☀️ Micro Morning Meditation: A Rule For Our Duties in Human Relationships
It is worthy of great praise, when man treats man with kindness.
Your 3-Part Micro Morning Routine
1. 🧘 Morning Contemplation
🎧 You can find the audio version of this morning’s contemplation below.
Good morning.
The Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, although not a Stoic himself, admired Stoicism and wrote extensively about its principles, particularly in his work On Duties where he has the following to say about the Stoic virtue of Justice, which he introduces as “the conservation of organized society, with rendering to every man his due, and with the faithful discharge of obligations assumed”:
The first office of Justice is to keep one man from doing harm to another, unless provoked by wrong; and the next is to lead men to use common possessions for the common interests, private property for their own.
…Since, as the Stoics hold, everything that the earth produces is created for man’s use; and as men, too, are born for the sake of men, that they may be able mutually to help one another; in this direction we ought to follow Nature as our guide, to contribute to the general good by an interchange of acts of kindness, by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill, our industry, and our talents to cement human society more closely together, man to man.
The foundation of Justice, moreover, is good faith; — that is, truth and fidelity to promises and agreements.
Here we can see that Stoic Justice isn’t just one thing.
As Cicero explains, it encapsulates things like keeping people from being harmed, contributing to the common good, and good faith.
In Seneca’s 95th Letter to Lucilius, we get a further sense of how Stoic Justice requires us to focus on our responsibilities toward others:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to What Is Stoicism? 🌷 to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.