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Why Virtue is the ONLY good (Episode 61)
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The Stoics thought anyone could be happy in any situation.
This is because virtue is the only good and it is obtainable by anyone.
But why did the Stoics think virtue was the only good?
That’s what Caleb and Michael discuss in this conversation. They frame the discussion around objections to that idea from Scott Aikin, William Stephens, and Massimo Pigliucci (all past Stoa Conversations guests).
Epictetus’s Encheiridion: A New Translation
Virtue cannot be the ultimate good
(02:51) Why This Matters
(09:04) What is Virtue?
(17:45) The Objection
(26:31) Response: Stoic Move I
(31:59) Response: Stoic Move II
(39:43) The Practical Upshots
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoic Conversations
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You're not acting well because you displayed the kind of disposition that would tend to benefit you in other circumstances. You just had a choice and you made the right choice, even though the cards were all cards that had bad outcomes externally. And I believe that's possible.
00:00:19
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And insofar as you believe that possible, I think you're committed to the view that virtue can't be just good for something else. It has to be totally possible to be good in and of itself without consideration or grounding in anything external to it.
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome to Stoic Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week, we'll share two conversations. One between the two of us, and another will be an in-depth conversation with an
Listener Inquiries and Feedback
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expert.
00:00:52
Speaker
Hi all, my name's Caleb. In this conversation, Michael and I go into an objection, a philosophical objection against Stoicism, and we use it to explore the nature of the virtue in the ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Of course, keeping in mind how that matters for our lives today.
00:01:17
Speaker
This specific episode was inspired by an email from Joe, so thanks for sending us that note, Joe asking us to go deeper into different objections against stoicism. We're always responsive to emails we get and read every single one, so if you have any feedback, comments, or questions, send them to
00:01:43
Speaker
Stoa at Stoa Meditation. And of course, if you would like to help the podcast, help Michael and I, subscribe to Stoa Conversations on your podcast player, and give us a rating on Spotify or Apple podcasts. And of course, you can share it with a friend as well. All three of those things go some way towards helping others find the show.
00:02:09
Speaker
And before we dive into it, if you'd like to get two emails from me on stoic theory and practice, go to stoelector.com, www.stoelector.com, and subscribe, and you'll get a simple short email on Mondays and Fridays.
00:02:29
Speaker
If you'd like to go deeper still and want daily routines, meditations, and lessons, check out the Stoa app. Simply search Stoa in either app store and you'll find it. All right, here is the conversation.
Virtue as the Ultimate Good
00:02:45
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ontiveros. And I'm Michael Trombley.
00:02:52
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And today we're going to be talking about the idea that virtue is the ultimate good, the only good that's relevant for human happiness.
00:03:08
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this sort of key controversial Stoic claim, the key ethical Stoic claim. And we're talking about it because a while back I had a discussion with Scott Aiken, Professor Scott Aiken. He and William Stevens have a new version of Epictetus's
00:03:30
Speaker
handbook that includes a fine history of Stoicism in the beginning, their new translation of the handbook, and in the last section is a section on objections to Stoicism.
00:03:43
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And we spent a bit of time on a few different objections to stoicism in that conversation. And then we had an email about it asking, you know, can you go into more detail on some of these objections? And one of those objections has to do with whether virtue can be the only good that's relevant for human happiness. So that's the one we're going to be chatting about today, this issue of how do you ground the goodness of virtue?
00:04:13
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This is probably going to be more of a philosophical, theoretical episode, but I think stoics should care about it. It's one because they should have a good sense of what stoic theory is, but also because what you think the ultimate good is, I think defines what someone's life is geared towards. You know, if you're just optimizing for wealth, you're going to have the focus of becoming rich, always present in your mind.
00:04:42
Speaker
And that's going to be a different experience from the experience of most of us who optimize for a mix of things, wealth, reputation, pleasure, but also virtue. And if you include the experience, think about the experience of the Stoic Sage, their experience of the world is always going to have virtue present in front of their mind. And whether or not you're the sort of person who has
00:05:08
Speaker
virtue as a sole goal or at least the most important goal, the thing you try to come back to whenever you get pointed astray depends on whether you think it is the only good that's relevant or happiness.
Role of Virtue in Stoic Ethics
00:05:23
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That's one idea about why this question matters. The other reason why this issue matters is that if virtue isn't the highest
00:05:32
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good, if it isn't the only good that's relevant for human happiness, that suggests it can be sacrificed or something else.
