On What Side of the Debate Are the Stoics?

 

On What Side of the Debate Are the Stoics?

Claude from ChatGPT's outline account:

There is no ambiguity. The Stoics are firmly on the realist side of the debate.

From Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus through Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism maintains that virtue is objectively good, vice is objectively bad, these are not matters of preference or convention, moral error is genuine error, and reason can apprehend moral truth. They reject moral subjectivism, relativism, expressivism, and skeptical suspension about moral categories.

The Stoic Realist Position

Their position includes four interlocking commitments. First, moral realism — good and bad are features of reality, not projections of human sentiment. Second, cognitivism — moral statements are truth-apt, capable of being true or false, not merely expressions of attitude. Third, rational accessibility — the rational faculty can recognize moral truth directly, without requiring empirical investigation or social consensus. Fourth, rejection of error theory — when someone calls disgrace not bad, he is not merely different. He is wrong.

Beyond Modern Realism

The Stoics go further than many modern realists. They embed morality in a rationally ordered cosmos — the Logos that pervades and governs reality. They treat virtue as the only genuine good, collapsing all other apparent goods into the category of indifferents. And they collapse moral value into the state of the rational faculty itself — virtue just is the rational faculty in its proper condition, vice is its corruption.

In contemporary terms they are realists, non-relativists, anti-skeptics, and strong objectivists simultaneously. No hedging, no quietism, no deliberate metaphysical minimalism of the kind Parfit chose. The Stoic position is maximally committed.

The Implication for Sterling's Project

This matters for understanding what Sterling's Core Stoicism is doing. Sterling is not importing moral realism into Stoicism from outside. He is recovering what was always central to it. The anti-realist period in analytic philosophy produced interpretations of Stoicism — therapeutic, physics-oriented, culturally accommodating — that systematically muted the realist commitments that define the tradition from its foundation.

Sterling names those commitments explicitly and defends them philosophically. The Stoics were realists, cognitivists, anti-skeptics, and strong objectivists. Core Stoicism is what happens when you take that seriously.