II. Stoicism and Liberal Ideology

By “liberal ideology” I do not necessarily mean a society with a constitutional democracy as its system of government. Antiquity knew nothing of the kind of democracy and universal suffrage current in Western Europe and North America. For any realistic comparison between modern liberalism and ancient thought, the relevant bases of comparison have to do not with legally granted political rights but with assessments of human beings and their deserts that exclude reference to people's gender, ethnicity, and social status. By these criteria, Stoicism emerges as the most overtly liberal, if not the only liberal, ancient philosophy. This is not to say that Stoic philosophers or Stoic adherents, in virtue of their belief system, advocated political action to reform the rampant prejudices and inegalitarian practices of their societies. My point is, rather, that Stoic conceptions of the common identity of human beings in virtue of rationality exclude any grounds for ranking men's innate aptitudes ahead of women's, or for positing natural slavery, or for treating anyone as ethically superior to another on the basis of wealth or social position or race.

The explicit evidence for all these points, though not extensive, is sufficient for me to assert them as clear and uncontroversial.⁶

One way Stoic philosophers do this, especially Epictetus and Marcus, is by insisting on our human kinship with divinity. Notwithstanding Jesus' injunction “be ye perfect” (Matthew 5.48), the Church itself, perhaps for dubious political reasons, has preferred to emphasize innate human imperfection and ethical helplessness apart from divine grace. In Christian circles, Stoicism has often been stigmatized for pride and arrogance, but what its critics regularly fail to register is not only the human dignity and worth Stoics sought to emphasize through insisting on everyone's likeness to the divine but also, and more particularly, the social implications of this exalted relationship.⁸

Here, for instance, is a characteristic statement of these points from Epictetus:

Anyone ignorant of Stoic theology and committed to the separation of religion from politics would no doubt balk at my citing this passage as support for my proposition concerning the Stoics' liberal egalitarianism. “Hold on,” I respond. For Epictetus as a Stoic, and similarly for Plato and Aristotle, theos (divinity) in such contexts does not refer to a supernatural being with the denotations of Judaic, Christian, or Islamic monotheism and religiosity. Theos here certainly connotes divinity in one of the senses that an adherent of such religious faiths would understand (i.e., as that which is objectively the best and greatest power in the world), but what theos primarily denotes is rationality because, according to Stoic doctrine, rationality is the one great attribute that divine and human have in common.

This is not to say that Epictetus's remarkable statements about “carrying god” and so forth amount to his saying nothing more than: “You are a rational being.” His way of saying that is theologically supercharged, in order to highlight his interlocutor's unacknowledged but exalted status, and especially what is incumbent on every human being as a privileged sharer in rationality. The implicit thought is that, because we humans are essentially rational beings, that fact about us immediately implies a series of “oughts.” For Epictetus, as for Stoics in general, anthropos is not simply a species denominator; it is also a normative concept, or, as he frequently likes to say, “a profession.” For instance:

If I may quote myself, “Epictetus treats family relationships, public office, and stages of life as quasi professions—normative identifications that specify the conduct appropriate to each designation. To be a real son, one must be filial, to be a real brother, one must be fraternal; the blood relationship by itself is insufficient to identify one in these ways.”⁹

In this way of looking at one's human identity, one can never opt out of the ethical, which is also (and more challengingly) to say that one can never opt out of the political. Why the move from the ethical to the political follows is the next step of my argument; but for the moment I want to anticipate the validity of that step in order to make a connection with some shortcomings of our modern, highly restricted concept of the political.

If the officially political realm virtually stops at each individual's front door, as is largely the case in our modern theory and practice, we face the obvious problem that much of what may be flagrantly wrong and unjust in social relationships—mindless cruelty, discrimination, abuse, and other types of nastiness—if it is not demonstrably illegal, is tolerated in the interests of privacy, liberty, and noninterference. The point has been taken by contemporary thinkers, especially feminists, who have argued that insofar as human relationships frequently involve coercive power, politics is not confined to the ballot box and the council chamber. Certainly, a strong case can be made for distinguishing sharply between public and private; we do not want routine policing of the kids' room or the marital bedroom. But if the basic unit of society is the household, as Aristotle cogently argued (and the Stoics followed suit), then there is something to be said for an ideology that leaves the boundaries between the ethical and the political fuzzy, or even declines to treat the two realms as categorically distinct.

