Category Archives: philosophy

are we entering a post-truth era?

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When the returns are in, just about half the people, those who voted for the loser, will have to ask themselves how seriously they believe the campaign orators who told them that democracy was lost if their opponents won the election. If they believe seriously that Mr. Wilkie is the head and front of an unholy alliance of revolutionaries and revolutionists or that Mr. Roosevelt is the center of an effort to set up a dictatorship and establish national socialism, then the loser cannot accept the result … But as a matter of fact the nation will accept the result …. because the people know in their hearts that the rhetorical threats and the rhetorical promises which they have just been hearing belong to the routine of campaigning in the month of October before election, and that for every grain of truth these political words contain, there are ten grains of buncombe.

–Walter Lippmann, “On the Strength of Democracy,” Nov. 5, 1940

To understand [diplomatic] briefings one must break out of the semantic fogs of our Orwellian times. The government information officer, to speak plainly, is a misinformation officer; his job is not to inform the press, but to put across the particular version or distortion, previously decided upon by the government for which he works. The briefing is a mild but effective form of brain-washing. … Arguments which the government disapproves are made to seem silly; key technical points are given rapid treatment so hurried and obscure as to hide their significance; one’s own position is high-lighted, the adversary’s is twisted and the neutral’s is given only a quick once-over.

— I.F. Stone, “How the Press is Brain-Washed and the Neutrals Gulled,” I.F. Stone’s Weekly, April 16, 1962

Last week, I heard my old friend Jason Stanley defend a thesis that he has also advanced very ably in series of pieces in The New York Times. He warns that we are entering a post-truth era.

The philosopher David Lewis proposed that in “a serious communication situation,” people generally say what they believe and expect listeners to accept statements that are true. Lying occurs, but it is like breaking the rules of a game that is still functioning as a game; lying is exceptional and risks a penalty. But people can also talk in situations that do not involve serious communication. Making up stories, exaggerating, or scoring points can be the normal and expected behavior.

In a reasonably deliberative democracy, politics is a serious communication situation, and lying or BS-ing are exceptional and risky behaviors. But once lying becomes widespread and incurs no political penalty, truth-telling becomes virtually pointless. Listeners don’t even expect it. They interpret speech as exaggeration, entertainment, counter-balancing of rivals’ exaggerations, motivational rhetoric, or other things that are not assertions of truth. Then, if you happen to say something true, listeners just discount it, divide your claims by the expected degree of exaggeration, and you lose the game that is being played in a post-truth era. Even fact-checkers, reporters, and other ostensible third-parties are quickly dismissed as partisan players.

I fully share Jason’s values and concerns, but I am open to two theses. Which one is right is an empirical question, and I am not quite sure how to investigate it.

1. Politics as serious communication was a fragile convention that we recently lost. We once had it because mainstream political leaders did not routinely and blatantly lie, and when they did, they paid some kind of price. Perhaps they paid a penalty for lying or being badly misinformed because the media system was controlled by a limited number of professional organizations, such as the TV news networks and the metropolitan daily newspapers. For all its ideological biases and blinkers, the media fact-checked. So if you said that Barack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya who wants to establish death panels, you either could not get into the news at all or you would be debunked therein. Once prominent candidates and broadcasters started saying such things routinely and paid no price, the convention of politics as serious communication quickly died. Jay Rosen has been arguing this thesis effectively. He has blamed “movement” conservatives and the right-wing media even though his original framework is quite nonpartisan.

… or …

2. Politics has never been very much about truth. Politicians have always gotten away with massive lies or with mistruths they did not know to be false, such as blatant racism or exaggerations of the Communist threat during the second half of the last century. It is a standard trope of intellectual criticism to say that nobody even cares about truth any more. That is because neither politicians nor voters have ever cared about it all that much. They have always used and interpreted political speech as a mix of things, such as truth-claims, ideological commitments, signalling to the troops, and slams at the opponent. The relative importance of truth shifts from decade to decade as different institutional structures wax and wane. For instance, the demise of the monopoly press and the rise of the Internet has changed the rules of the game, both for better and for worse. The relative role of truth also changes from month to month according to the political cycle. Just as truth is the first casualty of war, so it is the first virtue thrown overboard in a competitive presidential campaign.

