoic paradoxes was that all sins are equal. If you are not virtuous and wise, you are
totally bad and foolish. The wise are totally happy, the foolish totally unhappy. Whatever strides you may
have made towards virtue, you are no happier till you get there. They compared what it is like to be
drowning: whether you are yards from the surface or only inches from it, you are still just as effectively
drowning.
The motivation of this depressing thesis is not entirely clear. Stoic concern with the paradox of the
Sorites may have contributed to it, but the main driving force seems to be the conviction that actual
goodness, if achieved, differs not in degree, but in kind, from the scale of natural values. At a certain
point of moral development, you notice an emerging agreement or harmony between your individual
choices and acts. It is, thereafter, not the choices and acts or their objects that matter any longer, but
harmony for its own sake. Only from that point on do you have a conception of what goodness is: it is
located in a perfect 'agreement' both within the individual and between that individual and cosmic
nature.

What does this agreement consist in? Despite the Stoics' extensive cataloguing and classification of the
kathekonta which the sage will perform, ultimately the wise are characterized, not by the actual success
of their actions - which may not always be in their control - but by the morally perfect frame of mind
with which they act - in other words, by virtue. Socrates had propounded that paradox that virtue is
knowledge: all there is to being good is to know the right things. The Stoics develop this Socratic idea to
the full. The word for knowledge - episteme - can also more specifically mean 'science', and they regard
each virtue as a genuine science, complete with its own constituent theorems. The skill of living in
harmony is a skill analogous to, although vastly more difficult than, any branch of mathematics or
medicine.

Plato had given four virtues canonical status: justice, wisdom, temperance or self-control (sophrosyne),
and courage. The Stoics adopt this list, and treat all other virtues as subordinate species, or perhaps
branches, of the four...

The goal

The 'goal' or 'end' (telos) is defined as 'that for the sake of which everything is done, while it is not itself
done for the sake of any further thing'. This is identified with happiness (eudaimonia), or 'living well'.
Both are commonplace to the Greek philosophical tradition. The partisan content arises when
philosophers offer their formulas for what this end actually consists in. Zeno's formula was 'living in
agreement' ...

Zeno's vagueness was probably deliberate. The 'agreement' comprises both the perfect internal
coherence and rationality of the good life - 'living in accordance with one concordant reason' - and its
conformity with nature, the 'nature' in question being itself equated with both one's own individual
nature and the nature of the world. Happiness is also identified as a 'smooth flow of life', and Zeno's real
point was that only those with complete understanding of cosmic rationality can make their own aims
and choices entirely one with those of nature, and thus never come into conflict with either their own or
the world's rationality.

Pressure for clarification led either Zeno himself or Cleanthes to make the first addition to the formula,
which now became 'living in agreement with nature'. Chrysippus substituted 'living in accordance with
experience of what happens by nature'. What became clearer, as these and other formulations
competed, was that the ideal life was defined in terms of things which were themselves morally
indifferent - the 'things which accord with nature' (see �15). The challenge which the Stoics faced from
their opponents in the Academy was how moral good could depend on a set of aims whose attainment
was morally indifferent. The answer was as follows. What matters is not necessarily achieving natural
advantages like health, which cannot be guaranteed in all circumstances, and which in any case do not
bring happiness. What matters is making the right rational choices - doing everything that lies in your
power towards achieving what nature recommends. It is the consistency of those efforts, not of their
results, that may ultimately become perfect agreement with nature, that is, happiness...

The cosmic city

Everybody without exception strives for a good and happy life, but only the wise achieve it. Most people
in fact misapply the very words 'good' and 'happiness', which they mistakenly associate with morally
indifferent states like wealth and honour. This simple point came to be extended by the Stoics to all the
other things which are conventionally prized. Everybody wants to be rich, free, powerful, beautiful,
loveable, and so on, but, paradoxically, only the wise achieve these goals. Everyone else is, whatever
they may think, actually poor, enslaved, powerless, ugly and unloveable. This is because real wealth is to
have something of genuine worth (that is, virtue), or to lack nothing that you need; real freedom is to be
in full control of your life (including the knowledge of when to accept death rather than ever be forced to
do what you do not truly want to do); real power is to be able to achieve everything you want; real
beauty is a quality of the soul not the body; and only the genuinely beautiful are genuinely loveable.
These Stoic 'paradoxes' are of Socratic inspiration.

A primary motif of Stoic political thought is the extension of such paradoxes into the civic realm.
Conventional political ambitions belong to the realm of the indifferent just as much as wealth and health
do. Thus, while Stoicism actively promotes conventional political activity as a way of following human
nature, it at the same time downgrades it in relation to true moral goodness. Everybody wants to have
power, and would like if they could to be a king; but only the wise have power (only they can achieve
everything they want) and kingship (defined as 'rule which is accountable to no one'). These Socratic
redefinitions were extended even to humbler civic aims: only the wise are generals, orators, magistrates,
lawyers, and so on.

