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All You Need To Know About Determinism and Freewill in Stoicism (Episode 93)
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"Nothing has happened which was not going to be, and likewise nothing is going to be of which nature does not contain causes working to bring that very thing about."
The Stoics believed that we were responsible for our actions and that every action was fated.
In this conversation, Michael explains how they made sense of those two ideas.
We cover determinism, freewill, and moral responsibility in Stoicism.
(00:54) Introduction
(04:41) The Lazy Argument
(07:03) Stoic Physics
(15:56) The Argument for Causal Determinism
(25:10) Moral Responsibility
(35:33) Free Will
(44:29) Objections
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Freedom and Determinism
00:00:00
Speaker
The person who wouldn't feel bad about killing people and robbing, they've got the most choices. They've got the most freedom because they can do all the good things and they can do all the bad things. But that's not the kind of freedom you want or not the kind of freedom the Stoics care about, at least. They care about, you know, are you self-authoring, which is a really good way of putting it and flipping that idea of freedom a bit. Welcome to Stoic Conversations. My name is Caleb Bontiferros. And I'm Michael Trombley.
00:00:28
Speaker
And today we are going to be talking about determinism and free
Debate on Free Will and Moral Responsibility
00:00:33
Speaker
will.
00:00:33
Speaker
This is a listener request. So thank you to the listener who provided that and a reminder to anybody else that we do read those emails. We do check our social media. So if you know, if anybody asks for anything, there's a good chance. Uh, well, I will at the very least, we will strongly consider it. And then if it, if it fits in, um, love to talk about it. So yeah, as you said, determinism free will it's, it's one of those great questions that.
00:00:58
Speaker
matters to people today very much. And really, to frame that, it's this question of
00:01:05
Speaker
Do we have free will, or are we predetermined to do the things we do? If we're predetermined, is that compatible with free will in any case, or does free will require us not to be predetermined? And I think most importantly for most people, other than just the ickiness of not having free will, so if we're predetermined, if determinism is true,
00:01:30
Speaker
Can there be any moral responsibility? Do we have any grounds for judging people, for throwing them in jail, for punishing them? Interestingly enough, we've talked a bit about the stoic view on punishment in previous episodes when we have a previous episode on it. Punishment isn't going to really be a strong motivator for why the stoics would want more responsibility.
00:01:54
Speaker
But to many people, there's that kind of idea of, well, I want to be, how could I be proud of myself or angry with myself? Or how could I be proud or angry with anybody else if people don't have freedom, if they're not making free choices?
Stoic Physics and Determinism
00:02:07
Speaker
So that's a really sticky question. And it's one of those questions you could do in a first year philosophy class. Anybody you pull off the street is going to think that's an interesting question. But 2,000 years ago, the Stoics has thoughts on it. And I think really compelling thoughts, I think thoughts that we can learn from and frame our own discussion on the topic.
00:02:23
Speaker
And I always just find it historically interesting to see like, well, look, this is something humans have been wrestling with for a long time. And how did humans 2,000 years ago think about these kinds of questions? So today, determinism and free will. And we're going to go over three things. So first, stoic physics, so that how do the stoics view the universe? And how does that feed into their view on determinism? Then stoic determinism, their position on determinism?
00:02:51
Speaker
then the implications that have on the stoic view on free will and more responsibility and then we'll do any objections and questions. Any framing you want to give for the conversation Caleb?
00:03:02
Speaker
Just in terms of a little bit more motivation, many modern Stoics start thinking about these issues of free will and determinism because Stoicism emphasizes people's agency and it has a strong focus on what is up to them and the idea that you can change how you think and that's going to shake your life significantly. That's of course a central Stoic idea.
00:03:29
Speaker
But they also have this idea that everything is determined. So initially, there's a potential conflict between those two ideas. And we shouldn't, I think, shouldn't just say that the Stoics have that idea, but it's very common to hear most people, many philosophers.
00:03:46
Speaker
many scientists who, you know, they have these view that, you know, the world is determined.
Empowerment Through Stoicism and Agency
00:03:53
Speaker
And we'll jump into what that means. But on the surface that there's this question, how can you make sense of agency, if at all, in a fully determined world? And I see this all the time on
00:04:04
Speaker
Facebook and Reddit, great point Caleb, is people get into stoicism because they feel unempowered. And stoicism has this beautiful ability that I think still stands to make you feel even when so much is out of your control. You can find that kind of that locus of control within you. You can find a way to give yourself purpose, meaning, and empower yourself in any circumstance. And so stoicism can be very empowering.
00:04:27
Speaker
But I think people find determinism to be unempowering. They find free will, the idea of not having free will or not having free will outside of determinism to be the opposite of empowering, to be restricting, defeatist. And we can get into this a bit later, but the Stoics even argued against these arguments back then. I always love how these conversations echo modern discussions. The Stoics would argue against what was called the lazy argument.
