The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

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ETHICS: DEFECTS 203
cases, one cannot help feeling that there was an element
of acting that is out of place.
1
On the same lines, we find a further proof
of the
Stoic s inability to estimate human life at its true value,
in the fact that he made no definite stand against in
fanticide. Even the humane Seneca defends the practice.
Children," he says,
"if
they are born weakly and ^x
deformed, we drown. It is not anger but reason to
separate the useless from the sound (De Ira, i. 15).
IV
Last of all, the Stoics, despising pleasure and uncom
promisingly upholding virtue, could hardly
fail to be
unjust to the Epicurean ethical end. Many
of their
criticisms, indeed, of pleasure as the summum bonum
might find a place
Sidgwick s Methods of Ethics, and are effective ;
but it
was still
open to an Epicurean to argue that his con
in so subtle a modern book as
ception of pleasure did not tally with that of the Stoics,
and, consequently, that many of the criticisms had no
relevance to him they were simply beside the point.
In the first place, the Stoic, entertaining a low opinion
of the body, could not place a very high price on
pleasure. Pleasure must needs seem to him to be little
more than a synonym for selfishness, and so required
to be fought with outright from the beginning. But in
pleasure, it might be rejoined, there is nothing in itself
rid of the fear of
1
Epicurus had a summary way of gettingdeath,
without invoking suicide. He reasoned, "While we exist,
death is not present ;
and when death is present, we do not exist ;
therefore, death is
nothing
to us."