 Now I'm planning to introduce Stoic Ethics not just on the basis of that Skeptical account of it that we get in Cicero, but also on the fragments from Hellenistic philosophy of the Greek Hellenistic philosophers that you already read and their key piece of evidence on page 190 Tells us that Stoic ethics can be introduced under these eight heads And so we have another one of these kind of curriculum or syllabi of Stoic ethics we have that for their physics we have it for their logic and so we have it for their ethics and The topics and this is the order that they ought to be studied in Impulse good and bad passions virtue the goal Primary value actions and ending with encouragements and discouragements Now what I actually want to do is Because I'm not a card carrying Stoic. I'm a card carrying Epicurean so I can present Stoic Ethics however I want I'm going to start with the eight part on Encouragements and discouragements Because this will give you an idea of the radical aspects of Stoic philosophy Okay, and the first point so for example here's some radical even paradoxical claims Being made being made by them the first one is that virtue is sufficient for happiness Okay, nothing else is relevant Pleasure is irrelevant wealth is irrelevant Beauty or ugliness is irrelevant Nothing matters, but virtue Nothing else either leads to or is constitutive of happiness besides virtue or excellence or attack furthermore the virtues if There really are several of them form a unity and you can't have one virtue without having all The others so you can't for example be courageous, but not wise or be just but not self-controlled You must be wise courageous just and self-controlled if you have any virtue whatsoever Otherwise you you are purely vicious you're an ignorant cowardly Intemperate immoderate unfair person Furthermore intelligence or knowledge is sufficient for virtue if you have enough knowledge Then you are ipso facto Virtuous and if you don't have enough knowledge, then you are for that very reason Ignorant foolish vicious et cetera virtue just is a certain kind of intellectual activity in their view That is it's knowledge of what to do and what not to do and and thus of what is good and what is bad and One having knowledge of that necessarily acts in accordance with it and so is Virtuous and the primary virtue that encompasses all the other ones is Wisdom so basically the only people that have any virtue are the wise and anyone who is not wise Doesn't have any virtue, but is completely vicious Now we can attach some names to these various species and components of theory So the idea that virtue is sufficient for happiness is a virtue theory of ethics It means their entire account of ethics is based on virtue not based on Consequences or outcomes or conformity to rules or obligations or that sort of thing But has to do with a state of character of people The idea that all the virtues Form a unity and you if you have one you have them all and if you don't have any one then you don't have any of them We call the unity of virtues thesis and the idea that what virtue is is a certain kind of Intellectual activity and a specifically a kind of knowledge we call intellectualism Okay, so the Stokes hold all of those views They seem very striking and counterintuitive and offensive and elitist and so forth And so we got to figure out why they hold these views But before let's even get some more crazy stuff that they say on board here Okay, so those who are wise and so virtuous are invulnerable in their view to luck and chance Nothing that luck can do can affect the wise in any way whatsoever So the wise cannot be affected by having bad health or losing all of their money or Losing all of their friends Even or their city to a tyranny or anything like that because none of that can affect Whether they are wise or not and thus whether they are virtuous or not and thus whether they are happy and Successful and prosperous or not all of those things depend only on the condition of their own mind in being wise and so Contrary to what Aristotle says in the opening of Nicomachean ethics that we read The Stoics hold that the wise person can be virtuous while and thus happy While being tortured on the rack by a tyrant Okay, and some stoic say that they'll actually smile and be happy while that's happening and others will say well They might groan and cry, but they're still happy and successful Okay, so even whatever miserable Circumstances that are outside of their control you can imagine imposing on them have no Affect whatsoever on their success or happiness because that is entirely a matter of their own virtue and their virtue is a matter of a condition of their mind and whether they have wisdom and furthermore the wise person becomes like a god in this respect and Rivals God for happiness the happiest God is Equivalent in their happiness to even the unfortunate But wise person who has to commit suicide because they have so many bodily diseases and impairments and poverty and so forth That wise person is equivalent in happiness to the highest God enjoying Whatever else could possibly happen because the wisdom is exactly the same and the wisdom is the Sufficient condition for the virtue which is the sufficient condition for the happiness on the other hand all those who are Not wise and therefore lack virtue and therefore lack happiness