00:04:53
Speaker
And that was, that's their term for 2000 years ago. And the lazy argument was this view that, well, if determinism is true, then why should I do anything? I should just kind of lie around. There's no points in doing anything. Um, there's no point in me working hard to try to improve my life. There's no point in me fighting back against injustice. Everything is just going to be the way it's going to be. So I have no reason to put an effort in. And that was the, that's the lazy argument. They called it basically an argument determinism is true. You should just be lazy.
00:05:21
Speaker
and the Stoics argued against that, but that's still something, you know, conversations people are having today are falling into those same sort of cycles. So let's see, is there a way to recover any of that agency from the stoic determinist view? And what does that have to say about things like the lazy problem, which really takes away a lot of your, which is that argument that you have no agency. So why does it matter anyway? Who cares? Just lie down and don't do
The Nature of Existence in Stoic Philosophy
00:05:48
Speaker
anything.
00:05:48
Speaker
This is also one of those topics, last preamble before I jump into it. You know, a little bit of background about me. I mean, Caleb, you know this, but for those listening, I did my PhD in philosophy. I did it on Epictetus's ethics. And so I would say I know a fair amount about Stoicism, but there's always more to learn. And if I had a weakness, it would be in Stoic physics, Stoic logic, Stoic
00:06:12
Speaker
You know this and where those intersect, you know stoic idea of causes and things like this. That stuff to me is like I have a grasp of it but it's challenging so this was a good episode for me to dig back into the primary source material. And so you're coming those listening I'm not talking.
00:06:30
Speaker
at you you're coming along with a journey along with me as i'm trying to also understand these questions better and the stoic view on them more accurately and i think that's always that's always really fun um when i'm doing some learning and digging into the parts of stoic philosophy that's that's a bit hard for me um cool so with that in mind we're going to talk about stoic physics which is exactly what i was talking about
00:06:55
Speaker
So before we can understand, I could just say, well, the Stoics believe, I mean, first thing, spoiler alert, the Stoics think determinism is true. So they think all of your choices, your behavior, your character, that's all predetermined. So why do they think that is the question? We could start there, but I want to go back to that why, because I think it's actually quite a compelling argument. And so to understand why we need to start with stoic physics,
00:07:22
Speaker
So this is really stoic ontology, stoic philosophy of what exists and doesn't exist. So for the stoics of their first highest category of ontology, so the first highest category of things is things. So I'm trying, it's really hard to not throw the words existing in here casually because these have precise definitions. Of all things, it's the highest category of things.
00:07:52
Speaker
First big category is things and then you have the ones that exist and the things that don't. Okay. So of all things, some exist and some don't. And you may hear that and you go, that's really weird to say something doesn't exist. Um, but you know, we're working with these Greek terms here. We're translating them over.
00:08:10
Speaker
So of all things, some things exist, some things that don't. The things that exist, of everything that exists, it is a body or corporeal. So the distinguishing feature of things that exist is that they can act or be acted upon. So as bodies, they can act or be acted upon. So they can interact with each other.
00:08:36
Speaker
So, another way of putting that is that everything that exists has a kind of causal force. You know, if I knock down a domino and it hits another domino, well that first domino is interacting with that second domino, right? It's causing something. And only bodies have the ability to do this, things that exist.
00:08:53
Speaker
Of the things that do not exist, the Stoics would say these subsists, these are things that we can talk about but do not have body or causal powers. And so the Stoic list of these are time, void, lectas, which is sayables, those representations of those verbal representations of the world, and place.
00:09:19
Speaker
Uh, so again, time void electas in place. Those are the four things which subsist their things, but they do not exist. They do not, they're not bodies and they don't have any causal power. And so when I was trying to wrap my head around this, I mean, I was just thinking about this before this chat. Caleb was thinking something like you could think of something like a unicorn or the idea of a unicorn.
00:09:40
Speaker
And I might say this is something that it's a thing in one sense, but it doesn't really have causal power. It doesn't interact. But I could say true or false things about unicorns. I could say if I say unicorns have two horns, you could say that's false. We could have a coherent conversation about unicorns, but unicorns don't have causal powers. They're not bodies. They don't exist.
00:10:04
Speaker
That's what I like to think about it. The same way with time, you know, does 4.30 this afternoon, does that exist? Well, there's a bunch of bodies, but 4.30 doesn't exist, but we can talk about it in a way that makes sense. That's really me trying to wrap my head around that. Well, what do they think about numbers? Number another example of something that subsists?
00:10:28
Speaker
No, I mean, that's not a bad example, but that's the exhaustive list. Time, void, lectas. So those are sayables. So representations of the world and language and place. But no, not number. That's interesting because I would have thought numbers like the paradigmatic example of usually a platonic form or abstract thing that might not be a body or something of that sort.
