The Death of Marcus Aurelius

The Death of Marcus Aurelius

Sunday, November 6, 2022

Stockdale on Stoicism 28


The Stoics believe that every man bears the exclusive responsibility himself for his own good and his own evil—and that leads to their further conclusion that it is impossible to imagine a moral order in which one person does the wrong, and another, the innocent, suffers. 

Now add all that to Epictetus's firm belief that we are all born with an innate conception of good and evil, and what is noble and what is shameful, what is becoming and unbecoming, what is fitting and inappropriate, what is right to do and what is wrong, and further, remembering that all Stoic talk refers to the inner man, what is going on "way down in here." 

It follows that the perpetrator of evil pays the full price for his misdeed in suffering the injury of knowing that he has destroyed the good man within him. 

Man has "moral sense," and he reaps the benefits and pays the price for this inheritance. 

—from James B. Stockdale, The Stoic Warrior's Triad 

IMAGE: Pierre Subleyras, Justice (c. 1730) 



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