Nobody Does Evil on Purpose. Really?

Stoicism says nobody does wrong on purpose: every bad act begins in a mistaken judgement about what is good. But does that survive contact with clear-eyed cruelty, compulsive habit and modern moral psychology?

I test the claim against Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Medea, research on psychopathy and the Stoics' own internal disagreement. Then I keep the practical part that still works: catching one assent before it hardens into action.

Sources and further reading:

- Epictetus, Discourses 1.28 and 2.17
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1, 7.26 and 11.18
- Cicero, On Fate 42-43
- Aharoni, Sinnott-Armstrong and Kiehl, “Can Psychopathic Offenders Discern Moral Wrongs?” (2012)
- Aharoni, Sinnott-Armstrong and Kiehl, “What's Wrong? Moral Understanding in Psychopathic Offenders” (2014)
- Kühn and Gallinat, “Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated With Pornography Consumption” (2014)
- Grubbs et al., “Pornography Problems Due to Moral Incongruence” (2019)

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:18

A card came up on my phone this morning. Anki. Quarter to eight before anyone else in the house woke up. The question was what is the stoic position on whether anyone does evil on purpose? And the answer which I wrote myself said this. Nobody does. Even the worst person believes they have good reasons. They're simply mistaken. They're simply mistaken about what's good. I read that back and then the first name that arrived in my head was Ted Bundy. I watch a lot of true crime documentaries. So today I want to find out whether the thing I've been teaching is actually true. Here's why this isn't a philosophy seminar question. If you've done any stoic practice on anger, you've used this idea. It's the engine underneath the most famous passage in Marcus, the one everyone quotes at the start of book two. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself the people you deal with today will be meddling and ungrateful and arrogant, and then the line that does the actual work, they're like this because they can't tell good from evil. This is what this episode is largely based on. The person who cut you up in traffic isn't malicious, they're just mistaken. Your anger has nothing to grip. Epictetus says the same thing, but a bit more bluntly. If a man is deceived, he's the one who's been hurt, so we should feel sorry for him. So this isn't an abstract commitment. It's load bearing. If it collapses, a large chunk of stoic anger practice collapses with it, and we should want to know that. I've been sat with it for a while now and I've come out somewhere more complicated actually than where I went in. So I'll tell you where I landed at the end, but I want to walk you through the pressure I put on at first, because the pressure I think is the interesting bit. So where does this idea come from? This isn't originally Stoic. It's Socrates. It runs all the way through Plato. Nobody is willingly, nobody desires what they believe to be bad. In the Georgias there's this brilliant thing where Socrates says that tyrants do what they see fit but not what they actually want, because they're wrong about what's good for them. They're getting exactly what they aimed at, and it's ruining them. The Stoics took that wholesale. Epictetus loved Socrates more than he loved most of the Stoics, and there's this passage where he pushes it as far as it will go. He's talking about Medea. Euripides gives her that famous line where she says roughly I know what evils I'm about to do, but my anger is stronger than my deliberations. Now that looks like a knockdown counterexample. She says it herself. I know it's wrong, and I'm doing it anyway. Epictetus doesn't blink. He says she isn't choosing evil as evil. In that moment, revenge genuinely looks to her like the thing most worth having. She's blinded, but the blindness is her judgment rather than her eyes. Which is either profound or a sort of magic trick, and I genuinely go back and forth as the witch's witch. Now what about the machinery underneath this? This is Chrisopus, third head of the Stoa, the systems architect of the whole school. There's one Greek word worth having for this episode synchatathesis or ascent. It means the moment you say yes to an impression, something appears to you, this is threatening, this is worth having, this is unbearable, and there's a gap. And in that gap you either sign the form or you don't. You either endorse it as true or you wait or endorse it as false. Everything moral in Stoicism happens in this gap. Virtue and vice are made of small moments of ascent. And here's something radical. Chrysopus refused to divide the soul. Plato had reason in one corner and appetite in another. Wrestling, Aristotle had something similar, but Chrysopus said no. There's one faculty and it's rational, and there's nothing else in there to be overpowered by. Which means anger isn't reason losing a fight with something else. Anger is a judgment, a bad one, held hard at speed. So when you're furious, you're not being irrational in the sense that some beast is getting loose. You're reasoning, but just badly, about what matters most. And if that's right, then wrongdoing is always and only a mistake. There's nothing else it could be. So Ted Bundy. Forensic evaluations were clear that he was legally sane. He knew right from wrong, he planned, he covered his tracks, he evaded capture for years, which takes intact, functioning, practical reasoning. And in interviews he