If that thought troubles the modern liberal, I need to say that Stoics such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are as adamantly on the side of noninterference, within the limits of statutory law, as any libertarian could want. Their philosophy steers a fine but completely clear line between emphasizing, on the one hand, the mutual dependence, kinship, interconnectedness, and mutual obligations of human beings, and, on the other hand, the right, however misguided, of individuals to reject Stoic principles and to be tolerated for that rejection. Stoicism presents itself both as an unequivocally true and cogent set of doctrines, and as a system that persons, however misguidedly, are quite free to reject. The two Stoic thinkers I have been citing constantly advise against criticizing or passing judgment on anyone other than oneself. Marcus writes:

What Marcus implies here (and what we need to add, to supplement his reasoning) is that the only human being who can strictly do one benefit or harm is oneself. No one, on this view, can be harmed by another person's shortcomings or opinions, and therefore the Stoic has no reason to be intolerant or censorious.

III. Citizenship as Everyone's Normative Nature as a Rational Being

Early Stoic doctrine held that the world as a whole was a “quasi city, consisting of gods and human beings, with the gods serving as rulers and human beings as their subjects. They are members of a community because of their participation in rationality, which is natural law” (LS 67L). Here again we find the Stoics using the term “gods” or “divinity” as a stand-in for “perfect rationality.” The crucial point at this stage of my argument is the inference that our normative nature as rational beings confers citizenship or community membership upon us.

Is this anything more than Aristotle's famous doctrine that human beings are political animals by nature (Politics I.2.1253a2–3)? The answer is surely that it is much more. For Aristotle, the doctrine means that you cannot fulfill your human nature unless you are a participating member of a specifically organized polis, and thus able to engage in the cooperative activities and just practices that such membership betokens. Aristotle does not envision your being a citizen of the world, so to speak, but that is precisely the primary connotation of Stoic citizenship.

Thus Epictetus writes:

What does Epictetus mean by not allowing the detached person to be recognized as an authentic human being? We might suppose Epictetus, notwithstanding his allusion to world citizenship as that in which one primarily participates, to be making an Aristotelian point both about the unconditional need for engagement in appropriate social activities, and also about one's need for citizenship in the conventional sense in order to make up for one's lack of self-sufficiency if living in isolation. Actually, such rather obvious interpretations would considerably understate the challenge of Epictetus's context. His analogy between the attached foot and the attached human being registers the thought that either one of these, viewed functionally, has to be seen as a part of a whole. A functioning foot, as an organic part, must sometimes get muddy or hurt or even require amputation for the body's sake. To remain always clean and intact, it would have to be detached, and hence not a real foot. By analogy, authentic human beings, as citizens of the world, must acknowledge that their attachment to the social world (including their human relatedness to the divine) may require their discomfort, illness, risk taking, or even untimely death.¹⁰

According to this view, not only can you not opt out of the exigencies and obligations of your social context and still fully merit the designation human being, you cannot reasonably expect that your life as a citizen will always run smoothly or free of discomfort. To be a world citizen is not to be a member of a world state in an organized political sense. It is, primarily, the acknowledgment that you are socially and ethically related to your fellow human beings, wherever in the world you happen to be; and it is, secondarily, the understanding that the conditions of human life, wherever you are living, necessarily involve aging and dying, probably illness and serious losses, and possibly many other circumstances, including social isolation, that one would much prefer to do without.¹¹

At this juncture, Epictetus's recommended outlook will probably seem disquietingly distant from anything a modern Western civilian can readily relate to under normal conditions of peacetime existence. Can we be attached citizens in Epictetus's sense if we have not volunteered for military service or some other potentially dangerous profession? Unfortunately, recent experience, whether as a result of terrorism, natural disaster, or epidemic, shows that our modern predicaments may include both a civic unpreparedness for unforeseen catastrophes and also, when catastrophes occur, precisely the loss of the truthfulness and shame in our elected leaders that Epictetus underscores as the essential ingredients of normative citizenship. (Without endorsing Stoic fatalism or resignation, we need to educate our citizens into balancing the reasonableness of wanting life-enhancing material goods and security against an ethically sound appreciation of human vulnerability, unpredictable disaster, and communal dependence, and an understanding that nothing can justify the forfeiture of integrity.)

Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 4.1.4), in one of his rare versions of a formal argument, connects the concepts of rationality, and of the world as a kind of community, with law, in this chain of inferences:

He repeatedly underlines his conviction that rational beings are constituted for one another's sake, and that therefore sociability is a human being's principal function (e.g., Meditations 7.55). As Roman emperor, Marcus occupied a very different position or “profession” (as Stoics would say) from that of the ex-slave, Epictetus. Yet each of them (and the same holds true of Cicero) constantly derives social/political/ethical implications from such concepts as I have been adumbrating: i.e., divinity/rationality, law, community, human nature, and attachment to (world) citizenship.

Taken at face value and out of context, Marcus's premises concerning shared reasoning and shared law may appear to be hopelessly naive if not vapidly rhetorical. Yet you have only to sample a few pages of his Meditations to recognize his melancholy, resignation, pessimism, and brutally low expectations of persons he encounters in daily life. Can we reconcile this sober tone with his optimistic talk about shared rationality and world citizenship?

I think we must try to do so, because I see little point in presently engaging in political theory unless we hold onto something like Marcus's faith in the possibility and prospects for shared reason and community, while acknowledging, as he did, that every day brings fresh evidence of assaults upon these values. “Don't hope for Plato's Republic,” he wrote, “but be content to advance a tiny extent, and reflect that its outcome is not something trivial” (Meditations 9.29). The seductive voices of cultural relativism are difficult to hold at a distance when one reads ancient philosophical appeals to reason, as if such a supposedly dispassionate and shared faculty could settle the entrenched hostilities that generate daily acts of barbarism. Very likely, reason will not be efficacious, but to settle for the belief that it cannot be, is not the Stoic way, and it had better not be our way. In what follows, then, I ask my readers to take propositions that make reference to human beings' shared community, not as statements that Stoics thought people in general endorsed but as ideals whose force they thought normal persons, however approximately and limitedly, have some capacity to acknowledge and live by. (What this might mean for us, in terms of education and public policy, is a question I shall briefly address in the conclusion of this essay.)

To conclude the present section, I offer a further commentary on the Stoic investment of citizenship in everyone's normative nature as a rational being, amplifying my previous comparison between Stoic and Aristotelian presuppositions concerning the foundations of human sociability.

Aristotle (Politics I.2.1253a8) recognizes that we human beings are not the only social animals by nature. Yet we are so, preeminently, he argues, thanks to our linguistic powers (logos), which extend well beyond voicing pleasure and pain, as other creatures also do:

Starting with logos meaning the capacity for speech, Aristotle appears to slide into the term's more extended meaning of “rationality,” as manifested in the human being's having a moral sense. Stoics would agree with all of this, but they would also find Aristotle omitting their own distinctive contribution to the naturalness, and hence rationality, of human sociability and citizenship. I refer to the concept they called oikeiosis.¹³

Oikeiosis is a Stoic term of art which lacks a standard translation, so I shall leave it transliterated here. The root of the word connects it with the things or persons of the household (oikos) and with ownership and what belongs to oneself. At its most basic, oikeiosis signifies every animal's instinctual propensity to love and seek to preserve itself in accordance with (what we would call) its genetic programming. Animals, the Stoics presume, are natural owners of themselves, and, no less naturally, animals have an affectionate and protective regard for their offspring, treating these as an extension of their self-ownership. The Stoics justified these two manifestations of oikeiosis by the evidence of animals' behavior, but they also took them to be normative principles, manifesting capitalized Nature's (that is to say, cosmic Reason's or God's) indwelling way of organizing all life-forms with excellent purposiveness. In the case of the human animal, oikeiosis, as Cicero expresses it, is both the basis of one's self-development from infancy to maturity (Fin. 3.16–20) and “the source of the mutual and natural sympathy between humans, so that the very fact of being human requires that no human be considered a stranger to another” (Fin. 3.63).

Our lamentably few sources for the technicalities of Stoicism tell us much more about the primary aspect of oikeiosis—the instinct for self-preservation and (genetic) development—than they do concerning its parental, other-regarding, and social aspect. Did Stoics envision the latter as an outgrowth of the former, or did they regard it as a relatively independent instinct whereby one starts to treat other persons as an extension of oneself and one's self-ownership? The evidence does not permit any final answer to these important questions. We do know, however, that the primary oikeiosis was grounded in “self-perception,” which the Stoics took to be the foundation for every animal's specific behavior.¹⁵

It is a fair guess, I think, that just as the self-preservative oikeiosis presupposed affectionate self-ownership in virtue of self-perception, so the other-regarding oikeiosis was grounded in the idea that, speaking generally, one cannot perceive one's family and other human beings without being drawn toward them and extending to them a measure of the regard one already has for oneself.

