Submit your questions about Stoic ethics
Celebrating the one-year anniversary of Stoic Ethics: The Basics
August 26 marks the one-year anniversary of Stoic Ethics: The Basics by Christopher Gill and Brittany Polat. I can’t believe it’s already been one year! Thank you so much to all of you who have supported our work. If you’re not familiar with the book, here’s a summary of it and some short excerpts. Basically, we wanted to create a short but rigorous introduction to the most important aspects of Stoic ethics. Main topics we cover include virtue, indifferents, nature, development, sociability, and our relationship with the environment.
If you have read the book, we would greatly appreciate you leaving a rating and review on Amazon or GoodReads. Not only does the rating help us as authors, it also helps people discover our book and learn about the ethical side of Stoicism. Please consider giving the book a quick rating and review if you have not done so already!
And to celebrate this one-year milestone, we’d like to invite everyone to submit questions about Stoic ethics. What would you like to know about ethics and Stoicism? Feel free to ask about theory, practice, or whatever else is on your mind. Chris and I will compile questions and provide our answers in a post at the end of August. You can submit questions either by posting a comment below or by using the private message feature on Substack.
Thank you again for supporting our book by sharing with others or leaving a review on Amazon. I look forward to seeing some interesting questions/comments about Stoic ethics!
This book is good. Not just good, it is so great that I keep it near and refer to it often. I underline important passages, but now my copy is almost entirely underlined. I do still have questions though, so I am very grateful for this opportunity. I apologize if any of this is already covered in the text, but here it goes. These all relate to how and when we take action as Stoics.
1) We hear so much about the only thing in our control are our opinions, desires, choices, etc, and everything else is indifferent. At the extreme of this we get Stoic detachment where tragedy (or good things) unfold in our lives and we bear it virtuously and with good character, but don't act on events because it involves externals or indifferents. Is action that we take to effect our lives then dependent on preferred indifferents? Or, how exactly does virtue compel us to act when virtue seems to be an internal state that doesn't rely on the outcomes of our actions?
2) I would love some clarification on the Stoic view of evil and what should be done about it. We know virtue is the only good, and so vice is the only evil. Still, Stoicism asserts that people only choose vice because of ignorance of the true good. What then is the Stoic response to evil acts of others? Forgive and forget? Dismiss it because it is all external and indifferent? Or do we act against evil according to our respective roles in life?
3) Last one! This goes a bit beyond ethics, but the ancient Stoics believed that everything is fated or pre-determined. If that is the case, to what extent do humans have agency and the ability to steer the course of our lives and why bother trying?
Sorry this got a bit long. Thanks again for the opportunity to ask and thank you for your time!
I've been helping a homeless man in a local coffee shop I frequent in the afternoon. Every time I'm in, he’s watching videos on a tablet. Employees say he arrives shortly after opening and leaves just before closing. He is of sound mind and body. He appears to be in his mid-40s and able to work, with no sign of drugs or abuse of alcohol. The support I give is modest: clothes that were going to Goodwill, a small gift card from the establishment, and rewards from the same shop that I wasn't going to use before expiration. My question is: Am I condoning bad behavior?