did before his execution, talking about himself and the third person the way he did, he said he knew it was wrong to think about it, and certainly wrong to do it. So where does that leave? He was simply mistaken about the good. The stoic answer is available, and it's not stupid. It goes like this. Bundy wasn't mistaken about the facts, he was mistaken about value. He'd built a scheme in which his own gratification and his own power counted as genuine goods, and once you've got that scheme, everything follows. He was getting what he aimed at. He was, in Socratic terms, doing what he saw fit, not what he wanted. That's coherent, and I want to be honest that it's coherent. But I also want to be honest that it feels like the argument is doing a lot of work to protect itself when someone appears to relish the suffering rather than just tolerate it as a cost. He was confused about the good, starts to sound like a category we've made big enough to swallow anything. Now, here's where the modern research is more interesting than people expect. The obvious move is to say psychopaths just don't understand that it's wrong. And there was research pointing that way. In the mid-90s, James Blair ran studies suggesting psychopaths struggle to tell the difference between moral rules and mere social conventions, which fits the stoic story perfectly. They're morally blind, if you will. But that result hasn't actually held up. Aha Roni, Synod Armstrong, and Keel tested 109 incarcerated offenders in 2012 and found that psychopathy scores didn't predict performance on the task at all. They ran it again in 2014 with 139 same result. Their accuracy at classifying moral transgressions wasn't associated with psychopathy. So they can do it. They can tell you which acts are wrong and be right. What the literature converges on instead is a phrase I keep coming back to. They know the words but not the music. They can state that it's wrong, it just doesn't move them. And that's fascinating because it puts the Stoics back in play from an unexpected direction. Socrates never thought knowledge was a matter of being able to say the right sentence. For him, knowing the good and being moved by it aren't two different things. If you can recite it and it doesn't touch you, you have an opinion, not knowledge, which means the replication failures point towards the Socratic reading, not away from it. Do I think that it settles it? No. I think it rescues the thesis at the cost of making knowledge mean something quite specialized, and the moment you define knowledge as the kind of thing that always moves you to act, you've made the claim harder to falsify. And that should bother us. Okay, so I want to leave the serial killers behind now because I think they're the easier case, and I think the harder one is much closer to home. Take someone ordinary, right, a decent person, kind to their family, no history of cruelty in their life at all. And then they start watching extreme stuff on the internet. Over years, not weeks, what they watch drifts, it gets rougher, and at some point they notice with real horror that something in them is responding to the suffering itself, not despite it, because of it. Nothing about that person was chosen. There was never a Tuesday where they sat down and decided to become someone who finds cruelty arousing. And this is where the Stoics are much stronger than people give them credit for. Because Chrysippus has an account of exactly this. Every ascent you give lays down a disposition, a hexus, and the disposition makes the next ascent of the same kind easier, which means your character isn't a fixed thing you have, it's the sediment of every yes you've ever given. You had an image of it, a cylinder. Push a cylinder and it rolls, but how it rolls is down to its shape, not your push. The world pushes all of us. What happens next depends on what shape you've become, and the shape is made of your previous ascents. That is a two thousand year old description of desensitization written before anyone had the word for it. Now, the neuroscience. And I want to be careful here because this is an area where the popular version has run miles ahead of the evidence. There is real work here. Kuhn and Gallinat published a study in Jamma Psychiatry in twenty fourteen, sixty four men, which found that higher self-reported consumption was associated with reduced grey matter, volume in the stratium, and reduced connectivity between the stritium and the prefrontal cortex. Their own reading, and they've appropriately hedged about it, is that this could reflect changes in neuroplasticity from intense stimulation of the reward system. So there's something there, but here's what you won't hear on most podcasts that cover this. There is no porn diagnosis in the DSM. The ICD 11 has compulsive sexual behavior disorder and files it under impulse control, not addiction. Whether tolerance even works as a concept for behavioral addictions is genuinely disputed, and Joshua Grubb's research keeps finding that a great deal of the distress people report is driven by moral incongruence by using porn against their own values rather than by consumption levels as such. I'm telling you that because I'd rather be accurate than persuasive. The escalation phenomenon is real. The addiction framing around it is contested. Both things are true, and I'm not going to flatten one to make my argument tidier. Here's the philosophical crunch. Somewhere on that escalation curve, that person had a moment, probably hundreds of them, a flicker of this isn't good, this