Sterling and Seddon: Projects, and Appropriate Objects of Aim
Sterling and Seddon: Projects, and Appropriate Objects of Aim
A philosophical dialogue between Dave Kelly and the Sterling Decision Framework instrument. Corpus in use: Core Stoicism, SLE v3.1, Nine Excerpts, Sterling’s Decision Framework v3, Sterling Activation v4, Harshness and Beauty in Epictetus, Seddon’s Glossary.
The Seddon Passage Under Examination
“We need to distinguish between our interests and projects on the one hand, and the way we carry on the business of pursuing our interests and furthering our projects on the other. Everything that we engage in in daily life will further some project which in turn satisfies some interest we have. Interests would include earning an income, gaining an education, staying healthy, raising children, etc., etc. A project is some activity we perform which furthers an interest, such as taking a course at a local college, or taking up a new diet. Notice that interests and projects concern indifferent things (with the singular and unique exception of our interest to perfect our characters and thereby to fully flourish and live happily). But the way we carry out our projects — noting that the way we act in pursuit of something is entirely distinct from the project itself — concerns our capacity to act virtuously, to act in ways characteristic of the person who has perfected their character. This, say the Stoics, is what is good or bad, and this is what is of supreme importance.”
— Keith Seddon, Stoic Serenity, pg. 30
Exchange 1: Is This Compatible with Sterling?
Question: Is this compatible with Sterling?
Response: The Seddon passage maps cleanly onto Sterling’s framework at every substantive point.
The interests/projects distinction is just Seddon’s way of restating the indifferents doctrine. Earning income, gaining education, staying healthy, raising children — these are all preferred indifferents in Sterling’s terminology. Seddon names this explicitly: interests and projects concern indifferent things. That is exactly the framework’s Value Strip classification.
The “way we carry out our projects” formulation is Seddon’s expression of Sterling’s core move in Theorem 29 — that virtue consists in the manner of pursuit, not in achieving the external object. The Decision Framework operationalizes precisely this: the agent identifies preferred indifferents as appropriate objects of aim, then determines rational action directed at them, with reservation. The virtue is in the quality of the will, not the outcome.
The singular exception Seddon notes — the interest in perfecting one’s character — is compatible with Sterling’s classification of virtue as the only genuine good.
The terminological note: Seddon uses “interests” and “projects” as his organizational vocabulary. Sterling’s framework doesn’t use these terms; it classifies everything directly as preferred/dispreferred indifferents or genuine good/evil. The Seddon vocabulary is usable in explanatory prose, but the framework’s own steps — particularly Value Strip and Virtue Identification — run on Sterling’s terms, not Seddon’s. No translation error results as long as that substitution is conscious.
In short, the passage is compatible and could serve as useful supplementary explanatory material. It is not a source of propositions that can be quoted as governing principles within a framework run.
Exchange 2: Is Seddon’s Opening Claim True?
Question: “Everything that we engage in in daily life will further some project which in turn satisfies some interest we have.” Is this true?
Response: No — not from within Sterling’s framework, and the exception Seddon himself acknowledges points to why.
Seddon carves out one exception: the interest in perfecting one’s character. But on Sterling’s analysis, this exception is not merely a special case sitting alongside the others — it is categorically different in kind. Virtue is the only genuine good. Everything else on Seddon’s list (income, education, health, raising children) is a preferred indifferent. The activity of perfecting one’s character is not a project in the same sense at all, because it has no external object that can be achieved or frustrated. Its “success” is entirely within purview.
This creates a problem for Seddon’s claim as stated. If virtue is genuinely good and everything else is indifferent, then the activity of pursuing virtue cannot be described as just another interest that daily life happens to serve alongside earning income and staying healthy. It is the only thing that is not an interest in Seddon’s sense — because it is not aimed at an external that may or may not be obtained.
There is also a second problem. The claim that everything we engage in serves some project which serves some interest assumes a means-end structure for all action. But the framework’s central point — the “way we carry out” move that Seddon himself makes a few sentences later — is that virtuous action is not a means to an end. It is not a project serving an interest. It is valuable in itself, regardless of whether the external object is achieved.
So the opening universal claim is too strong. It works as a rough description of how most people unreflectively organize their activity. It does not hold under the framework’s own analysis, where the virtuous manner of action stands apart from the interest-project hierarchy entirely.
Exchange 3: Aren’t We Always Pursuing Appropriate Objects of Aim?
Question: “My action is my choice” is document 10 in Nine Excerpts. Aren’t we always pursuing appropriate objects of aim?
Response: No — and Sterling’s text in document 10 is the clearest refutation of that idea.
The full passage says action is appropriate or inappropriate at the instant the choice is made. That “or inappropriate” is doing significant work. Sterling gives explicit examples of inappropriate choices right there: going to a restaurant known to fund terrorism, or planning to walk 50 miles in a lunch hour on icy sidewalks. Those are real choices directed at objects — but they are not appropriate objects of aim. The action is inappropriate because either the end itself is wrong or the means selected are irrational.
So the framework distinguishes two failure modes. First, the end can be wrong — choosing an object that is genuinely dispreferred or morally impermissible. Second, the means can be wrong — choosing an irrational or dangerous path to an otherwise acceptable end.