00:05:41
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Now, you know, that doesn't necessarily follow, but if that idea is true, that you can sacrifice virtue for some outcome, that idea is not a Stoic idea. Stoicism would be, strictly speaking, false. Because Stoics don't see the world that way, it's worth thinking about, okay, well, what actually grounds virtue, what grounds their view that it's the ultimate good?
00:06:04
Speaker
I think those are both great points. You had one point about the orientation of your life. If you think money is the greatest good, you're going to orient yourself towards money. You're going to consider money. I also think that the greatest good is a hierarchy of good, if you will, because there's not necessarily only one for non-stoics.
00:06:24
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But that hierarchy of good is going to determine your decision-making process. I think part of philosophy is living intentionally. Part of being ethical is living intentionally, making your decisions in a way that's consistent with your values. So I think you need to clarify your values. So you need to think carefully. And if you're flirting with stoicism, you're thinking about stoicism, then you're probably either already committed to the idea of virtue as the only good, or you're pretty sympathetic to that position.
00:06:53
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So you need to wrestle with the coherence of this idea and be clear on your own hierarchy of values. The other thing I should say is that the idea that virtue is the only good, that somebody, a stoic would be happy on the torture rack if they were a good person. Not just a stoic, any person would be considered happy on the torture rack if they were a good person. The idea that you, as you said, you should never trade any amount.
00:07:19
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of money for your virtue or never succumbed to any kind of threat in exchange for your virtue. That's I think the core ethical position of stoicism. And so if you don't agree with this, you are not a stoic and that's okay. No judgment here. You can, you can still adopt some of their ideas. You can still use some of their practices.
00:07:41
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This myself is an argument that I wrestle with, or I think one of the key debates in whether or not to be a stoic or not is if this is the only good, but this really separates the stoics from the non-stoics, the stoics from those who use stoic exercises or use the kind of stoic tools, I would say. So really in the ethical debate, this is the key distinction here.
00:08:04
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And we often, we've talked in the past about the distinction between, I don't know, people who use stoicism on kind of a shallow level as kind of a set of psychological tools, and then modern stoics who agree with stoics ethics, and then traditional stoics who agree with the metaphysical claims, the conception of a stoic God and so on and so forth.
00:08:29
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that middle layer, the modern stoics, let's say kind of a middle layer of intensity or commitment to stoicism, they still believe that virtue is the only good. So your commitment to even that really rests on this debate. So that's why it's such an important one. Yeah, that's a good point. I think it's good to link that up to some of these contemporary issues about how you define the stoicism as well.
00:08:54
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So just before we hop into the debate, we'll, I think there's a little bit more introductory work we need to do.
Exploration of the Four Cardinal Virtues
00:09:01
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First is this very idea of virtue. You know, what is virtue? Remember for the Stoics, you know, or if you're new for the Stoics, virtue is a kind of knowledge or expertise. It's knowing how to be an excellent human and what an excellent human is, is given by our
00:09:21
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individual nature as well as nature as a whole. Often virtues is described by the four cardinal virtues. We have courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. Those four virtues are
00:09:43
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knowing what to avoid, being courageous, knowing the right amount of things that discipline or sometimes called moderation, knowing what others are owed, that is justice. And then finally, wisdom, which involves knowing what is good and how to apply it properly. That's some quick background on what the virtues are for the Stux. You want to add anything to that quick picture, Michael?
00:10:13
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Yeah, so one thing that I want to clarify before we move forward that often gets confused is there are these four virtues, but the Stoics thought that you couldn't have one of them and not another. When we talk about virtues, we're not talking to them about kind of skills, like, oh, that person's quite courageous, but they're not very just, or that person is very temperate, but they're a bit of a coward.
00:10:34
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These are the sides of the same cube. You can't have one of them without the entire structure there, but you can look at the structure from different perspectives. So that's one thing to keep in mind. In their view, there's no such thing as a courageous thief, for example, because you couldn't be unethical in other actions. Still courageous because
00:10:59
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To be courageous is to know how to act in a certain situation and to know is like an all-encompassing thing. They talk about knowledge as being a straight line. You know, you can't be bent anywhere for that line to still be straight. They talk about being locked in and solidified in place like a puzzle with all the pieces interconnecting.
00:11:21
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So that's the one thing I was going to say is that these virtues, we talk about the four cardinal virtues, but virtue is this state of total knowledge, this state of excellence that only the sage achieves once every 500 years, the stoics would say.