Here is a further expression of the doctrine by Cicero, which combines the Aristotelian focus on the community motivations of speech with the Stoics' other-regarding oikeiosis:

Human beings are taken to be special because in their case, when they are mature, oikeiosis manifests itself, as Cicero says, through reason. Citizenship and society, in this construal, are not merely instrumental to the satisfaction of a human being's self-interested desires. The social and civic outcomes of other-regarding oikeiosis are represented as being naturally desirable for their own sake. It is certain, moreover, that Stoics derived justice from social oikeiosis.¹⁶

IV. Natural Law and Normative Human Nature

Stoicism is rightly identified as the philosophy that first promulgated the concept of natural law in a fully articulated fashion.¹⁷

Following the last sentence of this excerpt, Cicero identifies god (in the singular) as “our one common master and ruler, and originator and judge of this law.” This is the theological underpinning we have already encountered, but, like Epictetus, Cicero goes on to say that disobedience to natural law involves contempt for human nature. In other words, while the Stoics did believe that the world as a whole is under the direction of a supreme divine being, this god is also present to human beings as the voice of their own normative rationality or correct reasoning.

Now if we moderns are agnostics, we shall obviously not endorse the Stoic conviction that the world is under providential direction by a supreme and benevolent intelligence. In the absence of that conviction, Stoic natural law loses divinity as the ground of its objectivity. Yet its prescriptions and prohibitions can retain secular objectivity if (1) human beings as such are amenable to seeing the rational force of moral rules that fit the liberal requirements I outlined in Section II, and if (2) they see them not as external impositions but as principles that are implicit in our natures as interdependent social beings. And, as I observed when rebutting the objections of cultural relativism, the Stoic concept of natural law, whether grounded theologically or secularly, has no predictive value concerning compliance. If there are objective moral rules for humanity as such, their existence is not undermined, as Cicero himself observes, by the fact that they have no effect on shameless persons.

Gisela Striker has argued that the Stoic concept of natural law originated as an attempt to ground an objective notion of justice, and that in this respect it is an answer to an old problem already addressed by Plato and Aristotle: the problem of whether justice is anything more than a set of local and variant conventions.¹⁸

His context (Off. 3.21–28) is the impossibility of conflict between what is genuinely useful and what is honorable. To put his thesis another way, injustice is not only dishonorable but also contrary to our interests, if our interests are correctly construed. Cicero formulates this principle in what I will call the first Stoic natural law (Off. 3.21):

How so? Because the injustice such acts involve necessarily disrupts the bonds of society. And “human society is most of all in accord with nature.”

Although Cicero finds this natural law established in the statutes and penalties of particular communities (the purpose of which, he claims, is to keep relationships between citizens inviolate), he looks to “nature's reason, which is divine and human law” (ipsa naturae ratio, quae est lex divina et humana; Off. 3.23), as “the much more effective” grounding of the principle. He acknowledges that you cannot conduct a discussion with people who think that natural law permits them to do unprovoked injury to others. Such people are incorrigible, I take it, not simply because they are behaving criminally and unethically, but because they fail to see the force of the natural law which it is their Stoic function, as rational beings, to grasp and endorse.

Within the same context, Cicero advances the content of three further natural laws:

It is important to see that Cicero is largely reticent concerning divine providence or the supposed goodness of nature's rational order. Striker has proposed that, on the basis of such assumptions, the Stoics “proceeded to deduce the content of nature's laws for human beings from observation of the apparent purposes nature had followed in making man the kind of creature that he is.”¹⁹

I leave it to my readers to decide whether Cicero's presumptions concerning our natural interests in one another's welfare are more than optimistic hand-waving. What merits closer discussion is his connecting natural law with the notion that “there is an interest that is common to everyone” (Off. 3.27).²¹

In any case, any value we may ascribe to the concept of natural law needs to presuppose a high degree of vagueness to its prescriptions, or if not vagueness then at least generality, and hence adaptability. I agree with Striker and others that the Stoics did not want their concept of natural law to underpin a set of exceptionless moral rules with highly specific content. We should interpret the concept as a “higher order” notion of law, open to interpretation with reference to a society's traditions and current circumstances, but completely invariant and mandatory in terms of the liberal principles I explored in Section II.

