 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Like a Rolling Stone – Stoic Ethics I'd like you to imagine that you're walking along a railway line. You're just out for a stroll listening to some philosophy podcasts on a portable audio device of your choosing. Suddenly, your blood runs cold. An innocent child is playing on the rails, and a train is bearing down on it at great speed, too fast to slow down in time. Without a thought for your own safety, you rush forward instinctively, snatch the child in your arms and leap aside with seconds to spare. The train hurtles obliviously onward, but onlookers have witnessed your brave act. You are hailed as a hero in the local community, and use the brief weeks of fame to encourage your admiring public to listen to this great podcast you've been enjoying lately. It's a story with a happy ending. But does it have an unhappily confused middle section? We spoke of your bravery, the heroism of your split-second decision to save the child. But we also said you acted instinctively, without pausing to weigh up the costs and benefits of your perilous undertaking. If this is right, why should we give you credit for what you have done? You acted, we might say, automatically, and your dash towards the child was no less inevitable than the oncoming rush of the train. You are, it would seem, just the kind of person who reacts that way in these child-threatened-by-train situations. Sure, it's lucky for the child that you happened to be there, but it's not as if you had any choice in the matter. You didn't pause to choose, and if you had had time to pause, you wouldn't seriously have considered letting the child be crushed anyway. How can we reasonably praise you and write admiring newspaper articles about your bravery, given that in this situation that confronted you, you quite literally could not have done otherwise? In these podcasts, I've been trying not to derail things by introducing too many technical terms, all those words ending in "-ism." But in this case, the train of our thought will have trouble leaving the station without a couple of terms like these in our trunk. Sorry if this metaphor is speeding out of control. So, two "-isms," determinism and compatibilism. Determinism is the idea that everything that happens is, wait for it, determined. All things are unavoidable, or, if you prefer, everything that can happen does happen. Why might you think that? Well, there are various reasons. We already saw one kind of determinism in discussing Aristotle's infamous sea-battle argument, according to which the truth of propositions about the future makes future events inevitable. Another kind is what you might call causal determinism, the view that causes necessitate their effects, and that everything is caused. If this is true, then there is an unbreakable chain of cause and effect stretching back into the past, which guarantees both that the present could not have been otherwise, and that there is only one possible future. As we saw last time, the Stoics accepted this view of the world. Determinism deepens the problem of your heroics and the train. We said that if it was impossible for you to do anything other than what you did, then it's hard to see why you should get any credit for it. Similarly, if I cannot help, say, pushing you in front of an oncoming train, if I literally cannot do anything else, then how can I really be blamed? In short, if determinism is true, how can anyone be morally responsible for anything? That brings us to our second ism, compatibilism. This is simply the view that freedom, or moral responsibility, or something along these lines, is, after all, compatible with determinism. In other words, a compatibilist thinks that even in a deterministic world, people should still be praised and blamed for what they do, not as a convenient fiction, but because, as the Stoics put it, their actions really are up to them. Again, this is an ism accepted by the Stoics. The early Stoic Chrysippus in particular devoted careful attention to the question of how actions can be up to us, even if those actions are fated to happen by inevitable chains of cause and effect, which are carrying out the irresistible providence of God. It's worth emphasizing that Chrysippus and the other Stoics are really serious about this. For them, fate is, like these podcasts, without any gaps. You cannot escape it in even the tiniest detail. So the idea is not simply that, for instance, whatever Oedipus does, he will wind up killing his father and marrying his mother, just as the prophecy says. The idea is that even the actions Oedipus takes along the way to that outcome are also fated. Fate determines not only Oedipus's patricide, his excessive mother-love, and his poking out his own eyes, but also which eye he will poke out first, which clothespin he will use to do it, and what he will have had for breakfast on the fateful day. For the Stoics, every day is fateful, as is every action, no matter how trivial. And yet, as I say, they insist that Oedipus's actions are up to him. It is up to him what to have for breakfast to murder the man at the crossroads to take out his eyes. This might seem to you a paradox, but it's worth exploring how the Stoics defended their position, not least because many philosophers nowadays also endorse compatibilism. Chrysippus should probably be credited with the first sophisticated defence of this ism. In essence, he argued that it will be up to an agent how to act, so long as the action flows from the desires and character of that agent. If you push a cylinder, he said, it will roll in a straight line. If you push a cone, it will roll in a circle. Likewise, the same situation will provoke different reactions in different men. Oedipus's murder of his father was in large part due to the pride and temper of Oedipus himself. A meaker man would not have committed murder at the crossroads. It is precisely in this sense that it was up to Oedipus whether or not to kill, and the same goes for all the actions for which we are morally responsible. If an event is not up to me in this way, then on the Stoic view I am not responsible for it. If I threw Chrysippus out a window and he landed on a man and killed him, Chrysippus would insist that this murder was not up to him, and that he should not be blamed for it. He would also insist that the actions that are up to us are not, strictly speaking, necessary. As we saw a couple of episodes