00:11:36
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I have another quote here by Deogenes Lyertius, who is not a Stoic, but he was a biographer of famous philosophers, and he says, quote, virtue is a consistent character, choice worthy for its own sake and not from a fear or hope of anything external. Happiness consists in virtue, since virtue is a soul which is fashioned to achieve consistency in the whole of life.
00:12:01
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So that idea here about a consistent character choice worthy for its own sake, not because of what it will get you, I think is a really important idea as well.
00:12:13
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Right, right. I've been leafing through Chris Gill's most recent book, Learning to Live Naturally, and he describes virtue as, in a way, all of these are the same thing, but one way this does describe it is a benefit. It's something that whenever it is exemplified, it benefits the person who is virtuous. It's living in accord with nature.
00:12:39
Speaker
And then finally, it also has this last aspect. There's this aspect of consistency. It's consistent with the way things are. One thing to do here is to distinguish the stoic view that virtue is the ultimate good from a subtly different view that there's a hierarchy of goods. One kind of view would be that
00:13:10
Speaker
Actually there's lots of good stuff in the world. There's wealth, pleasure, friendship, virtue, but not all of these things have the same amount of goodness and perhaps virtue's number one and then lower down on the scale there's things like health.
00:13:29
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pleasure and those things are good, but they don't ever outweigh or at least they're hardly as important as other kinds of goods, namely virtue. And what the Stoics want to say is that when we say that virtue is the ultimate good,
00:13:49
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We're saying that it's the only good that's relevant for human happiness. Perhaps we can say there are other goods. The ancient Stoics thought that God was good clearly, but God's goodness isn't so much relevant to human happiness. It's not something that's
Challenges to Stoic Virtue as Sole Good
00:14:04
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choice worthy. It's not something that provides a principle for selecting indifference that's in any way different from the guidance of virtue.
00:14:16
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Do you think that's useful distinguishing between this hierarchy of goods view and the classic stoic view?
00:14:23
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Yeah, I think the hierarchy of goods is important. And the stoic argument here for this, we have to be really careful about language when we talk about good and bad and these kind of, cause it's something we use colloquially or passively, but we'll get confused when we're trying to make these fine distinctions. The stoic distinction for good is something is only good if it will always benefit you. You know, you mentioned this earlier, but it will always benefit you. Something is only bad if it will always harm you.
00:14:53
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And so because of that, there's only one thing that will always benefit you. There's only one thing that will always harm you, and that's virtue and vice. So in that sense, there can't be a hierarchy of goods, because under that definition, there would be a hierarchy of goods if there was something that always harmed you, but harmed you much less, or something like this. And the stoics are going to say, that never really happened. So we really only have one thing that's good and one thing that's bad.
00:15:22
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And that, and again when I say good and bad, I don't mean pleasurable. I don't mean makes you feel good. Don't mean nice. Don't mean I would prefer to have it if it was the case. I mean necessarily benefits you in all cases always. That's what the stoics mean by good. And necessarily always harms you in all cases always is what the stoics mean by bad.
00:15:44
Speaker
And when you understand that, it really helps clarify the hierarchy versus the, I don't know, the black and white that I caught in the picture that the Stoics have about virtue. And so, yeah, we don't want to think about a kind of staircase with virtue at the top of it. We want to think of it as a total type difference. Right, right. There's some debate, I think, whether some renegade Stoics had the hierarchy of goods view, some scholarly debate about whether that is true or not. I think that
00:16:13
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At this point, when you're debating this hierarchy of goods type view versus the view that virtue is the only good, then at that point, the argument might be somewhat academic, but it will crop up again.
00:16:31
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when we think about this objection. But I do want to say that the hierarchy of goods view, if you're in that, if you're thinking about the good in that sense, you might end up in a way that your actions align very closely with what the Stoics would do anyway, which would be a good thing, I think. And I wouldn't hold too much against someone who has that kind of view. Nonetheless, whether you hold
00:16:58
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that view or the view that virtue is the only good is going to change how you orient thinking about making these decisions, going to change your experience of the world and especially how you think about this issue, what grounds virtue at all.
