A glaring challenge arises whenever we try to apply a system of personal ethical practice to the wider world. Simply put, how do we get from A to B? How can we translate the basic ethical skills and values that our practice demands into concrete ideas and projects that make a positive external impact?
For virtue ethicists, and thus for Stoics, the question becomes: How do we move from the abstract and highly personal idea of virtuous behavior toward virtuous lifestyles, virtuous careers, and virtuous politics? A big part of the Discipline of Action (and, as a result, everything we are concerned with here on the Stoics in Action blog) consists in finding a way to answer this question in new ways for modern life.
For the past year, modern Stoics Kai Whiting and Leonidas Konstantakos (of the University of Lisbon and Florida International University, respectively) have been working with a number of collaborators on tackling the question of virtuous action at an especially grand scale: the level of sustainable development of the global economy. Coming from their respective backgrounds in engineering and philosophy, they are interested in how to combine both fields. “I do philosophy,” says Whiting in a presentation he gave this fall for Stoicon 2018 in London (do check out the video below, and find the slides here), “because I realize that engineering on its own is not sufficient.” Both approaches have something vital to offer to such a giant social and technological problem.
The conclusions that Whiting and his collaborators offer are wide-ranging, but in my reading they can be boiled down to four key themes: realism, benevolence, and a distinctively Stoic view of material services and teamwork, respectively.
I’ll cover each of these in this post, but it’s important to note that Whiting’s overall agenda is much more general: his aim is to invite modern Stoics to put serious work and thought—and, especially, collaborative energy—into finding ways to develop our engagement in the world in positive and high-impact ways. Sustainability is just one (big, complex) piece of that Stoic benevolence puzzle.
Stoicism? Really?
Whiting’s Stoicon talk opens by acknowledging that we don’t generally think about Stoic philosophy as applying directly to huge, complex external problems like global sustainability:
We have usually used Stoicism for personal endeavors and personal development: how to deal with anger, how to get over death of a loved one, how to envision one’s own death… What has sustainability got to do with any of that?
Stoic philosophy, they cede in their published work, “has been used throughout the centuries to discuss and support the flourishing of individuals,” and it “has rarely been applied to collective wellbeing.” And it’s certainly true that the ancient Stoic texts don’t offer any particular model of sustainable economic practices. “So, if Stoics are not charged with offering a specific solution,” they write, “how can their philosophy contribute to the sustainable development discourse?”
Starting with an open-access paper published this February in the journal Sustainability, and continuing on with a number of blog posts and podcast interviews, Whiting and Konstantakos have been pursuing an answer to this question. Boiled down to a prompt on a PowerPoint slide, the question becomes simply “is it Stoic to be unsustainable?” And if not, what then?
The idea of “sustainability” they are invoking here derives from a historic and influential definition given by the UN’s Brundtland Commission in the 1980’s:
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Their answer is complex and touches on many subareas. At risk of oversimplifying their contributions, I’ve distilled their message down to a few themes. In each of them, Stoicism has something direct to offer.
1. Realism
First and foremost, a Stoic is someone who “follows Nature.” Among other things, that includes understanding the physical world, and accepting the fact of the matter about what is and isn’t possible.
And the fact of the matter is that economic growth cannot continue forever. “The first and second law of thermodynamics establish the realm of that impossibility, regardless of technological efficiencies.” Whiting et al. warn in their paper that while “techno-optimism” has become the standard reply to worries about a Malthusian growth catastrophe, humanity has not actually come close to genuinely “conquering Nature’s limits.”
For Whiting et al., Stoic principles encourage us to acknowledge that our ultimate physical limitations are outside our control, and that our current global system’s demand for infinite growth cannot be satisfied. “Population size is not the real issue,” they argue. “The problem is the demand for growth, which relies on and is supported by finite resource.”
More generally, Stoic realism invites us not only to acknowledge the existence of the problem, but to combat the temptation to rationalize our individual complacency. For all its emphasis on our limitations, inaction is not the Stoic answer to problems of this kind. During his Stoicon talk this October, Whiting illustrated this with a provocative graphic featuring the ever-endearing Stewie Griffin:
My sense of this part of their argument is that Stoicism can indeed be a major motivator toward attentiveness: our way of life calls us to approach the problems facing humanity with a mindful attitude of προσοχή (prosoche), with Prudence (which can be defined as “actions performed intelligently,” as Seneca puts it in Letters to Lucilius #120), and even with a strongly emotional dose of εὐπάθηεια (eupatheia)—healthy emotions like caution, directed at making good and bad choices. Avoiding the trap of rationalization, along with making an effort to realistically acknowledge the real challenges and limitations that our society is up against, is a great way to put these values into practice.
