Should Stoics Be Concerned About Others?

Over the course of Stoic Week, I created a sequence of seven videos, four of which focused on discussions of key Stoic doctrines in the works of the Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, Cicero (who was not himself a Stoic, but who did admit himself attracted to a number of their doctrines, particularly in the field of Ethics.  On one of those videos, one of my interlocutors - a very bright, young South African student and blogger, Marc Smit asked me a very important question.

I feel that Stoicism does offer relevant ideas for me as individual, in the sense that I can apply it to my own thoughts, feelings or actions bearing on things that happen to me, but how do I respond to these things when then happen to others, notably friends or loved ones?

Are the Virtues Already In Us?

In my Ethics classes, one type of assessment and exercise I routinely require my students to engage in is what I call an Application Assignment.  I provide them with a complex, morally ambiguous, problematic scenario, which they then have to analyze along various lines.  I'll write more about those parameters in a follow-up post, and discuss just how the assignments work to foster student learning at several different levels.  For now, what I'd like to focus on is one very interesting, common, and revealing mistake I see some students make semester after semester.

A key component of the assignment is competently applying three of the moral theories we've been studying to the case in question.  This requires that the students do a bit of explaining about the key concepts of the theory, and then go on to particularize these to the characters of the narrative.  Students do all right with Egoism, with the authoritarian Might-Makes-Right theory, and often enough with Utilitarianism.  Many of them run into problems with Virtue Ethics, and there are a variety of distinct misunderstandings and misapplications.  I'm particularly interested in one recurring way students get matters wrong.  Some students interpret Virtue Ethics as asserting that the virtues lie within each and every person, ready to be used when situations call for them.