00:17:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that was something we talked about previously as well, this idea that, you know, should we stress too much about something that's not going to have a practical difference in the way you act? And, you know, it's likely the person that thinks virtue is the highest good is going to act really similar to a normal, to somebody who thinks that, you know, while there's other goods that are much less important than virtue. But as you said, it's going to ground these arguments and frame your attention, your focus. So I think it's worth, it is worth, you know, getting clear on and clarifying, which we'll try to do here.
00:17:45
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All right, so now we're coming to the objection.
Comparisons with Other Philosophical Views
00:17:48
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The objection, in a nutshell, is that the stoic cannot ground virtue's goodness. So I'm going to give this objection sort of from two people. There's a version from Scott Aiken and William Stevens, and then also a version from
00:18:08
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Massimo Pilucci, all past Stoic conversations, guests. So let me just read from Aiken and Stevens. The Stoic insists that virtue is the only good, but a reasonable challenge is that virtues are good because they are stable relations with other goods. On this view, virtues are really second-order goods that depend on their value on the first-order goods they reliably produce.
00:18:36
Speaker
Here's an example. Consider the virtue of being a good parent and providing a stable and nurturing environment for one's children. If children were not reliably made healthy and well adjusted by those efforts, they would not be coordinate with being a good parent. We can make a similar analysis on any virtue. What makes a virtue a good thing is its stable relation to some other good beyond virtue. And then here's also
00:19:04
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Massimo Piolucci. He's talking about virtue in the context of a skill. Virtue is excellent. It's being skillful, but then he says, but why would you want to play the game skillfully in the first place? Because you want to win, or at least to give your opponents a run for their money. The spectators, the enjoyment of a good spectacle, and yourself, the satisfaction of a game well played. The idea in both of these
00:19:32
Speaker
examples is that being a good parent means doing things to help one's child, to raise one's child well, and that's the outcome, a good childhood that grounds virtue. Or what does it mean to be skilled? It means to give your opponents a run for their money, the spectators enjoyment and yourself, maybe some amount of satisfaction.
00:19:58
Speaker
One final example that is useful is that we often talk about games of chance when it comes to thinking about stoic philosophy. It's a very useful analogy, I think. So if you think about good poker strategy, well, what makes a good poker strategy? It's one that maximizes winnings over the long run.
00:20:24
Speaker
it's consistent with losing specific hands. Sometimes you're going to get unlucky, but if you play the optimal strategy, you're going to be winning over the longer run thousands of games. But then the thought is that
00:20:41
Speaker
Well, there's nothing intrinsically valuable in good poker strategy. What makes good poker strategy good is that it's the sort of thing that wins poker games over the long run, and that's an outcome. That's not in and of itself a skill.
00:21:03
Speaker
So that's the short version of how to think about this in terms of an exception. The idea is that virtue cannot be the only good, the ultimate good, because how we define virtues, how we think of virtues is necessarily in relation to how they produce good outcomes or how they are grounded in good outcomes.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, I guess two things I want to say about this. First is that this is just the Epicurean argument, right? So that we can ground this even in the stoic zone time. Epicurean argument is, yeah, virtues are the most important thing because virtues are the things that tend to produce pleasure and minimize pain, right?
00:21:52
Speaker
I think the poker example is really important because you could say, well, me being a stoic sometimes leads to me losing my job or sometimes leads to me offending somebody. Those aren't good outcomes, but the poker point is a process one, which is a really compelling one, which is like, well, virtue is the kind of way of acting that over time is most likely to produce the best life. That's exactly what the appearance would say.
00:22:17
Speaker
Being virtuous is the, sometimes if you're, if you're the good person, you're going to get screwed. Sometimes if you're a good person, you stand up for your friend, you're going to get, you know, beat up by the bullies. You're going to feel some pain in the short term, but over the whole, over the life, that's the process that produces the happiest life. The one with the most pleasure and the one with the least pain. And I mean, I will get into the stoic position on that.
00:22:40
Speaker
The thing that I do want to clarify here when we get into these more theoretical debates too is that we should be careful to make a distinction between the way people talk about things and the way things is actually the case. So putting aside this argument for a while, I do think this is actually the way people talk about virtue colloquially today or character colloquially today. Hume made this argument. Hume said,
00:23:04
Speaker
Where do morals come from? Well, morals are just the things that we ascribe to people that tend to benefit us. So we praise just people because we tend to do better when we're around just people. We praise honesty because we tend to like being around honest people. So we've created these categories and we just put them on the kind of people that make us feel good. And we've created vices, selfishness, anger, revenge, greed, and we put these categories on the people that tend to make us feel bad.
