A Stoic Understanding of Evil
Everybody is Innocent
One of the fundamental ideas of Stoicism is that there is no good or bad in the world, only in the mind.
All that is in the world is “indifferent”. We may prefer some indifferents such as money, and disprefer others, such as disease, but they are all morally neutral in terms of good and bad.
To understand the Stoic view of evil, it’s worth clearly defining what it means in philosophical terms. We typically think of evil as premeditated actions that are harmful to other people.
We think of murderers and drug dealers and sometimes corporate bankers as evil. But in its true sense an evil can be anything harmful to human life and interests.
And so evil can be divided into two broad categories — moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is exactly those premeditated intentions and acts of evil. Natural evil is anything outside of human consciousness that is harmful to people such as predatory animals, natural disasters, and diseases.
From our understanding of that central tenet of Stoicism — that there is only good or bad in the mind, we can rule out the existence of natural evil.
For the Stoic, the world is perfect as it is — it is in the category of “indifferent”. We prefer to not be afflicted by disease, but…
