Stoic role ethics: a primer
One of the most innovative aspects of Stoicism could be one of the best ways to live your life
We all play a number of roles in life, whether we explicitly think about them or not. For instance, I am, at least: a son, a father, a husband, a friend, a teacher, a colleague, a writer, and a citizen of two nation-states (Italy and the US). You can tell a lot about a person by identifying their roles and observing how they play them. In fact, arguably you can tell almost all there is to know about that person on the basis of such information.
That being the case, can we base an entire system of ethics, that is, of practical living, on the notion of roles? At least two great philosophical traditions have done just that. The traditions in questions are Confucianism and Stoicism. In Confucianism, the core concept of role ethics is the idea of filial piety, or xiao. Which means that Confucian role ethics is fundamentally rooted in the family as a core unit of society, with ritual propriety, or li, reinforcing family roles and binding the members of the family together.
Stoicism has a very different system of role ethics. Indeed it has two. The first was introduced by the Middle Stoic Panaetius of Rhodes (185/180 to 110/109 BCE), the second one by the Late Stoic Epictetus of Hierapolis (50 to…
