Indifferents: what is neither good nor bad

The claim

For the Stoics, only virtue is good and only vice is bad. Everything else, wealth, health, reputation, sickness, poverty, even death, falls into a third category: adiaphora, things indifferent. Epictetus puts the test plainly. Asked what things are indifferent, he answers: "The things which are independent of the will" (Discourses I 30). If something can be taken from you by forces outside your own faculty of choice, it cannot be what makes your life good or bad. That work belongs only to your judgments, choices, and use of things.

Marcus Aurelius draws the same line inside a single person. The body cannot perceive differences, so all things are indifferent to it. The mind, though, has its own activity, its judgments and choices, and only what falls outside that activity is indifferent to it too (Meditations 6.32). The dividing line is not between body and world but between what your faculty of choice does and everything it does not do.

The misreading

The word "indifferent" invites a shallow reading: that Stoics should not care about health, money, or whether they live or die. This is not the doctrine. Seneca is direct about how strange this sounds even to sympathetic readers: an opponent argues that a glorious death cannot be indifferent, since nothing indifferent is glorious. Seneca answers that death itself is indifferent, but a brave death is glorious, because glory belongs to how a person deals with indifferent things, not to the things themselves (Moral Letters Vol II 82.10). Indifferent does not mean unimportant. It means not itself good or bad, not the kind of thing that can make you a good or bad person by its presence or absence.

Epictetus makes the same point through an image from gambling. The dice and counters are indifferent, but how you play them is not. He warns explicitly against the lazy version of the doctrine: telling someone that things are indifferent should never make him negligent, because life is indifferent but the use of life is not (Discourses II 6). Careful, skillful engagement with externals is exactly what the doctrine asks for. What it forbids is putting your good or your ill inside them.

Preferred and dispreferred

The Stoics distinguish preferred and dispreferred indifferents according to their relation to nature. This is different from Seneca’s classification of goods in Letter 66.5: that passage distinguishes ways virtue is expressed, not kinds of indifferent things. Elsewhere he grades indifferents themselves by weight: death is not as indifferent as how you wear your hair, because death has in it a semblance of evil, an aversion built into us by nature, even though it is not actually an evil (Moral Letters Vol II 82.15). The distinction between preferred and dispreferred indifferents predates Seneca; these letters explain how to apply it. Health, wealth, and a sound body are naturally to be selected. Sickness, poverty, and pain are naturally to be avoided. Neither selection nor avoidance makes them good or bad.

Seneca even proposes a technical name for the preferred kind: not goods, but advantages, things to be held as property outside ourselves, not as parts of ourselves (Moral Letters Vol II 74.17). He explains why he still seeks health and rest, not because they are goods, but because they accord with nature, and because seeking them well is itself an exercise of good judgment. The only good in a suitable dinner or a steady walk is the deliberate choice behind it, not the dinner or the walk (Moral Letters Vol II 92.11).

Why it matters, and the hard case

Take this seriously and something changes. You still pursue health, provide for your family, and take a job that pays well. But you stop locating your worth in whether you get them. Epictetus's dice player is careful about the throw and untroubled by the outcome, because the outcome is not where good or bad live (Discourses II 5). Seneca argues that Fortune only hands us raw material. Whether it becomes good or ill depends on the state of the soul that receives it, not on Fortune itself (Moral Letters Vol III 98.2).

The hardest case is death. Calling death indifferent looks callous. But Seneca does not say death does not matter. He says the fear built into us by nature is not proof that death is evil, only that it feels that way, and that a person who correctly judges baseness as the only evil can face death without anxiety (Moral Letters Vol II 85.24). This is the radical part of the doctrine, stated without softening: your life and death are not, strictly, good or bad. Only your character in the face of them is. That is a demanding claim, and the Stoics knew it. Their answer is that it is also the only view that keeps your good entirely in your own keeping.