Causal Determinism and the Universe
00:10:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good example. The important takeaway from this, though, is that when we talk about things that exist, they're all bodies. So anything that exists must be a body. And we know it's a body because it can interact with something or be interacted upon. And then there's some implications of this, right? God then is a body. The mind or the soul is a body.
00:11:28
Speaker
Insofar as the mind or soul can interact with things and, you know, cause you to, uh, desire something or to not desire something or to cause an elevation in heart rate or to cause an emotion. Insofar as there's any causal power, the mind is a body. So that's part one.
00:11:48
Speaker
Or maybe another clarifying question is, what are we talking about when we say it's a body? I mean, it takes up space that's formed from atoms, or what are we talking about here?
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, so my understanding of, it really is that interactability. So yeah, I would say that it takes up space is certainly going to be like a criteria of that interactability. The Stoics don't believe in atoms, so they don't believe that
00:12:23
Speaker
physical, uh, that bodies can be broken down, um, into, uh, discrete in divisible pieces. That's what an Adam is. Adam just means the thing that cannot be divided. Um, so really matter, my understanding of it is that matter kind of extends. It doesn't, it doesn't, um, it's not dividable and it doesn't end.
00:12:46
Speaker
Um, and so that extension I suppose is what, is what gives it its capacity to act and be acted upon. I guess, uh, bodies, they have the capacity to act or be acted upon. That's all you need to know. That's it. That's it. You're good. Cool.
00:13:08
Speaker
So bodies, they have extension. They can cause things and be acted upon. They can act and be acted upon. And this gets us, we just want to keep that in mind. And so everything that exists is a body. Everything that does anything to anything else is a body. And we want to keep that in mind moving into this idea about stoic determinism.
00:13:33
Speaker
which, you know, they would also call fate as well, uh, which has some interesting religious implications or theological implications when we're talking about this. So it's not just determined from an abstract sense, but also faded. Um, so when we talk about determinism, there's many types of determinism, but today we're talking about causal determinism. Causal determinism is the view that everything has proceeding cause and that the nature of each event was determined by its causes or is determined by its causes.
00:14:03
Speaker
In other words, the way I like to think about causal determinism is if the preceding circumstances are the same, then the outcome will be the same. If you rewound time back five minutes and said go, everything would happen again the same way. That's a world in which causal determinism is true. If you have the same point A, it's going to cause the same point B every time.
00:14:29
Speaker
That's that's the causal determinants of you people don't like it because is this the well, how does free will fit into that? Where is kind of random chance? Where does my freedom to interact with that causal chain come in if that's true? So there's some ethical and personal considerations in that, but that's the view.
Fate and Opposition to Stoic Determinism
00:14:48
Speaker
And so
00:14:50
Speaker
You know, one way to get around causal determinism, I think it's, it's, it's fun to think about causal determinism by thinking about what it would be like if it was false. One way to get around causal determinism would just be this idea that there's some things that are just actually just random. And that's the Epicurean position. Epicurean position is that some atoms just swerve sometimes and they swerve in random uncaused ways.
00:15:12
Speaker
And so if you rewound time five minutes and you let it go again, well, maybe that bird would fly in a different direction. Maybe the wind would blow a little bit softer. Maybe, I don't know, it would start raining a little bit later in the day. You'd have these changes that would butterfly effect in on themselves. And so any sort of swerve would constantly be creating these different realities from other
00:15:38
Speaker
potentials because you have randomness in the universe. So causal determinism, if it's true, is the idea that we don't have that randomness in the universe. Because causal determinism is true if you have the same previous circumstances, you're going to get the same result every time. So why do the Stoics believe in causal determinism? Well, when we keep that idea of the Stoic body in mind, or that everything that exists is a body, we get a pretty simple argument.
00:16:06
Speaker
I do this in a four-part argument. First, everything that exists is a body. Second, everything that exists today has a prior cause, and everything that exists in the future will have a cause. The third part is that these causes must be bodies, because bodies are the only things that can cause things. So the third thing is these causes must be bodies, and these bodies abide by predetermined physical laws.
00:16:34
Speaker
Therefore, causal determinism is true. So everything is predetermined because everything is a body. Bodies follow physical laws of cause and effect. And so every state of existence
00:16:53
Speaker
is a chain of cause and effect following these physical laws. There is nothing that exists that steps outside of this physical chain, which is one answer. There's no randomness because the laws of physics doesn't have total randomness. Maybe we're seeing some of that introduced now in this idea of
00:17:18
Speaker
quantum mechanics, this idea that maybe nature does have some randomness built into it, which is kind of interesting. But that's not something that the Stoics believe. I think, look, these physical states are following non-random physical laws. And there's some beautiful quotes here, one by Cicero on divination.
