Review - The Stoics On Determinism And Compatibilism
by Ricardo Salles
Ashgate, 2005
Review by James Pratt
Sep 19th 2006 (Volume 10, Issue 38)

The Stoics espoused two doctrines that, at first glance, do not seem to cohere. The first was a belief in a providential order in which every event was fated to occur. The second was an assured belief in the moral responsibility of individual agents for their actions. If we take these in conjunction with the commonly accepted notion that an agent can only be responsible for those choices that could be chosen otherwise, then the first doctrine implies that no one can ultimately be held responsible for anything, because all choices are fated to occur. The belief that both doctrines can be made coherent -- that moral responsibility can be preserved in a deterministic world -- is known among philosophers as compatibilism. Thus, the Stoics were compatibilists.

Ricardo Salles sets out in his book to explain how the Stoics reconciled determinism and responsibility. He begins with determinism. The Stoics were not just determinists; they were fatalists. Usually fatalism is described in the following counterfactual terms: If you are a fatalist, you believe that if a future event F is fated to occur, then even if the preceding event P which supposedly necessitates F were to not happen, F would still come about. This sounds mysterious, as if a politician were fated to win an election for which she did not campaign or even enter. This gives rise to what opponents of the Stoics called the “Lazy Argument”, which basically says that if I am ill but am fated to recover, then there is no need to call a doctor or take my medicine. And if everything that happens to me is fated, then I should be able to live my life in bed. Obviously this is not the case. Therefore, fatalism is false. Furthermore, this kind of fatalism is incoherent, because it posits that different events have different modal qualities; F can only be fated on the supposition that P is not. But according to fatalism, P and F (and every other event) are necessary. According to Salles the Stoics get around this objection through the doctrine of co-fated events. For instance, a politician is fated both to enter an election and to campaign and to win it. This counters the Lazy Argument and the charge of modal inconsistency. Determinism is defended. But what about moral responsibility?

According to Salles' account, the Stoics defend responsibility in several ways. First, they distinguished between external and internal causes. Responsibility attaches to the latter. To the obvious rejoinder that whether externally or internally necessitated, our choices are still determined, the Stoics have at hand the answer that though this may be so for isolated actions and choices, taken more holistically, at the level of character,  things are different. Though interesting, and characteristically Stoic, this answer is not entirely convincing.

Second, against the view that we are only responsible for those choices which could have been chosen otherwise, the Stoics claimed that we are responsible for those choices that, though internally necessitated, are the result of previous reflection. It is not their contingency that counts, but rather their being the product of deliberation and identification. As such, they are a reflection of the agent's character. The challenge then is to explain how we can also be responsible for choices that result from failure to reflect, or from mistaken reflection. For such an explanation Salles turns to the later Stoic Epictetus. Roughly, poor or missing rational reflection is not an exculpating factor insofar as such faulty practical reasoning is itself blameworthy. As human beings, we have a general capacity for reflection, and failure to exercise it properly is a failure to exercise our faculties towards our true species-end. It is to this general capacity that responsibility attaches, not to a specific capacity to do otherwise in a situation. The argument is, I think, weak, but Salles' discussion of Epictetus here is nonetheless stimulating.

Another angle the Stoics take is to accept the view that we are only responsible for those choices for which we could have chosen otherwise; they then argue that, at least at the moment of choice, the agent could have chosen otherwise. In many ways Stoic compatibilism bears similarities to the version of it defended by Harry Frankfurt. For one thing, both Frankfurt and the Stoics cast doubt on the presumption that the crucial thing about responsibility is the freedom to do otherwise. Instead, they both stress the importance of rational deliberation about values, and the identification of an agent with his choices. Indeed, Salles devotes considerable space to an explicit analogy between Stoic compatibilism and Frankfurt's version of it, finding much common ground, though with a couple of disanalogies that Salles finds relatively trivial.

As his discussion of Frankfurt's compatibilism demonstrates, the classicist looking for a deep exegesis of Stoic texts may be disappointed by Salles' approach in this book. Though he is not above digging into the texts -- his long excursus on the Stoic doctrine of conflagration is, in my opinion, not entirely necessary -- he is more concerned with how Stoic thought on determinism and responsibility can shed light on modern philosophical debates surrounding determinism, compatibilism, and libertarianism. Read in that spirit, though aimed primarily at the scholarly reader, the book is written in a clear, crisp style. There is also a depth of argument that obviously cannot be captured in a short review.

© 2006 James Pratt

James Pratt is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada. His area of research is in moral psychology. He is also completing on a book on the philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713).