are all equally miserable, so my example anybody who's unfair towards their Roommate is just as bad as Hitler or the cruelest tyrant and worse dictator. It's all Vice if you look at the state of their character in the state of their mind. It's equally miserable, okay, so all of those counterintuitive and almost ridiculous sounding paradoxical views They in fact hold now does anybody want to clarify any of those before we get into how they reach those conclusions Okay, so let's talk first about the primary impulse Because that was also the starting point with Epicureanism, right? What is the primary impulse according to Epicurean's? What? Pleasure, yes, and what does it mean to say that the primary impulse is for pleasure? Exactly, so and give me examples of everything Yes animals human beings so we can look at if we can study infant psychology We can study animal psychology and we'll find in every case that their primary impulse is avoiding pain and getting pleasure According to the Epicurean theory the Stoics reject that theory and say that the primary impulse of every animal is actually for its own preservation and survival and So animals are congenial to themselves not alien and this is why they repel that which is Injurious and pursue that which is congenial to them not for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of self preservation and Developing into the kind of thing that they actually are and so the Stoics appeal to animal and child Psychology to support their account of the impulse The primary impulse so they say that it's clear all living things so seek self Preservation they all have self love and self awareness Initially just of their body, but in the case of human beings you have an awareness not just of your body But of your cognitions of your thoughts of your feelings and you have ownership of all of these you think of them all is belonging to you and you want to preserve these and All animals have this kind of self awareness in their view and all know how to move their limbs in appropriate ways Now this is so even if they're not conscious of these states as infants and animals are not and it's only in the case of humans that this impulse can get corrupted and we can do self-destructive things or things that imperil our Self are our survival or preservation as the kind of things we are and They think it's just ridiculous to think that nature would ever create an animal that isn't doesn't have as a basic basis self-preservation and doesn't furthermore have what it needs in order to survive and So they contradict the view that it's that it's pleasure They say that pleasure is just a byproduct that happens to a company living things when they join what's Congenial so if I'm surviving if I have bodily integrity then I enjoy that but that doesn't mean I'm That I want bodily integrity for the sake of pleasure Like it would be painful if I had my hand cut off But it's not because it would be painful that I don't want that to happen I don't want that to happen because I want to preserve all parts of my body in a functional working order How they how they are if they accord with nature and if I have the capabilities that nature's Given me the fact that it would hurt is just a byproduct of the problem that that it would it would create for me and They observe how children and animals will undergo pain in order to do things the right and proper way so Children struggle to walk and stand upright and they actually fall and so forth while they're learning to do this Even though it's painful they do it because they're trying to preserve a natural Condition of of being a human and they have this sort of instinct and impulse in order to be a bipedal erect Kind of animal and they will undergo lots of pain including pain of instruction and so forth in order to get that Now I've said a lot about the body, but once certain beings acquire a reason and There's some arbitrary age where this happens like 7 or 14 or something then your primary impulse to preserve Yourself becomes focused on your reason and not your body You're still you still want to preserve your body, especially to the extent that that helps you Live in accordance with nature in other ways But it's really your reason that you're concerned about preserving and this is why things like dimension so forth are so Terrible because the thought that you would you could lose the ability to reason lose your memory lose your ability to think lose your ability To recognize your friends and family and so forth Suddenly you start identifying with that those kind of powers More and more and you want to live in accordance with cultivating and maintaining those kind of powers become What's important to you? And you will undergo pains in order to preserve that concept of self identity and Self preservation. Okay, so that is their account of the primary impulse and there is a big Empirical debate as it were between the Stoics and Epicureans on how we should really interpret this behavior is the cause of it Pursuit of pleasure minimization of pain or is it really trying to preserve bodily integrity and self Preservation and you can and you can develop different philosophies depending on which of those standpoints you have on That the psychological issues Okay, now the accounts of good and bad Recall that for Aristotle There's a whole range of things that