Ten Maxims, Audited
Ten Maxims, Audited
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
The Occasion
A list of ten Stoic maxims was posted to a discussion board under the heading of practical advice. It is a fair sample of what circulates: compact, memorable, drawn from Epictetus and Marcus, and offered without argument. Lists of this kind are how most people meet Stoicism now.
The list is worth auditing rather than dismissing. Six of its ten items are correct as stated. Two are correct but imprecise in ways that matter under pressure. Two depart from the framework, and one of those two is the most widely repeated claim in popular Stoicism.
The audit runs each item against Core Stoicism’s theorems and against the six commitments. Where an item is corrected, the correction names what performs it.
The Six That Hold
Catch your impression before it becomes a passion
Correct, and it names the operative moment. A pathos is caused by a judgment about good and evil, and the judgment is given by assent to an impression. The interval between the impression’s arrival and the assent is where the whole of the practice happens.
Grounds: Th7. In the five-step method this is the Pause, and what makes it a genuine pause rather than a delay is the commitment to libertarian free will.
Every action should be made with a reserve clause
Correct. An act of will must have content — the result at which one aims — and some things are appropriate objects at which to aim although they are not genuinely good. The reservation is what keeps the aim from becoming a judgment that the outcome is genuinely good.
Grounds: Th24, Th25. Proposition 38: the appropriateness of a choice is determined at the moment of choice, regardless of outcomes.
Nothing can harm your moral choice
Correct, and the list states it in the right register. You can be injured, tortured, killed. The moral choice cannot be impeded. The harshness is the precision: a softer version would concede that sufficiently severe externals reach the will, and nothing in the framework permits that concession.
Grounds: Th6, line 12, Proposition 19.
Vicious people harm themselves
Correct, and it follows immediately. Vice is the only genuine evil; vice is a type of act of will; acts of will are the agent’s own. The man who acts viciously has done the only thing that can genuinely harm him, and he has done it to himself.
Grounds: Th10, line 11.
Up to you is your choice; not up to you is everything else
Correct, and one clause is worth restoring. The corpus formulation is that the only things in our control are our beliefs and will, and anything entailed by our beliefs and will. The entailment clause is not decoration. Desires are in our control precisely because they are entailed by judgments, and without the clause the partition looks narrower than it is — as though only bare acts of choice were ours, with the emotional life falling outside.
Grounds: Th6, and line 8 for the entailment.
Your natural role is to be a social rational being
Correct as to role. The list says social rational mammal, and the biological term imports a grounding the framework does not use. The agent is his rational faculty; the body is external. A role held in common with other rational beings is not held in virtue of shared biology.
The correction is small and the direction matters. Grounding the social role in the organism makes it contingent on facts about the organism — which would make it revisable by biology, and it is not.
Grounds: C1.
The Two That Overshoot
Virtue should be in your desire, and satisfaction with the whole — but individual things and events should not be desired
The first two clauses are correct. The third overshoots, and it contradicts the list’s own item on the reserve clause.
Th25 states that some things are appropriate objects at which to aim, although they are not genuinely good, and Th26 lists them: life, one’s own and others’, health, pleasure, knowledge, justice, truth-telling. The framework does not forbid aiming at individual things. It forbids judging them genuinely good, and it requires the reservation.
The distinction is practical rather than academic. A man who takes the maxim as written has no ground on which to pursue his health, provide for his family, or finish his work, and the reserve clause has nothing left to attach to — a reservation presupposes an aim. What the framework asks is not the elimination of aims but the correction of the judgment that their attainment is genuinely good.
Correction: individual things may be desired as appropriate objects of aim, held with reservation, and not judged genuine goods.
Love for others and things should be free of attachment and desire
The intent is right and the wording will be read as detachment, which is not what the framework asks.
What must be given up is the judgment that the person is a genuine good — because that judgment is what converts his loss into a genuine evil and produces grief. What need not be given up is the aim. Other persons appear in Th26’s list of appropriate objects; caring for them is an appropriate act, and its appropriateness closes at the moment of choice rather than depending on what becomes of them.
Correction: love free of the judgment that the beloved is a genuine good. Not love without desire, and not love at a distance.
The Two That Depart
There is a God and daimon inside you that sleeplessly monitors you
This is Marcus and Seneca, and it is where popular Stoicism and this framework separate.
The framework grounds moral facts in their being real features of the world, and grounds the agent’s access to them in direct rational apprehension. Neither requires an internal witness, and the witness does no work the other two do not already do. What it adds is a second party in the room.
There is a further and more practical objection. An agent who holds that he is continuously observed is holding a second-order proposition about his own state, and at the moment an impression arrives that proposition competes with the impression for attention. The corpus has ruled on the parallel case: even virtue is correct assent must not surface as foreground content at Reception, because it replaces the first-order impression with an audit of the agent’s own performance. A sleepless monitor is that error with a personality.
What survives the correction: the moral facts do not depend on whether anyone is watching, which is a stronger claim than the maxim makes and does not require the daimon to carry it.
Vice is a type of ignorance and virtue is a type of knowledge
This is the most repeated claim in popular Stoicism, it has good ancient credentials, and Sterling’s version is narrower.
Virtue is correct assent. Assent is an act, not a state. The difference is not verbal.
If virtue were knowledge, then possessing the knowledge would settle the case — the agent who knows would act, and the only work left would be instruction. But the framework holds that the examination indicates and does not compel: having established that the impression fails to correspond, the agent must still withhold assent, and the withholding is his own origination. That is why libertarian free will stands beside the commitments that do the examining rather than following from them.
The intellectualist thesis erases the act. It also mislocates the failure. On the ignorance account, the man who assents wrongly did not know; on this account he may have known perfectly well and assented anyway, which is the ordinary case and the one the practice addresses.
Correction: vice is incorrect assent, virtue is correct assent. Knowledge is necessary and is not sufficient.
What the Audit Shows
Six of ten correct is a better result than lists of this kind usually return, and the two overshoots are the more instructive failures. Both err in the same direction: toward renunciation. Desire nothing individual; love without desire. That is the direction popular Stoicism drifts when the theorem about appropriate objects of aim drops out, and what remains is a counsel of withdrawal that the framework does not teach and cannot support — because an act of will must have content, and content is composed of the result at which one aims.
The two departures are different in kind. Neither is a drift; each is a substantive position with its own ancient support. The daimon is genuinely in Marcus. The intellectualist thesis is genuinely in the early Stoa. They are not errors of popularization but places where this framework takes one road and the tradition took another, and they should be recorded as such rather than corrected as mistakes.
Sources
Core Stoicism, theorems and numbered lines, Grant C. Sterling. The six commitments. Proposition 19 and Proposition 38 of the unified propositions.
The five-step method and the assignment of commitments to each step are treated separately, as is the ruling on second-order content at Reception.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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