I began with two quotes to show that intellectuals have been worried about the demise of truth for at least a century. Many more examples could be cited, but I like these two because of some interesting contrasts.

First, Lippman and and Stone were opposites in many respects, ideological, professional, stylistic. “Everything about them was a study in contrast,” writes Myra McPherson. Yet they both wrote extensively about the dangers of propaganda, the public’s low esteem for truth, and the consequent dangers to America. That suggests that this is not a wholly new problem.

These short quotes only hint at their complex views, but they illustrate two different levels of concern. Lippmann describes the 194o campaign in words that eerily presage 2012. But he is not deeply worried, assuming that when Americans hear all the “buncombe” about socialist Democrats and plutocratic Republicans, they will discount it at an appropriate rate and expect sanity to return after the inauguration. In other words, they know what game is being played at any given moment and expect truth to reemerge during the legislative session (just not in October of an even-numbered year).

Stone’s words also seem prophetic.  As if describing a 2012 campaign commercial or debate, he writes (in 1962), “key technical points are given rapid treatment so hurried and obscure as to hide their significance; one’s own position is high-lighted, the adversary’s is twisted and the neutral’s is given only a quick once-over.”  But Stone is very concerned, arguing that the mass media and mass publics of the West have been lied into a state of terror to support the Cold War at the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

Neither man would be surprised by the spectacle of 2012, but their reaction would differ. Stone might say, “You are once again risking the loss of your democratic birthright by allowing powerful leaders to lie deliberately and destroy your very regard for the truth.” Lippmann might reply, “It was always thus. Politics (in the sense of national competitions over governmental power) has never relied much on truth. Just let the people make a general judgment about who’s on their side, and things will work out OK.”

Of course, there is another option, which is to build institutions and practices that favor truth. Walter Lippmann was deeply impressed by the power of propaganda in World War I and wrote in the Phantom Public (1925) that citizens could not know what is going on, lacked coherent values and interests, were easily manipulated, and never seriously affected the government. He concluded that their only role was to use the blunt force of majority rule to unseat extremely incompetent or tyrannical leaders. John Dewey responded in The Public and its Problems (1927) that citizens had indeed lost their ability to deliberate, pursue truths, and govern themselves, but this was the result of fixable flaws in the press, the university, the legislature, and other modern institutions.

Dewey saw that citizens need not only more and better information, but also relationships characterized by mutual trust and accountability. Information is easily dismissed, manipulated, and misused, but when people have good reasons to trust their metropolitan daily newspaper, it can tell them truths that they may not want to hear. When they trust religious congregations and unions, those organizations can call them to hard truths. And when they have genuine relationships with public institutions, public leaders can risk speaking the truth. Dewey’s theoretical writing was often frustratingly vague, but he played a role in building settlement houses, news magazines, social studies classes in high schools, the NAACP, and a host of other organizations that strengthened deliberative democracy for the 20th century. Our question is how to revive that in the 21st.

why we wish that goodness brought happiness, and why that is not so

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Socrates: Yes, indeed, Polus, that is my doctrine; the men and women who are gentle and good are also happy, as I maintain, and the unjust and evil are miserable.
Polus: Then, according to your doctrine, the said Archelaus is miserable?
Socrates: Yes, my friend, if he is wicked.
— Plato, Gorgias (Jowett trans.)

Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the way that leads to the cessation of pain: this is the Noble Eightfold Way; namely, right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. …

Thus spoke the lord, and the five monks expressed delight and approval at the lord’s utterance. … And while the Wheel of Doctrine was set turning by the lord, the earth-dwelling gods raised a shout: ‘This supreme of Wheel of the Doctrine has been set going by the lord at Benares at Ispatana in the Deer Park …’
— from the Buddha’s Sermon at Benares (Burtt, trans.)

(Indianapolis) It would, indeed, be wonderful news if goodness reliably made us happy–and even better news if goodness were both necessary and sufficient for happiness. In that case:

  • We would have a reliable path out of suffering, because one can always do what is best among the possible options, and that makes you good. If goodness then brings happiness, one can always be happy.
  • We can be happy while also satisfying our conscience: that tension is banished.
  • We have an effective argument for people who threaten us. We can truthfully tell them that they can only get what they want (their own happiness) by doing what we want (being good to us and others).