contribute to happiness that we call good Impulse or drive of human being because I think that if for example the sexual pleasure was not involved in the procreation then the most probably even you know the Human species you know would not be so spread in this whole large number So I want to say that this is the preservation of this species and everybody everybody engages in sexual Intercourse for the sake of pleasure, and that's the only way to explain why it happens But a lot of people have a sexual intercourse in order to create other Humans and the and the pleasure is just kind of a nice side effect that comes along with that I mean this isn't how I think about Sex, but lots of people do not a particularly enjoyable thing But you want to you want to preserve the species you want to preserve another being like you you want to live vicariously And so you produce children Now now I think it's I think it's just false to say that people are doing that Or it begs the question to to say they must all be doing that just for the sake of pleasure In fact, it causes a lot of pain if you think about it Right crying babies never sleeping so forth. I mean I look at my colleagues that have had children wearing crazy Okay, but no this is naturally what we should do this is in accordance with nature and so we undergo these pains and these sacrifices and The pain of being kept awake all night and so on because that's the natural right thing to do Now epicureans will say well, that's really the only That's that's that's the only point, but that's Stoics won't agree with that and would not would not see that point to you Okay And there are a lot of people I think they're wrong But they'd say that you should only have sex if it's for the sake of procreation I mean, I don't even think that the Stoics can to them can be attributed that Ridiculous position, but there are lots of people that hold Such a position and so those people definitely don't hold that Hey, if it feels good do it and if they really thought that the end of it was pleasure Then what would be the objection to premarital sex or contraception and things like that, right? Those things all presuppose that pleasure is the point of it Okay, but not everybody agrees with those things Okay, so let's let's figure out what we mean by good and bad The most controversial part of their Theory They don't accept that everything that Aristotle says is good wealth health Having a good fatherland having a noble upbringing all that's a good as in addition to pleasure bodily integrity Having lots of experiences And intellectual things in addition to that no not all those things are good only a limited class of these are good But good is defined as in one sense that from which something beneficial Comes another That which is in accordance with the nature of a rational being and the Bab is the opposite of those Something out of accordance with that or from which something detrimental comes and they make a distinction between what's valuable And what's good? Okay, so there's two kinds of valuable things Things that are valuable in accordance with nature. That is they are intrinsically valuable They they are good and only good and can only produce goods and second Things are valuable which bring about what is in accordance with nature bring about what is intrinsically valuable even if those things? aren't intrinsically valuable Okay, so Money is not intrinsically valuable in order for it to be valuable I have to exchange it for something like food, but food even in itself isn't intrinsically valuable The pleasure I get from eating you might say is intrinsically valuable stokes won't agree with that But suppose we agree that the pleasure that comes from relieving my hungry hunger is valuable Then we can agree that food and money are only instrumentally valuable towards that end. They are goods and of themselves They're valuable towards getting a good thing now in the stoic view even pleasure itself Can is not an intrinsic good? Sometimes it's a very bad thing. It can be good if it brings about something that's in accordance with nature Ie virtue, but it can also Be bad now their theory of indifference recall the view that only What is moral is good all other things besides morality are indifferent and indistinguishable from one another only virtue and vice are Distinguishable from each other in the strict sense Though there can be a ranking among these other things Okay, so recall my examples of things that were indifferent to because they cause no impulse whatsoever Like whether you have an even or odd number of hairs on your head makes no difference and causes no impulse Or maybe you notice this so if you have if you have a hand sitting on your lap is your small Little finger extended or is it bent? Right nobody knows because nobody cares It's something that we're indifferent to because we just don't care Okay, how many of you noticed I asked you to last time whether when you got up from your seat You started on your left or your right foot. I asked you to notice that does anybody did anybody follow my Nobody ever does but did anybody happen to follow my Instructions on that okay. No, and that's because it doesn't cause any impulse You can't see any way that it connects to anything that matters to you. Okay, but there's other things That we should also be indifferent to but they do cause an