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Arguments for eradicating most emotions were the Stoic thesis that one misevaluates indifferents, the approval of serenity, and the point that pleasant emotions are inextricably tied to unpleasant ones, and that ordinary love turns to hate. The case against eradication is not always well argued. For Stoic eradication is not suppression or gritting of teeth, but re-evaluation, nor do the Stoics remove all motivation. Freedom from emotional judgements, even if not from non-judgmental shocks, is imaginable from Epictetus' description of his training methods, and it was further pictured by Aristotle, Cicero, and Christians by imagining the situation of God or of the next life. But would such a state be human or humane, or is that not something to be required of a sage? For ordinary people, emotions are of the highest value, even though Romanticism's glorification of all of them should not be shared.

This chapter discusses the issue of discipline as it affects the development of both mind and body. It explores whether Stoic teachings about our relationship with our bodies offer sage counsel. Americans have become a culture obsessed with physical fitness and the demands of fashioning a hard, strong body. The stripped-down life of military endurance offers something of a model of discipline and control. The view seems Stoic, but ancient Stoics view bodily health and vigor as “indifferents,” that is, external goods, not valuable in their own right or fully within our control. Stoic doctrines force the questions of how we are to live with the fragility of our bodies, what efforts we are to put into their adornment and sculpture, and what attitudes we are to take when our bodies fail us.

Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus sharpened the claim that happiness requires external goods as well as virtue, a claim prominently denied by the Stoics. Their position that virtue is sufficient for happiness requires revision of the content of happiness and adjustment of our attitudes to premature death and many other matters. The strain put on our concept of happiness is, however, greatly alleviated by the Stoic theory of preferred indifferents, which allows things other than virtue to have value of a different kind, as the material on which virtuous activity is exercised.

Stoics claim that only virtue is good, only vice is bad, and the rest are indifferents of various sorts. The strategies employed Stoics to argue for this claim, and why they should be believed are analysed. Cicero’s discussion on the fourth book of his treatise de Finibus (On Ends) is examined. It is argued that the Stoic account of human good must be met on the grounds of physics and metaphysics, with a competing account of human nature.

Aristo of Chios’ total denial of moral value to objects intermediate between virtue and vice prevents selection or rejection of indifferents from being a basis for rational action. Moral action appears arbitrary, irrational and incomprehensible, as Cicero concludes (Fin. IV.43). A testimony of Plutarch (Stoic Self-refutations, ch. 23) suggests that Chrysippus too was compelled to take in consideration the notion of indifferent as ‘that by which impulse or rejection is moved no more in one direction than another’ (Sextus Empiricus M XI 60), showing that not only Aristo, but the whole Stoa, had this problem. To confront this difficulty, Chrysippus tried to harmonize the Stoic notion of indifference with rational action. He used Aristo’s theory of rational behavior as a possible answer for his school.

This chapter examines two models of how Stoics decide what to do: the Salva Virtute deliberation and Indifferents-Only deliberation. The Indifferents-Only model is superior to the Salva Virtute model for deliberating on an actual situation. The Salva Virtute model is unable to provide any content to the notion of doing the ‘virtuous thing’ beyond saying that the virtuous action is whatever the Sage will actually do. The Indifferents-Only model proposes that virtue is not mentioned among the inputs to deliberation. The deliberation will eventuate in the specification of a virtuous action, but will start by describing the various courses of action purely in terms of how various indifferents — promoted and demoted — are distributed.

This chapter examines the problems of the Indifferents-Only model. This model was replaced by a Naturalness-Only model, while the Salva Virtute model was replaced by the No Shoving model. The two new models are deliberately equivalent — yielding the same principles in the same circumstances — as a result of the bridging principles between acting contrary to what is just, and acting contrary to nature. Both have integral roles of considerations of what is just, arising from the welfare, advantages, and property rights for other agents, and the needs of the agent’s country or human community. The role of virtue in deliberation is discussed.

This chapter is focused the Stoic value theory. The Stoics notoriously claim that only virtue is good, while the only vice is bad and everything else, including health, wealth, beauty and life itself, are mere indifferents. The inclusion of beauty in this list seems to show that the Stoics were not interested in theorising beauty. A thorough reading of the material shows that beauty is not treated as if it was of no interest in general; the evidence only shows that it is an inferior value to virtue. This interpretation is supported by other evidence, including the texts of later Roman Stoics, such as Epictetus. Most importantly, this interpretation shows that the Stoic value theory and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive areas of study.

