The Melding Question — Sterling on Stoic Ethics and Other Systems
The Melding Question — Sterling on Stoic Ethics and Other Systems
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
The Dispute
For two decades the most persistent argument in internet Stoicism was whether Stoic ethics can stand without Stoic physics. One side held that the ethics is inseparable from the cosmology: that without a providential, rational universe there is no ground for living in agreement with nature, no reason to wish events to happen as they happen, and no source of the objective oughtness the ethics requires. The other side held that the ethical system is a distinct piece of philosophical machinery which can be stated, defended and practised without the pantheism, the pneuma, or the divine fire.
The argument generated more heat than any other on the forums. It was rarely settled, partly because the two sides were often not disputing the same claim. Sterling addressed it directly on several occasions across more than a decade, and his position is more precise than either camp usually allowed.
Four primary sources establish it.
Two Senses of “Based On”
Source: Sterling, “Basing Ethics on Metaphysics,” International Stoic Forum, 23 September 2021.
Sterling begins by splitting the question, and the split is what most of the disputants were missing.
Take metaphysics broadly, as the study of what exists. In that sense every ethical theory is based on metaphysics, and the claim is nearly tautological. No ethical theory would be adequate that made no claims about reality. If the Stoics held that moral properties exist — good, duty — they were making metaphysical claims. Even theories denying such properties make the metaphysical claim that they do not exist. Sterling notes that the term metaethics was invented to name roughly this: the inherent metaphysical aspect of ethics.
But there is a second and more demanding sense. Some theorists explicitly begin from general, non-ethical metaphysical claims and derive metaethical conclusions from them, then derive specific ethical recommendations from those. Sterling gives two examples.
Ayer begins from the claim that no property can exist which is not physical and empirically detectable, and that we cannot meaningfully speak of such a non-property. From this he deduces that moral properties cannot exist. Since people nevertheless use moral language, that language must be doing something else — expressing feelings.
Bentham begins from the claim that no one can be motivated by anything but the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain. From this he deduces that ethics cannot prescribe any other goal, since a prescription no one could follow would be worthless.
In both cases a clearly non-ethical premise does the work from which the ethics is deduced. Sterling calls this a more robust sort of basing than the near-tautological version — and then makes the ruling that decides the dispute: this sort of basing is optional. Not all ethical theories are like this, and he sees no reason to think the ones that are not are thereby at fault.
Theology Is Not a Special Case
The same analysis applies when the metaphysics in question is theology, and Sterling works it through with three examples.
Aristotle believed in God and mentions the gods in his Ethics, but the ethical ideas are not put forward as essentially tied to his theological commitments. Sterling’s test is the detachability of the two in practice: Aristotle’s proof of God’s existence has been adopted by philosophers with very different ethical theories, and Aristotle’s ethics has been adopted by philosophers with very different notions of God.
Divine Command Theory is the opposite case. Subtract the theology and no ethical theory is left over at all.
Aquinas he calls an interesting middle case: taking over Aristotle’s ethics almost in its entirety, with just as little theology included, and then adding a new theologically-based structure on top of it.
Sterling then applies the test to himself. He gave a paper on the nature of human free will in which he mentioned a possible connection to theology, but holds that his views on free will are independent of his theology. Convince him the theology is false and he will abandon it without altering anything essential in the theory of free will, and the reverse holds equally.
He adds an aside worth preserving. He says he has never understood the idea, embraced by some recent philosophers and which he attributes to Bertrand Russell’s influence, that each philosophical problem must remain utterly isolated from every other. The point is not that connections between areas are illegitimate. It is that a connection is not a dependency.
The Verdict on Stoic Ethics
The conclusion follows in two parts.
First: Stoic ethics, like every ethical theory, is based on metaphysics in the broad sense, and it is. It claims that moral properties exist. It includes, or is inextricably intertwined with, claims about human psychology, and it carries epistemological claims as well.
Second: Sterling does not see that it is, or needs to be, grounded in metaphysics in the robust sense. It can be mixed with a variety of theologies and metaphysical conceptions with little alteration.
And the qualification that keeps this from being relativism: not with just any other ideas. It cannot be mixed with Ayer’s metaphysics or Bentham’s. The constraint is real and is a matter of consistency, not preference. A metaphysics which entails that moral properties do not exist cannot host an ethics whose first claim is that they do.
