Consider a political dissident who defies a ruthless dictator, is captured by the regime’s henchmen, and is publicly tortured to death. Your response would likely be outrage — you might appeal to Amnesty International, call for sanctions, or demand that the dictator be tried in The Hague. The Stoics reflected on a similar case in antiquity: Phalaris, the sixth-century BCE tyrant of the city of Akragas in Sicily and the Brazen Bull that he commissioned. Victims were locked inside the hollow bronze bull while a fire was lit underneath, slowly roasting them alive. Some accounts claim that the bull was designed to amplify and distort their screams, transforming them into eerie bellowing — a spectacle meant to amuse the tyrant and to terrify his enemies. Were the Stoics appalled by such cruelty? Not at all. They insisted that the wise and virtuous are just as happy inside the Brazen Bull as they would be enjoying a good meal with family and friends. Shocking? Certainly. But their view challenges a core modern moral conviction: that we should strive to eradicate suffering and fight injustice. If the virtuous can flourish even in the Brazen Bull, this is no longer self-evident. The burden shifts from the torturers to the victims — what matters is not what is done to them, but how they respond, the attitude they adopt. According to the Stoics, all that we should do by way of response to injustice is cultivate virtue. But even if we ultimately reject Stoicism, engaging with its defiant perspective — and its popularization as self-help literature in recent years — forces us to confront some of our deepest assumptions and brings into view an ancient ideal of flourishing and resilience that still merits our attention. Bending the arc of the universe In 1853, Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and fiery abolitionist, declared that while “the arc of the moral universe is long,” it “bends toward justice.” This wasn’t just rhetoric — he tried to bend it himself, sheltering fugitive slaves, defying the Fugitive Slave Act, and even supporting armed resistance against slavery. The drive to make the world better has become so deeply ingrained in our moral sensibility that we rarely ask whether it is justified. On a sunny morning in 2019, my children left their schoolbooks behind and grabbed the protest signs they had drawn the night before. My son’s was taped to a hockey stick: “S.O.S.,” with a painted Earth as the “O.” My daughter had glued hers to a tennis racket: “I’m sure the dinosaurs also thought they had more time!” They were seven and ten. In the schoolyard, they joined classmates for a rally against climate change. Like many parents, my wife and I went along — partly to support them, partly to keep them safe. We felt proud. On that day half a million people marched — the largest demonstration our city had ever seen. My wife took my hand. We smiled in the middle of the surge, the shouting, the urgency. It was a small moment in a much larger movement. Grassroots activists block pipelines, billionaire philanthropists fund vaccines, students march against war, UN peacekeepers are deployed to conflict zones. Superheroes battle injustice, celebrities launch charities, musicians call for change in anthems such as “Imagine” and “We Are the World.” We respond to wildfires, tsunamis, and pandemics with early warning systems, emergency aid, and scientific breakthroughs. The impulse behind it all is the same: the world is not as it should be, and it is up to us to fix it — through protest, policy, philanthropy, science, pop culture, and more. The arc of the moral universe will not bend on its own. We have to pull it in the right direction. There is no arc to bend According to the Stoics, all these efforts are pointless. We cannot improve the world because we already live in a flawless one. There is no arc to bend. If you list evils — war, crime, poverty, racism, disease, earthquakes — the Stoics acknowledge the existence of such things but deny that they are evil. Consider Job, God’s greatest accuser. He has a loving wife, thriving children, a large estate, and a trusted circle of friends; his piety appears beyond question. “Have you considered my servant Job?” God asks Satan. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.” Yet Satan retorts that if you strip away all his blessings, his faith will collapse. God accepts the challenge, granting Satan free rein to make Job suffer. Enemy tribes plunder his estate and kill his servants; a fire consumes what remains; a storm destroys the house where his children gather, burying them in rubble; Job is stricken with painful sores “from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.” The only thing spared is his life. Job’s story highlights the age-old problem of undeserved suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people? For believers, in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God, there should be no unjust suffering — yet the world seems full of it. The Stoics dismiss this puzzle as based on a false assumption: that suffering is an evil needing justification. They claim the only true good is virtue and the only true evil is vice — everything else is irrelevant. Since virtue depends solely on our choices, it is within everyone’s reach. Had Job been wise, he would not have seen himself as suffering evil at all. The Stoics are equally unmoved by the challenges posed by God’s other accusers, from Candide to Ivan Karamazov. Candide catalogs horrors — war, earthquakes, persecution, slavery, colonialism, rape — to argue that no grand cosmic plan exists. Ivan goes further, insisting that even if a divine order did exist, it could never justify the suffering of a single innocent child. Yet the Stoics stand firm: none of this is evil. They are
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