Summer, Season of Justice
What did ancient Stoics say about justice, and how can we apply it today?
Last week I introduced a new Stoic calendar to help us focus on one cardinal virtue per season. Yesterday was the first day of summer, so today we’ll look in detail at the Stoic virtue of justice.
Normally I approach Stoicism from the perspective of human nature, since to me this is the most compelling foundation for a philosophy of life. However, today we will take a slightly different approach. In this post I will primarily focus on one standard ancient definition of justice, the one provided by Arius Didymus. Of course, I will bring in my own perspectives, which necessarily involves a bit of human nature too, so overall I hope you will find this point of view both informative and practical.
What is Justice?
Today when we talk about justice, we typically have in mind some form of legal, political, or public setting: courtrooms, public demonstrations, the wheels of justice grinding slowly along to ensure that members of society get what they deserve. We don’t usually refer to justice in the private sphere, although we may sometimes invoke antiquated ideas like “divine justice” or “just deserts” when someone “gets what they deserve.”
The ancient Stoic meaning of justice is somewhat different. Justice captures all our attitudes toward and interactions with other people, perhaps in the public sphere but primarily in the private sphere. Justice covers our relationships with family, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, and all those connected with us, as well as people not connected with us in any way. In ancient Rome the Stoics were famous for advocating that justice extend in various ways to people that most Romans did not see as equals, including women, slaves, children, non-Roman citizens, and people living in foreign lands. (From today’s vantage point it may seem that they did not go far enough in these areas, but their ideas were already pretty radical for the time.)
One of our primary ancient sources on Stoic ethics is (probably) the Stoic philosopher Arius Didymus, whose account was preserved by the later scholar Stobaeus. It’s thought that this account is based on original Greek Stoic sources, and as such it’s one of our closest sources to original Stoic thinking on ethics. (Maybe other sources will be discovered soon!)
Arius Didymus describes each of the virtues in terms of different types of knowledge, and he defines justice as “knowledge of distribution of proper value to each person.” Other ancient sources like Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and Cicero also characterize justice in terms of distributions. So it’s related to who gets what from whom. But this definition doesn’t just encompass physical goods like money and food. I think it can also apply to interpersonal goods such as care, affection, and respect, or to natural human rights (which the ancient Stoics are credited with pioneering).
This is quite a broad conception of justice, and as such it covers much of what goes on in human social life. At the most basic level of who gets what from whom, we could say that parents distribute physical resources such as food, clothing, and shelter, as well as non-physical resources such as attention, a sense of security, and other psychological goods to their children. At a very complex level, entire societies decide how to distribute these resources among members, devising various methods to handle this daunting task.1 And at every level in between, groups of every kind (friend groups, corporations, institutions, sports teams, etc.) determine who gets what from whom, ranging from opportunities for advancement to the best spot on the couch after dinner.
You can see that Stoic justice theoretically covers everything from political systems to intimate relationships, and I think there is a place for all those levels to be fleshed out in modern Stoicism. However, for today we will focus on how to apply justice in the personal sphere, which is where most of our activities take place and where we have most control.
Let’s now dig into some of the details and see how this broad definition can be more specifically applied. The account in Stobaeus provides four subdefinitions of justice:
Piety: knowledge of service to the gods
Good-heartedness: knowledge which does good to others
Public-spiritedness: knowledge of fairness in a community
Fair dealing: knowledge of how to deal with one’s neighbors blamelessly
Piety
It might seem odd that piety is included as part of justice, but remember that traditionally religion has played an important role in regulating social behavior and in determining the communal distribution of resources. Readers who follow a traditional religion will certainly want to incorporate this into their current practice of Stoicism; readers who do not follow a traditional religion will still recognize that many of our resources are gifts of the universe, which are only ours to give because they have first been given to us. An essential aspect of Stoic justice is gratitude for these gifts, which inspires us to appreciate the things in our lives and distribute them wisely.
Good-heartedness
This is my favorite aspect of justice. Many people, especially those with misconceptions about Stoicism, may not realize that good-heartedness is required for Stoics. Sorry, no curmudgeons allowed! However, it’s not so much about being outwardly cheerful as about having an inner disposition to help people. As Seneca says,
Nature brought us to birth as kin, since it generated us all from the same materials and for the same purposes, endowing us with affection for one another and making us companionable. Nature established fairness and justice. According to nature's dispensation, it is worse to harm that to be harmed. On the basis of nature's command, let our hands be available to help whenever necessary.
Seneca, Letters on Ethics, 95.52
Keep in mind that good-heartedness can be expressed in different ways depending on what is appropriate for your personality and situation in life. You don’t have to be artificially cheerful or go around showering children with candy. You simply need to be open, well-disposed to other people, and consistently willing to help in ways that fit with your social roles and the expectations of your society (more on this below). So there is both an attitudinal component and an action component, ensuring that we show goodwill to others.
