Virtue = Right Reason = Prosocial life based on Reason

Dear Greg L,

Thank you so much for your response to my initial prompt for the current round of Stoic Letters here at the Stoa Nova. You focused primarily on my suggestion that perhaps both Epicureans and Stoics actually used virtue as an instrumental good, contra the usual narrative that sees virtue as instrumental for Epicureans and as intrinsically good for Stoics.

I particularly appreciated your point, with which I agree, that perhaps one problem here is that the word “virtue” is polysemic, so that the two schools meant significantly different things by that term, which makes any direct comparison a bit tricky.

However, my bringing up Epicureanism was only incidental, and perhaps distracted us from the crucial point: what do we say to a modern practitioner of Stoicism who asks the very legitimate question: why, exactly, is virtue the only good?

You do provide an answer: “Because [the ancient Stoics] believed it was the only thing that meets the intensional definition of ‘good.’”

“Intensional,” in logic and philosophy, is used to describe the meaning of a term based on its attributes rather than just the objects it refers to. This is in contrast with extensional definitions, which focus on the actual instances or members of a set.

Applied to the issue at hand, you say that according to our sources (such as Arius Didymus and Diogenes Laertius) whatever is good must be: beautiful/noble, advantageous/expedient, profitable, beneficial, and/or useful. Okay, but you also admit that this answer immediately leads to additional questions, in part because we don’t have a clear sense of why the ancient Stoics came up with this particular list of attributes.

That’s why I modeled my discussion on the type of contemporary approach to Stoicism that Larry Becker developed in his A New Stoicism [1]: I’m interested in what we can say about virtue today, as modern practitioners, to our fellow prokoptontes and prokoptousai.

But in so doing I made a mistake that your analysis helped me realize and correct. In my original post, again inspired by Larry’s exploration of the relationship among virtue, right reason, and living according to Nature, I reinterpreting things in the following fashion:

Virtue (true good) = Right reason => Prosocial life based on reason (telos)

While in fact it should have been:

Virtue (true good) = Right reason = Prosocial life based on reason (telos)

Note that the revised version has equal signs all across, that is, virtue is the true good because it is defined as right reason (to use Seneca’s phrasing), which in turn is assumed to be identical to a prosocial life based on reason—what the Stoics mean when they say that we should live according to Nature. [2]

Put that way, the sequence is not circular any more, since the identity signs indicate definitional equivalency. Accordingly, we could drop entirely both the words “virtue” and “right reason” and simply say that the only true good in Stoicism is to live according to Nature, which is also the end (telos) of Stoic philosophy. Why? Because we are social animals whose primary tool for surviving and thriving is our intelligence, so the best human life just is one in which we use our reason to cooperate with other human beings. This grounds Stoic ethics in empirical observations about human nature, precisely in the way in which modern virtue ethicists like Philippa Foot have argued we should, indeed, ground moral reasoning.

Foot famously used an analogy with a cactus plant. If you buy a cactus and bring it home, you are presumably interested in making so that the cactus can flourish. In order to accomplish this, you need to know something about the nature of cacti, for instance that being desert plans they need a lot of light but little water. If you give them a lot of water, assuming that they are generic plants, you’ll kill them. Similarly, says Foot, for human beings: a good life, a naturally good life as she would say, can be inferred by observation of what makes human individuals and groups thrive, namely, cooperation and reason.

To sum up, then, when a fellow prokopton or prokoptousa asks: why is virtue the only true good? The answer is: because virtue consists in a life rooted in reason and cooperation with other human beings. To the further “why” question, the answer is: because Nature made us so that we thrive under those circumstances.

Vale,
Massimo

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[1] Becker’s analysis differs a bit from the one I propose here, though the blueprint is similar. Specifically, he writes (sans the references to sages): “There is a single developmental account for three fundamental features of Stoic ethics: agency, [the] ‘commanding faculty’ (hêgemonikon) […]; virtue, the coherent combination of the separate virtues, vices, and other elements of human physiology and psychology […]; and eudaimonia (happiness), [that is] equanimity and other states of being and consciousness […]. These three things are distinct conceptually, but in this version of Stoicism they are so closely linked together causally that for practical purposes they are inseparable. The Stoic version of ideal agency is both necessary and sufficient for the Stoic version of virtue-in-the-singular, which in turn is necessary and sufficient for Stoic eudaimonia. To have any one of these things is to have them all.” (A New Stoicism, chapter 6, section 1)

[2] There is decent support in the ancient literature for this sort of analysis: “Zeno, in his work On Human Nature, said that the goal is to live in harmony with nature, which means to live according to virtue; for nature leads us to virtue. […] Again, to live according to virtue is equivalent to living according to the experience of natural events, as Chrysippus says in the first book of his work On Goals. […] The goal becomes to live according to nature, that is, according to our own nature and that of the universe. […] And this very thing constitutes the virtue and smooth current of the happy life.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.87-88)