Episode #273 - "Nobody Gets Away With Anything, Ever"

What if the best thing that you can do for yourself is to do things for others? Certainly, that’s the “virtue is the only good” argument, to a large degree. That is, Stoicism claims that we can only truly flourish if we live a life of virtue in which we recognize our own place in the cosmos in the greater picture of everyone else. The Stoic lives and acts to make the world a better place. So, we could perhaps deem living virtuously selfish from a certain perspective.

Episode Notes

What if the best thing that you can do for yourself is to do things for others? Certainly, that’s the “virtue is the only good” argument, to a large degree. That is, Stoicism claims that we can only truly flourish if we live a life of virtue in which we recognize our own place in the cosmos in the greater picture of everyone else. The Stoic lives and acts to make the world a better place. So, we could perhaps deem living virtuously selfish from a certain perspective.

“I want myself to flourish, and the best way to do that is to be virtuous towards others.”

Or, perhaps:

“If I make the world a better place, then I get to reap the benefits of that better world.”

If there’s anything Obi-Wan Kenobi taught me it’s that we can change our point of views to understand any perspective.