An upshot of this was a corresponding downgrading of the civic institution within which such offices
operated. A city, in the conventional sense of a human cohabitation with geographical boundaries, a
legal code and so on, is an artificial construct. A city in the most correct sense is not constrained in these
ways: in fact the world itself is the ultimate city, being a habitation common to humans and gods, united
by their shared rationality.

The idea was of Cynic inspiration. The Cynics had already coined the expression 'citizen of the world',
kosmou polites, which the Stoics took over. In a way every human being is a citizen of the world, and this
generous version of Stoic cosmopolitanism was to become enormously influential on the ideology of the
Roman Empire, as well as leading some Stoics to challenge entrenched gender and class barriers. But on
a narrower criterion - influenced by Zeno's early utopian work the Republic (see Zeno of Citium) - it is not
all human beings, but only the wise, who participate in the real cosmic city. The cosmic city has its own
law, a natural moral law defined as 'right reason' (orthos logos) which commands what should be done
and forbids what should not'. This notion of a cosmic moral law which transcends local legal codes
exerted a powerful influence on later theories of natural law....

Passions

Everyone who has not achieved virtue is in a state of vice or moral badness. Most commonly - for
example, in the work of Plato and Aristotle - vice was viewed as a state in which reason is dominated and
deflected by strong irrational emotions, or 'passions'. But Socrates had established an enduring
intellectualist alternative, according to which the soul has no irrational parts, and virtue is knowledge, so
that its lack, vice, is simply ignorance: 'No one does wrong willingly. The Stoics are fully committed to
developing Socrates' position, in particular the thesis that passions are really value judgments.

A passion is commonly thought of as disobedient to reason. Reason says that you should face some
danger, but fear disobeys. Reason chooses to abstain from embezzlement, but greed wins out. This
suggests that an emotion can hardly itself be a rational state. The Stoics accept the description of
emotions as 'disobedient to reason', but redescribe what this amounts to.
An emotion is primarily a judgment - a false one. A fear may be the false judgment that some impending
thing, say injury, is bad for you. The falsity lies in the fact that physical injury is actually not bad, just a
'dispreferred indifferent' and therefore strictly irrelevant to happiness. Your belief that it is bad takes the
form of an 'excessive impulse' to avoid it, and that impulse, as well as being a judgment, is like any
intellectual state also a physical modification (in this case called a 'contraction') of the pneuma that
constitutes the commanding-faculty of your soul. The new overtensioned and perturbed state of your
mental pneuma is one that you cannot instantly snap out of. Were you to entertain the correct judgment
that you should not shrink from the danger, your pneuma would not be able to respond. That is what
makes the passionate state of fear 'disobedient to reason' - a status it can have while itself also being a
piece of faulty reasoning. Chrysippus compared it to a runner who is going too fast and therefore cannot
stop at will.

The four main kinds of emotion are appetite, fear, pleasure and distress. Appetite and fear are faulty
evaluations of future things as good and bad respectively. Pleasure and distress are corresponding mis-
evaluations of things already present. Each has a variety of sub-species, and one of particular importance
in Stoic discussions is anger, identified as a species of desire, namely the desire for revenge. Calling
pleasure a passion and a vice may sound harsh, but the kind of pleasure envisaged here is one involving
conscious evaluative attitudes, such that its sub-species include gloating and self-gratification. ('Pleasure'
understood as that sensation of wellbeing which automatically accompanies certain states and activities
is not a vice but an 'indifferent'. It is the view that pleasure - in this latter sense - and pain are indifferent
that has given 'stoical' its most familiar modern meaning.)

It should not be inferred that a Stoic sage is feelingless. The wise lack the 'passions', which are
overevaluations, but they do instead have the correct affective states, which the Stoics call eupatheiai, or
'good feelings'. Thus the sage has no 'appetites', but does have 'wishes', whose species include kindness,
generosity, warmth and affection. Similarly, instead of 'fear' the wise have 'watchfulness', and so on.

The Stoics' conviction that emotional states, far from being mere irrational drives, are primarily specified
by their cognitive content is one of their most valuable contributions to moral philosophy. Its most
important implication in their eyes is that philosophical understanding is the best and perhaps the only
remedy for emotional disquiet. In the short term strong emotions are disobedient to correct reasoning,
but in the long term rational therapy can restructure the intellect and dispel all passions.

Fate
Socrates had been a firm believer in the powers of divination and in divine providence. Stoicism took
over this outlook and developed it into a doctrine of 'fate', which by the time of Chrysippus had become
a full-scale thesis of determinism.

That everything that happens is predetermined is a thesis which flows easily from all three branches of
Stoic philosophy. Ethics locates human happiness in willing conformity to a pre-ordained plan, and treats
the use of divination as a legitimate means towards this goal. Physics provides the theory of the world's
divinely planned cyclical recurrence, unvarying in order to maintain its own perfection.

Physics also supplies a fundamental principle, regarded as conceptually self-evident, that nothing
happens without a cause. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the world's entire history is an
unbroken causal network. 'Fate is a natural everlasting ordering of the whole: one set of things follows
on and succeeds another, and the interconnection is inviolable'. 'The passage of time is like the
unwinding of a rope, bringing about nothing new and unrolling each stage in its turn.' A modern analogy
might be the continual rerunning of a film.

