Courage is a pretty obvious choice for being the most important of the four Stoic virtues. It was Aristotle who said courage was the mother of all the rest. In a world that's not virtuous, it's a brave thing to go out there and do what needs to be done.
Self-discipline is another obvious choice because, well, you can't do anything without it. And—as Aristotle also pointed out—courage that isn't checked by temperance quite easily veers into recklessness.
The fact that you can argue either of these convincingly is the reason why when I (hey, it's Ryan here, breaking the fourth wall—sorry) announced Courage is Calling I said courage was the most important virtue. And then when I did Discipline is Destiny, I said discipline was the most important virtue.
With a straight face though, I can also say that justice is the most important virtue because without justice what is the point of any of it. The Stoics were very clear, the whole point of life, the whole point of the philosophy was to direct a person towards doing what was right. Courage in pursuit of injustice? Discipline dedicated to an entirely selfish or destructive goal? That's not how Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or Zeno would have defined the good life. In fact, Marcus Aurelius says that injustice is a blaspheme against the oldest of the gods.
For the past five years I've been working on the Stoic Virtue Series, I've come to realize justice meant something very different in the ancient world than it does today. Today, when we think of justice, we think of politics, we think of "our rights," we think of the legal system. And we love to debate the meaning of justice—what it is, who it's for, and how it's accomplished.
For too many of us justice is some abstract notion that happens outside of us, away from our control and influence. But justice occurs in each of our lives every day. Not only in the big moments, but small ones, too—how we choose to treat a stranger, how we decide to behave at work, the standards we hold ourselves too, how we respond to a friend going through something. In fact, by the time we sit down for lunch on a given day, the world has presented us dozens of chances to engage with justice, to do the right thing in our lives, here and now, and accept our responsibility to improve the world around us.
Because justice is something that happens within us, not outside us. Justice is a verb, not a noun. It's something we do, not something we get.
This is evident in the lives—and more importantly, the actions—of the greats we admire. Over the years, we've talked here in the Daily Stoic emails about Harry S. Truman and Jimmy Carter, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth and Florence Nightingale, Marcus Aurelius and Cato the Younger. These are the people–among many–whose stories Right Thing, Right Now is built around. Through these role models, we learn the transformational power of living by a moral code and how if we learn to stand by our own convictions, not only will we change the world for the better, we will change ourselves in the process, and discover a deep level of fulfillment most never know is possible.
Right Thing, Right Now officially launches June 11, 2024. Preordering makes a huge difference for authors (and bookstores) as they try to get a book off the ground. So it'd mean so much if you could support this book. To make it worth your while, I put together a bunch of awesome bonuses. For pre-ordering just one book, you receive bonus chapters I couldn't fit into the book, and the Spotify playlist I used while writing it. But if you pre-order five books, you get all that plus a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of Right Thing, Right Now, and access to a live Q&A session with me about the book (moderated by someone cool). And if you pre-order 120 books, you get all those bonuses, and an invitation to a philosopher's dinner at the Painted Porch, with me, the Daily Stoic team, and fellow Stoics from all over as we gather to celebrate this philosophy that means so much to all of us.
Also, exclusively available at the Daily Stoic Store, we have 15,000 signed and numbered first-edition copies of Right Thing, Right Now available. Once these sell out, that's it, they're gone. So get one while you can!
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