What Did the Stoics Mean by Living According to Nature?

The Stoics held that a good human life is lived in agreement with nature. By nature they meant both the order of the world and our place in it as beings capable of reason and life in community. In practice, that means our first impulse is one part of a situation we have the capacity to judge.

The ancient Stoics understood the cosmos as an ordered whole governed by reason, and human reason as part of that order. Consider a wallet lying on an empty sidewalk. The money may be welcome, and the person who lost it has a claim you are capable of recognizing. Both facts belong in your judgment. For the Stoics, living well meant exercising that capacity in keeping with the kind of being you are and the larger world you inhabit.

That helps explain the place of virtue in Stoic ethics. Finding the owner may take time, and he may never thank you. The quality of your judgment and conduct is still yours to attend to. If the wallet has identification, make a reasonable effort to return it. If it has none, think through what steps are fair and practicable. The situation calls on more than the wish to have money or the wish to think well of yourself.

A question worth carrying out of the example is whether your reasons still hold when your advantage changes. If you’d say the money belongs to its owner when you lose it, justice asks you to give the same fact its force when you find it.

Further reading: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Stoicism,” section 4.1 (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/#Telo).