Member-only story
Citizens of the World
How the virtue of justice reaches across all
If the virtue of wisdom runs through all the others, it is justice that determines how best to put that wisdom to use.
Justice anchors us to being good, not just for ourselves but for those around us. Justice is what helps us determine how to act, it is what, as the Stoics believed, brings us proper decision-making so we can pursue the best course of action every day.
Within Stoicism, justice is not a virtue solely dedicated to what we would think of as the justice system. Rather, justice is the virtue that helps support doing what is morally correct — it is about doing the right thing, not just for ourselves but for the world. As Socrates once said, “Justice is the virtue that makes us useful to ourselves as well as others.”
But in order to properly understand our decisions and actions, we need to understand how they interact and influence ourselves and the world around us.
“Each of us is, as it were, circumscribed by many circles,” the Stoic philosopher Hierocles once wrote, “some of which are less, but others larger, and some comprehend, but others are comprehended, according to the different and unequal habitudes with respect to each other.”
