The Stoic Concept of Evil

Abstract

The adjective 'stoical' denotes an attitude of mind which has, as its characteristic, hardiness and uncomplaining endurance of physical and mental suffering. 'Stoical' gets this meaning chiefly because the Greek philosophical school established in the Stoa at Athens denied pain, whether physical or mental, to be kakon (the adjective most frequently used in Classical Greek to denote a con-attitude to anything). At first glance this proposition appears paradoxical. Painful sensations are generally unambiguous with respect to their painfulness. To say that someone has a pain is to say that he is aware of something which is hurting him. Most of us dislike such experiences, irrespective of their cause, and we also dislike and may be pained by the sufferings of others. If physical pain is inflicted gratuitously we may make moral judgments on its perpetrators. Not all of us are satisfied by beliefs in the remedial or educational efficacy of pain as a necessary means to a good end. The founders of Stoicism would not, I think, have quarrelled with much in these remarks. Pain is an empirical fact and they denied neither its physical effects nor its unpleasantness.2 Indeed, it is because their attitude to pain purported to be realistic that they refused to call it bad (kakon).3 By the same token, absence of pain or external prosperity was not good (agathon or kalon). Of course, the latter condition is preferable to the former, but neither in itself is of the slightest moral significance.4 We do not praise men for being healthy or blame the sick where the healthy are naturally sound in body and the sick have contracted an unavoidable disease. To call pain an evil in normal situations is not to make a moral judgment. The Stoics disliked linguistic ambiguity and in their strict statements reserved the terms agathon and kakon for descriptions of moral character and action. In this they were clearly trying to behave not paradoxically but realistically. Their argument may perhaps be summed up thus :-' Pain is