Isaiah Berlin at first denied that the Stoic conception of freedom was freedom at all. But the Stoic Zeno transformed the freedom enjoyed by his Cynic teachers, who mocked popular objectives. Instead, he allowed that natural objectives were preferable and demanded pursuit, but coined the idea that they were preferred indifferents. The indifference freed one from slavery to needs, the preferability made these objectives respectable. Virtue regained the centrality that Socrates had given it, by being the one important thing. The freedom that mattered, ability to be one's own agent (autopragia), was compatible with being subordinate, or even owned. True autopragia, required reducing one's self-conception to exclude indifferents. One can be enslaved even to books. For Gandhi too, the freedom that mattered was rule over oneself, which was needed for the lesser freedom from subordination to rulers. That subordination came from seeking British employment, instead of reducing oneself to zero.

Persius’ metaphors of food and sex seem to provide us with a stable interpretive framework for making sense of his satires, but upon closer inspection this framework collapses in a jumble of self-contradictions. This is intentional, for figural language is not, in Persius’ view, the place to be seeking a stable philosophical view of the world. Metaphor makes us attach emotion and value to the things of this earth that are, in Stoic terms, indifferents--even such shocking extremes as cannibalism and incest. In the end, the images of poetry and the warnings of philosophy join forces to help us give up the life of appearances for the more abstract life of Stoic realities.

This chapter considers two passages in the Euthydemus and Meno on the explanation of value, which appear to be closely related. This close relation can be understood in terms of one ‘reading’ the other—one is alluded to in the other, and thereby becomes the subject of critical reflection. The Euthydemus goes further than the Meno in insisting that wisdom is the intrinsic good. These passages are later read carefully by the Stoics, and their readings are the source of disagreement between Zeno and Aristo about the nature of ‘ethical indifferents’. The Platonic background allows a distinctive account of an indifferent being ‘preferred’, namely promoted in value. This allows an interpretation of early Stoic ethics that does not suppose there may be two quite different structures of value, but rather that what is good itself by itself is the source of value for anything else, which is thus ‘preferred’.

The Stoic treatment of magnanimity was formulated independently from Aristotle’s, though there are points of resemblance, considered at the end of this chapter. In early Stoic thought, magnanimity is presented as a subdivision of the cardinal virtue of courage, and is marked by an ability to rise above external circumstances, especially adversity. Stoic thinking on magnanimity is analysed here in terms of their theory of value, psychology, and worldview. The main later Stoic treatment of magnanimity comes in Cicero’s On Duties, a highly influential work in medieval and early modern Europe. Magnanimity here appears as one of the four cardinal virtues, defined both in terms of the ability to rise above misfortune and the readiness to undertake great actions on behalf of others; the relationship between magnanimity and honour also emerges as a new theme in Cicero’s treatment.

Most approaches to ethics and economics today are “Aristotelian” in methodology. Although he had a psychological account of virtue to which to refer, Aristotle largely analyzed economics in terms of market norms and general social good. This chapter argues for the radical proposal of the Stoics. It suggests that we need, in addition to an account of virtue, a tool for considering the role markets play in our lives—and only the Stoics provide us with the right kind of theoretical tool in their virtue ethic. The key to their agility with ethics and the market is their theoretical approach to economic goods. They term economic goods “indifferents” and the benefits from making this distinction enable us to talk about ethics and economics without confusing the two.

Leading interpretations of Stoic ethics treat the value of promoted indifferents either as instrumental, contributing to the telos of happiness, or as intrinsic, grounding reasons for action that do not depend on the virtue in which happiness consists. This chapter argues that neither interpretation fits our evidence and proposes a new account of indifferents and their role in early Stoic theory. Specifically, it employs a distinction between practical and epistemic reasons to show that indifferent objects and states of affairs can guide an agent’s actions without constituting their justificatory ground. On the resulting account, indifferents are indispensable to deliberation in that an agent must consider their status in order to ascertain the action she ought to perform. But they are not a source of value or normative justification in their own right. That role is satisfied only by the rational order expressed in the cosmos as a whole and, in the case of human agents, by a disposition that has cognized this order as far as is humanly possible. This interpretation is borne out by evidence for Stoic ethics that is not tainted by association with the Academic tradition. It can be discerned in the Chrysippean account of indifferents targeted in the polemics of Plutarch and in passages of Epictetus that preserve a Chrysippean view.