00:17:39
Speaker
And this is actually, this is one of the most beautiful slow quotes I've read, especially the second half of it. And so don't take it from me. Let's see what Cicero has to say. And he says, by fate, and he's speaking on the slow position here, by fate, I mean what the Greeks call hymenini, an ordering and sequencing of causes, since it is the connection of cause to cause, which out of itself produces anything. It is everlasting truth flowing from all eternity.
00:18:09
Speaker
Consequently, nothing has happened which was not going to be, and likewise nothing is going to be of which nature does not contain causes working to bring that very thing about. This makes it intelligible that fate should be not the fate of superstition, but that of physics, an everlasting cause of things. Why past things happen, why present things are happening, and why future things will be.
00:18:37
Speaker
And that's got some Marcus Aurelius beauty in there. That idea of fate should be not the fate of superstition, but that of physics, an everlasting cause of things. That's a killer line. And one last one on the view here, quote, the Stoics describe fate as a sequence that is an inescapable ordering and interconnection. So that's the Stoic view. Anything to add to that, Kilp?
00:19:07
Speaker
Let's see. Well, what's most important to understand about this? I suppose one way to sum it up is just to sort of push it back on opponents of Stoicism and look at what they have to deny. So if the ancients who didn't agree with this, they would introduce things that don't exist that are not bodies. Maybe they have souls or something of that sort.
00:19:35
Speaker
Or they would introduce randomness. I suppose there are other options as well. You can introduce bodies that effectively cannot be acted on, but can still produce causes. That's another option. But typically, the ancients would go for the idea that not everything that exists is a body. There's some idea of perhaps an immaterial soul.
00:19:59
Speaker
or the idea that some things are just random. Does that seem right to you in terms of cashing out these other positions? I think that's exactly right. I mean, the random play is the one that the Epicureans make. They don't think there's a soul, but they make the random play. They say there's just randomness in the world. I think that idea of the soul, the soul as being something
Determinism's Impact on Perspective and History
00:20:27
Speaker
I mean, that's it. That's an interesting example of something you might think that like it does not follow physical laws, but has causal power. Right. Um, yeah, I think that's, I think that would be, I don't know which of any school that takes that position, but that would be another way in which. Determinism would be false because that's, that's the, that's the thing that we're, we're not talking about determinism of like.
00:20:48
Speaker
You know, when a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound, right? Like we're not talking about when the tree falls in the forest, does it follow the same way? We're not really caring about causal laws when we're talking about that. We're caring about causal laws when it comes to us, human beings, you know, our choices and our moral responsibility. And so the stoic view is the rejection of that thing you said. There's no soul or part of yourself that's not a body. There's no soul or part of yourself that's free from this causal chain that could sidestep determinism.
00:21:17
Speaker
nor is there any randomness to the universe. So the universe is more like an, uh, like an unfolding is the way I think about it. It's something that's already been spun up.
00:21:26
Speaker
It already has all its causes inside of it and they're coming about the way Cicero puts it is so beautiful. Likewise, nothing is going to be of which nature does not contain causes working to bring that very thing about. So really, right? Like there's a, there's a, there is a million year causal chain unfolding right now that will cause something a million years from now. Right. That's, that's the stoic view. What's awesome about the Cicero quote, is it highlights how
00:21:57
Speaker
understanding reality, I suppose taking this higher view, taking this view from above does in fact radically change one's perspective on happenings in history and ordinary life. Everything that has occurred is this pure unfolding, as it were.
00:22:27
Speaker
That's a nice picture. Immediately following that quote, Cicero says this, which makes me want to read on divination in its entirety. These are some beautiful parts.
00:22:40
Speaker
The consequence of Stoic determinism is this idea that if you understood all causes, you could really understand that you could predict the future. You could understand all that would be. So the Cicero line here is, if there was some being who could see with his mind the connection of all causes,
00:22:57
Speaker
He would certainly never be deceived. For whoever grasps the causes of future things must necessarily grasp all that will be. But since no one but God can do this, man must be left to gain his knowledge from various signs which announce what is to come.
00:23:13
Speaker
And so, yeah, that consequence, you talk about that higher perspective, there's that consequence of that higher perspective is understanding, well, look, I can see that causal chain from the past to the present, but I could also, if I was God, I could extend that causal chain out. And there's a kind of...
00:23:32
Speaker
I mean, that's when you get kind of close to acceptance, right? Or maybe even close to, you can understand that idea of a more fatty of having to love fate. Um, you can understand the kind of demand that plays on you if you think that that's, that's a necessary state of the world. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Well put. Cool. Yeah. So another interesting idea here. I mean, we talked about this before I defined earlier in the episode determinism as this idea that.