“Appropriate objects of aim” is a normative standard that action can fail to meet. Virtue consists in pursuing appropriate objects of aim — which implies that vice or error consists in pursuing inappropriate ones. If we were always already pursuing appropriate objects, Theorem 29 would have no action-guiding content. The whole framework would be pointless.
The framework’s purpose is precisely to help the agent identify what the appropriate object actually is in a given situation — because that identification is not automatic and can go wrong.
Exchange 4: Aren’t We Always Pursuing Some Object?
Question: Aren’t we always pursuing objects, either appropriate or desired?
Response: Yes — that much holds. Every voluntary action is directed at some object. The will always aims at something.
But this is where Sterling’s distinction in Theorem 29 cuts sharply. The contrast he draws is between two kinds of object: appropriate objects of aim and objects of desire. These are not the same category, and they do not always coincide.
When an agent pursues an object of desire, they are aiming at something they want to obtain — and they have a stake in whether the external outcome actually materializes. When an agent pursues an appropriate object of aim, they are directing the will rationally toward a preferred indifferent, with reservation, without desire for the outcome.
So the more precise answer is: we are always pursuing some object, but not always the right kind of object, and not always in the right way. The framework’s job is to correct both the object selected and the manner of pursuit — stripping false value from desired objects and replacing desire with rational aim.
Seddon’s interests/projects vocabulary maps onto the “objects of desire” side of that distinction for most of daily life. Sterling’s point is that this entire structure needs to be reoriented — not replaced with a different set of external targets, but reconceived as rational aim at preferred indifferents held with reservation. The shift is not primarily in what we pursue but in how we hold what we are pursuing.
Exchange 5: We Established That Most People See Value Incorrectly
Question: We established before that the people we see are almost certainly seeing things incorrectly as to value.
Response: Yes — and that has a direct bearing on Seddon’s interests/projects framework.
If virtually everyone around us is organizing their daily activity around objects of desire rather than appropriate objects of aim, then Seddon’s description — “everything we engage in furthers some project which satisfies some interest” — is accurate as a description of how people actually operate. It is a sociological observation about the unreflective majority.
But it cannot serve as a normative model without importing exactly the error the framework is designed to correct. The interests Seddon lists — earning income, gaining education, staying healthy, raising children — are pursued by most people as though they were genuine goods. The false value judgment is already built into the typical agent’s relationship to those interests. Pursuing health because you falsely judge it to be genuinely good is a different act, at the level of assent, from rationally aiming at health as a preferred indifferent with reservation.
So Seddon’s framework describes the structure of action as it appears from the outside, or as the non-reflective agent experiences it. It does not describe the structure of action as Sterling’s framework reconceives it. The interests/projects vocabulary is phenomenologically accurate for most people precisely because most people are operating under false value judgments.
This is why the compatibility verdict from earlier needs a qualification. The passage is compatible at the level of ontology — yes, actions have objects, some of those objects are indifferents — but it describes a starting condition that the framework exists to transform, not a completed account of how a Stoic agent relates to daily life.
Exchange 6: But Sterling Pursues Interests Too
Question: But Sterling pursues interests which further some project too.
Response: Granted — and the point is well taken. Sterling eats, travels to conferences, writes papers. The behavioral description is accurate for everyone, Sterling included.
The correction needed is more precise than the previous response made it. Seddon’s interests/projects structure is not wrong as a description of the content of daily activity. The error would only arise if that structure were used to explain why the activity has value — if the implicit claim were that the interest is what makes the action worth pursuing, or that satisfying the interest is the measure of success.
Sterling pursues the same external objects as everyone else. What differs is the value he assigns to them and the manner in which he holds them. The income, the health, the productive conversation — these remain preferred indifferents aimed at rationally and held with reservation. The interests/projects structure describes the shape of the activity. It does not determine whether the agent is relating to that activity correctly or incorrectly.
So the earlier critique was aimed at the wrong target. The problem is not the interests/projects vocabulary as such. The problem would only arise if someone used it to smuggle in the claim that satisfying interests is genuinely good — that success or failure at the project level constitutes real benefit or harm. Seddon himself does not make that claim in the passage. He explicitly flags the indifferent status of the objects.
The structure is neutral. What matters is what the agent believes about the value of what the structure is aimed at.
Exchange 7: The Corrected Formulation
Question: So, we should always be pursuing our interests, appropriate objects of aims (preferred indifferents), and not the objects of our desires.
Response: Yes — that is a clean and accurate formulation, and it maps directly onto Theorem 29.
The three terms line up precisely. Interests and projects describe the content of daily activity — what we are actually doing and why, at the behavioral level. Appropriate objects of aim describes the correct normative relationship to that content — the preferred indifferent pursued rationally with reservation. Objects of desire describes the incorrect relationship — the same external content held as though it were genuinely good, with a stake in the outcome.
The agent who earns income as an appropriate object of aim and the agent who earns income as an object of desire may be doing the same thing externally. The difference is entirely at the level of assent — what the agent believes about the value of what he is pursuing, and whether he desires the outcome or merely aims at it with reservation.
Seddon’s passage, read through Sterling, becomes a useful practical entry point precisely because it starts where people actually are — organizing life around interests and projects — and the framework’s job is to reorient the relationship to those interests without necessarily changing their content. You keep pursuing health, income, family welfare. You stop treating their attainment as genuinely good and their frustration as genuinely evil.
That is the core practical move, and your formulation states it exactly.
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