He closes that post with an explicit boundary: he makes no claim there about whether a person mixing Stoic ethics with something other than pantheism and pneuma could reasonably be called a Stoic. He thinks they could, and thinks Epictetus did, but he is not defending that view in the post. He is arguing only that an undeniably Stoic ethics can be presented without relying on undeniably Stoic metaphysics and theology.
What Melding Means
Source: Sterling, quoted by Steve Marquis in “One Path or Many?”, stoics list, 19 June 2010. The original was posted to the Stoic_Christian group, which was subsequently deleted after what its moderator called a cyber brawl. The passage survives only in Marquis’s quotation of it.
Sterling’s formulation:
If it isn’t clear, then, I think that the way to meld Stoicism and Christianity is to regard them as parts of _one path_, not two. I aim for perfection, as a Stoic (and as a Christian).
Immediately following, and in the same quotation:
Nevertheless, I reject the pragmatism of an approach that says “it makes no difference whether you have true or false beliefs about something, as long as you get the payoff”. In the case of happiness, though, I think the payoff is impossible to attain without the true view of value.
Three things follow from the pair.
Melding is not synthesis. It is not two systems reconciled by adjusting each until they fit. It is the recognition that they are parts of one path, aimed at one perfection. The unity is in the object, not in a negotiated settlement between the doctrines.
Melding is not tolerance of useful falsehood. The second paragraph is a guard, placed immediately after the first, against precisely the reading that a melded position can hold false beliefs so long as they help. Sterling rejects that pragmatism explicitly, and adds the stronger claim that in the case of happiness the payoff cannot be had without the true view of value. The melding therefore costs nothing in truth conditions. Nothing false is admitted for being useful.
The truth condition is what distinguishes melding from syncretism. Syncretism combines systems by relaxing the demand that each be true. Sterling’s melding does the opposite: it holds the truth demand fixed and finds that two systems, so held, turn out to be aimed at the same thing.
The Marquis Position, and Where It Diverges
Marquis quoted Sterling in order to agree with the first paragraph and reject the second, and the divergence is instructive because it marks exactly where the melding question turns.
Marquis’s frame is the Wisdom Tradition. He compares the situation to Hinduism’s several Yogas, developed as he understands it to suit different psychological types, and sees a similar relation between Christianity and Stoicism — Christianity focused on love and relationship, Stoicism on mental discipline and philosophy.
His argument is that we all hold false beliefs, that false beliefs are not created equal, and that some move a person toward true beliefs while others do not. Being students, we cannot know in advance which tradition contains only true beliefs, if any does. We take our best choice and see what the path does for us. False beliefs can therefore be instrumental to the single goal of exclusively true beliefs, and all the different pragmatically true paths will eventually converge.
He extends this into a practical stance: rather than condemning a friend’s belief system outright, he challenges the friend to inquire whether it pragmatically makes him a better or happier person. And he draws a further conclusion — that this approach lets a follower of any path avoid excessive attachment to its truth claims, an attachment he identifies as the antithesis of growth and as the presumption behind much religious violence. He closes by treating an appeal to intuition as something whose proof cannot be carried over by testimony, and counsels skepticism about being absolutely right.
The divergence. Marquis reads Sterling’s second paragraph as a misunderstanding of his own position. It is not. Sterling’s claim is not that Marquis is indifferent to truth; it is that instrumental value cannot substitute for truth in the case that matters. Marquis’s convergence thesis requires that a false belief can be a means to happiness. Sterling’s claim is that happiness is constituted by the true view of value, so a false value-belief is not a slow route to the payoff but an obstruction of it.
Marquis’s position also puts pressure on the corpus’s later commitments, which is worth marking without adjudicating it here. Skepticism about being absolutely right and the treatment of intuition as untransferable testimony sit uneasily with C3 and C4. Under the corpus’s own numbering, the melding question and the foundationalism question are not independent.
What Cannot Be Melded
Sterling’s permissiveness has a boundary, and he drew it twice on different grounds.
On metaphysics: not Ayer, not Bentham. A framework whose premises entail that moral properties do not exist, or that only pleasure can motivate, cannot host Stoic ethics without contradiction.