So I don’t blame the monks and gods for raising a joyous shout when they heard the Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth. But is it a truth?

Social science says that making a contribution to one’s community is associated with feelings of happiness and satisfaction (see evidence from population studies and our own work at Tufts). That’s important to know. I would go so far as to say that a person who is languishing psychologically should probably try collaborating with others on a goal of public value. It’s wiser, too, to choose a career of public service than to be a rapacious capitalist or a tyrannical bureaucrat, because over time, you will have better odds of being happy.

But an empirical association isn’t enough to win Socrates’s argument in the Gorgias or to get the monks and gods joyously shouting. It won’t suffice for several reasons:

Being good probably doesn’t work for everyone. In the Gorgias, Callicles presents himself as a happy sociopath. Social science tells us those people are rare, but they may exist. And for them, goodness is not the path to happiness. So if you face Callicles, Socrates and the Buddha do not provide you with persuasive arguments.

Being good probably doesn’t work in every circumstance. Sure, it’s wise to choose an altruistic career, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll be happier if you neglect an opportunity to steal a million dollars from a big corporation and get away with it. The statistical correlation between goodness and happiness arises because most people, most of the time, don’t have opportunities to be bad, safe, and happy. Alas, the opposite is also true: in tragic situations, being good is not much of a solace.

Surely one reason that goodness tends to produce happiness is that goodness is frequently rewarded, at least with the respect and gratitude of other people. But it is easy to think of cases in which doing the best thing will gain no respect or when acting badly is the best path to applause and acceptance. The statistical relationship between goodness and happiness breaks down in those–not infrequent–situations where goodness goes unnoticed or is actually disparaged.

The correlation between goodness and happiness is a variable, not a constant. In different subcultures, contexts, and times, goodness can either reliably produce happiness or come largely apart from it. If the relationship is a variable, then we can probably vary it. We can make cultures and situations more communitarian–so that being good generally requires harmonious interpersonal relationships–or we can strive for rugged individualism, so that people learn how to be happy without being good to others. Socrates proposes an extremely communitarian utopia in the Republic, and the Buddha actually built one when he founded the Sangha. But that doesn’t prove that people need community to be happy.

Finally, being good in order to be happy doesn’t sound like truly being good. It’s too transactional and self-interested; goodness becomes a coin that you accumulate to buy happiness.

Riffing off Nozick’s famous example: imagine that you are offered two pills. One will make you completely happy and impervious to all negative emotions for the rest of your life. Among the emotions that you will never feel again are guilt, sympathy, and righteous indignation. So you can live happily without being good. The other pill will make you good for the rest of your life: it will prevent you from wanting to make any unethical choices. I think most people would take neither pill, because we will not renounce our freedom and our sensitivity to the full range of emotions, including guilt and temptation. Happiness without goodness will feel hollow, and goodness without moral weakness will feel automatic and inhuman. But if your only goal is to be happy, you should take the first pill, not the second. And that shows that to want to be happy is not to want to be good.

This is why I think there are three different goods–equanimity or happiness, community or ethics, and truth–and none of the three guarantees any of the others. (By the way, despite my criticism of the Deer Park Sermon, Buddhism is compatible with the idea that there are different good things.)

all that matters is equanimity, community, and truth

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I’ve come to think that the necessary and sufficient conditions of a good life are equanimity, community, and truth.

Equanimity means a good inner life, marked by something like happiness, satisfaction, or peace. Unless individuals achieve satisfactory inner lives, even a perfectly just society is a nightmare.

Community encompasses all valuable relationships among living things, from the baby on her parent’s lap to a fair and efficient economic order that integrates all seven billion people and does justice to the animals, as well. Love and justice are two of the virtues that turn relationships into communities.

By truth, I primarily mean knowledge about the way things actually are–empirical knowledge–because I would assign knowledge about the good to the other two domains.

These three principles are necessary because, unfortunately, they are not perfectly compatible. If they were harmonious, we could perhaps reduce the list to a single underlying principle. But alas, truth can make equanimity and community harder. Relating well to others can undermine internal peace. Valuable relationships sometimes depend on fictions. These and other tensions among the three principles partly explain why it is so hard and rare to achieve a good life.