Fair Dealing
This subvirtue is closer to what we often think of as justice: fairness in our interactions with others. The contemporary judicial system deals with this aspect, since people can file lawsuits when they believe they are unfairly treated according to the law. Of course, we all know that the legal system only covers a fraction of our social interactions. Most of our relationships with others are simply in the ethical realm rather than the legal realm. But guess what—it’s all covered by Stoic justice. The way we talk to the waitress who gets our order wrong; the way we respond to people whose political views we disagree with; whether or not we put down our phones to spend more time with our family members. All of this can fall under the heading of fair dealing with others.
Public-spiritedness
Public-spiritedness can apply to communal justice—how our community (or state) gives or withholds resources from its members—but also how we as individuals approach involvement in our communities. The Epicureans, ancient rivals of the Stoics, advocated withdrawing from the community to their own private garden, enjoying the quiet company of like-minded friends. While this would certainly maximize pleasure for many of us, Stoics don’t think this represents what humans are all about. Humans are a prosocial species, so our ethical ideals should reflect this. The virtue of public-spiritedness means we become involved in our communities by raising a family, participating in governance, and doing whatever else responsible adults do in our particular time and place. We orient ourselves toward what is good for the community as a whole, not just a narrow conception of what is in our personal, short-term interest.
Environmental justice
To these subvirtues we can add another, which Chris Gill recently introduced in Learning to Live Naturally, and which we pick up again in our forthcoming book Stoic Ethics: The Basics—environmental justice. Now that we are aware of humanity’s capacity to change the natural world for better or worse, we need to seriously consider how we interact with all facets of nature, from individual plants and animals all the way to whole biomes and the whole planet. When we think of fair dealing or proper distributions, we no longer have the luxury of ignoring the nonhuman world. Instead, we can incorporate the environment into our thinking about who gets what from whom.
Principles of Stoic Justice for Today
Justice is a huge topic, and obviously this is only an introductory sketch of what it means to apply Stoic justice in our own lives. There are many different potential approaches to this topic, and hopefully we will explore some others in the future. But from this introduction we can clearly recognize the significance of this virtue in daily life. Every time we interact with other people or the natural world—which clearly is every moment of our lives—we are participating in some form of justice. Even ignoring justice is a philosophical position on justice. Because the Stoic definition is so comprehensive, we can see that justice is not something that only some people do sometimes, but something we all contribute to all the time, whether we want to or not.
So the question is, how do you want to perform justice in your personal relationships and interactions with other people (and the environment)? We do have some very helpful guidelines and examples from the ancient Roman Stoics, and also from Cicero who was not a Stoic but who respectfully presented Stoic thought in his writings. The picture of justice that comes across from these thinkers is of a person actively involved in their family and community life, contributing whatever talents they happen to have, dealing with people as fairly and benevolently as possible, behaving in ways appropriate to their character and social position. For example, Epictetus tells us:
If you're sitting on the council of some city, remember that you're a councillor; if you're young, remember that you're young; if an old man, remember that you're an old man; if a father, remember that you're a father. For each of these names, if carefully considered, indicates the actions that are appropriate to it.
Epictetus, Discourses, 2.10, 10-11
Personally, I don’t think justice can really be abstracted out from our social responsibilities; rather, it is completely integrated with them. While we can certainly follow some theoretical guidelines, justice only makes sense in the context of specific lives and situations. As hypersocial creatures, we reach excellence when we interact with other people in the way most appropriate for our social lives. We do not try to escape from social duties, or at least we only do so in exceptional circumstances (such as becoming a Cynic philosopher; see Epictetus, Discourses, 3.22).
However, this doesn’t imply that we think only of the people whose lives are closely bound up with our own. It is possible to love our families and perform our social obligations to our neighbors without thinking they are better than other families or neighbors; they simply happen to be ours. We have certain responsibilities toward them because we happened to be born in a certain place and time; if we were born in a different place and time, we would have similar responsibilities to those people. As Marcus Aurelius reminds us, pointing out the somewhat arbitrary nature of our social relationships:
Adapt yourself to the circumstances in which your lot has cast you; and love these people among whom your lot has fallen, but love them in all sincerity.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.39
And while we have different kinds of responsibilities toward people we don’t know than toward those we do, we do have a certain type of responsibility toward all humans. Today we would also say that we also have a certain type of responsibility toward everything on the planet. Our relationship is different to each of these types of entity, but each relationship forms part of the virtue of justice.
Of course, our biggest moral dilemmas often arise when these differing levels of relationships come into conflict with each other. If one of your family members commits a crime, do you report it to the police? If your elderly parents and your young children both require your care, which one do you prioritize? If your office calls during your family vacation, do you take the call? If you have $100 to donate to charity, which one do you give it to? All of these can be defined in terms of distributions, or who gets what from whom.
