Virtue in the face of misfortune
On the axis: The highest good · a life
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment The Just Man Struck by Misfortune:
Picture a man who lived an upright life: honest, courageous, devoted to those close to him. But fate turns against him: he loses his children, his health, his possessions, and ends in pain and abandonment. Nothing can be held against him, his virtue remains intact, and yet his life closes in the most utter misfortune.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Was his life, in spite of everything, a good one? In other words: is happiness safe from misfortune, or can it be torn away from us?
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Justification
The good, the Stoics argue, must be what always benefits and never harms; yet health, wealth or pleasure can be misused: they are not goods but , at most « preferred ». Only virtue, the right use of reason, meets the criterion, hence the school's most disputed thesis, against : it , and the sage stays happy even amid torments.
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius · Cicero, On Moral Ends, book III
Justification
The is the founding act: only our judgments, desires and impulses are truly up to us, not the body, reputation or fortune. The argument is practical: tying one's good to what is not up to us dooms one to disturbance, whereas concentrating effort on the one masterable domain makes serenity invulnerable to circumstance, even in exile or prison.
Of things, some are in our power, and others are not.Enchiridion, §1
Epictetus, Enchiridion, §1 · Epictetus, Discourses
Justification
If every action aims at an end, and ends link up as means, then, on pain of infinite regress, there must be a final end willed for its own sake and never for the sake of anything else: this self-sufficient good is . What it consists in is settled by the function argument (ergon): as the flute-player has his excellence, the human has his own, the activity of the soul's rational part carried out in accordance with virtue. Happiness is therefore neither pleasure, nor honour, nor wealth, but an excellent activity unfolded over a whole life, whose highest form is contemplation.
The good of man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete.Nicomachean Ethics, I.7 (1098a)
Nicomachean Ethics, I.7 (1097b) · Nicomachean Ethics, X.7
Anchors: the Stoics · Aristotle
leads to: Scope of action