Day 3 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Here’s a claim worth sitting with:
wealth is not good.
Health is not good.
A long life is not good.
That’s not pessimism.
It’s the Stoic theory of value, and understanding it might shift how you think about almost everything.
The Stoics made a radical distinction between things that are genuinely good and things that are merely preferable.
Health, wealth, reputation, comfort, even long life, these are “preferred indifferents.”
You’re allowed to pursue them.
It makes sense to prefer them.
But they are not good in themselves, because they can be used well or badly.
A wealthy person can use their money to help others or to cause harm.
A healthy body can be used for courage or cruelty.
The thing itself doesn’t determine the value, the person using it does.
Only one thing is genuinely good, the Stoics argued: virtue.
And only one thing is genuinely bad: vice.
Virtue, for the Stoics, has four faces.
Wisdom is the master virtue, the capacity to know what to do, what to value, and how to act in any given situation.
It’s not intelligence or book-learning; it’s practical judgement.
The ability to see clearly what a situation actually requires.
Justice is the virtue of our relationships with others.
It means doing right by the people around you, not because you’ll be rewarded, because it’s right.
Marcus Aurelius was particularly drawn to this virtue.
He wrote about it constantly: the obligation to care about others, to seek the common good, to resist the temptation to treat people as means to your ends.
Courage is not the absence of fear.
It’s the willingness to act correctly despite fear, to do the right thing even when it costs you something.
While physical courage is the obvious version, the Stoics were equally interested in moral courage.
The courage to say the true thing, to hold the unpopular position, to live according to your values when the social pressure to abandon them is intense.
Temperance is self-discipline.
The ability to govern your appetites and impulses rather than being governed by them.
Not austerity for its own sake, freedom from compulsion.
For vegans, the virtue framework does something clarifying.
The choice to live without exploiting animals is, at its core, a virtue claim.
It’s a claim that justice matters, that beings who can suffer have a moral status that demands consideration, regardless of whether society agrees or whether the law protects them.
It’s a claim that courage matters, that you’re willing to be different, to be inconvenienced, to have difficult conversations, to hold a position that most people around you reject.
It’s a claim that temperance matters, that your desire for a particular taste, texture, or convenience doesn’t override an ethical obligation.
Stoicism doesn’t use the language of veganism.
It wasn’t written with animals in mind, that’s a genuine limitation worth acknowledging, and we’ll return to it.
Its ethical framework, virtue over preference, doing right over doing easy, maps cleanly onto why most people go vegan in the first place.
There’s a deeper implication worth drawing out.
If the Stoics are right that only virtue is genuinely good, then the person who lives ethically in poverty is living better than the person who lives unethically in comfort.
The person who holds their values under social pressure is living better than the person who abandons them for an easier life.
The good life, on this account, is not the comfortable life or the successful life or the admired life.
It’s the life lived in accordance with reason, justice, and care.
That’s a demanding standard.
The Stoics knew it was demanding.
Marcus Aurelius spent decades in the most powerful position in the world and still wrote to himself, almost daily, about how far he fell short.
That honesty is part of the tradition.
The question for today isn’t whether you’re perfectly virtuous, none of us are.
The question is which virtue you most need to develop, and what that would actually look like in practice.
Practice for today
Think of someone in your life who embodies each of the four virtues, wisdom, justice, courage, temperance.
They don’t have to be the same person.
Then write honestly about which virtue you feel weakest in, and give one specific example of what developing it would look like in your life this week.
Cameron is a prolific blogger with a number of sites where he shares his thoughts on a wide range of topics.
His main site is CameronBlewett.blog
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