00:24:00
Speaker
If you have state A, it's always going to lead to state B, because state B is caused by the causes in that prior circumstance. But it's just cool to see the Stoics actually say that in their own words 2,000 years ago. So Alexander was a second century Aristotelian. The quote from him is, he says that the Stoics relied on the argument that if in identical circumstances, someone will act differently on different occasions, an uncaused motion is introduced.
00:24:29
Speaker
And it's just that that's kind of a stoic counter argument against those objecting to determinism. So the person comes to the stoics and say, well, no, determinism isn't true. I have free will. I can do what I want. And they say, look, if in identical circumstances someone was acting differently, then you've introduced an uncaused motion.
00:24:51
Speaker
You have to say that there is something that changed the sequencing of events, but didn't have a cause. And the stoic, the implication there is that, you know, that's impossible. That's a silly argument to make. And I love that.
Stoic Views on Moral Responsibility and Punishment
00:25:04
Speaker
I love that stoic argument is so succinct and it's something you would still see today.
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, so of course, I think the pushback from people who start to get worried about this would be you can imagine seeing things.
00:25:23
Speaker
from above, seeing the full flow of things to the extent that we can get in that position, you can accept what occurs more easily. But you wonder, does that come at the price of being able to evaluate things as truly good or bad, especially our own moral actions? You know, if you say that
00:25:43
Speaker
in any circumstance, or actually we won't emphasize, if you say that the person would do the same thing if they were in this circumstance, with this past, every time, it's just necessitated by who they are and the laws of nature. To what extent can we say people are morally responsible?
00:26:04
Speaker
And that's concerning. I agree. I'm also concerned. So let's jump into that. Let's see, can we salvage more responsibility from this idea of determinism? So the objection you just made, however, the concern, it's something that would have happened, it was happening in ancient times as well.
00:26:26
Speaker
So the Epicureans argued against the Stoics and said, look, there's no moral responsibility if determinism is true. There's no praise or blame. And this is a quote from Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism. He wrote, the man who says that all events are necessitated has no grounds for criticizing the man who says that not all events are necessitated. For according to him, this is itself a necessitated event.
00:26:51
Speaker
And it's this kind of meta joke, you know, you can't even call the person arguing against the terminism stupid or a bad argument or you can't even criticize that person because that there's no more responsibility here. There's no blame. There's no finger pointing in this world that you're claiming is the case.
00:27:11
Speaker
So a very succinct summary of that position. So how did the Stoics try to salvage this? How do they salvage more responsibility? Well, the first way they're going to try to salvage this is they're going to say, look, even if everything is fated and even if things are determined, we can still criticize and praise fated events. We can still judge things that are predetermined.
00:27:36
Speaker
So, according to Alexander, who's the second century Aristotelian who I was citing below about the uncaused motion, he writes on on these questions in stoicism, and he says that the stoic say,
00:27:51
Speaker
Therefore, it will be in accordance with fate that animals have perceptions and impulses, and some animals will merely be active while others will perform rational actions, and some will do wrong while others will perform right actions, for these are natural to them.
00:28:07
Speaker
But so long as wrong and right actions remain, and their natures and qualities are not removed, there also remain commendations and censors, punishments and honors, for such is the sequence and the order to which they are subject." So the Stoic argument here, as put through Alexander, is this idea that look,
00:28:26
Speaker
Animals are going to have, like all beings are going to have different qualities. Some things, some people are going to be rocks or some things are going to be rocks. Hopefully people aren't rocks. Some things are going to be rocks. Some animals are going to be less intelligent than others. And some animals are going to be rational animals, humans.
00:28:42
Speaker
And when we're talking about rational animals, those rational animals are going to have the ability to do right actions and wrong actions. I think the Stoics would say, I'm extrapolating here, actions that are in accordance with their nature or not in accordance with their nature. And as long as we get that on the table, as long as we can say there are right actions or wrong actions, then there is still commending and blaming, punishing and honoring, because this is part of their nature.
00:29:12
Speaker
That's not something that requires their nature to be different to still allow. And the way that I like to frame this argument, and interested in what you think of it, Caleb, if I'm getting it right or you think it's a poor argument, I think of this argument as basically the view that human character is a kind of a skill or a craft. And so when we judge a knife or a car, we don't think, well, did that car have free will?
00:29:40
Speaker
Did that car, was there enough randomness in the making of this Ferrari? We just say, well, that, that is a good car. I like that car. And so the same thing with humans, we can appeal to their telos, their natural ends. We can appeal to what's in accordance with their nature.
00:29:55
Speaker
We don't appeal to causal history when we talk about cars, knives, uh, video games, things like this. We just, we, we look at them, um, on their own grounds. We praise them or blame them on according to that. And so the same argument here is this idea that when we praise or blame something has nothing to do with whether it was faded or not. It has to do with the type of thing it is and how well it's achieving its ends. And the same thing applies to humans the same way it would apply to animals in this quote. And in my argument, I extended kind of artifacts.