That said, I feel like Whiting et al.’s advice on this point is a little vague and high level. It’s true that many people avoid thinking about the problem and even deny its existence outright (as is clear from a variety of ongoing, politically fueled debates here in the United States over environmental regulation). And others do settle for a shallow form of social media activism that does little real benefit. The causes for these pathological reactions are complex, however, and while saying that Stoic virtue calls us to something better is a great starting point, that recognition by itself—as Whiting would no doubt agree—is just the beginning.
2. Benevolence
Next, Whiting and Konstantakos come across as especially concerned with the problem of selfishness, and how it aggravates our attempts to cooperate in the face of significant economic challenge.
Both capitalist and Marxist approaches to economics ultimately rely on “hedonic” assumptions to model humanity’s collective goals, they argue. In particular, traditional economic models often rely on a utility maximization principle: an agent aims to (selfishly) gain as many external goods as possible, given the practical trade-offs that must be made to do so. And on a higher level, the ultimate measure of success tends to be phrased in terms of GDP.
But the Stoic value system’s contention that virtue is more important than anything else undermines this calculus. “Under Stoicism,” they point out, “the acquisition of goods and services is not only a preferred indifferent but also carries a moral component, in that one’s preferences, if they do not benefit the whole, do not and cannot maximize utility for the consumer” (emphasis mine).
This virtue-ethical perspective suggests that our satisfying our preferences should not necessarily be the goal that the system drives at. Our patterns of material consumption, argue Whiting et al., are determined as much by the “collective virtue” of the people who create it as by other market forces.
At this juncture, another fundamental Stoic principle comes to bear: the Stoic model of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia) essentially rejects the dichotomy between selfishness and altruism. As Whiting et al. put it, “if something is in the interest of the whole of humanity, not just most, and not just one’s family, or tribe, or society, then and only then, it is of interest to the individual.” The Circles of Hierocles is the operative image here, and they argue for an expansive version of it that extends beyond the human κοσμόπολις (cosmopolis). Their expanded rendition of the circles helped to inspire the scheme of nested circles that we’ve built the Stoics in Action site around:
As with their point about realism, an uncharitable reader might take this injunction toward benevolence as a rather vague and impotent response to such real and concrete global problems as pollution, dwindling resources, climate change, and inequitable resource distribution.
But Whiting et al. are clearly driving at something more than good old-fashioned Stoic moralizing here. They are asking us to think about the fundamental incentives that drive our economy, and about how theories on both the left and the right have failed to direct our collective human activities at the things that really matter for human wellbeing. Which brings me to their next point:
3. Material Services
Getting a little deeper into the substance of the economic problem here, Whiting et al. raise the complex topic of how material goods can either help or hinder our wellbeing. The Roman Empire’s massive wealth, infrastructure, and “throwaway culture,” they point out, was comparable to our own in many ways (clean running water, sewage systems, and central heating were common in the city of Rome—as also was dramatic income inequality and all sorts of decadence), and Epictetus and Seneca’s numerous observations on Roman-era consumerism offer us one model for how Stoicism may interact with these wider issues.
But managing our personal impulses tower consumerism isn’t enough, argue Whiting et al.: “Most sustainability discussions in modern Stoic circles,” they claim, “emphasize the individuals’ duty towards the environment, made manifest by living moderately and reining in consumerist appetites.” These goals are great, they say, but they operate mostly as a “means of exercising self-control and an opportunity to re-focus on the non-material aspects of self-development.” Virtue also points us toward a more expansive engagement with our world, and “leaders in the early Stoa of Classical Greece were also concerned with a collective view of a virtuous society.”
In particular, they argue that Stoic values lead us toward making an effort to procure adequate material services for society:
In economics, material services differ from material goods, in that services are the fundamental economic products that make external survival and societal flourishing possible. The distinction is an important one, and it offers us one way to start separating the idea of a decadent consumerist economy on the one hand (which focuses on growth and novelty for its own sake) from a more efficient society on the other that ensures everyone’s basic needs are met. “A consumer does not actually want, or indeed require” material goods, they point out, “but rather the service” which they provide. In particular, researchers have identified 14 critical material services, which Whiting et al. illustrate with both modern and ancient examples:
The point here is not only that Stoics ought to care about benefiting others in external ways by providing them with access to preferred indifferents (though that is a major part of Stoic practice—as can be seen in Seneca’s extensive writing on benefits, for example). Instead, for Whiting and colleagues, material services also support the the deeper kind of ultimate benefit that Stoic values are centered on: the practice of virtue itself, both for us and future generations, is made possible by access to essential material services. The point is that
collective wellbeing (both hedonic and eudaimonic) is and was supported by material services. Arguably, for a Stoic, it is the access to and quality of material services which support sustainable wellbeing, because, although they are not sufficient in and of their own right, they do enable the individual and the collective to act virtuously, both in the present and the future.
