DO STOICS SPEAK OF PREFERRED INDIFFERENTS AS VALUE JUDGMENTS?

 

WHEN STOICS TALK ABOUT VALUE JUDGMENTS, WHAT ARE THEY REFERRING TO? 

Claude:

When Stoics talk about value judgments, they're referring to the mental evaluations we make about whether things are good, bad, or indifferent - and crucially, they argue that most of our common value judgments are mistaken. 

The Stoics distinguished between three categories of things: 

**Good** - Only virtue and virtuous actions (wisdom, justice, courage, temperance). These genuinely benefit us and make us flourish as human beings. 

**Bad** - Only vice and vicious actions (foolishness, injustice, cowardice, excess). These genuinely harm us and prevent human flourishing. 

**Indifferent** - Everything else, including health, wealth, reputation, external circumstances, and even life and death. These things don't affect our fundamental well-being or moral character. 

The Stoics argued that we suffer because we make false value judgments - we treat indifferent things as if they were genuinely good or bad. For example, we might judge losing money as "bad" or getting promoted as "good," when these are actually indifferent from the perspective of what truly matters for human flourishing. 

This doesn't mean Stoics were apathetic about external things. They recognized that some indifferents are "preferred" (health over sickness) and others "dispreferred" (poverty over wealth). But they maintained that our peace of mind and moral character shouldn't depend on obtaining or avoiding these externals. 

The practical upshot is that by correcting our value judgments - recognizing what's truly up to us versus what isn't - we can achieve greater emotional resilience and focus our energy on what actually matters: developing virtue and acting with wisdom, justice, courage, and self-discipline.  

DO THEY SPEAK OF PREFERRED INDIFFERENTS AS VALUE JUDGMENTS? 

Claude:

No, the Stoics would not classify preferences for indifferents as value judgments in the strict sense. They made a careful distinction here. 

**Value judgments** (in the technical Stoic sense) are about what is truly good, bad, or indifferent. These are absolute evaluations about what contributes to or detracts from human flourishing and virtue. 

**Preferences among indifferents** are different - they're practical selections we make between things that are morally neutral. The Stoics called this "selection" (ekloge) rather than judgment about good and bad. 

For example, a Stoic would say:

- "Health is good" = **false value judgment** (health is indifferent)

- "I prefer health to sickness" = **legitimate selection** among indifferents 

The Stoics argued we can and should have rational preferences for things like health, reasonable wealth, and good reputation while maintaining that these preferences don't constitute value judgments about what's truly good or bad. 

This distinction was crucial because it allowed them to engage practically with the world (preferring some outcomes over others) without compromising their core principle that only virtue is good and only vice is bad. They could pursue preferred indifferents while remaining emotionally detached from the outcomes, since their fundamental well-being didn't depend on obtaining them. 

The key insight is that we can act rationally and make practical choices without treating external circumstances as genuinely good or evil - which is what would constitute a false value judgment.