On the Eastern traditions — source: Sterling, on the stoics list, 12 August 2012. He grants at the outset that many systems have points of intersection with Stoicism: Platonism, Epicureanism, Aristotelianism, Buddhism, Taoism. Then he names the crucial difference, which is not doctrinal content but the standing of reason itself.
The most crucial difference, to his mind, is the fundamental anti-intellectualism of Taoist thought. The way is utterly inexplicable, incapable of definition or adequate description. One progresses toward virtue not by coming to understand the world better but conversely by letting go of rational thought and becoming more spontaneous.
Against this he sets the Stoic position: all reality is held together by the underlying Logos, and it is no coincidence that logos means both word and explanation. Reality is ultimately rational and graspable by coherent thought, and our own souls contain a spark of this divine fire, which is our reason. In Taoism there is an underlying reality, but it is incoherent, and reason is if anything an obstacle to following the way.
His summary of the relation: the Taoists, like the Stoics, hold that emotions and desires lead us astray from the true path — but the two point in opposite directions when asked what the true path consists in and how to make progress along it. In that sense Taoism is a direct opposite of Stoic thought.
He then adds, parenthetically: similar things can be said about some forms of Buddhism. The qualifier is his, and should be preserved. He is not issuing a verdict on Buddhism as such, and Buddhism is not the subject of the post.
The structure of the exclusion. Both boundaries are drawn at the same place. Ayer and Bentham are excluded because their premises contradict the existence or authority of moral properties. Taoism is excluded because it denies that reason is the faculty by which the path is found. In each case what is refused is not a different answer but a different account of how answers are reached. A system may be melded with Stoic ethics if it leaves the rational faculty in place as the instrument of moral knowledge. It cannot be melded if it removes it.
That criterion is C3 and C4 operating before the commitments were named. What can be melded is what does not deny direct rational apprehension of moral truth or the foundational structure that apprehension terminates in.
The Bridge Case
Source: Sterling, “Theosis, Atonement, and (yes!) Stoicism,” Stoic_Christian group, 14 June 2010.
The same period produced an instance of what melding looks like in practice, and it is not a soft one.
Arguing against the claim that Jesus’s purpose was to enable theosis rather than to serve as atonement, Sterling identifies a point of agreement he calls one of those bridges between Stoic and Christian thought: the theotic Christian and the orthodox Stoic both claim that human moral perfection is possible. As the Sage is pictured as morally perfect, so the theotic Christian must hold that we can become morally perfect. He notes the consequence for the forum’s critics — anyone taking theosis seriously cannot then criticize the Stoics for claiming that absolute moral perfection is possible.
He also observes, in an aside, that for the Stoic God’s moral perfection follows deductively from omniscience: an omniscient being has no false beliefs, all wrongdoing comes from assent to false value beliefs, therefore an omniscient being can do no wrong.
The bridge is a shared substantive claim reached from both directions, not a diplomatic overlap. And the post as a whole is an argument that a particular Christian position is incoherent — melding, in Sterling’s practice, includes telling the other tradition when its own doctrine does not hold together.
The Position, Stated
Assembling the four sources:
Stoic ethics makes metaphysical claims and cannot avoid making them. It is not derived from a general non-ethical metaphysics, and it does not need to be. It can be mixed with a range of theologies and cosmologies with little alteration, but not with frameworks whose premises contradict the existence of moral properties or the authority of reason to apprehend them. Where the mixing is with Christianity, the correct form is not two systems joined but one path recognized. And at no point is the truth condition relaxed: nothing false is admitted for being useful, because in the case of happiness the true view of value is not a means to the payoff but a constituent of it.
This is neither the traditionalist position that the ethics collapses without the physics, nor the pragmatist position that any path serving a person is thereby true enough. It is a third thing, and it was available in the archive for twenty years while the argument continued without it.
Sources
Sterling, “Basing Ethics on Metaphysics,” International Stoic Forum, 23 September 2021. Message 17c133748918ad7e.
Sterling, quoted in Steve Marquis, “One Path or Many?”, stoics list, 19 June 2010. Message 12950b8310778ead. Original post to the Stoic_Christian group, since deleted.
Sterling, “Re: Taoism,” stoics list, 12 August 2012. Message 1391c0faf32d4be1.
Sterling, “Theosis, Atonement, and (yes!) Stoicism,” Stoic_Christian group, 14 June 2010. Message 1293779b8caa998e.
All four retrieved in full from the ISF Gmail archive.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.