00:23:33
Speaker
And so that can be a kind of a sociological claim about the way we talk about these things. And I think that's a really, really compelling sociological argument. But then there's the kind of philosophical argument about the way the world actually is. And I think it's important in this discussion of trying to keep those separate. I guess I agree with it or compelled by it as a sociological argument.
00:23:56
Speaker
But I think there's still some space. There's some wiggle room in the philosophical debate, but I am sympathetic towards this argument and the Epicurean version of it specifically. Right, right. Yeah, that's excellent.
00:24:11
Speaker
And to sort of summarize this argument with some other lines from Massimo Pilucci's piece, where he says, so to say that we want to be virtuous for virtue's sake doesn't compute. Rather, we want to be virtuous because virtue is what allows us to achieve eudaimonia.
00:24:32
Speaker
Regardless of whether we think of the latter as ataraxia, harmonious social living or pleasure, virtue is a tool, eudaimonia, the object on which we use this tool. So here he is talking about eudaimonia, the term for it.
00:24:47
Speaker
the highest human life. Sometimes it's translated as flourishing or happiness. Also, ataraxia, that's mental tranquility, mental calm. And it says, look, we're talking about virtue's the tool to get to some objects and perhaps the object's the Epicurean one, araxia, mental tranquility, or perhaps it's something else. But regardless, you need to have some other object, some other good that virtue is aimed at.
00:25:18
Speaker
And that's not to say that virtue doesn't, on the Stoic view, result in some other goods. For the Stoics, if you act virtuously, one likely will experience Adoraxia. You have the line from
00:25:35
Speaker
Epictetus, what is the goal of virtue after all, except a life that flows smoothly. Seneca says it's like the brightness of the sun that dims all lesser lights, that shatters and overwhelms all pains, annoyances, and wrongs. And look, virtue is going to have some benefits, but on the stoic view, it's not merely a tool, it's something worth pursuing and in for itself. Yeah, I mean, I'll try to summarize this.
00:26:05
Speaker
Virtue is, we desire virtue because it gets us something else. And we don't, that something else can be pleasure. It can be living, you know, it can be living socially harmoniously. As, as he said, it can be, you know, the lack of pain, whatever it is, but we, we do it for something else. If, if it didn't get us something else, we wouldn't value it. Yeah. That makes sense to me. I, I, it's co it's coherent as, it's coherent as an argument.
00:26:31
Speaker
All right, so what's Stoics say in response? Well, the first move Stoics would make is that virtue is the only thing that's unconditionally good. And from Diogenes' layer chess, we have an account of how the Stoics saw the good. He said good is
00:26:49
Speaker
In general, that from which there is something beneficial, hence virtue itself, and the good which participates in it, are spoken of in three ways.
Intrinsic Value of Virtue
00:26:59
Speaker
The good is that from which being benefited is a characteristic result. It is that according to which
00:27:06
Speaker
being benefited as a characteristic result, for example, action according to virtue. It is he by whom, and by whom means, for example, the virtuous person participates, who participates in virtue. And that's a somewhat confusing and clunky passage, but the main
00:27:26
Speaker
upshot is this idea that good is something which must characteristically benefit anyone who experiences it and hence good actions are going to be beneficial and participating with the good will be beneficial.
00:27:45
Speaker
It doesn't make sense to say that someone experienced something that was on the whole good for them, but was made worse off. That doesn't compute for the Stoics. Now, the Stoics think that
00:28:03
Speaker
Only virtue has this characteristics because indifference can be used well or badly. They do not always benefit. If you take the indifference of wealth, wealth can be a
00:28:19
Speaker
Blessing, it can be used well, but it can also cause people to make mistakes. The Stoic Musonius Rufus actually argued that he would prefer to be physically ill than exceptionally wealthy, and I don't know if that's the correct view, but it certainly does highlight that wealth all by itself.
00:28:43
Speaker
is not something that is good, but rather how it is used is good. And we can say the same thing about pleasure. Pleasure often enriches a life, but if one becomes addicted to particular pleasures, it can degrade a life as well.
00:29:04
Speaker
And that thought is not going to explain what grounds virtue, but it's the first move against this idea that virtue is supposed to be some tool which is necessary to attain some other object. What the Stoics are going to say is, well, tell us what that object is, and if it turns out that sometimes that object is harmful,
00:29:31
Speaker
In what sense can it ground the goodness of virtue? It can't is what they argue because the good must be unconditionally good.
