Stoic Virtues by Jedan Christoph

Author:Jedan, Christoph.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Practices of Virtue

Chapter 11

Law and Rules

The last part of this book focuses on the practices of Stoic virtue. The plural ‘practices’ indicates what is a major—in my view even the single most important—interpretive puzzle about the practical application of Stoic ethics. We find in our (admittedly rather scarce) sources not only evidence of a far-reaching flexibility and sensitivity to context of the Stoic practical prescriptions, but we also find opposite courses of action explicitly prescribed by leading Stoics without any indication that the unity of the teaching of the Stoic school was perceived to be endangered. It is not easy to see how the flexibility and the contentiousness of practical prescriptions square with the stress in our sources on the concept of a natural moral law that leads us to expect a deduction of exceptionless rules from general first principles and a rigid prescription of Stoic practice rather than flexible and contended prescriptions of divergent practices. In consequence of this difficulty it seems that, in the recent literature, readings of Stoic ethics that give the notions of natural law and deduced rules a weaker, procedural interpretation and play down their overall importance have got the upper hand. Although such interpretations have reminded us of hitherto neglected problems in the traditional natural law interpretation of Stoic ethics, they fail to make sense of the whole range of available evidence. In the remaining two chapters of this book I shall defend the more traditional interpretation that ascribes a far stronger role to the concepts of natural law and deduced rules, and I shall attempt to show how these concepts could have worked within the framework of Stoic ethics.

In this chapter I shall examine the evidence for the Stoic concepts of a natural law and action-guiding rules prescribing what is appropriate (the kathēkon), and I shall offer my view of how the concepts could have worked in Stoic practical deliberation. In Chapter 12 I shall analyse our evidence for the versatility and contentiousness of Stoic practical prescriptions. I shall argue that the interpretation of Stoic ethics as a fundamentally religious system can help us to understand why the contentiousness of Stoic practice did not undermine the unity of the teaching of the Stoic school.

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