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Question

Are virtue and vice really the only good and bad?

A look at why the Stoics located good and bad only in character, and left everything else, health, wealth, even death, as indifferent.

Updated

The short answer

Yes. The Stoics hold that virtue is the only good and vice the only bad, and everything else, health, wealth, reputation, even the lives of the people you love, is indifferent in the technical sense: it does not by itself make you good or bad. Seneca tells Lucilius that anyone who calls something other than the honourable good hands control of his happiness to Fortune, while the person who defines the good only by the honourable is happy with an inward happiness. This is not a claim that externals do not matter at all, only that they cannot be the measure of your character.

Key points

  • Seneca states that the only good is that which is honourable, meaning virtue, and that calling anything else good puts you under the control of Fortune.
  • Seneca's letter lists people ruined by grief, anxiety, jealousy, and political failure or success, as illustrations of what happens when externals are mistaken for goods.
  • Epictetus distinguishes the external fact, which is indifferent, from the judgment or use made of it, which is not indifferent.
  • Calling something indifferent is not the same as being negligent about it, and being careful about something is not the same as treating it as a good.
  • The practical test the Stoics offer is to measure every choice against the single standard of virtue rather than against many competing goods.

The longer answer

Seneca puts the claim plainly to Lucilius: the chief means of attaining the happy life is the belief that the only good lies in that which is honourable, meaning virtue itself (Moral Letters Vol II 74.1). Anyone who calls something else good, he says, puts himself in the power of Fortune and under the control of another. This is the hard core of Stoic ethics, and it is easy to misread.

The common misreading is that Stoics think health, money, reputation, and even the lives of your children do not matter at all, that a Stoic should feel nothing when a child dies or a marriage fails. Seneca's letter shows exactly the opposite worry. He describes a man saddened when his children die, another anxious when they fall ill, a third embittered when they behave disgracefully, men tortured by jealousy, men wrecked either by losing an election or by winning one (Moral Letters Vol II 74.2). These are not examples of what Stoics should feel. They are examples of what happens to someone who has quietly made health, office, or reputation into a good, so that its loss becomes, for him, a genuine evil. The claim that only virtue is good is not indifference to these things. It is a diagnosis of why they wreck us when we treat them as more than they are.

Epictetus gives the same structure from a different angle. He distinguishes the indifferent fact from the judgment about it: a hypothetical proposition is indifferent, but the judgment about it is either knowledge, opinion, or error, and in the same way life itself is indifferent while the use we make of it is not (Discourses II 6). Life, health, money, and reputation are what the Stoics call indifferents: not literally without weight, since some are naturally preferred, but outside the one thing that actually makes a person good or bad, which is the state of their own faculty of choice. What is good or bad is never the external event. It is the judgment, the impulse, the use.

This is why Seneca tells Lucilius to test every choice against the purpose of your whole life, the way a painter cannot produce a likeness until he has decided what he means to paint (Moral Letters Vol II 71.2). If your standard for what to seek and avoid is scattered among many small goods, health today, praise tomorrow, a good marriage next year, you have no single ruler to measure anything by, and Seneca says this is exactly why we make mistakes: we consider the parts of life but never life as a whole (Moral Letters Vol II 71.2). Fix the standard on virtue alone, and the parts fall into their proper rank beneath it.

Take this claim in its full strength and something changes in how you carry loss. It does not mean a Stoic is unmoved when a child is sick or a job is lost. Epictetus is explicit elsewhere that you should be careful about such things and not become negligent, only you should not become abject or struck with admiration of them either (Discourses II 6). The grief or concern that follows is not being denied. What is denied is that these things can make you, yourself, good or bad. Your ill fortune is not evidence against your character, and someone else's fortune is not evidence for theirs.

The practical move is to ask, before a loss or a gain lands, what exactly would be damaged. If the honest answer is your bank balance, your plans, or your reputation, you can mourn that loss without concluding that you are worse than you were. If the honest answer is that you lied, betrayed a friend, or acted like a coward, that is the one loss the Stoics say is worth calling bad, because it is the one loss that was ever up to you.

Primary passages

You are right, of course, my dear Lucilius, in deeming the chief means of attaining the happy life to consist in the belief that the only good lies in that which is honourable. For anyone who deems other things to be good, puts himself in the power of Fortune, and goes under the control of another; but he who has in every case defined the good by the honourable, is happy with an inward happiness.

Seneca, Moral Letters Vol II 74.1 Read in context

Seneca states the core claim: only the honourable, that is virtue, is good, and calling anything else good hands your happiness to Fortune.

man is saddened when his children die; another is anxious when they become ill; a third is embittered when they do something disgraceful, or suffer a taint in their reputation. One man, you will observe, is tortured by passion for his neighbour’s wife, another by passion for his own. You will find men who are completely upset by failure to win an election, and others who are actually plagued by the offices which they have won.

Seneca, Moral Letters Vol II 74.2 Read in context

Seneca's examples show what happens when externals are quietly treated as goods: their loss, or even their possession, becomes a source of ruin.

The hypothetical proposition is indifferent: the judgment about it is not indifferent, but it is either knowledge or opinion or error. Thus life is indifferent: the use is not indifferent.

Epictetus, Discourses II 6 Read in context

Epictetus locates good and bad not in the external thing itself, life included, but in the judgment and use made of it.

When any man then tells you that these things also are indifferent, do not become negligent; and when a man invites you to be careful (about such things), do not become abject and struck with admiration of material things.

Epictetus, Discourses II 6 Read in context

Epictetus warns against both misreadings: indifference is not negligence, and care about externals is not the same as valuing them as goods.

Important distinctions

Indifferent versus worthless

When Stoics call health, wealth, or reputation indifferent, they do not mean worthless. Epictetus is explicit that you should be careful about such things, not negligent (Discourses II 6). Health is naturally preferred over sickness, but preference is not the same as goodness. Only virtue earns the name good, because only virtue is entirely up to you.

Feeling loss versus judging it a moral evil

Seneca's catalogue of men wrecked by grief, anxiety, and jealousy is not a list of acceptable Stoic responses (Moral Letters Vol II 74.2). It is a diagnosis of what follows from treating an external as a good. A Stoic can register loss and still refuse to conclude that the loss has made him worse as a person, since that judgment concerns something not in the external event at all.

Objections and replies

This looks like it demands indifference to real tragedy

If only virtue is good and only vice is bad, it can sound as though the deaths of your children or the collapse of your health should leave you unmoved, since none of it touches the one thing that is actually good or bad.

Reply

Seneca's own examples cut against this reading. He describes the man saddened by a child's death and the man anxious over illness as ordinary facts about people who have made an external into a good, not as a Stoic ideal (Moral Letters Vol II 74.2). Epictetus adds directly that treating something as indifferent must not tip into negligence (Discourses II 6). The claim is about where good and bad reside, not about whether loss can be felt.

Doesn't everyone actually care about more than character

In practice, people spend most of their energy on health, income, and relationships, not on cultivating virtue as such. Calling only virtue good can seem detached from how life is actually lived.

Reply

Seneca answers this by pointing to the cost of the ordinary way of living: without one standard, the purpose of your whole life, you handle each part of life separately and, in his words, this is why we make mistakes (Moral Letters Vol II 71.2). The Stoic claim is not that you should stop caring about health or relationships, but that you should stop measuring your own goodness by how they turn out.

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Concepts

Philosophers

  • Epictetus Epictetus argues that freedom does not come from your circumstances but from correctly sorting what is up to you from what is not.

Sources

  1. Epictetus, Discourses II Primary text, Stoa library
  2. Seneca, Moral Letters Vol II Primary text, Stoa library