Seneca's Clarification Of What Being Vicious Involves

a helpful distinction for addressing a deeply counter-intuitive Stoic doctrine

One of the difficult, even paradoxical, positions within Stoic ethics is their stance on virtues and vices. What we might call the more or less “official doctrine” can be summed up in several interconnected points

• Every human being is either virtuous or vicious, with no in-between the two

• Virtue and vice don’t admit any difference in degree or amount. If you’re vicious, you’re just as vicious as any other vicious person

• If you’re virtuous, you have all of the virtues. If you’re vicious, you have all of the vices.

As it happens, the Late or Imperial Roman Stoic authors whose works we have don’t stick with this teaching in its full rigor. It seems pretty clear when reading Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius that they are committed to the notion that we can make some progress (prokopē) towards virtue and away from vice, and that they do make comparisons between people and actions that are more bad and less bad. If we include a strongly Stoic-influenced Cicero in the mix, we see him discussing how people might be better or worse, or have some virtues but not all of them. And he certainly doesn’t seem to accept the you’re either virtuous or vicious.

So while there does seem to be something like an acknowledged official doctrine, or if you like, “party line”, for the Stoics, you might call it one that is, as the saying goes, often honored in the breach, or just outright ignored. There are some decent reasons for setting it aside in practice and even in theorizing, viewing it as an unworkable quirk. I expect that’s what a lot of modern-day adherents of Stoicism do with it.

When we turn to Seneca’s works, the picture gets a good bit more complicated. Seneca is explicitly committed to those three points, and even spends time explaining and defending them from would be critics at certain points in his work. To be sure, he also makes a number of interesting and useful distinctions and qualifications that transform an all-too-blunt “Stoic” doctrine, that turns virtue and vice into the equivalent of little more than an on-off switch, into something much more workable, plausible, and applicable in practice.

If you’re particularly interested in hearing more about that, you might check out this videorecording of a talk about the Stoic position(s) on virtue and vice I gave at the Midwest Seminar in Ancient & Medieval Philosophy

There is one very helpful explanation Seneca provides in a work of his that I think gets read a lot less often than some of his other works, On Benefits, specifically in book 4, chapters 26 and 27 He tells us that:

According to the Stoic system (ex constitutione Stoica), there are two senses in which a person can be ungrateful. There is the person who is ungrateful because he is a fool. . . Then there is the person who is ungrateful in the ordinary sense (volgo dicitur), who has a natural propensity to this vice (in hoc vitium natura propensus).

The first sense of being ungrateful reflects the standard Stoic teaching about vices, as he goes on to explain:

If he is a fool, he will be a bad person, and because he is bad, he will lack none of the vices (nullo vitio caret). Therefore he will also be ungrateful. In this sense, we say all bad people are intemperate, greedy, sensual (luxuriosos), spiteful (malignos).

So in some sense, every bad person has every one of the specific vices, which sounds pretty awful! Here, however, he adds a vital explanation about how Stoics hold that bad people (i.e. anyone who is not good, that is, virtuous) “have” all of these vices:

not because they as individuals (singulis) possess all those vices in a marked and obvious form (omnia ista. . . magna et nota vitia), but because they have them potentially (quia esse possunt). And they are there, even if they are hidden (etiam si latent).

A bit later on, he will clarify:

A person who is a fool does not have all of the vices in an acute and active form (aeria et concitata) in which some people have some of them (quam quidam quaedam). All vices exist in all people (omnia in omnibus vitia sunt), but all vices are not prominent in each individual (non omnia in singulis extant).

Understood in this way, the clarified position of the Stoics becomes much more reasonable. Any person who is not completely virtuous has the “seeds of wickedness” (nequitiae semina) or potentialities of each of the vices, within them. But that doesn’t mean that any given non-virtuous person necessarily exhibits or is even motivated by any of those vices in any actual manner (though odds are, they’re going to succumb to some of them at some point).

What about the second sense of being ungrateful, where the person has a propensity to that specific vice? This is the kind of person who characteristically “cheats people of benefits” (beneficiorum fraudator est), because they have an “inclination of their mind” to do so (procubuit animo).

He points out that other vicious people have similar vicious tendencies or propensities towards different specific vices. Some are fear-driven, others are in thrall to their greed, and still others to self-indulgence. We could actually run through the totality of the vices if we wanted to, pointing out examples of people who have developed propensities to one or another of them in particular.

From the point of view of Seneca, there is a significant difference between these two ways of being said to have the specific vice of ingratitude, or being said more generally to be a vicious person. One is, as he says, “not free from any vices”, while the other has actually developed and displays at least one vice.

This even guides how we ought to behave towards these two different kinds of “vicious” people.

On the one kind of ingrate, the person who does not lack this vice, because he does not lack any, the good person will confer a benefit. . . On the latter kind of ingrate, who. . . has a natural inclination, he will not confer benefits, any more than he will lend money to a bankrupt. . .

Clearly, Seneca views this distinction as relevant for guiding prudent and just decision-making and behavior for Stoics. Anyone who is not virtuous can be vicious, but some people are actually vicious in specific ways that have to do with their “character”, or more literally their habits (mores).

I should point out that a similar distinction gets drawn very early on in his work On Anger, where he tells us about the emotion of anger:

How it differs from wrathfulness (iracundia) is plain. The same way that being drunk differs from being a drunkard, and being afraid differs from being fearful. Someone who is angry might not be wrathful. Someone who is wrathful might not always be angry (1.4)

Unless we are virtuous, we all have the possibility of getting angry (which from a Stoic perspective is bad) and of doing bad, vicious actions, motivated by that emotion of anger. That isn’t the same thing as wrathfulness, the manifestation of the vice rooted in the fabric of our souls, what in On Benefits, Seneca was calling a propensity.

I think taking Seneca’s discussion in On Benefits 4.26-27 as providing a Stoic take on what it means to be “vicious” can be helpful for clearing up unduly rigid formulations of the “standard take” Stoic doctrine of virtue and vice. So if that is something that has really bothered or worried you about Stoic ethics, perhaps this might be of some help for you in wrapping your head around a solution at least one well-informed Stoic author has to offer us.