00:30:26
Speaker
Right, right. I suppose one difference would be is, well, you could recognize a knife or car as a good knife or a good car, but you may not censure it or punish it. And that's, you know, to the extent that that makes sense at all. I picked the example. It's my fault.
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I think you wouldn't want to punish someone who is blind for not being able to see, right? And then so what's the difference in that case and the case where someone does do something wrong, but there is a real sense in which they could not have done otherwise given their nature and the physical setup of the universe.
00:31:13
Speaker
Um, so I, my read is sort of, there's this, there's a story from Diogenes Largis about Zeno of Citium that I've, that I've quoted probably about twice so far in this podcast, maybe just once. Um, where, uh, one of Zeno's servants steals something from Zeno and says, you shouldn't punish me because it was in my nature to steal. And then Zeno says, well, I think I'll punish you because it's in my nature to punish, which
00:31:42
Speaker
is sort of seems to be saying that punishment, these ideas of punishment and praise as such are
00:31:56
Speaker
made relative to the action and probably have less to do with the kinds of things that we today would think of as relevant to punishment or praise which you know have to do like could they have done otherwise? What could we have expected from them?
00:32:13
Speaker
where it's almost just like this idea of, given the nature of what you did, this is the right response. You don't need to think much more than that. I don't know if you agree with that or not, but that's how I would understand this quote. I like that two thoughts I had when you were saying that. One is that I like this idea of calling out punishment
00:32:37
Speaker
as an interesting example. I think one way to get around is that stoic view, which I think is what you were getting at. We talked about this in our episode of punishment, which is that punishment itself is never not a kind of moral retribution. It is always done for another cause, the kind of a role ethics cause. I'm the teacher, you're the student, I'm the parent, you're the child. I guess I'm the lawyer and you're the defendant or something like this.
00:33:05
Speaker
or it's done for kind of an educational purpose. In the best way, it's done for an educational purpose. So I guess one way is to say, look, the kind of punishment we're talking about, you could have done otherwise, you're disgusting, and you deserve to be punished. The stoics don't even have that in their vocabulary anyway as being kind of righteous. Another thing that I was thinking of was this idea that you were raising as a criteria for punishment, this idea that you could have done otherwise.
00:33:34
Speaker
And it's interesting to me, and I know that's something that's a part of like moral contemporary philosophy, but it doesn't really seem to me to stand up when we talk about praise. Like if I think about somebody who's like had been habituated or trained to be the kind of person where, you know, they're really the kind of person that, you know, if you insult their friend, they're going to stick up for their friend. They're going to have like a non-reflective emotional response where they're going to stand up for the week.
00:34:01
Speaker
That seems to me like a kind of person who's totally worthy of praise. I'm not saying like, oh, the fact that you, I don't praise more the person who was closer to doing the wrong thing. Uh, the person who was like so good, they could have never been bad. I think that person is deserving of just as much praise.
Free Will and Self-Authorship in Stoicism
00:34:19
Speaker
And so the condition that you could have done, and maybe that's the stoicism leaking into my thinking.
00:34:23
Speaker
But the condition that you could have done otherwise doesn't seem to me to remove the possibility of punishment. It would just be the inversion of that, or at least blame. Punishment's weird, but at least blame.
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the first point you said, which is that the Stoics are going to think about punishment, censure, in a radically different way from the typical modern person who's thinking about these questions of moral responsibility. And that is important to be clear about, that they think, you know, Abakkis explicitly talks about the example of punishing someone who is
00:35:00
Speaker
physically blind and says, you know, that's absurd, but it's equally absurd to punish other people who do wrong because they are blind in similar respects. And as you say, the reasons to do, to respond with something like punishment is the best case
00:35:18
Speaker
an ameliorative one, a sort of a healing approach. And then perhaps as a case for punishment because that's what's required by a role. Perhaps that's the most important thing to make sure is clear here. I want to move on to kind of, I would say the second argument. You'll notice I haven't talked much about free will.
00:35:42
Speaker
A reason for not talking about free will is that free will is a notion that's introduced after the Stoics. Braden Wood argues that the notion of free will originates in Seneca, whereas at least strongly influenced by the writings of Seneca. But Seneca is not
00:36:00
Speaker
reflecting on free will the way we were talking about it today. Maybe it originates in Seneca and then gets pulled into some Christian writing, but the Stoics aren't aren't working with this framework of a will. They're thinking about your mind, they're thinking about specifically your hegemonicon, your ruling faculty, or your proheiruses, your capacity for choice, depending on you know if you're an older Stoic or we're talking about Epictetus focuses mostly on the proheiruses. So when we're talking about
00:36:32
Speaker
who you are. They're not thinking about in terms of your will or the freedom of that. They're thinking about in terms of your mind, your soul, your character.