V. Living Mutually Beneficial Lives

In the light of antiquity's slave-based economy, the poverty and political impotence of the free masses, and the absence of any concept of natural human rights, it is understandable, though no less admirable, that an enlightened member of the male elite, such as Marcus Aurelius, should constantly emphasize the obligations of kindness, generosity, human warmth, and tolerance. Noblesse oblige, as we used to say. Yet in the same ancient perspective, when he and Cicero emphasize the intrinsic value of community and normative citizenship, for the reasons we have already explored, one wishes they had been as sensitive to the ills of human bondage as they were to the blessings of human bonding. The ultimate indifference of material well-being to happiness, well grounded though I shall argue it to be in the overall context of Stoic theory, sounds more convincing when we hear it from the poor Epictetus than from such affluent Stoics as Seneca and Marcus.

In this section of my argument, I propose to situate the intrinsic value of shared citizenship not in any ancient Stoic context but in that of our modern Western selves. By according community intrinsic value, as distinct from instrumental value, Stoic theorists offer thoughts that can probably resonate more strongly for ourselves than they could for persons chosen randomly in antiquity (whose material circumstances were probably at little or no more than the minimal level of subsistence).

First, I offer a sample of the ancient evidence. At the end of de Officiis (On Duties), Book 1 (152–55), Cicero argues at length that, of all the virtues, justice places the strongest demands on us. In probably deliberate disagreement with Aristotle, Cicero sets justice ahead of theoretical, nonpractical wisdom on the grounds that justice is a productive virtue, which safeguards human interests:

A virtuous scientist, though absorbed in mathematical calculations, would drop everything in order to help his country or protect a parent or a friend (Off. 1.154). In implicit disagreement with Plato's account of the origins of society in the Republic and with Epicurean anthropology, Cicero insists that human sociability is not grounded in mutual protection or individual insufficiency.²³

Such philanthropy and social concern are still very much alive among many individuals in our societies (as one sees in the generous responses to recent catastrophes). It has also been the case for at least the last hundred years that citizens of Western democracies have looked to government to provide the populace in general with opportunities for goods and services on a liberal and equitable scale that has no counterpart in antiquity. Hence, it seems, the following paradox arises: Ancient society in practice (notwithstanding Stoic theory) lacked political systems and dominant ideologies which gave any credence to the idea that their power structures and policies should seek to promote the well-being of the populace in general. We Westerners live in societies that have such systems and ideologies. Yet throughout our democracies, broadly speaking, governments are rather unpopular and people tend not to vote. Without exploring the reasons for such tepid attitudes, I simply conjecture that by the majority of people the state and large-scale community membership or citizenship have come to be regarded not as intrinsic goods but as instrumentally valuable just to the extent that they serve the independently perceived needs and desires of individuals and local groups.

However that may be, I propose that, notwithstanding our natural impulses and needs for material goods and services (which Stoic philosophers acknowledged but lacked the power or motivation to actively campaign for on an egalitarian scale), Stoicism challenges us to consider that rationality and mutual reverence are not only values of a categorically higher order but are also integral to our sheer survival as a civilized race. Is it the case that these higher-order values are at risk precisely because our cultures have placed so great a premium on the supposed necessity of nonessential material goods?

Rather than risk pontificating further, I restate my original formulation of this fourth step of the Stoicizing argument: Our shared citizenship as rational beings is not for the sake of our economic and physical well-being (which ultimately is a matter of indifference) but to do everything in our power to live mutually beneficial lives as adjudicated by good reasoning. When one gives thought to such modern predicaments as the violence caused by the availability of guns and the tribal warfare they seem to promote, the ruin brought to many young people as a result of the international drug trade, the inanity and obscenity of much television, the hostility generated by religious and cultural disagreements, and, above all, the ethical failings of those in positions of great power, it is tempting to dismiss mutual beneficence and good reasoning as whistling in the wind. Yet, as understood in Stoicism, these heady expressions do not pick out some indiscoverable philosopher's stone, as one sees at once when one samples Epictetus. They are to be cashed out in terms of his concept of human “professions,” which I mentioned a while back, meaning conducting one's family relationships and jobs really well and gracefully—whether as parent, son, daughter, shop person, paramedic, teacher, attorney, banker, or whatever—doing one's job not just as an instrumental necessity but as a manifestation of one's shared human/civic identity, where doing one's job “well” means doing it with integrity, truthfulness, respect for others and oneself, and with the Marcus Aurelius–like awareness that one may not get thanked, or may even be resented, for one's efforts.