impulse one way or another Okay, group a things like life Hell pleasure beauty strength wealth reputation nobility of your birth All of these things you might think you might have noticed like if I said hey, how many of you come from noble Parents or how how beautiful do you think you are that you may have given some further thought to And now the Stoics are going to have a way of getting you to think of those as being as being indifferent to those Those aren't good things or bad things. There are things you should be indifferent to But there's another class of things that we're indifferent to and they're basically the contrary of all the things in the first class Death disease pain ugliness weakness poverty low reputation low birth and so on Okay, so none of those things in a or b is good or bad at all And you should be indifferent towards everyone They could be good Health could be good Like if health enabled you to do something good for somebody else like to benefit the poor say and so manifest You know generosity and justice then your help would in that case be a good thing but say that You were going to use it to Shoot people innocent people at school Okay, then it would be better if you didn't have health and you were in fact crippled and couldn't Couldn't move couldn't operate a firearm It would be good and better for you not better in the general scheme of things are better For the people that would be the victims It would be better for you to not have health in that case In fact, it would be better for you to have death in that case better for you Okay, and Similarly we can run this argument with money if the money helps you get an education or helps you Help the poor or something then it's a good thing if it helps you buy weapons of mass destruction Then it's actually a bad thing for you Okay, and so since every one of these things can produce something either good or bad Then they cannot fit the definition of what is good, which is something that always produces Something good so they can't be goods or Bats it depends on The situation from the moral standpoint, they're indifferent So I can't tell you whether it's good or bad for you to live or to be in pleasure or pain or to be weak Or to be strong or whatever because I don't know anything about the state of your virtue Right those things could be good because they could be instruments if they are being used to create a wise Virtuous person, but if they're being used to support a an ignorant vicious miserable person Then those things are bad and their opposites would be valuable Okay, so any questions about that doctrine now, okay Just one last thing about this, but we can say though these are all Indifference we can recognize that we prefer a over B Right. There is an impulse towards one and a repulsion Away from the other that doesn't make it good or make it bad make the other set bad, but but it's To have a descriptively adequate theory we have to acknowledge that we in general prefer one set over the other That doesn't that doesn't matter Morally because what whether it should be chosen or considered valuable will differ depending on the individual cases, but we have We're not going to call these like Aristotle does goods and we're not going to call these bads or evils We're going to call them preferred and disperfered in difference. All right. Any questions about that? There will be questions about that later Now Selection Okay, we want to engage in appropriate actions and The initial appropriate action for us to engage in is to preserve oneself in one's natural Constitution because that's our primary impulse. So we choose lots of things in order to do that But also to select what is in accordance with nature and to reject the opposite What is not in accordance with nature or what is contrary to? Nature and what we want to do is get into a condition where we can make this selection Constantly and all and in every choice in every decision that comes before us. We choose the one that is in accordance with nature and we reject the opposite one and When we start doing this then we start valuing this ability to select the right things in accordance with nature So choose wealth when that's good choose Poverty when that's good Choose power when that would be a good thing to have choose lack of power when it's not choose to have a job when that's good choose unemployment when that's good and The wise are those who can make those selections among the indifferent things always in a way that is in accordance with nature and thus is using them instrumentally towards Goods towards virtues and that is why Why is people are happy because they don't get confused and make the wrong selection when they when they should have Not taken that job, you know Gas chamber operator or whatever, you know, yes, I needed a job and it was the only thing that paid You should not have you should not have taken it the wise Constantly make those decisions that seem obvious. Oh, you're having a job is always a good thing. No, it's actually not The wise person understands the difference between things that are actually good in these other things that are only instrumentally valuable for them Okay, now they're a doctrine of Pathé eye or pathway Okay, affections passions or emotions the relevant Greek term path a literally means something like suffering or disease and the English word