Por uma ética estoica do aperfeiçoamento moral individual em direção ao comprometimento social

Abstract

Stoic ethics is part of an ethics of virtues, however, due to its historical moment and unique development within the philosophical schools of both classical antiquity and Hellenism, it proposes ways to see personal and social ethical development differently from other schools, both from his time, the Epicureans, and from classical antiquity, the Platonic/Aristotelian ethics. In the academic hegemony of Aristotle's ethics as an ethics of virtues, we will propose a stoic ethics that can dialogue both with other contemporary ethics – deontological and consequentialist – and show that it can face issues of an ethics of virtues from another perspective. In order to show the strength and breadth of Stoic ethics, we will not make comparisons between it and other ethics here, but we will outline its ethics on top of a moral issue that even today, in ethical and social discussions, appears as an aporia, the relationship between personal ethical development and consideration for others or the social. By developing this aporia within the concepts and horizons of Stoic ethics, we will give a broader view than what is often a poor or even wrong notion of Stoicism about its conceptions as a philosophical school. Although individual strength or autarkeia is one of the notions of Stoic ethical development, we will show how much this notion is embedded and supported by appropriate acts as social and how individual improvement leads to social commitment.