The three principles are sufficient because other good things are only good insofar as they benefit the three. For example, beauty is probably necessary for a rich and satisfying inner life; good communities possess and produce certain kinds of beauty; and the truth is sometimes beautiful. But beauty can also be false, unjust, or distressing. Insofar as beauty does not support truth, community, or equanimity, its pursuit is no part of a good life.

How do I reach these conclusions? Not by way of arguments from first principles. Arguments are made within the three domains, not in favor of them. For instance, all large societies need the rule of law and individual rights, among other things. That is the kind of conclusion that can be grounded in evidence and reasons–but one must assume that it matters whether communities are good, in the first place. If you deny that justice toward others has any relevance to you, no argument can prove that it should. (Here I draw on Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.)

The same is true of truth. Nietzsche liked to demonstrate that the pursuit of truth was a choice. If one makes that choice, the scientific method commends itself. If not, there is no argument for the scientific method. Finally, reasoning about how to achieve equanimity is fruitful, but there is no argument for seeking it in the first place.

Despite the lack of arguments for the three principles, all three tend to emerge in rich and mature traditions, from ancient India to the Hellenistic Mediterranean to modern Europe and many other places, even when someone tries to deny one of the three. For example:

Classical utilitarians defined the goal of life as pleasure and argued that a society could maximize the pleasure of its members by getting its markets and laws right. In other words, they dispensed with equanimity and relied only on community and truth. But the young John Stewart Mill blamed his depression on that oversight and developed a richer account of utilitarianism in which equanimity regained its independent standing and was no longer a mere consequence of community.

Certain anarchists and libertarians, such as Ayn Rand, have denied the virtues of community. But I once heard the libertarian philosopher Loren Lomasky compare libertarians who ingest Rand to snakes who eat pineapples. Rand takes a while to pass through the system, and you are better off when she is gone. A more sophisticated libertarian, such as Friedrich von Hayek, begins by recognizing that people are social animals, intrinsically connected to one another and needing strong ties for happiness and welfare. Hayek simply criticizes the state as a buttress of community, arguing that governments lack adequate information and trustworthiness to make beneficial decisions. In other words, community returns to libertarianism once one reflects more maturely.

The post-structuralist generation in France raised serious questions about truth. But I doubt that authors who mainly debunked truth (like Derrida and Baudrillard) will last. What will continue to matter is Foucault’s long and hard struggle for truth. To be sure, Foucault asked whether truth was always just a function of power, and thus made science and reason seem more problematic than they had seemed before. Yet his intellectual biography shows a constant pursuit of truth; that was the impetus for his skeptical questions in the first place. The world was obdurate for Foucault; he would not simply ignore it. The virtue he defended in his late (1983) lectures was parrhesia, speaking truth in the face of danger–in other words, truth that upsets equanimity.

The constant return of three principles (even when smart people try to dispense with them) suggests that they are deeply rooted in human experience. Yet it is wishful thinking to believe that they coexist easily. Our struggle is to pursue all three.

mapping a moral network: Auden in 1939

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We can think of a person’s moral mentality as a network. The nodes are ideas or values; the links are various kinds of connections among the ideas: implications, explanations, influences, and meaningful tensions. For instance, I believe that all human beings have exactly equal value, yet I also believe that my primary obligations are to my own family. These are two nodes in my personal moral network, connected not by a contradiction but by a tension.

A good moral mind comprises important and correct nodes. For instance, it is better sincerely to endorse a principle of equality than to advocate hating some of one’s fellow human beings. That example shows that a single node can affect–even determine–a person’s character. But it is hard to argue for any given idea all by itself. (Why equality, for instance?) And it is not enough to have the right principles; they must also be well organized.

Those two considerations lead us to think not merely about which principles are right or good, but also about the overall shape of a person’s moral network. Does it include enough ideas to handle the actual complexity and variety of human affairs? Are weighty and serious ideas central to the network? Do ideas just stand by themselves, or are they linked together in meaningful ways?

I’ve been thinking about these questions introspectively–but that is a somewhat private matter. Another way to demonstrate this kind of analysis is to examine the moral network map of a famous person.

A full personality would be an immensely complicated thing to map, since it comprises all kinds of principles, desires, aversions, memories, virtues, vices, memberships and identifications, hopes, plans, skills, and facts. It changes constantly and is inconsistent, replete with thoughts that are only half-endorsed, only half-sincere. But if we are interested in moral questions–What should we do? How should we live?–we can simplify the analysis to a person’s moral ideas.