These are questions each person has to answer for themselves. We are each responsible for reflecting carefully on considerations of justice and for organizing our lives so that we can respond to them in the best way possible. That means we are each responsible for studying ethics (however that is feasible, given our personal opportunities and constraints) and for preparing ourselves, to the best of our ability, for ethical behavior. This includes looking at role models and the patterns of behavior that have worked best for other individuals and other societies.
But the particular responses each of us will offer in the give-and-take of life may vary depending on a number of factors. That’s why knowledge of the world and good judgment are crucial in applying Stoic justice in our lives. So let’s consider below how we can put these ideas into practice.
Practical Applications
Based on the information provided by Arius Didymus, we can create a sort of checklist for making decisions about distributions in our own lives. When faced with a dilemma that touches on justice, you might consider these steps:
1. Start with appreciation. We always want to approach life in a spirit of gratitude for what we have. In the midst of a problem or crisis it’s difficult to be thankful, but you will make a better decision if you frame the issue in terms of distributing gifts that you have received from the universe. If the dilemma involves friends or family members, be thankful you have friends and family members. If it involves money, be thankful you have any money at all. No matter how bitter you might feel, try to find something to appreciate.
2. Define the problem in terms of distributions. I would encourage you to write down or at least reflect on the specific elements of distribution: who is getting what from whom. Remember to include yourself if you are involved in the issue, and be sure to fairly include entities that cannot speak for themselves, like children, disabled adults, animals, and even elements of the environment.
3. Define social expectations. After you’ve defined the who and what, think about what social responsibilities, expectations, and/or rights are in play. This can be quite difficult because social expectations are often contested, ambiguous, or in flux. As cultures change, expectations can shift, and some people adhere to older mores while others insist on new ones. Or sometimes people just have different understandings of the same role or relationship. However, the first step in fairly distributing resources is defining the expectations that have a bearing on the situation. Perhaps even the act of clarifying these different expectations—which often remain unspoken, assumed, or murky in some way—can help resolve the dilemma.
4. Define fair dealing. Once you are clear on the exact issue at stake, the parties involved, and the social expectations involved, you can then explicitly think about what fair dealing involves in this situation. Are there conflicting claims about something? On what basis can the parties properly decide who gets what from whom? What ethical or legal factors come into play? What social responsibilities have been upheld or ignored? What remains unknown or unknowable about the situation?
5. Make your decision in a spirit of good-heartedness. When people feel they are being unfairly treated, tempers can flare and things can become ugly. Parties to a disagreement may show the worst of themselves during the proceedings (whether formal or informal). Stoic justice includes comporting ourselves well even in the midst of contentious times and heated discussions. Remember what types of words, actions, and attitudes are appropriate for you. Even when others around you forget, you can maintain your honesty and personal integrity, trying to see the best in others no matter how difficult that may be.
Summer is a great time to start implementing these concepts of justice, since the weather naturally makes us want to reach out to others and be social. This is also a time when people interact frequently with the great outdoors, making it a perfect time to integrate environmental justice into our lives. I would recommend starting out by identifying at least one way you can act with justice in each of these areas:
Personal relationships
Community
Environment
I’m probably preaching to the choir here, since I know that many readers are already highly attuned to justice in these areas. However, there is always room to do more. For example, this summer I have the environmental goal of reducing red meat consumption for my family. We’ve had this goal for a while but it’s very difficult to implement. I think the key is finding dinner substitutes that my husband and kids really like, which is a challenge for me because I’m a terrible cook! Nevertheless, I’m trying to make sure we don’t eat beef any more than once a week, while also accounting for competing priorities like proper protein intake for my kids (and my husband’s love for steak). Other people will surely have different goals, but I feel sure everyone can identify at least a few changes they can make in personal relationships, community involvement, or environmental care.
Concluding Thoughts
Stoicism offers a practical way of dealing with questions of distribution, from our closest relationships to the broadest spheres of institutionalized justice. We’ve just barely scratched the surface here, but I hope this has given you some useful ways of reflecting on and implementing Stoic justice in your life. Let’s finish with some no-nonsense advice from Marcus Aurelius (Meditations, 4.3), who had to deal with more difficult issues of justice than probably any of us today:
What is it, then, that arouses your discontent? Human wickedness? Call to mind the doctrine that rational creatures have come into the world for the sake of one another, and that tolerance is a part of justice, and that when people do wrong, they do so involuntarily; and think how many people, up to this time, have lived in enmity and suspected, hated, and viciously confronted one another, only to be laid out dead and reduced to ashes. So put a stop to your complaining.
There is a branch of contemporary political thought called distributive justice, which focuses specifically on the distribution of resources in society. This is just a narrow slice of what Stoic justice encompasses, but it’s quite interesting to think about the ways in which modern Stoicism could contribute to this area.