What is up to us

Enchiridion 5 explains why this is a theory of happiness and not just a theory of value. What upsets people is not things but their judgements about things.² Death is not terrible, Epictetus says, or Socrates would have thought it so. The terror lies in the judgement that death is terrible. So the place where a life goes well or badly is the place where impressions are judged, and that place is yours.

Discourses 1.1 gives that place a name. Of all our capacities, only one can examine itself and assess its own workings: the faculty that makes use of impressions.³ Grammar can tell you how to write to a friend but not whether to write. Music can tell you about melody but not whether to sing now. The faculty that decides whether to assent to an impression is the one thing the gods put entirely in our power, and it is the one thing a Stoic will not trade for any outcome.

The Stoics were also determinists. Everything happens through an unbroken chain of causes, which seems to make "up to us" a fiction. Cicero reports Chrysippus' answer in De Fato.⁴ Push a cylinder and it starts to roll, but it rolls because of its own shape. The push starts the motion; the cylinder's nature carries it on. An impression is the push, and whether you assent is your nature at work. Your assent is caused and is still yours, which is the only sense of "up to us" the Stoics needed.

The motions on Sophecs test this in two directions. "Does the model decide?" asks whether a language model contains anything that does what the ruling faculty does, receiving an impression and then assenting or withholding. The Stoic answer is that it has inputs and outputs and nothing in between that judges. "Borrowed judgement" turns the question on the user. Handing your choices to an assistant gives away the one possession that was wholly yours, and better outcomes cannot buy it back, because outcomes were never yours. "The careful builder" follows from the same line. Blame attaches to judgement, so a builder who judged well and was unlucky did nothing wrong.

The cost of this view is what it says about results. A Stoic can call the careful builder blameless while the people the system hurt are still hurt, and the theory files their injury under things not up to them. A utilitarian will reply that a moral theory which treats a death as an indifferent has lost track of what morality is for. The Stoic answer, that the victim's own virtue is untouched by what happened to them, is consistent. Whether it is enough is what you have to defend.