[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.