ETHICS

DR. LIONEL E. BUENAFLOR

Head-Social and Behavioural Sciences Department
Head-Batangas Heritage Center
University of Batangas
 Stoicism

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Origin of Stoicism
• Cynicism was a philosophical school which
revolted against the rigidly ordered philosophies of
Plato and Aristotle.
• It was said to have been founded by Antisthenes,
who took Socrates as a model for the Stoics. It was
said that Antisthenes had to walk almost five miles
every day to hear Socrates (Soccio, 202).
• After the death of Socrates, Antisthenes founded a
school called the Cynosarges (the Silver Dog). The
term Cynic is the Greek word for dog.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Origin of Stoicism
• The Cynics believed that the very essence of
civilization is corrupt. Manners are hypocritical
and phony.
• Material wealth weakens people, making them
physically and morally soft.
• The desire for success and power produces
dishonesty and dependency.
• As the tragic death of Socrates underscored, not
even the wisest person can control other people
or external events.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Origin of Stoicism
• Happiness can come from self-discipline,
rational control of all desires and appetites,
and minimal contact with conventional
society.  
• Eventually, Cynics were hostile, arrogant
individuals who despised everyone else and
hated the society in which they lived.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• Zeno of Citium (334-262 BCE) was the known founder of
the philosophy known as Stoicism.
• Zeno was able to inherit the Cynics’ distrust of social
niceties, which he regarded as irrational, and founded the
Stoic school of philosophy, named after the portico, or
what they called the painted porch—stoa poikilh; hence,
the name Stoicism.  

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy

• The Stoics had given importance to all the three divisions

of philosophy formulated by Aristotle’s Lyceum, namely,
logic, physics, and ethics. (Stumpf and Fieser, 106).
However, logic and physics were taken by the Stoics as just
a way in order to justify the precepts of ethics.
• The Stoics believed that both pain and pleasure, poverty
and luxury, sickness and health, were supposed to be
equally unimportant.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
EPICTETUS, The Sage Slave

• Inasmuch as a slave’s life is not his own, Epictetus was

able to reflect on the major issue of Stoicism: controlling
what we can and accepting what is beyond our control.
• As a slave, the only absolute control Epictetus had was
over his own reaction to what happened. His motto was
Anexou kai apexou: Bear and forbear.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
EPICTETUS, The Sage Slave

• “I was never more free than when I was on the rack.” He

had learned that he could control his attitude, but that
fate controlled his life.
• Epictetus was given freedom sometime after Nero’s death
in the year 68 CE. Later on, he became a well-known
teacher.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS

• Although he lived his life in the midst of lies and betrayals,

Marcus was loved by many Romans for his kindness and
mercy.
• He convinced the senate to pardon the family of the
traitorous general when other emperors would have
destroyed it. Instead of taking revenge against those
people who had been accused to be his wife’s lovers, he
recommended them to be promoted as this could be for
the good of Rome.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS

• Marcus combined classical philosophy with a spiritual

quality that foreshadowed the Christian-influenced
Scholasticism of the Middle Ages.
• He was also one of the kindest, wisest, and most virtuous
philosophers.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy

• The Stoic philosophy centers on the ethical living.

• Its ethical teaching is based upon two principles that were
developed in their physics:
1. The universe is governed by absolute law, which
admits no exceptions.
2. The essential nature of the human person is
reason.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
Both of these ideas are summed up in the famous Stoic
maxim—“live according to nature.”
This maxim has two aspects:
1. human persons should conform themselves to nature
in the wider sense, i.e., to the laws of the universe;
2. they should conform their actions to nature in the
narrower sense, i.e., to their own essential nature—
reason.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• In a sense, there is no possibility of disobeying the laws of
nature, for we, like all else in the world, act out of necessity.
• Zeno considers virtue as a life according to reason. Morality,
for the Stoics, is a universal reason, which is to govern our
lives, not the caprice of the self-will of the individual.
• A person is said to be wise if he/she subordinates his/her
life to the life of the whole universe

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• Just like the Epicureans, the aim of the Stoics is the
attainment of happiness. However, unlike the
Epicureans, the Stoics believe that happiness could
not be found in pleasure.
• The Stoics tend to look for happiness in wisdom.
• Wisdom will be the means in order to control what
has been within the human power and to accept with
dignified resignation what had to be.
•  It is impossible to control what will happen in the
future and it is also useless to fear the future because
they will happen anyway whether we like it or not.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• Instead of fearing the future, the people should learn
to control the attitude towards what will happen.
• For the Stoics, the world was so arranged that
everything on it was acting on the principle of
purpose.
• There was a rational substance that is existing in the
whole of nature. This rational substance is the Logos,
which makes the universe remain rational and
ordered.  

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• Because God is reason, the world is governed by reason.
This idea mean two things:
1. There is purpose in the world, and therefore,
there is order, harmony, beauty, and design.
2. Since reason is law as opposed to lawless, it
means that the universe is subject to the
absolute sway of law.
• Every individual, therefore, is not free and there can be
no freedom in the will in a world which is governed by
necessity.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• Stoicism rests on the simple insight that the world is like
a stage where every person is seen as an actor/actress in
a human drama.
• Epictetus held that in this drama, it is the Director who
selects people to play various roles.
• Human wisdom consists only in recognizing the role that
one has to play in this drama of life and in performing
the part well.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• Moral virtue is the only good, and wickedness is the
only evil. There is nothing therefore for the virtuous
person to regret since in being virtuous, he/she must
have already done his/her best.
• A human person is virtuous when he/she wishes that
those events that will happen will be according to the
will of the Divine Providence.
• Passions and emotions are irrational elements or vices
and must, therefore, be eradicated in order to complete
the domination of reason and to avoid every surprise.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• If the complete domination of reason cannot be
retained, the stoic will have to recourse to suicide; for,
according to them, it is better to flee life than to lose
tranquility of spirit.
• The Stoic renounces all the temporal goods because
their loss can cause disturbance of the mind.
• The Stoics developed a strong notion of
cosmopolitanism, i.e., the idea that all persons are
citizens of the same human community.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• Every human person is acting on a universal
brotherhood. Every human person is equal to one
another.
• The Stoics considered hardships and sufferings as not
totally negative.
• The Stoics kept on reminding its followers that suffering
cannot be bad by nature, or else good men like Socrates
would not have suffered.

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor

 The Stoic Philosophy
• The goal, therefore, is not really to avoid the ordinary
trials of life but to use them in order to become a good
person.
• To summarize the point of the Stoics, one can follow
thus: While making reasonable efforts to get what we
want, it is wise to learn to be happy with what we get
(Soccio, 221).

Dr. Lionel E. Buenaflor