pathology Comes from this okay pathology is a determination of what somebody is suffering from or what disease They're afflicted with but this is the same word for things like affections emotions and passions Okay, so it's quite it's quite problematic that all of those terms you might think emotions are really great things Okay, Greeks are inclined to because of the term that they use for them to think they're really bad things and really horrible Things can now we might have we might think there are good emotions like love and so forth that we want to promote And I'll say something about those in due course, but in general hathay are Irrational movements of the mind or excessiveness of our impulses Okay, they're they're where we're getting carried away from rational thought and from wise thought and being affected by things Okay, so in emotion or an affection or a passion is not when you're acting and choosing and thinking about something It's when you're being affected by something that's happened to you Okay, and so the Stoics want to minimize You suffering from these things that happen to you and make you so upset and They have a system for doing this by identifying how each kind of emotion is actually the result of a cognition of a thought that you're having they realize that What upsets us is not the objects that are out there. It's not my mother that upsets me It's the thoughts that I have about my mother that upset me Right, or it's it's not this the fact that I'm a poor philosophy professor and everybody's making more all of all of my Childhood rivals are making so much more money than me. That's not the problem It's my thinking about that that I really wish I was I had more wealth or something And I'm really miserable that I don't that's the problem. I'm suffering from my thoughts About it not from the objects themselves In fact objects themselves can't if you if you take on the stoic view cannot affect you in any way Okay, and so you can actually eliminate all forms of suffering due to Emotions so what we do is we classify all Emotions or passions or affections According to four different species of them and we explain how they are all false judgments or false cognitions about things Yeah just a clarification Emotion rather seen as something that are individualistic and Because it's considered motion in motion or an interaction between Something external and internal as I just seen that coming. Well, there's there's an external stimulus from it So for example, if I'm on a boat and I see a massive wave coming at it It looks like it's gonna overwhelm the ship. Okay, then that is that is a A stimulus to an emotion, but see what I can do in that situation It's actually my thoughts about it that will bother me So if I have a thought there is an enormous wave crashing over this ship that I'm standing on the deck of and that's a really bad thing Then I will become upset and I will suffer from fear of that wave But if I think if I let the intervening thought be yeah There's a wave crashing over this, but that's not such a bad thing all that to do is you know Kill me or destroy this ship or something, but that's not a bad thing because living is not necessarily a good thing My virtue is a good thing, but this wave isn't gonna affect whether I'm a virtuous wise person or not So so therefore I remain calm and unaffected by that and that's a better thing to do in that situation Then to start worrying and crying about this big wave that's gonna overwhelm the ship Okay, what I should rationally do is okay. Well, if there's some way of Battening down the hatches and so forth to make it safer And then if I determined that it would be good for this ship because not every ship shouldn't make it to every harbor That's all an instrumental thing about whether it would be good or not if it's carrying relief supplies for innocent war victims Then it might be a good thing if it's carrying arms to support both sides of a civil war, then it's a bad thing But let's suppose it's a good it's a good thing And so I want it to happen then I will take rational actions in that situation to make that happen Not having become overwhelmed by an emotion of fear All right, and we can and so we can explain how every single emotion is a result of a false judgment And we can do this according to a grid It's a false judgment that something either good or bad is either present or absent So if I have a false judgment that something is present to me, and I think it's good Then this they say is the emotion of pleasure because that's a false judgment. So I think that That I'm a really good-looking person I think that's really good and that matters then I might take pleasure in thinking that That's all of course totally confused being good-looking is not a Good thing at best. It's a preferred indifferent thing But I could suffer from this emotion of pleasure if I had that false cognition or that something is Absent that's good like it'd be really good if I had a lot more money and I don't and so I desire to have More money that's all confused because of course money isn't a good thing Just as easily be a bad thing, but if I was confused about that Like almost everyone you know is confused about that then they will suffer from a desire They will suffer from an emotion of desire and they'll have these kind of ambitions and so forth related to that