Most people (including me) are not sure what those are; we would have great difficulty explaining our moral premises adequately to other people. We are not terribly clear or articulate. Fortunately, some writers describe moral ideas cogently and concisely, not merely listing them but putting them in a formal arrangement that reflects appropriate amounts of tension, irony, ambivalence, and ambiguity. Whether the resulting text reflects the author’s sincere, inner motivations doesn’t matter; we are not interested in psychoanalysis, but in finding a moral worldview to analyze. It is the text, not the writer, that we will use for analysis.

Morally conscious lyric poets are especially helpful for this purpose because their writing is concise and is concerned with form and organization as well as discrete ideas. Also, poetry can accommodate abstract concepts, concrete stories, personalities, reasons, and emotions–as the poet sees fit. I don’t believe we should screen out any of these kinds of ideas in advance but should see how they work together in a particular mentality.

Recently, I offered a brief reading of a great and influential moral poem, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” I explored the complexities of Auden’s pronouncements, some of which we know he did not mean literally. For instance (as he himself said later), the line “We must love each other or die” is false, since we will die even if we do love each other. So its place in the poem is more complicated than just a proposition that Auden endorsed. The setting–a gay bar on the first night of World War II–may be as important as some of the abstract themes.

One way to think of the structure of the poem is as a literal network map. See the top of this post for an example. To make that image, I selected ideas (and in some cases, quotes) from the poem. I used software to place them in literally random locations on a blank plane, connected the ones that seemed related–using dotted lines for nodes that are in mutual tension–and then applied an algorithm that moves the nodes around as if they were billiard balls connected by springs, until the diagram stabilized at an equilibrium. That yielded a picture of the relationships among Auden’s ideas as presented in this (partly fictional) poem.

An important disclaimer: the labels of those nodes are simplistic; they reduce subtle and ambivalent ideas to slogans. So you must actually read the poem. Nevertheless, the network analysis brings out certain points:

Auden presents a rich view in just a few pages. I found 16 nodes and 52 links, and I’m sure I could have found more. None of these nodes can be collapsed into others, but a few separate areas of emphasis emerge. As shown at the bottom-left of the map, Auden is anti-collectivist: against the state, mass society, and ideologies (including corporate capitalism). He admires personal conscience–but not the retreat into private life.

Another important ideal for him is disinterested love, which is threatened by the universal desire to be loved exclusively.

I put “gay identity” on the map because the setting is known to have been a gay bar, and Nijinsky/Diaghilev (mentioned in the poem) formed a same-sex couple, as did Auden/Kallman. But I can’t connect that node to others because Auden is not explicit about homosexuality. This is a case where what is unstated is also part of the map.

Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot)

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Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) was a careful empirical scholar of ancient thought and a clear and modest writer, yet he defended a conception of philosophy that was exciting enough to attract the enthusiastic support of Michel Foucault. I’m becoming directly acquainted with Hadot for the first time via a collection entitled Philosophy as a Way of Life, edited by Arnold Davidson (1995). These are some of Hadot’s most important points:

In the Greco-Roman world, a philosopher was someone who lived the good life. What made a life fully good was a matter for debate, but it was widely understood to involve equanimity-in-community (borrowing a phrase from Owen Flanagan): that is, inner peace or control over one’s own emotions combined with active and ethical engagement with other people. Another essential element of the good life was freedom from error. That didn’t mean full understanding, which was impossible, but the avoidance of logical, scientific, and moral mistakes.

A philosopher need not develop or hold original views or arguments. Socrates was the model sage of all the ancient schools, and he didn’t even write anything, let alone teach positive doctrines of his own. His life–including his dialogic relationships with other Athenians, and the equanimity he displayed on the point of death–was what made him a philosopher.

All the ancient schools developed spiritual exercises designed to train the practitioner to be more philosophical. These exercises included, for instance, describing emotionally fraught situations from the dispassionate perspective of nature or science, and learning to focus on the living present, because it is all that really exists, while the past and future are  sources of irrational emotions. Debating abstract issues with other people was yet another spiritual exercise. While participating in an argument, one took the propositional content seriously, but the point of the dialogue was to improve the participants’ personalities and their relationships.

