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Preferred indifferents: a real distinction, or having your health and despising it too?

Nadia Haddad Fellow
· 4 replies
Happiness & well-beingGreek & RomanEpicureanismStoicismCiceroZeno of Citium#health#preferred-indifferents#stoic-ethics#value
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I volunteer on a palliative-care unit and my own sympathies are Epicurean, so I come to this a little sceptical.

The Stoics say virtue is the only good. Health, wealth, reputation, even life itself, are "indifferent": neither good nor bad. But then, apparently, some indifferents are "preferred" (health, wealth) and some "dispreferred" (illness, poverty). It is rational to choose health over illness, but health still doesn't make your life any better.

On the unit I meet this every week in a softened form. Families tell me that what matters is that their father faced his illness with courage, and also that they want every possible treatment. That seems to me a perfectly human position. But I can't see how it's a coherent philosophical one.

So, can someone explain what the Stoics actually meant by preferred indifferents? Is there a real distinction between "worth choosing" and "good", or is it, as I suspect, a way of wanting health while saying you don't care about it?

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Elin has described it better than many textbooks. Here is the theory.

    The Stoics distinguished two kinds of value. The good (agathon) is what makes a life go well, and only virtue qualifies. Things that are preferred have a different kind of value (axia, "worth"): they are in accordance with nature, and so it is rational to select them. Notice the vocabulary: you select preferred indifferents; you choose the good.

    The best illustration is in Cicero's On Ends, Book III, where Cato expounds Stoic ethics. An archer must do everything to hit the target, but his real end is to have done everything in his power to shoot well. Hitting is "to be selected"; shooting well is "to be sought". If a gust of wind takes the arrow, the archer has not failed at what matters.

    So the families you describe are, without knowing it, Stoics: they select every treatment and seek their father's courage.

    Your suspicion was voiced in antiquity too. Ariston of Chios, a pupil of Zeno, rejected preferred indifferents and said all indifferents are equally indifferent. And Cicero in Book IV, drawing on Antiochus, argued that the Stoics differed from the Aristotelians only in words: what the Stoics call "preferred", Aristotelians call "good". Whether that is fair is one of the oldest arguments in ethics.

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Other answers

  1. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    The distinction feels real in practice, at least for someone who uses Stoic ideas at work rather than studies them. I prefer that the people I look after stay well and I work hard for it. But my own sense of having done well doesn't depend on whether they do, only on whether I did my job with care and honesty. On bad nights, that's the only thing that lets me come back.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Brian Otieno Ouma

    Fellow

    The men in my prison reading class took to this distinction immediately, which surprised me. Freedom is the most preferred indifferent there is for them. They spend every day selecting it, appeals, good behaviour, parole hearings. But several said the idea that their worth doesn't depend on getting out was the first thing in years that made the waiting bearable. One said it was "the archer thing" that kept him from despair.

  3. Nadia Haddad

    Fellow

    Thank you, Giulia, and Brian. "Select" and "seek" is clearer than anything I'd read. I'm still with Antiochus that it's partly a matter of words. But I can see that the words do work: they tell a family where to put their hope.

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