00:36:42
Speaker
So if you're talking about a free will, I think instead you want to talk about a free character or a free choice, free actions. These are the kinds of things that the Stoics are going to be more interested in and they are going to care about freedom. Epictetus writes a lot about freedom, but they're not going to talk about it in a frame of, you know, your will or something like this. And so where can we get any of that freedom from this?
00:37:07
Speaker
I'm compelled by the Stoic argument here. I want to present it, see what you think. The Stoic idea is that we should praise individuals for the fated events they cause. And we can say that someone has caused an event when that event has been brought about through them.
00:37:31
Speaker
So this is Eusebius, who's a third century Christian historian, and he says, hence Chrysippus says in book two, that it is obvious that many things originate from us, but that these two are nonetheless cofated along with the government of the world. And he uses certain examples like the following.
00:37:53
Speaker
that the cloak should not perish, he says, was faded not absolutely, but together with its being looked after. Someone's escaping the enemy was faded, together with his running away from the enemy. For many things cannot come about without our wanting them and applying the most intense determination and efforts over them, since it is together with this, he says, that they are faded to come about. The idea there is that,
00:38:20
Speaker
The cloak wasn't faded to be well-maintained. The cloak was faded to be well-maintained through your effort and care. And that's what he's saying. That's what this idea of co-faded was. There is this kind of fate of it at a universal level, but then there's this co-cause, which is the individual causes that are bringing it about if you want to zoom in.
00:38:45
Speaker
So, you know, as Eusebius says, for many things can't come about without our wanting them and applying the most intense determination and efforts over them. And so these things that we bring about through us, that are co-fated to come about through us, the Stoics are going to call those in our power.
00:39:05
Speaker
And the argument here is that we exist as a causal force in the world. We interact with things. We make people's lives better or worse. Our participation is one of the circumstances that brings things about. And so our participation, while not separate from the causal chain, is called in our power and we are to be judged for it.
00:39:22
Speaker
I think about this a lot like the idea of the, the, the Evictinus's view on what a free choice means is not something that's free from a causal chain, but is something that's not coerced by somebody external to you. Um, it is, it is generated from just your character.
00:39:43
Speaker
And for him, those are the most free choices, the ones that are generated just from your character. And I think we talked about this before, but Hume provides a similar argument where if you put a gun to someone's head and says, give me the money, you blame that person less than somebody who stole from their local store on their own. And because the person with the gun to their head is being coerced, is being impelled, it's not as free of a choice.
00:40:09
Speaker
So we don't exist, we don't exist separate from the causal chain, but we're part of that causal chain and our freedom. I would say we should be judged by the way we interact with that causal chain and we should be judged more by our freer events and the freer events are the ones that come about, um, based on our character or that results from our character. That's my, that's my swing at it. What do you think?
00:40:35
Speaker
That seems right to me. I think that there's a shift to focus on.
00:40:41
Speaker
what is up to you, and that means what's internally brought about. So there's an example that Chrysippus gives of the rolling cylinder, right, where someone begins to push a cylinder down a hill. The initial cause is from without, but it continues to roll because of what it is, because of its own
00:41:09
Speaker
nature and shape and when you're thinking about shaping yourself that and we're thinking about freedom for humans that involves being able to
00:41:27
Speaker
and to have the internal nature sort of shine through without being coerced or dependent on exterior forces, which I think is subtly different from a lot of the ways people might tend to think about freedom today, which is maybe more in terms of
00:41:44
Speaker
optionality, you know, you have the opportunity to do this or that. Totally. Whereas for the Stoics, it's instead that you have your self-authoring, right? And you're able to fully express your nature without being reliant on irrelevant externals.
00:42:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's a beautiful way of putting it. I love that. And I think that comes back to the example I was giving before about the person who's so good, they don't have choices, seems deserving of praise.
Freedom, Morality, and Providence in Stoicism
00:42:22
Speaker
Like the person who has the most choices, the person who's kind of shitty, the person who doesn't feel bad about the person who wouldn't feel bad about killing people and robbing, they've got the most choices. They've got the most freedom because they can do all the good things and they can do all the bad things.
00:42:36
Speaker
But that's not the kind of freedom you want or not the kind of freedom the Stokes care about at least. They care about, you know, are you self-authoring as you said, which is a great, I think a really good way of putting it and flipping that idea of freedom a bit. Right, right. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think maybe the idea that in order to be
00:43:03
Speaker
free, you know, one needs to have the
00:43:09
Speaker
opportunity to do evil is a Christian one or a remnant of Christianity liberalism, I'm not entirely sure. But there's a French fellow who wrote a number of excellent maxims and he has one which is like, no one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not also have the strength to be bad.