The philosophical writing that comes down to us, then, wasn’t what the ancients called “philosophy.” It was just the offshoot of one of their philosophical exercises: abstract disputation. Writing was not a satisfactory substitute for actual dialogue, which must involve real people who were friends as well as debating partners. All the schools disparaged as “sophistic” the view that a text could suffice. Nevertheless, the philosophical writing that survives is excellent, especially if one reads it with proper attention to genre, purpose, and form. For example, Marcus Aurelius didn’t report his actual mental states or try to advance true and original propositions. Instead, he recorded standard Stoic moral exercises, beginning with his daily thanks to each of his moral teachers (book 1), and ending with a reminder that all famous men end as “smoke and ash and a tale” (book 12). He listed his own teachers and the exemplary men by name because he would actually visualize each of these people in turn. Those were just two spiritual exercises for which the Meditations was a notebook.

Hadot argues that the ancient conception of philosophy as an integrated way of life shifted, during the Middle Ages, into philosophy as argumentative writing about abstract topics. Early Christians fully understood the ancient ideal, but they split it into two parts. Monks borrowed, developed, codified, taught, and described the spiritual exercises of the ancient schools. The life of a hermit, monk, or friar became “philosophical,” in the ancient sense. Meanwhile, the task of reasoning about logic, metaphysics, and ethics was assigned to universities and understood as a tool for improving theology, supplying “the latter with the conceptual, logical, physical, and metaphysical materials it needed.” Hadot observes,

One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals who train professionals. Education was thus no longer directed toward people who were to become educated with a view to becoming fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in order that they might train other specialists. … In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a away of life or form of life unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy [pp. 270-1].

Although Hadot admires the ancient conception of philosophy and argues that it has been forgotten in the Continental European university, he is not given to pessimism and cultural nostalgia. Matthew Sharpe writes,

Unlike many of his European contemporaries, Hadot’s work is characterized by lucid, restrained prose; clarity of argument; the near-complete absence of recondite jargon; and a gentle, if sometimes self-depreciating, humor. While Hadot was an admirer of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and committed to a kind of philosophical recasting of the history of Western ideas, Hadot’s work lacks any eschatological sense of the end of philosophy, humanism, or the West. Late in life, Hadot would report that this was because he was animated by the sense that philosophy, as conceived and practiced in the ancient schools, remains possible for men and women of his era: “from 1970 on, I have felt very strongly that it was Epicureanism and Stoicism which could nourish the spiritual life of men and women of our times, as well as my own.”

Hadot argues that the ancient tradition of philosophy has lingered among influential writers deeply schooled in Hellenistic thought: Montaigne, Spinoza, Goethe, the young Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, among others. And it has the potential to flourish again today.

I don’t know whether Hadot addressed the vexing questions that arise for me in reading his work on the ancients: Should philosophy be a way of life? How that would be practiced? By whom would it be taught? And what it would mean for the evidently fruitful and impressive enterprise of modern academic philosophy?

I would be most excited by a revival if it took seriously all three parts of the ancient ideal: equanimity or inner peace; avoidance of error; and ethical political participation. The last is easiest to overlook in an era of psychotherapy, when the “self-help” section of the bookstore is full of ancient philosophical works and modern popularizations, but we don’t seriously study how to improve the world. Hadot ends,

This concern for living in the service of the human community , and for acting in accordance with justice, is an essential element of every philosophical life. In other words, the philosophical life normally entails a communitary [sic] engagement. This last is probably the hardest part of carry out. The trick is to maintain oneself on the level of reason, and not allow oneself to be blinded by political passions, anger, resentments, or prejudices. To be sure, there is an equilibrium–almost impossible to achieve–between the inner peace brought about by wisdom, and the passions to which the sight of the injustices, sufferings, and misery of mankind cannot help by give rise. Wisdom, however, consists in precisely such an equilibrium, and inner peace is indispensable for efficacious action [p. 274].

Cf. some of my own thoughts: “happiness and injustice are different problems“; “If you achieved justice, would you be happy?“; “three truths and a question about happiness” (inspired by Buddhism rather than stoicism); “Must you be good to be happy?” (exploring some relevant psychological evidence); and “the importance of the inner life to moral philosophy” (arguing that the main schools of modern ethics neglect equanimity).