Stoic News

By Dave Kelly

Thursday, June 26, 2025

What Is Really Good?

 The Stoics restricted the terms good and bad to the moral sense of the words. What does that mean? 


Claude:

The Stoics made a sharp distinction between what they considered truly "good" or "bad" versus what most people commonly label with those terms. 


For the Stoics, something could only be genuinely "good" if it always benefited a person and could never be used for harm. Similarly, something was only truly "bad" if it always harmed a person. When they applied this strict criterion, they concluded that only moral virtues (like wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance) qualified as truly good, and only moral vices (like injustice, cowardice, and intemperance) qualified as truly bad. 


This meant that things most people consider good or bad - wealth, health, reputation, physical pleasure, pain, or even death - were classified by Stoics as "indifferent." These things weren't morally good or bad in themselves because they could be used either virtuously or viciously. Wealth, for instance, could enable generous acts (good) or fuel greed and corruption (bad), so wealth itself was morally neutral. 


The practical implication was profound: a Stoic would say that losing your job, getting sick, or facing social rejection weren't truly "bad" things happening to you - they were merely external circumstances that tested your character. What mattered was how you responded to these situations. Your virtue or vice in dealing with them was the only thing that could genuinely help or harm your wellbeing. 


This framework was designed to give people greater emotional resilience and moral clarity by focusing their attention on what they could actually control - their own choices and character - rather than external outcomes beyond their influence.

Philosophical Foundation for Zeno's Stoic Doctrine of Indifferents.


Sterling's Logical Framework Immediately Applied to Situations


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