back, Chrysippus held that possibility is basically a matter of what a thing is capable of, but that possibility can be removed by external forces. It's possible for a piece of wood to burn, even if it doesn't burn. But if the wood is at the bottom of the sea, the water eliminates this possibility. We can now see what he was after. With this definition in hand, Chrysippus can say that it is possible for me to perform an action or not, so long as it is something I am physically capable of. Normally, it is possible for me to walk or refrain from walking, but if I am tied to my chair, then it is no longer up to me whether I walk or not, and no one can blame me for not going to put out the garbage. This nifty interweaving of logic and ethics is entirely characteristic of Chrysippus and of the Stoics generally. It means that they can have their cake and eat it, holding on to both determinism and contingency in the world. But make no mistake, everything you do is still necessary in a different sense in that it is made inevitable by the causal chains of fate. The later Platonist author Plotinus complained that the Stoic view makes humans out to be little more than stones being rolled along, rather ironic in light of Chrysippus' analogy of the cylinder and cone. Though the Stoics would admit that we are guaranteed to do whatever divine fate decrees for us, they point out that part of what is fated is our own internal attitude and character, which in itself helps to explain the things we do. As Zeno and Chrysippus put it, we are like a dog tied to a rolling cart. It is up to us whether to go along with the dictates of fate cheerfully or with much whining and resistance, but we will go along either way. The sage is the man who always goes along cheerfully. As you'll remember, the sage is an ideal figure who never makes any mistakes so perfect is his wisdom. This is as true in the ethical sphere as in the sphere of non-ethical judgments. In fact, it is ethical judgments the Stoics had especially in mind when they argued for the possibility of this perfect sage. Whatever the world throws at the Stoic sage, he will react appropriately, in terms of both belief and action. Only the sage is truly virtuous according to the Stoics because true virtue means being not just fairly reliable, but infallible in acting well. Furthermore, the Stoics follow Socrates in claiming that nothing but wisdom and virtue is truly valuable. They adopt the Socratic point that things like wealth, health, and political power are just as capable of aiding evil as furthering goodness. In fact, they seem to go even further than Socrates did. Socrates, at least as Plato presents him, said that wealth, health, and so on are indeed good but only when used wisely. The Stoics, in a slight but crucial change, insist that wealth, health, and so on always remain indifferent, neither good nor bad. Any good that attaches to them is derived only from virtue, and they have no value in themselves. Here I think we can detect a family resemblance between Stoicism and Cynicism. This is not surprising when we recall that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, supposedly associated with the Cynic philosopher, Kratis. The Cynic philosopher's faith in himself as utterly self-reliant, clothed only in virtue, finds an echo in this Stoic idea that all is indifferent save for virtue itself. Now I know what you're thinking. Why weren't the Stoics living in wine jars and living like dogs like the Cynics did? Good point, but I haven't told you the whole story yet. The Stoics agree with the Cynics that everything apart from virtue and wisdom is indifferent, having no genuine intrinsic value. Yet for them all indifference are not created equal. Some are to be preferred, others not. Health is a good example. It is not intrinsically good because it fails the test Plato applied to causes in his Phaedo. A really good thing would not give rise to what is bad. And health clearly can help cause bad things, as for instance when health belongs to a tyrant. Nonetheless, the Stoics argue, it is still eminently reasonable to prefer health to illness, all else being equal. So the sage will choose health, he will prefer it, unless this choice would run afoul of the demands of virtue. This position led to a rupture within early Stoicism. Chrysippus held to the theory of preferred indifference, and this would become the standard Stoic position. But his contemporary, Aristo of Chios, insisted that an indifferent should really be indifferent. If health is not good, then one cannot reasonably prefer it. Chrysippus, according to Aristo, was smuggling in a lesser kind of intrinsic value for health. It is indeed good, it's just that its goodness can be trumped by the goodness of virtue. That sounds like a powerful objection. But before we become dissident Stoics like Aristo, we should reflect that Chrysippus has an equally powerful counterargument. He can say that something is only really good if it is required for our happiness. And health simply isn't required. How could it be if we will sometimes be happier by deliberately avoiding health, as when we volunteer for a suicidal military expedition to save our city? If you'd prefer a more up-to-date example, but not too up-to-date, consider yourself going to a silent film festival. You'd prefer to see a Buster Keaton movie, but none is playing. Still, you won't let this ruin the festival for you. You'll be content to see a Charlie Chaplin picture, and equally happy with the festival as a whole. The Stoic sage is able to retain his implacable attachment to happiness, because he understands that all is for the best, since it is ruled by Providence, and because he unerringly knows what he should do in each situation. But now we might worry that the Stoics are telling us very little about what the sage would in fact do. They've told us he will prefer some indifferent things, like health, but we can't be exactly sure when he would give up on these preferred items. If the Stoics' advice boils down to, do whatever the ideal sage would do, that will be pretty disappointing, given that none of us have ever met an ideal sage, nor are we likely to. But wait, there's more. Remember that, for the Stoics, nature is in some sense identical with God. It is not so surprising, then, to discover that the Stoics find another point of agreement with the cynics, saying that the good and happy life is the life lived in accordance with