00:29:42
Speaker
Yeah, not to obscure this with some confusion, but I'll try my best to do this. And I think, I think the first point is clear, right? Is that look, the stomachs think virtue is the thing that's always good. I was thinking while you were talking about ataraxia, the lack of pain, I was like, when could the lack of pain ever be bad?
00:30:01
Speaker
But then, you know, imagine you're sick and you don't feel pain. So you don't get checked out or, you know, somebody's treating you unfairly or poorly, and you don't feel any distress at this. So you don't notice it. There's lots of times when a kind of a distress can be helpful as a form of kind of a gentle caution or a gentle awareness of where to act. Or, you know, in the case of your appendix, bursting a kind of extreme sensation of like, you should probably wait your appendix checked out. So there, there can be times the pain benefits you or a lack of pain would be harmful.
00:30:31
Speaker
Now, just to play devil's advocate here though, I think this is going to be the stoic response or one of the lines of response, but it doesn't really get over the problem because the problem is going to be, well, how does virtue benefit you? Virtue benefits you by getting you other things that are good, right? So when you say virtue always benefits you, what you mean is virtue, we'll go back to the poker example. I think that's a really good example, right?
00:30:58
Speaker
When you say, well, you know, playing, playing, you know, going, going all in isn't necessarily good for me because, you know, sometimes that benefits me. Sometimes it doesn't. What benefits me is to know when to go all in. That's what always benefits me to understand what hand to play. That's what always benefits me. And the person just says, yeah, it always benefits you because you care about making money because it's grounded in something else. Right. And it benefits you because it's the best way to make that money.
00:31:26
Speaker
But if you said money doesn't matter, then what are you doing? You're just playing cards. And what's the point of that? What's the value of that? It's circular as valueless. So I do think the Stoics would say that, but I don't think it kind of knocks over that objection yet. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that it's useful as a first move.
00:31:48
Speaker
It's a challenge to people who hold the view that's not the stoic one, but it's not actually gonna answer what grounds the goodness of virtue. And so the next move I think that the stoics need to make is
00:32:07
Speaker
they need to answer that question. What does crown the goodness of virtue? And for the Stoics, you can say that virtue is intrinsically valuable because it's an expression of our nature. And that's a bit abstract, but here's something from Scott Aiken and William Stevens. The good of virtue as dutiful action is that it is the actor playing her part in the drama of existence unfolding as planned.
00:32:37
Speaker
There are the roles of family member, spouse, citizen, and so on, but they are all subordinates to the role of rational being in the world.
00:32:49
Speaker
So the thought is that, look, we are rational human beings, and our good is defined in terms of what we are. And that means wisely selecting what the Stoics called indifference, these things like wealth, reputation, pleasure, and so on. And
00:33:13
Speaker
the good then is going to be grounded in our nature and expressing our nature well. And I think there's a sense in which this is the
00:33:26
Speaker
primary Stoic response. I don't know if you think that the Stoics have anything else to say or they had some other important lines on this, but I think to my mind this is ultimately what the Stoics come back to in terms of grounding the value of goodness. It's going to be in their picture of who humans are, what humans are, and that's going to inform what it is to live a good human life and
00:33:55
Speaker
that provides the account of a grounding virtue.
Ethics Grounded in Human Nature and Cosmic Order
00:34:02
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's an interesting argument to throw back at the Epicureans or something too, right? Which is to say, look, what grounds pleasure as a good? So you say, look, we can do this grounding forever, right? So back to the poker example, because I think it's a really good example.
00:34:21
Speaker
What grounds money? Well, money needs to benefit us in some way. And then we get back to that question of benefit. And then we keep going, we keep going in circles around that. You need some sort of definition of what it means to benefit you. You need some sort of definition of what it means to be good for you. And this is where we get grounded in stoic teleology. So this idea that human beings have some sort of end. They have an end at an individual level. So you're human beings. So you have what is better or worse for you as humans the same way
00:34:50
Speaker
you know, any sort of animal would have what's better or worse for them. And then you have your cosmic positioning, the fact that you're an actor in a play, the fact that you're part of a broader universe and your position within that universe, not only a universe, but a faded universe, a deterministic universe, something that is unfolding according to the laws of nature.
