Bringing the Master Passions to Work

"Ambition, envy, self-deception. These "master passions" are everywhere, say HBS professor Nitin Nohria and the University of Toronto's Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, co-authors of Master Passions: Emotion, Narrative, and the Development of Culture. In this excerpt, they describe what master passions mean for you."

Stoicism: Responsibility or Human Rights

"My understanding is that Stoics are not interested in human rights. Rather they follow Socrates' concept of responsibility to society, he having accepted suicide as part of his responsibility as a citizen. His arguement was that he had accepted the protection and benefits of the Athenian State, and as such had to also accept its judgements even if he did not agree with them" (Nigel Glassburrow).

Stoicism and Human Rights

"The result is that contemporary notions of human rights are not much more closely related to ancient Stoic ideas of natural law than, say modern notions of atoms that are divisible, penetrable, and convertible into energy are related to the indivisble, impenetrable, and internally unchanging atoms of Democritus and Epicturus" (Jan Garrett).