A flashcard came up on my phone at quarter to eight one morning. I had written it myself.
Question: What is the Stoic position on whether anyone does evil on purpose?
Answer: Nobody does. Even the worst person believes they have good reasons. They are simply mistaken about what is good.
I read it back. The first name that arrived in my head was Ted Bundy.
That is a rough way for a belief to meet the morning.
The belief matters because it is not decorative Stoicism. It is load-bearing. If you have ever used Marcus Aurelius to calm your anger at another person, you have probably relied on it.
Marcus's point is blunt: they behave like this because they cannot distinguish good from evil. He writes it at the start of Meditations 2.1, after rehearsing the meddling, ungrateful and arrogant people he expects to meet. The person who behaves badly is not a monster from another species. They are a human being making a mistake about value.
That thought can drain anger in seconds.
But is it true?
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The strongest version of the Stoic claim
Epictetus gives the argument in Discourses 1.28. We assent to something because it appears true. We choose an action because, in that moment, it appears preferable. If someone assents to a false impression, they did not choose it as false. The false appeared true to them.
He uses Medea as the hard case. She knows the horror she is about to commit, yet revenge looks more valuable to her than saving her children. Epictetus does not say that passion defeated her reason. He says her judgement was wrong.
That is the radical Stoic move. Anger is not a beast that escapes while reason watches helplessly. Anger is a judgement, held hard and at speed.
The same machinery sits underneath the Stoic idea of impression and assent. Something appears to you:
He is disrespecting me.
I deserve this.
I cannot stand another minute of this.
Then you sign.
Stoic practice is largely an attempt to notice the form before your name is already on it.
The edge cases are real
The obvious objection is that some people can state the moral rule perfectly well and violate it anyway.
Research on psychopathy once seemed to support a simple moral-blindness story. Later work complicated it. In a 2012 study of 109 incarcerated offenders, total psychopathy scores did not predict performance on a forced-choice moral-versus-conventional task. The authors concluded that the evidence did not justify saying psychopathic offenders could not know what was morally wrong. Their 2014 follow-up likewise pushed the explanation towards emotion and motivation rather than a basic inability to classify wrongdoing.
In plain English, a person may know the words without hearing the music.
The Socratic reply is available. If the knowledge does not move you, perhaps it was never knowledge in the full sense. It was an opinion you could recite.
That reply is coherent. It also makes the theory difficult to test. If “knowledge of the good” is defined as the kind of knowledge that always produces good action, no bad action can count against the theory. A claim that explains everything can become a claim that risks nothing.
The Stoics themselves were not completely settled. Posidonius objected to the idea that passions could be reduced neatly to judgements. Most of what we know about his argument survives through Galen, who had his own argumentative agenda, so the size of Posidonius' break with orthodox Stoicism remains disputed. Still, the disagreement matters. Someone inside the school looked at the clean theory and said it did not quite match the mess of being a person.
Keep the practice. Loosen the certainty.
Here is where I have landed.
As a complete theory of human action, “all wrongdoing is ignorance” strains too hard at the edges. Some people appear able to describe the rule, foresee the harm and proceed with clear practical competence. Calling every such case ignorance can start to protect the system rather than explain the person.
But the anger practice survives.
Marcus was not writing a paper in moral psychology. He was trying to enter a difficult day without becoming the kind of person he disliked. The useful question was not whether every wrongdoer in history was confused about the good. It was whether the irritating person in front of him might be acting from a distorted judgement.
Usually, they are.
That does not excuse the behaviour. Understanding is not acquittal. You can set a boundary, end a relationship, remove someone from responsibility or support a proportionate punishment without feeding yourself rage. Seneca's practical work on anger is full of correction, delay and prevention. It is not a manual for becoming passive.
Compassion changes the state from which you act. Accountability changes what you do.
You can keep both.
Every assent is a rep
The other part of the theory is less dramatic and, I suspect, more important.
Chrysippus compared character to a cylinder. An external push starts it moving, but its shape helps determine how it rolls. Your current character is not a verdict delivered at birth. It is the shape laid down by previous judgements and habits.
Each assent makes the next assent of that kind a little easier.
That is why the morally impressive moment often happens much earlier than we think. It is not the final choice under pressure. It is the smaller choice made when nothing seemed to be at stake.
The reply you rehearsed in your head.
The story about the other person's motives you repeated until it felt factual.
The tiny indulgence you kept calling an exception.
You do not suddenly become a different person in the big moment. You discover the shape you have been practising.
A one-assent drill
For the next 24 hours, catch one assent. Just one.
- Notice the sentence that appeared in your mind.
- Say, “This is an impression, not yet a fact.”
- Ask what the impression is pricing as good, bad or unbearable.
- Wait for one breath before you sign.
You do not have to defeat the thought. You do not even have to withhold assent. The first rep is noticing that assent happened.
If you want a broader version of the practice, Marcus Aurelius' approach to difficult people adds another question: what might this situation look like from inside their judgement?
The strong Stoic thesis may be too certain. The practical invitation is not.
There is a gap before the signature.
That gap is where you live.
Practise it for a week
The free 7-Day Stoic Challenge turns the core ideas into one short audio practice a day. No guru claims. Just a week of testing the philosophy against your actual reactions.
Sources
- Epictetus, Discourses 1.28 and 2.17
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1, 7.26 and 11.18
- Cicero, On Fate 42-43
- Eyal Aharoni, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Kent Kiehl, “Can Psychopathic Offenders Discern Moral Wrongs?” (2012)
- Eyal Aharoni, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Kent Kiehl, “What's Wrong? Moral Understanding in Psychopathic Offenders” (2014)