nature. In a more rare moment of agreement with the Epicureans, the Stoics make reference to the behavior of animals and small children in explaining this idea. Even such irrational beings, they say, have a sense of what is appropriate for them. The Greek word for appropriate is oikeion, and relates to the Greek word for home. When a baby nozzles after milk, or a lion tears into its prey, it is, we might say, right at home, looking to acquire what is appropriate for it. We go astray by turning away from what is natural and appropriate, for instance by desiring that statues be built in our honor. Of course, if this is to be a basis for ethics, we will need to inquire more deeply into our natures, but at least we can now understand how it is that the sage achieves such perfect ethical judgment. He knows his own nature, and the nature of other things, of the cosmos itself. His beliefs, his desires, are thus aligned with the providential divine order. There's more than a hint of Aristotle here, insofar as the Stoics ground their understanding of ethics in nature. A healthy dose of Plato can be detected as well. Remember the providential ordering deity of the Tamiya. But something else divides the Stoics from Aristotle and from Plato, at least in some of his moods. This is their insistence that only the ideal sage is virtuous. They pull no punches here, claiming that a non-sage can perform no virtuous actions. After all, someone who is not a sage is, by definition, not virtuous. This lands them with yet another problem. Being a sage requires total perfection, immunity to falsehood in belief, and weakness in action. That doesn't really look like an attainable goal. If the world is divided into fools and sages, it looks as if I'm bound to remain a fool, in which case I may as well have a good time. I can't have virtue, so perhaps I should settle for good old-fashioned pleasure. Pass the wine and call in the flute girls. Or if I hesitate to become a debauched libertine, I could seek a more refined type of hedonism by leaving the Stoic porch and calling in at Epicurus' garden. So clearly the Stoics need to say something to explain why some fools are better than others and how I could make progress toward sagehood. For this reason, they developed the notion of befitting actions, in Greek katheikonta. Respecting one's parents, for instance, or paying a debt is befitting. In general, a person who performs such actions is better than one who doesn't, even if they are not sages and do not perform the actions out of genuine virtue. That doesn't mean you should do these actions in every circumstance. To borrow an example from Plato, if someone lends me an axe and then goes insane, that's a debt I probably shouldn't repay. But in general, the strategy of choosing befitting actions allows us to achieve a kind of second-best virtue. Not the unerring perfection of the sage, but the dutiful and occasionally misplaced rectitude of the upstanding citizen. As Stoicism developed, increasing attention was also paid to the question of how we can improve ourselves, even if becoming sages is a distant prospect at best. Panatius, a Stoic of the 2nd century BC, seems to have paid particular attention to this issue. Seneca quotes him responding to the question of whether a sage would ever fall in love. The answer given by Panatius is, in effect, who knows, but for non-sages like you and me, it's probably not such a great idea. Panatius urges you to reflect on your own character and seek out a walk of life that will suit you. This already seems a big step away from the nearly cynic attitudes of early Stoics like Zeno and Chrysippus, for whom the main point seemed to be that ethics is an all-or-nothing game. But a more tolerant attitude towards those who are merely making progress fits well with Chrysippus' stance in his argument with Aristo. As we saw, Aristo thought that the unique value of virtue meant that nothing else was even worth valuing. When Chrysippus sides with what looks like common sense, and allows us to prefer things like health over things like illness, he's vindicating a judgment even we fools can share. With these obvious and undeniable preferences, all of us seem to have some instinctual awareness of what is natural, an instinct that, as the Stoics emphasized, we can observe even in animals and children. Another beautiful example of later Stoic reflection on the question of moral progress comes from Hierocles, who lived in the 2nd to 1st centuries BC, and who, incidentally, laid great emphasis on the fact that animals do seem to understand what is appropriate to them. For instance, he pointed out that horned animals instinctively understand how to use these natural weapons. But the best bit of Hierocles is the one where he explains to us how we can make ourselves better people. Everyone, he says, naturally places value on himself. Imagine yourself, then, within a small circle, and then extend it to encompass your friends and family, drawing them within the circle of value. Even better would be to draw your circle around your fellow citizens. But best of all is to draw it around all humans out to the furthest foreigner. This arresting image of moral development leaves slightly unclear whether we are meant to see ourselves as actually united with others in some way, or simply to include them within our sphere of affections. But whatever the point, Hierocles is showing how Stoic ideas about nature and appropriateness can be the basis for a powerful, even uplifting, ethical attitude. In this, Hierocles was setting a trend that would continue into the Roman Empire. The development of Stoicism sees the school turning ever more towards ethical concerns, ethical development, and concrete reflection on what Stoicism means for us in our everyday lives. The later so-called Roman Stoics show that this is a philosophy with something to say to all of us, whether slave or emperor. We'll be looking at three of the Roman Stoics very soon, but first I want to do some reflecting of our own on the question of how we got from the early Stoicism of Zeno and Chrysippus to the later Stoicism of the Empire. For this, there's no more appropriate person than a man who did as much as anyone to put Stoicism, and Hellenistic philosophy as a whole, within the circle of historian's interest. So join me for an interview with David Sedley on the development of the Stoic school next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.