This secular Stoicism is still tremendously alive, in my experience of daily life in the United States, to the extent that it, as distinct from the newspaper, motivates one to get up in the morning, though it does not capture the imagination of the media who primarily influence our young people. As the Stoics themselves so acutely recognized, social corruption stems not from anything wrong with human nature but from what they called “the persuasiveness of external things and from communication with the people whose company one keeps” (SVF 3.228).

VI. Equity and the “Common Interest” Implications of Natural Law

In order to achieve a tighter fit between the “common interest” implications of natural law and liberal communitarianism, I need to correct a prevalent misconception about the Stoic analysis of value and the objectives that human beings are naturally and rationally motivated to pursue. At the beginning of this essay, I drew attention to what is probably the most notorious and contentious of all Stoic doctrines—the confinement of authentic goodness to excellence of character. How could a philosophy that relegates to indifference everything else that people normally value, including life itself, be of political interest? Can a modern society find any relevance in the doctrine that all one actually needs for complete human flourishing is moral virtue? Is Stoicism not completely incompatible with an ideology that makes the common good and governmental credibility depend (ideally) on equitable provision and distribution of material goods and services, employment opportunities, national security, health care, and so forth?

I propose, now, to argue not only that Stoicism can make a good shot at rebutting these challenges, but also that its doctrine of value and indifference, when properly understood, can provide a much needed antidote to such social ills as tend to stem from unbridled market capitalism and media pressures for citizens to outdo one another.

According to the doctrine of oikeiosis, we are naturally equipped with inclinations and disinclinations that are basic both to our survival as individuals and to the prosperity of our families and societies. Hence, health and wealth are not only naturally (i.e., objectively) preferable to sickness and poverty, they are also such that we would be insane, given the opportunity to opt for them without taking unfair advantage of others, not to do so. Why, then, given this distinction between the naturally preferable and the naturally dispreferable, do the Stoics decline to apply the terms “good” and “bad” to these items respectively? Is it consistent to say that life-enhancing objectives to which we are naturally predisposed are, nonetheless, inessential to our well-being?

There are several Stoic rejoinders to such questions. One strategy is to infer that, because it is possible to misuse the natural preferables and make good use of the natural dispreferables, such items cannot be essentially or intrinsically good or bad, meaning intrinsically beneficial or harmful to those affected by them.²⁵

That doctrine is sufficient to show that excellence of character is a quite different kind of value from that of the natural preferables. It is not, I hasten to add, sufficient to show that human beings can be completely happy on the rack, as the Stoics' ancient critics tellingly objected. However, there is good evidence to show that what guides a Stoic's day-to-day decisions, including even the decision (in extremis) to take his or her own life, is a calculus of the relative preponderance of natural preferables and dispreferables.²⁶

Does one ever know what is one's fate? In rare and fraught conditions this may happen, as it did to those brave passengers who downed the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. They had the impulse to die in the sense that they knew its inevitability; they made the best of that terrible fact by so dying that they saved incalculably many other lives. Generally, however, like Chrysippus, we do not have precise advance knowledge of our fate, and so he recommends our doing the best we can to achieve the natural preferables, which include a healthy and prosperous life for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors.

Now my second quotation:

From what we now know about the natural preferables, Chrysippus's account of the wise lawmaker is exactly what we would expect. One cannot legislate for excellence of character. What one can do is conduct public policy from the liberal and nondiscriminatory perspectives I have already attributed to Stoicism. Given the “common interest” implications of natural law, and given everyone's common and natural interest in material resources and health, an authentically Stoic society should be one that seeks to provide citizens with these things in ways that are equitable in the light of reason. As for social esteem (Greek doxa), I take Chrysippus to be giving his Stoic lawmaker the authority to acknowledge that even a thoroughly liberal and nondiscriminatory ideology will need to grant that some citizens are more deserving than others in terms of public recognition.