If There Is No Objectivity, How Can I Live Virtuously?

 

If There Is No Objectivity, How Can I Live Virtuously?

A question posed to the Sterling Stoic system, with response generated from the Sterling corpus. Attribution: response architecture and corpus integration — Dave Kelly; all theoretical content — Grant C. Sterling.

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Question

"According to the Stoics, one should live a virtuous life — but what is that? According to current modern thinking and philosophy, there is no objectivity. “You do you” is the current thinking. If I decide everything myself and there is no objectivity, how can I even live virtuously?" -- René Møller Yde in Stoicism Group.

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Response

This is a genuinely important question and gets to the heart of why Sterling argues that the philosophical commitments underlying Stoicism are not optional decorations but load-bearing architecture.

The “you do you” view is self-refuting. If there are no objective moral facts, then “you do you” is itself just one person’s preference — it has no authority to tell you anything. The moment a relativist says “you should decide for yourself,” he has made an objective moral claim. He cannot coherently hold the position he is trying to assert.

Moral facts are necessary truths, not social constructions. Sterling’s clearest statement of this: moral facts have no “source,” just as “2+2=4” has no source. It is a fundamental, necessary, and unalterable fact about the universe that, all other things being equal, one should maximize preferred indifferents. They do not depend on God’s decree or social agreement — any more than arithmetic depends on a vote.

We know moral facts the same way we know mathematics. We know moral facts by using our Reason, in the same way that we know that 2+2=4 — not by experience, not by revelation, not by social consensus. This is Sterling’s commitment to ethical intuitionism: the rational faculty has direct access to moral truth, not through sensation or social consensus, but through the same capacity that grasps necessary truths in logic and mathematics.

Without this, the Stoic project — and morality itself — collapses entirely. The Stoics think that the fact that one would be harming his parents is a reason not to act whether he cares about them or not. If there are no objective moral facts of this sort, then the Stoic project fails utterly.

The self-evidence is already in you. Even the person who denies objective moral facts betrays his own position in practice. As Sterling observes, the same man who does not repay a debt and pretends that he has no obligation to do so gets furious when someone else does not repay a debt to him. He knows. The knowledge of basic moral facts is not constructed — it is recognized.

So the Stoic answer to your question is this: you can live virtuously because virtue is real, because you already have rational access to the basic moral facts even if culture has buried them under false value impressions, and because “you do you” is not a philosophical position — it is a rationalization for not doing the harder work of actually looking.

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Sources: Stoicism, Moral Realism, and the Necessity of Objective Moral Facts (Sterling); Stoicism, Moral Facts, and Ethical Intuitionism (Sterling); The Six Philosophical Commitments That Ground Stoic Practice. Preserved by Dave Kelly, 2026.