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by lmm 1989 days ago
> 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?
1 comments
steve_adams_86 1989 days ago
> 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.

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lmm 1988 days ago
> 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.

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