[lmm]

Not the person you replied to, but I started out liking stoicism and then realised it was pretty much just solipsism-lite. I think it's ok, even good, to actually care about real-world outcomes sometimes. The stoics say that you should care about whether you acted virtuously rather than whether your actions lead to a good outcome, but if you don't care about outcomes then the definition of virtuous actions must surely be baseless. If I really believe in stoicism, shouldn't I just take drugs that make me feel happy/satisfied/virtuous?

[Pamar]

I see you point but I think you miss something. Stocism was based on the idea that a human being is always part of a society and as such they have sn obligation to work as good citizens.

Therefore no, even if something more effective than wine had been available at the time, I do not think "taking drugs to feel happy/satisfied/virtuous" would be advisable.

Being virtuous was "being a virtuous citizen"; no matter if you were a slave or an Emperor. If anything they tried to teach you not to care about the conditions you were in (rich, poor, young, old...) and focus on the outcomes only.

( I do not consider myself an expert, but I mantain a small page about Stoicism: https://www.pa-mar.net/Lifestyle/Stoicism.html )

[lmm]

> Being virtuous was "being a virtuous citizen"; no matter if you were a slave or an Emperor. If anything they tried to teach you not to care about the conditions you were in (rich, poor, young, old...) and focus on the outcomes only.

But stoicism tells you to focus on this "virtuousness" in defiance of the actual outcomes: it tells you you shouldn't care whether other people acknowledge you as virtuous or not, or whether you succeeded or failed in a contest, as long as you acted rightly. I think this is actually a contradiction, because you can't decide which actions are virtuous through pure reason without regard to their outcomes; or even if you could, how would you ever know whether your reasoning was correct or not?

[steve_adams_86]

> whether you succeeded or failed in a contest,

I've never seen the result of a contest being something that really mattered in stoicism.

The 4 cardinal virtues don't seem to be relevant in any conventional contest I can think of. Maybe I'm interpreting your comment wrong.

> in defiance of the actual outcomes

Is that true, though? I think wisdom comes into question here, and if you do "virtuous" things with bad outcomes, it's not very wise and therefor not very virtuous. Good intentions with bad results are nice in that you meant well, but good intentions don't make us virtuous on their own.

[lmm]

> I've never seen the result of a contest being something that really mattered in stoicism.

Yeah, my point is that's explicitly given as an example of something you shouldn't care about IIRC.

> I think wisdom comes into question here, and if you do "virtuous" things with bad outcomes, it's not very wise and therefor not very virtuous. Good intentions with bad results are nice in that you meant well, but good intentions don't make us virtuous on their own.

At that point doesn't the whole stoic idea just become circular? The wisdom to act virtuously seems to be no simpler than a complete philosophy. And all of the rest of stoicism seems to depend on being able to know whether your acts were virtuous - e.g. if I acted virtuously but had poor results because of things outside my control, I shouldn't be saddened - but that advice is no use if I don't know whether I acted virtuously.

[steve_adams_86]

> If I really believe in stoicism, shouldn't I just take drugs that make me feel happy/satisfied/virtuous?

Not as far as I understand it. Virtue is fairly objective, and doing that for your own sake wouldn't be virtuous. Classical stoics believe humans are a social animal, and truly virtuous behaviour is pro-social.

> The stoics say that you should care about whether you acted virtuously rather than whether your actions lead to a good outcome

I'm not sure I understand this, but I doubt that's your fault. All I can think is that if your actions lead to a bad outcome, ultimately you didn't act virtuously - even if the intent was there. There's a sort of tricky spot in the philosophy which I don't fully understand yet though. Take Cato the Younger for example. His virtue and integrity stats were so buffed that he brought ruin to himself and those close to him, and history seems a little torn about it. Was it virtuous to stick to his guns and end up dead, or was that actually foolish and ultimately not virtuous because it served no one around him? I don't fully understand the classic or modern stoic take on this kind of situation.

However I do think in most cases that if your actions have bad (bad as in Stoic Objective Bad) outcomes then you didn't act virtuously. I suppose if it couldn't have been anticipated, then maybe you did.

> solipsism-lite

Interesting - my take is the complete opposite. I see it as though Stoicism describes the ideal human as quite selfless and pro-social.

> I think it's ok, even good, to actually care about real-world outcomes sometimes.

I believe this is actually all that matters in stoicism, since real-world outcomes are all that matter to the people around you. I could be wrong - I've just read a couple translated books and listened to some podcasts at this point.

[lmm]

> However I do think in most cases that if your actions have bad (bad as in Stoic Objective Bad) outcomes then you didn't act virtuously. I suppose if it couldn't have been anticipated, then maybe you did.

I think you're understating it; this seems to be a major point of stoicism, that you shouldn't be sad if your favourite pot was broken or your wife died or your fellow citizens denounce you and exile you, so long as you acted virtuously. You should only worry about what you can control, your own actions, not what you can't control.

All the stoic writings I've read seemed to take it as a given that you already knew what was virtuous. So if what's virtuous is solely a function of what's in your own head, then the whole thing seems solipsistic. If you define virtuous actions in terms of their results and their effects on other people then it wouldn't be solipsistic, but in that case stoicism seems to tell you very little about how to live; judging which actions are virtuous doesn't seem any easier than just judging what you should do in the first place.

[aidenn0]

I don't think stoicism rules out using utilitarianism as a basis for virtue. It's not contrary to either utilitarianism nor stoicism to say that if you act in a way that good things are likely to happen, you shouldn't beat yourself up because a freak bad thing happened.

[lmm]

> It's not contrary to either utilitarianism nor stoicism to say that if you act in a way that good things are likely to happen, you shouldn't beat yourself up because a freak bad thing happened.

I think that's very much contrary to utilitarianism, which says you should measure your actions by their consequences. If you did x and got a world with utility y where you could have done z and got a world with utility w, and y < w, that's the very definition (under utilitarianism) of a bad action.

[aidenn0]

I disagree. If you are playing poker, betting on an inside straight is a bad move, even if you happen to get lucky.

Similarly you didn't make the wrong bet when you lose to a bad beat.

Any non omniscient actor can at best act to maximize expected utility.

If you ignore a pattern of bad outcomes that would lead you to improve your estimate of expected utility, then you are out of bounds, but my limited knowledge of stoicism does not make me think that it is opposed to such self reflection.

[lmm]

Stoicism tells you not to worry about the outcomes that you can't control, only whether your own acts (which you can control) were virtuous. But it assumes that you can perfectly distinguish the two, and gives you no tools for helping - indeed I'd argue that it makes those judgements harder by discouraging you from trusting your emotions. So either it's no help at all (because judging whether your actions were virtuous is a morality-complete problem) or it makes you dangerously unable to detect any mistakes in your moral judgement.

[tome]

> If I really believe in stoicism, shouldn't I just take drugs that make me feel happy/satisfied/virtuous?

Are there any? Perhaps the tenets of Stoicisim depend on there being no such drugs.