is changing me, and they clicked anyway. Now, was that ignorance? Because it doesn't feel like ignorance. It feels like the thing over described, seeing the better and approving it and following the worse. It feels like knowing. And the orthodox stoic has to say no. There is no knowing and doing otherwise. In that moment the judgment flipped briefly and completely, and the flip is so fast you experience it as conflict. I've spent quite a lot of time with this answer, and I think it might be true, but I also think it's the answer of someone defending a system. Here's the part that I love, and it's the reason I wanted to make this episode. The Stoics had this argument with themselves. Okay, here's how it went. Posardonius, about a century and a half after Chrysopus, wrote his own treatise on the passions and it was essentially a long complaint. His charge was that Chrysippus, having insisted that there's only one route in there, understanding and belief, simply could not explain what passion actually is. His evidence was phenomenological, and it's good. Emotions persist after you've corrected the belief. They vary wildly between people who hold identical judgments. They fade over time, even when nothing about the judgment has changed. If the emotion just is the judgment, none of that should happen. So we posited something else, an emotional pull, a capacity that isn't reason and doesn't answer to it, which is exactly what you'd need to make room for genuine weakness of will. Now, there's a caveat, and I'd rather give it than to pretend otherwise. Almost everything we know about Posidonius and on this comes through Gallan, writing much later, and Gallan has an agenda. He wants Chris to look like the deviant and everyone else to look like a platonist. Scholars argue seriously about how much of Posidonius the rebel is really Galen's construction. Some, like Benjamin Harriman, argue Posidonius spoke of powers rather than parts, which is a much smaller break than Galen makes it sound. I'm not going to pretend that's settled, it isn't. But the shape of the disagreement is what matters. The Stoic school produced from inside itself someone who looked at the monistic account of the mind and said this doesn't match what it's like to be a person. And Aristotle was already there. His view is that the weak willed person does have the knowledge but has it the way a drunk man has it, or someone reciting a lesson in their sleep, possessed but not switched on. His starting point was that we plainly do experience weakness of will, and the job of a theory is to account for it rather than argue it out of existence. Two and a half thousand years later, Donald Davidson is still trying to solve the same puzzle, and he hasn't succeeded. So, three things. One, as a complete theory of action, I don't think this holds. The claim that all wrongdoing is ignorance is at a minority position in modern philosophy of action for reasons I find persuasive. And I would say that the clear-eyed cases strain it badly, and every rescue makes knowledge a bit more specialized and a bit less falsifiable. I'd rather say that plainly than defend it because it's ours. Two, the practical move survives anyway, and this matters quite a lot. Notice what Marcus is actually doing at four in the morning. He isn't writing a paper on moral psychology. He's disarming his own anger before he walks into a room full of difficult people. And that works whether or not the underlying metaphysics is watertight, because the anger was never a good instrument for changing anyone. You don't need the strong thesis to be true of every human being who has ever lived. You need it to be true enough for the man who spoke to you badly in a meeting, and it usually is. Three, this is one I can't stop thinking about personally. The escalation case doesn't refute the Stoics. It's a warning they already wrote. Every ascent is a rep, not metaphorically. That's the mechanism. You are, right now, becoming easier to persuade of whatever you last agreed to. The shape of the cylinder is being set by what you keep saying yes to, and almost none of it feels like a decision at the time. Which means the practice was never really about winning the big moral moments. It's about the small yeses, the ones that don't feel like anything. Okay, the drill. One thing, rather than five. For the next twenty four hours, just catch one assent. That's all. Something appears to you like he's disrespecting me or I deserve this, I can't stand this, and there's a gap before you sign. Find the gap once. You don't have to do anything with it, you don't have to withhold. Just notice that it exists and that you are about to sign automatically. Because if the Stoics are right about anything, they're right that the gap is where you live. I'm going to rewrite that Anki card rather than delete it. The compassion move is sound, and I'll keep teaching it. But I'm gonna be taking out the certainty that was in the original. The new version is going to say something like, The Stoics held that wrongdoing comes from mistaken judgments about the good, and this is the strongest available ground for dropping anger, and there are cases it handles badly, and the school argued about it themselves. If you want to train this rather than just understand it, that's what the vault is for. There's currently 18 courses in there at time of recording, and one of them is a 12 week ataraxia course. A real curriculum, lots of people practicing it together rather than reading it alone. The links are in the show notes. Go well.