Finally, logic offers the principle of bivalence: every proposition, including those about the future, is
either true or false. Therefore, Chrysippus argued, it is true now of any given future event either that it
will happen or that it will not happen. What does that present truth consist in? It can only lie in the
causes now present, sufficient either to bring the event about or to prevent its happening. Therefore all
events are predetermined by antecedent causes sufficient to bring them about and to prevent all
alternatives from occurring.

Responsibility

The greatest interest of this determinist position lies in the Stoics' attempts to meet the challenge it
poses to moral responsibility. They implicitly accept that a person is responsible for an action only if they
could have done otherwise. But how could this latter be true in a Stoic world, where the actual action
performed is causally determined and even predictable in advance? Chrysippus was the author of the
main Stoic answers to this challenge. His task (see Cicero, On Fate) was to show that even in such a world
'could have done otherwise' makes sense: an action which I did not in the event perform may
nevertheless have been possible for me, that is, my failure to perform it was not necessary. The strategy
for securing this result included the following lines of argument.
� Suppose that you have failed to pay a bill despite having the cash. Paying the bill was 'possible' for
you. (i) It 'admits of being true': there is such a thing as paying a bill, unlike for example, being in two
places at once. (ii) Nothing external to you prevented you: you did not lack the funds, you were not
forcibly detained, and so forth. This account of possibility does allow that something internal to you may
(indeed must) have prevented you from paying: for example, your meanness, forgetfulness or laziness.
Still, it was possible for you to pay, in the sense that you had the opportunity to pay. Chrysippus seems to
maintain that the 'could have done otherwise' notion of responsibility holds in his world, because
alternative actions are 'possible' in just this sense: we regularly have the opportunity to do otherwise,
and therefore have only ourselves to blame for what we actually do.

Stoicism resists the alternative that 'could have done otherwise' might entail our being actually capable
of acting otherwise: surely the good, in order to claim credit for their conduct, do not have to be capable
of wrongdoing, nor need the bad, if they are to be blamed, be capable of acting well.

Importantly, the Greek word for a cause, aition, literally means the 'thing responsible'. However, the
Stoics' technical term for moral responsibility is eph' hemin: our actions are 'within our power'. This is
not a thesis of free will. What matters to them is not to posit an open future, but to establish the moral
accountability of human action even within a rigid causal nexus....

One remaining challenge was the Lazy Argument. Why, its proponents asked, should we bother to make
decisions if the outcome is already fixed? Why call the doctor, if whether you will die or recover from
your illness is already fated? Chrysippus' answer is that such sequences of events as calling the doctor
and recovering are 'co-fated'. In most cases the outcome is fated via the means, not regardless of them.

Some landmark events, however, such as the day of your death, may be fated regardless of the means.
Your character will cause you to decline numerous alternative actions to those you will choose, but even
if, counterfactually, you were going to choose one of those alternatives, it would still be going to lead to
your death on that same day. For example Socrates (in Plato's Crito) knew through a prophetic dream
that he would die in three days' time, and his reasoned decision to stay and accept execution was willing
cooperation with the rational world plan, where a bad person would have resisted by escaping but still
died on that same fated day. Zeno and Chrysippus compared a human being to a dog tied to a cart: it can
follow willingly, or be dragged.
In this way, morality is not simply argued to be compatible with determinism, but to require it. Only
within a framework of rational predestination can moral choices have their true significance. There
remains, however, the question why, in a world where it was pre-ordained that we would be precisely
the kind of people we are, our choices should have any moral significance at all. The answer is that
goodness belongs primarily to the world as a whole (identifiable with god). It is from this that moral
qualities filter down to individuals and their actions, as a measure of their cooperation with or
obstruction of the rational world plan.

Later fortunes

Stoicism's success ran high in the first century AD. It was perceived by writers like Seneca and Lucan as
embodying the traditional Roman virtues whose decline was so widely lamented. Roman Stoics formed
the main resistance to the emperor's rule, and, following the earlier model of the Stoic Cato, made the
principled act of suicide into a virtual art form.

In a way Stoicism's crowning achievement was in AD 161, when its adherent Marcus Aurelius became
Roman emperor. Here at last was a genuine philosopher-ruler. When Marcus established chairs of
philosophy at Athens, these included one of Stoic philosophy. Nevertheless, Stoicism was already on the
decline in the late second century, eclipsed by the revived philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. By then,
however, it had entered the intellectual bloodstream of the ancient world, where its concepts remained
pervasive in such diverse disciplines as grammar, rhetoric and law, as well as strongly influencing the
thought of Platonist philosophers like Porphyry, and Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria.

Through the writings of Cicero (whose philosophical works, although not Stoic, embody much Stoicism)
and Seneca, Stoic moral and political thought exercised a pivotal influence throughout the Renaissance.
Early modern philosophers who incorporated substantial Stoic ethical ideas include Spinoza and Kant...