00:43:35
Speaker
I think I probably mispronounced his name, but he's a French fellow. I was going to say, were you keeping his name a mystery? Like a French fellow, too mysterious to be named. Too mysterious to be named. Francois de la Rochenfold. Rocher for cold. I don't know. You can probably pronounce it properly. I think you named Francois, and you lost me at the last bit.
00:43:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's, I think that's really cool. That's usually what, usually what's, what, what happens when we're doing this marine mythosism is, you know, you're taking a word that they were, where you're translating a Greek word into an English word that's had 2000 years of history after the Greeks were talking about it. And so it's like making sure, you know, when you, when they say freedom, are we thinking the same thing? And that for me is the real value is, is not this, the paradigm shift that comes with ancient philosophy, this different worldview that comes from studying this stuff. It's a really cool example.
00:44:30
Speaker
So I wanted to move on questions, objections, spend some time on this. The first, some questions we have here is stoic determinism compelling? Are there good modern arguments? Caleb, did you have thoughts on that?
00:44:48
Speaker
I think there are arguments for determinism. Is it something you should bet too much on? I don't know. I think determinism needs to be exhaustive in a way. Every single thing needs to follow these
00:45:08
Speaker
deterministic laws have these kinds of properties. Is that really true that that needs to be the case? Is the amount of evidence we have for that proposition enough? You can imagine, I think we have at least some evidence that things are indetermined on the micro level and the macro level. It's probably not that good. So I can see why one would favor determinism.
00:45:38
Speaker
Nonetheless, it's a, it's a, you know, it's a big systematic claim and it's an interesting one. You know, how central is it to, to turn it stoicism to begin with? Um, I mean, that's a, that's a separate question on this first question. I want to get to the second one, but on the first one, I think I'm of the kind of.
00:45:58
Speaker
What's Marcus Aurelius's quote? Providence or Adams? Doesn't really matter, is his point. Just like, be a good person. And that's the thing that I think is important with determinism is, I think you grow up thinking about free will and thinking, well, all of this matters in the context of free will. And then you get confronted with determinism and you go, oh no, it all falls apart. What's the point? I should just be lazy. And I don't think any of that stands up. I think it becomes the Marcus Aurelius point, like,
00:46:24
Speaker
Providence or Adams, like doesn't really matter. I'm going to, I'm going to focus on being a good person. And that for me is the compelling takeaway is this idea, not a hundred percent that determinism is true, but that even if determinism is true, there's still compelling reasons for more responsibility. There's still compelling reasons to care about the project of bettering yourself. Um, and that that's my takeaway. Um, in terms of how central it is to the stoic claim.
00:46:52
Speaker
I do think some of the stoic view that external circumstances can't really go better or worse for you. There is this stoic idea that we should love fate, that there's a providential ordering to things.
00:47:12
Speaker
that things are, because the stoic view is not just pre-determinism, it's providence, right? So it's determined, but it's also rationally determined. It's determined to unfold in the best possible way. So if we lose determinism, we lose providence. If we lose providence, maybe we don't lose something for a kind of modern stoicism, a kind of secular self-help or ethical system. We definitely lose it in the more robust sense.
00:47:44
Speaker
Yeah, that might be right. I think there's some ways probably of making sense of spiritual stoicism without complete determinism, but they're just as some theists or Christians try to make sense out of ideas. They're specific ideas of providence and free will, human free will, but it's certainly not going to be what you would think of as traditional stoicism quite clearly.
00:48:13
Speaker
So yeah, Stoicism doesn't fall apart if you lose Providence, but it's going to look quite a bit different from traditional Stoicism, is what you're saying? Well, I think you can have Providence, but Providence itself is going to look different. It's going to be more limited, I think. What is that?
00:48:33
Speaker
The short version is there's a view in theism called open theism. So there's this question about how can people have free will and God knows everything. And their version is God does know everything, but people's free will is basically over things that are not yet settled. They're not even things, because I could choose this, I could choose that. It's just not a fact, but God knows all the facts.
00:48:57
Speaker
And I think providence would be sort of similar in the sense that the world is set up in a particular way where human needs are met. It's steered in a rational and ordered way, but there are these pockets. There are going to have to be these pockets of indeterminism to make sense of human free will.
00:49:18
Speaker
So Providence might be limited, but you still get it somehow. Overall, the story might still be steered in a particular direction. That's a fun one. So that's a little bit of esoteric, heretical stoicism for you all at the end.
Conclusion and Further Resources
00:49:38
Speaker
Yeah, this is great. Thanks for bringing this together. Yeah, fun. And thanks for suggesting the topic, listeners. That was a good one.
00:49:49
Speaker
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00:50:19
Speaker
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00:50:41
Speaker
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