Would a Stoic make sacrifices? At first, this might sound like a silly question. Any sort of intentional way of living will require the person first setting foot on that path, or keeping themselves on it later on, to make some sacrifices, will it not? Choosing to do something difficult good for you in place of backsliding into ease and comfort that leaves you further behind, isn’t that a prime example of making a needed sacrifice, and for good reason?

Special Stoic challenges

By the very nature of its distinctive moral valuations of matters, however, Stoicism would seem to face a challenge that other virtue ethics do not. Common to members of other schools, for example Platonists, Aristotelians, and later Christian thinkers deeply engaged with ancient thought, is classifying some thing(s) as the good or as primary goods, for example the virtues, contemplation of the form of the good, or communion with and rest in God, but then characterizing other things as lesser goods. These are conceded to be good in some sense but not as fully as the primary, higher good. Pleasure or bodily strength, even wealth, are examples of these "lesser goods."

What are these for the Stoics? What they call indifferents. They certainly can be preferred indifferents, and they do possess some measure of value, but not enough to call them actual goods. Why not? Because what is genuinely good for the Stoics is what is honestum or kalon, terms a bit tricky to directly translate into English, since the “honourable”, the “right”, the “morally good” are all common choices. Other things that other people might commonly call “good” are just “goods according to opinion”, as Seneca calls them, lacking the distinctive quality (proprietas) of goodness (Letter 74, 17). What is genuinely good? For the moment, let’s make use of what Epictetus considers to be a throwaway answer any beginner can rattle off when needed: “virtues and those things that participate in virtue (2.9)".

A Stoic who understands and evaluates the many objects of our potential desires and aversions in this manner would necessarily choose a genuine good like a virtue over a spurious good, a preferred indifferent. You could call it a “no-brainer”. You hardly have to think about it, right? One thing has genuine value as a good, and the other has only the much more limited value something indifferent could have. Would you call that a “sacrifice”? Perhaps in some technical sense of the term. The Stoic who chooses rightly prioritizes one thing over the other, but they aren’t “sacrificing” something that’s good, a goodness they then lose, for the sake of a greater or more lasting good. They are giving up or losing something in the process, but not something that truly matters, right?

Stoics don't use the term sacrifice

This strikes me as one of the many paradoxical positions one can articulate from Stoic starting points, but which as we think it through more fully unravels. We don’t find the term “sacrifice” used in Stoic literature in the sense of deliberately choosing to give up one valued thing in place of another, but perhaps that’s because other language and other concepts get used much more often. Cicero points out in On Duties that in some of our moral judgments, we must decide between two good things. Epictetus uses the language of prices, where one matter has to be evaluated against another, and we often have to choose one in place of the other, since we generally can’t have both.

Choices regarding the faculty of choice

Sometimes the choice we are faced with concerns the very faculty of choice, the prohairesis. We can either maintain it in decent enough condition (i.e., in accordance with nature), or choose something else that we find attractive or compelling at the moment. The very notion of askńsis, training or discipline, and particularly the habit-(re)formation involved in it, demands setting many things aside, saying no to some, saying yes to others, until some modicum of virtue has been established within us. Fulfilling our multiple roles and responsibilities, meeting the call of our duties, following through on commitments, restraining ourselves or rousing up our spirit, these all do as well. Would the word “sacrifice” be out of place in all of these cases? It strikes me that it might be one of the most apt terms we could use for them.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPA-certified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

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