Stoicism and justice

Abstract

This paper examines a relatively unknown Peripatetic argument, according to which the Stoic ethical doctrine makes impossible the existence of the very notions of justice and injustice. In order to prove it, the author first offers a translation of Anon. in EN, p. 248, 1-36 Heylbut, i. e. the Peripatetic text, where this argument is well-defined. Then after some comments clarifying its historical context and logical structure he tries to show on the basis of various Stoic texts that this argument is correct. The gist of the argument is the following: the notions of justice and injustice necessarily imply that moral agents inflict good and evil (or benefit and harm) on each other; therefore, good and evil could be either non-moral or moral. From the Stoic standpoint non-moral good and evil do not exist, whereas moral good and evil are always in the agent’s power and thuswise cannot be “inflicted”. Consequently, it is impossible for moral agents to inflict good and evil on each other, so the notions of justice and injustice make no sense. The author also shows that the notions of the “preferred” indifferent and of the “rejected” indifferent, which were introduced by Stoics in order to describe conventional non-moral goods and evils are of no avail for them in this case.