Chapter 5 is titled, Playing Ball With Socrates. The author uses a sports analogy in the chapter to illustrate why we can be indifferent towards something and that something is still important. The analogy boils the issue down to people rarely care about the ball but rather how the player(s) use it. If I had asked me a year ago to combine the words preferred, disperferred, and indifferent in a sentence I would have suggested you were crazier than a bed bug. Even now the phrases preferred indifferences and dispreferred indifference are hard to say. Interestingly, while it is hard to get out of my mouth, the concept’s basic idea is straightforward once understood.
In the stoic philosophy, character (a combination of virtue and wisdom) is the primary measuring stick of a human’s value. Everything else doesn’t matter. You can be a good person (good character) even if you are sick, rich, educated, or a hermit — the list of attributes could go on forever. Some atributes could make life easier and therefore are preferred (only if they do not negatively impact character). To a stoic anything that negatively impacts character is eschewed. The approach is a zero-sum game. Things like poverty or lack of education are dispreferred indifference. Assuming they do not impact character, they are states we would rather avoid. To a stoic, a rich asshole and a poor asshole are still assholes. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, ” It’s all about the character, stupid.”
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful-and hence neither good nor bad.” We would recognize all of these as dichotomies between preferred and disperferred indifferents.
Another concept in this chapter that struck me even harder the second time, was the idea of lexicographic preferences. In my Econ 101 class, we studied the butter for guns utility curve which represents the trade-off between civilian and military spending. This is a classic lexicographic dichotomy. This type of comparison suggests that there are classes of goods and services. While this sounds straightforward not all rational preferences can be described in this manner because not every good and service belongs in the same class. Within a class trade-offs occur but trade-offs do not occur between classes. You might save less for retirement to take a vacation but you would not sell your daughter to fund the same vacation (at least in most cultures). The point the author is making is that indifferences are not divided by a black-and-white line. There are compromises that individuals have to navigate. The bright line has to be drawn between anything that impacts your integrity and everything else. Integrity is in a lexicographic class by itself.
Massimo Pigliucci summarized the use of lexicographic preferences in ethics in the quote, “By all means avoid pain and experience the joys in your life long – but not when doing so imperils your integrity. Better to endure pain in an honorable manner than to seek joy in a shameful one.”
Buy a copy of How To Be A Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci and read along
Previous Entries:
Week 1: Logistics and Opening Thoughts
Week 2: The Unstraightforward Path
Week 3: A Roadmap For The Journey
Week 4: Some Things Are In Our Power, Others Are Not
Week 5: Living According To Nature