00:35:10
Speaker
And you have a role to play in that or a piece to play in that. And the less friction you can have with that role or that position, the better. So it benefits you is alignment, living in accordance with nature, consistency. These are the terms we were talking about before. Alignment with that individual role, alignment with that cosmic role. And that's what it means to benefit you. It's not having a bunch of money.
00:35:36
Speaker
It's not having the pleasure receptor in your brain go off more often than the pain receptor does. None of these things entail benefit. None of these things mean you have a good life. What means you have a good life is a kind of individual excellence as a rational animal, as a human being, and excellently fitting in to that larger order.
00:36:01
Speaker
Now that kind of pushes the buck back a bit because you can say, well, I don't believe in an essential human nature. I don't believe in there being any sort of value in matching with the universe, but you know, we could do a whole episode on that too. I do think that's the, that's the, the move the stoics are going to make.
00:36:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And ancient Epicureans make this move too because they say that human beings are essentially beings who seek pleasure. And sure, maybe you can talk about all these other kinds of goods, but
00:36:39
Speaker
Ultimately, because of the kinds of beings we are, we seek these goods because they make us feel pleasant, happy, satiated, whatever it is. One difference between ancient ethics and many modern forms of ethics is that these more ancient forms were nearly always grounded in a picture of
00:37:01
Speaker
what the human animal is, what our nature is, whereas other forms of ethics like say utilitarianism will also often put the good outside of human beings. Namely, they'll just say that it is pleasure for the classical utilitarian, the classical hedonist and
00:37:21
Speaker
Pleasure can be sampled by all sorts of different beings and it doesn't really matter in some sense what our descriptive human nature is or whether we have one at all. All that matters is that pleasure is maximized. I have a conversation with Emily Austin where we chat about this view in a contrast with the Epicurean view. So if, yeah, one interesting distinction between different ethical systems is whether
00:37:51
Speaker
the good is something that's detached like it is for utilitarians or whether it's grounded in human nature. And if you're the kind of person who thinks, yeah, my ethical system needs to have a good account of human nature and there's nothing too mysterious about that, then you are going to find this stoic line more plausible than people who perhaps don't. I think there's almost a working
00:38:15
Speaker
assumption behind this objection and that maybe comes out more with Massimo's version, which is that the goods are just things that we're trying to produce and to have more, it's good when there are more good things and we just need tools that produce those good things. That sounds like consequentialism. What you're trying to do is promote the good, not map on an account of what it is to live a good, good human life.
00:38:41
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I agree with that. And so what we're trying to do is map onto an account of what constitutes a good human life. There's not a circularity here. What there is, is there is a grounding in physical facts about nature, about the universe.
00:39:02
Speaker
about God or a lack of God. Even the Epicureans were atheists. It's not like every ancient Greek philosophy was hyper-religious. They certainly didn't believe in a divinely ordered providential universe or something like this.
00:39:18
Speaker
And so, so the Epicurean move and the Stoic move is not a kind of circularity, just trust us. It is to then appeal to facts about the, the worlds that then ground facts about humans and tell us what it means to be a good, to live a good or worse human life, which could seem counterintuitive as you were saying to somebody who's trying to ground things outside of humans in this kind of consequentialist picture. Yeah. I thought that, I think that's really interesting.
00:39:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, so I hope that's useful. I hope that's not too esoteric. There are some practical upshots to this discussion. One, I think is that not necessarily thinking that Aiken and Stevens are making this mistake, they gave this objection and then they offered their own response to it. But this idea that virtues are sort of independent from their
00:40:09
Speaker
results or consequences I think is misleading and it's it's used though what the subjection brings out is that virtue is knowledge about how to properly select indifference how to choose between indifference and if you go back to AKS Stevens example of
00:40:28
Speaker
raising a child to be a virtuous parent is to know what indifference are important for raising a child. And it's not something that's completely detached from that venture. And indeed, the outcomes of different choices are going to give you information about whether you are acting well or not. So I think sometimes
00:40:56
Speaker
one might be tempted to say this objection in a way that sort of forgets that virtue is tightly bound to this act of choosing indifference, not merely some independent thing that's completely detached from the choices and consequences of action.
00:41:17
Speaker
Yeah. And one thing I was thinking as you were saying, that killed one thing that came to mind. So, you know, your point was that. Look, it's not the virtue is not detached from the world. It is connected with the world because it's about, you know, understanding how to, as to be the ball player, just understanding how to play ball skillfully. It's not, it's not well, totally detached from indifference or externals, but it just relates to them differently. It's kind of a performance with them.
