Posted on January 27, 2022

"by all means go ahead and avoid pain and experience joy in your life—but not when doing so imperils your integrity. Better to endure pain in an honorable manner than to seek joy in a shameful one."

—Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic

This refers to the Stoics’ proposal to reach an eudaimonic life: even though integrity is the norm, there are preferred indifferents (e.g. education, health and wealth) and dispreferred indifferents (e.g. pain and poverty). Thus, Stoicism suggests that we live our good life centered in our values, while we seek our preferred indifferents. In the case, however, that we have to face a decision between reaching out to a dispreferred indifferent while keeping our integrity intact, or trading off our integrity for a preferred indifferent, we should go with the former.

I guess corruption—in any form—is the antithesis of this Stoic approach. Many would put their preferred indifferents (e.g. money, social status, material things) over their integrity, thinking this is the easy way to get them. However, I believe sacrificing our integrity, our word, our virtuosity, is not worth the little extra work we’d be avoiding to reach those preferred indifferents by our own means. Even though I know it’s very likely to face such a choice many times in one’s life, I’ll aim to take the Stoic view, because I want to, and because I can.