By connecting Stoicism to the concept of material services, it seems to me that Whiting et al. are hinting at the possibility of a modern theory of Stoic economics. Such a theory would put our innate capacity for virtue front-and-center, along with our ethical responsibility to enable that capacity by benefiting each other. It may be that a Stoic theory of this kind (were someone to develop it) would have a lot in common with the Aristotelean ideas that helped to inspire Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s famous “capabilities approach” to understanding social justice. Or maybe there would be some important differences.
On the level of basic Stoic values, some modern Stoics who have encountered Whiting et al.’s work have been somewhat taken aback by the claims they make about material services. Virtue is our self-sufficient inner citadel, after all—so isn’t it a rather heterodox to say that it depends on access to material services? There is a complex point to be made here about the two-way interaction between virtue and the external conditions that make its practice possible.
For me, this notion of material services reminds of how contemporary and ancient Stoics alike certainly acknowledge that our ability to exercise virtue is contingent on certain external conditions—and ultimately on our brain’s healthy functioning. When this ἡγεμονικόν (hegemonikon) or “ruling faculty” is damaged—say, by death or severe mental illness—the practice of virtue becomes impossible, and our existence as social and rational creatures comes to an end. Marcus Aurelius explains this, for example, in terms of the potential decline of our faculties in old age (Meditations 3.1):
if a man should live longer, it is quite uncertain whether the understanding will still continue sufficient for the comprehension of things, and retain the power of contemplation which strives to acquire the knowledge of the divine and the human.
This sort of physical ability to reason and act virtuously may be what Whiting et al. have in mind when they say that an adequate distribution of material services in our economy facilitate collective eudaimonia.” If so, then they are applying a standard Stoic idea in a new and provocative way: benefiting others in terms of material services doesn’t just make life more pleasant for our brothers and sisters around the world, but it is urgently important for it’s ability to make it possible for others (and for future generations) to pursue virtue for themselves and to live a genuinely good life!
It may be, however, that they also mean something beyond this, and that their interpretation of socially and economically engaged Stoic action in terms of “collective eudaimonia” is pushing the Stoic stance on externals in new directions that wouldn’t have occurred to, or even quite been compatible with, the ancients.
If so, then that kind of critical adaptation of Stoic thought is perfectly acceptable—”those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides,” goes one of Seneca’s celebrated remarks on free thinking (Letters to Lucilius, 33.11)— but it helps to be clear about what exactly we are doing when we stretch a philosophy in new directions! I’m not sure that Whiting and his collaborators have fully worked out the details of their concept of “collective eudaimonia” yet, or of how it fits with the classical Stoic emphasis on the invulnerability of virtue (though it’s possible that they have, and I’ve simply failed to understand it!). On that note, I look forward to seeing how their work evolves in response to criticisms both within and outside the modern Stoic community.
4. Teamwork
Finally, Whiting and his colleagues offer us a concrete strategic recommendation about how to go about engaging big hairy problems like sustainability: collaborate!
Stoic role ethics, they argue, calls us all to a variety of different occupations and specialties. Modern engineering, likewise, draws tremendously on teamwork, and on our ability to combine our various skills to create solutions to complex tasks.
Described in Stoic terms, a number of virtuous agents (Sages), not just the odd few, will need to come together from a wide range of disciplines (e.g., the climate, environmental, material, political and social sciences, economics, philosophy), occupations (CEO, journalists, politicians, schoolteachers) and walks of life to safely guide the rest of humanity on a coherent course of sustainable development.
In his Stoicon talk, Whiting notes that philosophy today is still dominated by the notion of individual scholars tending to their personal systems (with single-author papers as the norm). If he admittedly started doing philosophy specifically because “engineering by itself is not sufficient,” it’s also true that the engineering model of collaboration has a lot to teach philosophers!
This is precisely the reason that he, Konstantakos, and others (such as professors Greg Sadler and Christopher Gill) have teamed up across interdisciplinary boundaries to publish on topics at the intersection of Stoicism and natural science. An early result of this work is a fun open-access paper titled “Were Neanderthals Rational? A Stoic Approach,” which, as they put it, “offers insights for reflecting on the relationship between humans and other forms of life and any moral obligations that result.”
Whiting is enthusiastic in his support for team-building within the Stoic community. As a case in point, we became friends this spring after he called my phone from overseas to personally take me to task for wasting my time on social media when I could be working on concrete projects that advance virtuous action in more material ways! If we work together and set our sights on genuinely important, structured goals, he believes that Stoics can be a serious force for good in the world.
In essence, then, Whiting’s emphasis on this point is an implementation of the virtue of Prudence: actions performed intelligently. Adding a little bit of engineering intuition to our ethical life can go a long way to multiplying our ability to benefit humanity—a call that is essential to the Stoic way of life.