Virtue's Intrinsic Value in Adverse Situations
00:41:45
Speaker
But another thing, another way to kind of flush out this difference is that the Stoics would be committed that there is a right way to act in a situation that only has bad outcomes.
00:41:55
Speaker
This kind of, you know, if you're forced with an impossible decision, you know, no matter what happens, you're going to get killed. You're going to get harmed. You think of some kind of extreme injustice or threats or violence or some sort of terrible decision. There's a way, you know, to act. If you act bravely, even in that last moment, let's say, you know, before you're, you're killed in war or something like this, you're acting well.
00:42:21
Speaker
in and of itself, no other information required. You're not acting well because you got something good, because you didn't get something good, some external that you'll want. You're not acting well because you displayed the kind of disposition that would tend to benefit you in other circumstances.
00:42:39
Speaker
You just had a choice and you made the right choice, even though the cards were all cards that had bad outcomes externally. And I believe that's possible. And insofar as you believe that possible, I think you're committed to the view that virtue can't be just good for something else. It has to be totally possible to be good in and of itself without consideration or grounding in anything external to it.
00:43:08
Speaker
You can make a good choice, even if it's a choice between bad external options. I don't know if you find that compelling, but that's something that I think I think a kind of counter argument to that line of reasoning we've been discussing. Yeah, yeah.
00:43:23
Speaker
I read a book once on moral tragedies. The person argued that there are these situations that you describe where there's no right action, and their conclusion was that that's just a tragedy and a sad fact about the world, which the Stokes would reject, and which I would reject, too. That seems like a very odd way to think about.
00:43:46
Speaker
a moral reality, although it's true that there are tragedies doesn't follow from that, that there are situations where every action is wrong, that seems confused. But just to summarize, wrap up.
00:43:58
Speaker
some of the practical options of this discussion. One other point that I want to emphasize is that even though indifference can be the results of our choices are information, they're not what's ultimately important for the Stoics.
Character Development Over Outcomes
00:44:11
Speaker
Stoics are always going to focus on cultivating character, this ability to select between indifference well, not what happened. In that sense, they are like the poker player who knows that they didn't
00:44:25
Speaker
they didn't play their silly hand, even if playing the silly hand would have resulted in winning that specific one. And one other aspect that I want to always highlight here is that there's pressure on aesthetics to be more principled than others. It's easy to think of exceptions to rules or rationalizing breaking principles. And if you go back to that hierarchy of goods view, you know, you might think, well, I'm in a situation where
00:44:52
Speaker
Yes, the virtuous thing is to do this, but these other lesser goods, there are so many of them that it's got to be justified to turn a blind eye or compromise more virtues in this single case. And I think that's a serious risk with
00:45:09
Speaker
the hierarchy of goods type view or these other views, which are going to say that virtue is not the ultimate good. And that's a theoretical risk on one side. And then it's a challenge to Stoics, people who find the Stoic view plausible to be principled and not be stirred by the temptations of indifference.
00:45:36
Speaker
Yeah, great point. I mean, I often think of Kant's example. For those that don't know Kant, he's an ethical philosopher who had a set of basically viewed ethics as a set of rules you couldn't break.
00:45:49
Speaker
And he has one that was, you know, don't lie. And so somebody, he was a professor and somebody came up and asked, well, what if there was like an axe murderer who came to your home and said, you know, where are your kids? I'm looking to kill them. Would you not lie? And he's like, no, I wouldn't lie. I would tell the truth. And it's always kind of, I don't know, there's this kind of admiration of someone sticking to their guns in that example.
00:46:11
Speaker
You know, maybe a stoic would lie. I don't think a stoic is so committed to honesty in that case, but the stoic is certainly closer towards the Kantian than the regular person who can find themselves kind of bending very flexible for their personal preferences. I mean, there's something really admirable about that. I think, you know, if your ethical system isn't making you do something you wouldn't normally do without it, I don't know if it's helping you very much as an ethical system. It just seems like you're just acting out of the way you would anyway, you know?
00:46:41
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Or, or you've already changed, attained Sagehood or something of this sort, which seems unlikely. I'm jealous. All right. Well, let us know what y'all think of this episode. I think you can call it a conversation. Yeah. Thanks, Gil. All right. Thanks.
00:46:59
Speaker
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00:47:29
Speaker
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00:47:52
Speaker
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