What the Stoics meant by preferred indifferents

What “indifferent” means

The Stoics sorted everything by one test: does it benefit the person who has it, every time? Only virtue passes. Wisdom, justice, courage and temperance can’t be used badly, and their opposites can’t be used well. Everything else can go either way. Money pays for a child’s braces and for a bribe. Good health lets one person look after an aging parent and another put longer hours into a scam. Because such things can be used well or badly, they don’t by themselves benefit or harm anyone, and the Stoics called them indifferent, in Greek adiaphora (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

The word is technical. It doesn’t mean unimportant, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care. It means indifferent to the one question the Stoics thought decides how a life goes: whether you are acting well. A raise doesn’t make you a better person, and a layoff doesn’t make you a worse one. That is the principle usually summed up as virtue is the only good.

The Stoics did not say that all indifferents are equal, though. Seneca, answering critics of his own wealth in On the Happy Life, states the mainstream position:

Two claims sit side by side in his first sentence. The only good is virtue, and the things “which we call neither good nor bad” still have “a certain value,” some more than others (On the Happy Life 22). Those with positive value are the preferred indifferents. The Greek term was proēgmena, things promoted or ranked ahead, in Latin praeposita (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). Their opposites, the dispreferred indifferents, were apoproēgmena. Seneca’s own image is one of rank. With him, riches occupy “a certain place”; with his critic, “the highest place of all.”

The four categories

Put together, Stoic ethics sorts things into four groups. The examples below are the standard ones. They come from the summary of Stoic ethics preserved by the later biographer Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.102), and the IEP (opens in a new tab) sorts them into preferred and dispreferred the same way.

Two entries deserve a second look. Pleasure is on the list. The Stoics’ great rivals, the Epicureans, made pleasure the goal of life; the Stoics classed it as an indifferent, at most something to prefer, and denied that it is the good (see Stoicism vs. Epicureanism). And life itself is only preferred, death only dispreferred. That is the hardest line in the table, and critics have pressed on it since antiquity.

Strictly, there was also a third kind of indifferent, with no value either way, such as whether the number of hairs on your head is odd or even, or whether you bend or stretch a finger (IEP). Nobody needs a philosophy to choose among those. More Stoic terms are explained in the glossary.

Marcus Aurelius draws the line between what is his own and what is indifferent in a note to himself:

He uses the word in two senses. To the body, everything is indifferent in the plain sense, because it “is not able to perceive differences.” For the mind, the technical sense applies. Indifferent is whatever is “not the works of its own activity” (Meditations 6.32). Your judgment, your intentions and how you deal with the person in front of you are the mind’s own work. Your salary, your cholesterol and what people say about you after you leave the room depend partly on you and partly on everything else, so they fall on the other side. Marcus then narrows the line further: of the mind’s own works, only what it does now is in its power.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, a few early members of Zeno’s circle pushed the doctrine to its limit and held that all indifferents are exactly equal, so there is no reason to prefer health to sickness. Chrysippus rejected that view, and one short statement of his own position survives.

How to choose: Chrysippus in Discourses 2.6

Chrysippus of Soli headed the Stoic school from about 230 to 206 BCE and was its chief systematizer (SEP (opens in a new tab)). Almost all of his many books are lost. This line is known because Epictetus quoted it.

The passage answers three questions about choosing.

What to prefer. Among indifferents, Chrysippus clings to those “more adapted to the conservation of that which is according to nature” (Discourses 2.6). In plain terms, that means whatever keeps a human being alive, well and able to do a human being’s work: food over hunger, rest over exhaustion, a paycheck over debt.

How to prefer. “God himself has given me the faculty of such choice.” Long’s “choice” translates the Greek eklektikon, “able to select” (Perseus (opens in a new tab)). Selecting is the right word. You select the better of two job offers the way you would pick the drier path in the rain: carefully, because one really is better, but without thinking the pick decides whether you are a good person.

Until when. The preference holds “So long as future things are uncertain.” If Chrysippus knew that illness was fated for him, he would move toward it, as a foot with intelligence would step into the mud. The other half of that thought, accepting what is settled, is often discussed today under Nietzsche’s phrase amor fati. The half that matters here is the first: until the outcome is settled, you work for the better one.

Epictetus explains the foot in the discourse just before this one. Taken by itself, he says, it is natural for a foot to stay clean; as part of a body, it will sometimes step into mud or onto thorns. In the same way, a person considered alone would naturally be healthy, rich and long-lived, but as part of a larger whole you will sometimes be sick, run into danger or go without (Discourses 2.5, in our words). Preferred indifferents are defaults, not commands. A parent turns down a promotion to care for a sick child. A firefighter walks toward the smoke. Each selects something dispreferred, and neither has given up anything good.

The same discourse opens with the attitude that goes with all this:

Care comes from the fact that “the use of them is not indifferent,” calm from the fact that the material is (Discourses 2.5). You can work hard for the job and still sleep the night before they decide.

Everyday examples

The doctrine is easiest to see in ordinary choices. In each case below the indifferent is worth pursuing. What the Stoics rule out is trading the good for it.

Health. A checkup shows your blood pressure is up. Health is preferred, so you change what you eat, walk more and take your doctor’s advice. What changes is how you hold the number. It is information about your body, not a verdict on you, and if it stays high despite your efforts, you have lost nothing that makes you good.

Money. A raise is preferred, and so is a better-paid job; you can negotiate hard for either. The test comes when the money has a price in conduct. In the Enchiridion, Epictetus imagines friends urging you to get rich so they can share in it, and answers for you:

This is not a case against money. “Point out the way, and I will acquire it,” the answer runs, provided you can stay “modest and faithful and magnanimous” (Enchiridion 24). If the commission depends on telling a customer the product does something it doesn’t, you are in the trade he calls “unfair and silly”: giving up what is good for what is not.

Reputation. A good name is preferred. When a customer posts an angry review, you can answer it, fix what went wrong and hope the next reviews are kinder. What a Stoic won’t do is buy fake reviews or bury an honest complaint, because that trades honesty, which is good, for standing, which is only preferred. If the review stays up, your character is no worse for it.

Other people’s indifferents. The doctrine cuts both ways. If poverty and illness don’t make you worse, they don’t make anyone else worse either. Contempt for people who have less money, looks or status is a mistake about value, not a Stoic attitude.

Two questions sum it up. Which option better serves life, health, livelihood and the people who depend on you? Select it and work for it with care. Does getting it require acting badly? Then it isn’t on offer. The four virtues page has a free exercise that puts a real situation to wisdom, justice, courage and temperance, and the dichotomy of control covers the line between your effort and the outcome.