The Stoics
espoused two doctrines that, at first glance, do not seem to cohere. The first
was a belief in a providential order in which every event was fated to occur.
The second was an assured belief in the moral responsibility of individual
agents for their actions. If we take these in conjunction with the commonly
accepted notion that an agent can only be responsible for those choices that could
be chosen otherwise, then the first doctrine implies that no one can ultimately
be held responsible for anything, because all choices are fated to occur. The
belief that both doctrines can be made coherent — that moral responsibility
can be preserved in a deterministic world — is known among philosophers as compatibilism.
Thus, the Stoics were compatibilists.

Ricardo Salles
sets out in his book to explain how the Stoics reconciled determinism and
responsibility. He begins with determinism. The Stoics were not just
determinists; they were fatalists. Usually fatalism is described in the
following counterfactual terms: If you are a fatalist, you believe that if a
future event F is fated to occur, then even if the preceding event P which
supposedly necessitates F were to not happen, F would still come about. This
sounds mysterious, as if a politician were fated to win an election for which
she did not campaign or even enter. This gives rise to what opponents of the
Stoics called the “Lazy Argument”, which basically says that if I am ill but am
fated to recover, then there is no need to call a doctor or take my medicine.
And if everything that happens to me is fated, then I should be able to live my
life in bed. Obviously this is not the case. Therefore, fatalism is false. Furthermore,
this kind of fatalism is incoherent, because it posits that different events
have different modal qualities; F can only be fated on the supposition that P
is not. But according to fatalism, P and F (and every other event) are necessary.
According to Salles the Stoics get around this objection through the doctrine
of co-fated events. For instance, a politician is fated both to enter an
election and to campaign and to win it. This counters the Lazy
Argument and the charge of modal inconsistency. Determinism is defended. But
what about moral responsibility?

According to
Salles’ account, the Stoics defend responsibility in several ways. First, they
distinguished between external and internal causes. Responsibility attaches to
the latter. To the obvious rejoinder that whether externally or internally
necessitated, our choices are still determined, the Stoics have at hand the
answer that though this may be so for isolated actions and choices, taken more
holistically, at the level of character,  things are different. Though
interesting, and characteristically Stoic, this answer is not entirely
convincing.

Second, against the view that we
are only responsible for those choices which could have been chosen otherwise,
the Stoics claimed that we are responsible for those choices that, though
internally necessitated, are the result of previous reflection. It is not their
contingency that counts, but rather their being the product of deliberation and
identification. As such, they are a reflection of the agent’s character. The
challenge then is to explain how we can also be responsible for choices that
result from failure to reflect, or from mistaken reflection. For
such an explanation Salles turns to the later Stoic Epictetus. Roughly, poor or
missing rational reflection is not an exculpating factor insofar as such faulty
practical reasoning is itself blameworthy. As human beings, we have a general
capacity for reflection, and failure to exercise it properly is a failure to
exercise our faculties towards our true species-end. It is to this general
capacity that responsibility attaches, not to a specific capacity to do
otherwise in a situation. The argument is, I think, weak, but Salles’
discussion of Epictetus here is nonetheless stimulating.

Another angle
the Stoics take is to accept the view that we are only responsible for those
choices for which we could have chosen otherwise; they then argue that, at
least at the moment of choice, the agent could have chosen otherwise. In
many ways Stoic compatibilism bears similarities to the version of it defended
by Harry Frankfurt. For one thing, both Frankfurt and the Stoics cast doubt on
the presumption that the crucial thing about responsibility is the freedom to
do otherwise. Instead, they both stress the importance of rational deliberation
about values, and the identification of an agent with his choices. Indeed,
Salles devotes considerable space to an explicit analogy between Stoic
compatibilism and Frankfurt’s version of it, finding much common ground, though
with a couple of disanalogies that Salles finds relatively trivial.

As his
discussion of Frankfurt’s compatibilism demonstrates, the classicist looking
for a deep exegesis of Stoic texts may be disappointed by Salles’ approach in
this book. Though he is not above digging into the texts — his long excursus
on the Stoic doctrine of conflagration is, in my opinion, not entirely
necessary — he is more concerned with how Stoic thought on determinism and
responsibility can shed light on modern philosophical debates surrounding
determinism, compatibilism, and libertarianism. Read in that spirit, though
aimed primarily at the scholarly reader, the book is written in a clear, crisp
style. There is also a depth of argument that obviously cannot be captured in a
short review.

©
2006 James Pratt

James
Pratt is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada. His area of research is in moral psychology. He is also completing on a book on the
philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713).

Categories: Philosophical