that's all very unhealthy things for them to experience and Distress or pain the Thinking there's something bad present to me my poverty or my ugliness or my my ill Upringing or the state of my country that I'm living in right now Okay, I might think that's all really bad and is bad for me and all of those false judgments about those based on that false Value system will cause me to suffer this emotion of distress and fear I've already been through an example with that thinking that something bad is Going to happen. It's not currently happening, but it's going to happen later. Okay, and Then we can go through every single one of these emotions and then there are a range maybe an infinite number of Sub emotions related to each of those which we can define so for example if we If we define a desire as irrational striving we can distinguish that all kinds of species of that want sexual love hatred quarrel someness anger and So on can be defined as kinds of desire anger for example is a burning desire for revenge on one seems to have done an injustice okay and It has to do with me making a false judgment that Somebody's wronged me and I don't yet have revenge on them So I have this burning desire to have it and that's called anger. I want to inflict pain for pain Now that's something I'm suffering from anger is a painful emotion that we should that we should in their view Totally eliminate and so it's interesting how you would define for example anger as a kind of desire or Dread or shame as a kind of fear Okay, and we can we can identify all the forms of suffering that are caused by these emotions and Pathologies and we can furthermore come up with a way to eliminate them by removing the false judgments that intervene between Objects themselves and the subject who suffers from them in between that is the sort of screen of thoughts about those things And so if we can alter the thoughts that one has about those things That is alter the whole system of value judgments, then we can eliminate every one of those forms of suffering Okay, and now I won't spend any time on it right now, but they do Recognize some good emotional states Okay, so there is if if I have something Present to me and I think it's good and it actually is good then that will cause a state called joy so for example if I think that I have the virtue of courage and I think that's good and it is good Then I will experience joy from that and that's a good thing That's a good that that's a necessary outcome of making that correct value judgment Okay, or if it's true that There's some good that's absent to me I'm not yet a wise person, but it would be good if I were a wise person Then there is a rational state there called wishing or wanting or something that is Legitimate to feel and that one should feel that doesn't mean along with you if you don't if you don't feel that Okay, now the So we can go into detail on all of these But what I actually want to do and and I've given you details on the handout So one side of that handout is a synopsis of their entire theory of emotions all the bad ones and all the species of them with all of their definitions and then also with the corresponding good Emotional states so that that one Folio gives you The synopsis of their entire theory of emotion there now what I want to talk about for the last couple of minutes is The other side of that which gives a synopsis of their theory of virtue Okay, virtues are the essence of their moral theory. They are always good So wisdom always produces good outcomes never bad ones You always want somebody to be wise you never think it would be better if they if that person was less wise Damn if only they were less foolish the world or if they were more foolish the world would be a better place a thought never had by a rational person and They also recognize four kinds of virtues intelligence justice courage and self-control Each of these virtues has a specific object. So intelligence Allows us to make the appropriate acts justice the appropriate distributions Courage standing firm in the appropriate situations and self-control dealing with your impulses correctly and As with the emotions there are several species of each of these virtues. So for example intelligence, there's deliberative Excellence there's good calculation quick-wittedness discretion and so on for courage. There's endurance confidence high-mindedness Cheerfulness, etc. And each of these has a corresponding vice. So intelligence and unintelligence justice and injustice courage and cowardice self-control and wantonness or lack of self-control and Each of these Virtues as I said at the outset is a kind of knowledge and can be defined as a kind of knowledge So in general intelligence, which is like the master virtue since they have an intellectualist theory of virtue is knowledge of what one is to do and not to do and What it doesn't matter if you do or don't do And improvements is the opposite ignorance of what is good and what is bad and what is indifferent Justice knowledge of the distribution of the proper value to each person giving each person what they deserve injustice ignorance of what each person deserves and What they how it should be distributed courage knowledge of what is truly terrible and what is not Terrible and what is indifferent cowardice ignorance of the very same thing and Each subspecies will be defined