The Daily Stoic - Professor Paul Woodruff on Philosophy, War and Justice

Episode Date: January 28, 2023

Ryan speaks with Paul Woodruff about his book The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness, and Rewards, the ancient purpose of justice, reflections on a lifetime of studying philosophy, what serving in Vietnam taught him about justice, and more.Paul Woodruff is a classicist, professor of philosophy, and dean at The University of Texas at Austin, where he once chaired the department of philosophy. Before starting his career at the university in 1972, Paul served as an officer in Vietnam. His work deals with the translation, study, and analysis of works of ancient philosophy, with his best-known offerings focusing on Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, Plato, and philosophy of theater. His books include First Democracy; The Challenge of an Ancient Idea, The Necessity of Theater; The Art of Watching and Being Watched, and Reverence; Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. The first book of philosophy that Paul ever read was The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Paul’s new book is Living Toward Virtue: Practical Ethics in the Spirit of Socrates.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoke. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes. Something to help you live up to those four Stoke virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have. Here on the weekend when you have a

little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. I got a random email from a reader. He gets the reading list email, which I send out every month, just my favorite book recommendations. You can sign up there at RyanHoliday.net. But this guy just sent me a note.

He said, I wanted to recommend a book that I think you'd like by Paul Woodruff, a classics professor at UT Austin. He said, I'd heard you on the Dr. Drew podcast and you mentioned your struggles in researching for your upcoming book about justice. So suddenly, people ask me in the reading list, how do you find these books? What do you recommend? Well, I have a very fortunate advantage, which is people like Daniel just shoot me these unexpected notes. And I looked it up and it turns out that Professor Paul Woodruff is not just based in Austin, but is an absolutely fascinating character. Professor Woodruff has been a philosopher, writer, and translator at the University of Texas at Austin since 1973.

This is a guy who has dedicated his life to these topics. It's just absolutely fascinating to me. He was an officer in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He's written a number of books about ancient philosophy. He's translated a number of works of ancient philosophy. And as it happens, he told me in this interview, the very first book of philosophy he ever read was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. We had a great conversation. And it's just wonderful to be randomly, serendipitously exposed to such a wise and thoughtful person.

This is one of my favorite conversations I think I've ever had on the podcast. And I think you're going to see why Professor Woodruff's book, The Ajax, Dilemma Justice Fairness and Rewards, that uses an ancient story from the Odyssey to talk about this problem we have today, how to keep things, how to make society work, how to find fairness in an unfair world, how to get to justice in an unjust world, and then where does the role of compassion come in? He said, I want to understand justice in such a way that it's fully compatible with compassion if justice is going to help us get along.

It has to affect our feelings, and if justice is a quality of character, it must be about feelings because that's where character is in the feelings that help us do well or poorly. In that last analysis, I will argue justice and compassion come down to the same thing to a sort of human wisdom. So this is, as you can imagine, exactly the kind of thing I needed to read and wanted to read as I'm researching this book that I'm doing now, the third in my four virtues series, the first being about courage, which I also talked to Professor Woodruff about,

the next being about discipline, which I talked to Professor Woodruff about, and then the third being justice, and then the fourth being wisdom. So all these virtues are inextricably intertwined with each other. I think we're really going to like this episode in joy, and I'm hoping to have Professor Woodruff out to the bookshop to do another episode in person one of these days. So stay tuned for that as well. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target,

the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to Business Wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm doing the series now on the Cardinal Virtues and I'm on the Justice Book now. Justice is a difficult thing to define, isn't it, in a sentence or in a few sentences? Yes. Justice is extremely hard to define. The Greek word we translate justice and injustice, those two words could also be translated right and wrong because they have a broader range than our word justice. Yeah, they're pretty much all of the ethical considerations that apply to our dealings with other people.

Yeah, it is tricky because I think when people hear justice, they have kind of an almost instantaneous aversion towards it because it has this sort of modern political or legal context, but obviously it's a much broader concept than that. Yeah, because the ancient idea about justice is that justice is a necessary condition And this is our condition for human survival. That is in order to have a community that can function without cheering itself apart through anger and violence,

that we need to have, but not just justice, but we need to believe that we have justice and that we actually can get along without violence Yeah, aren't a lot of the plays of Escalus and Euripides sort of about what happens when people pursue grudges and their own

individual sort of pursuit of justice without, you know, a system when they give themselves over to the furies, if you will. Yes, I think that's right, especially the most famous set of plays is Eastkillus which is about a family conflict, really, mom killed dad, and now what are the children supposed to think about this? Because on the one hand, they're loyal to their father, and the other hand, they're bound to their mother. So, and all three playwrights wrote about this problem, but East Coast has it

resolved in a formal trial. The idea that you can have a public proceeding that's organized by the community that resolves a violent dispute was really important to the ancient Greeks. And actually, it goes back to Homer. It is interesting to think that these things were invented by someone. Like, there was a time that these things did not exist, and that these are in some ways the greatest achievements of a society. Well, actually, I think they always did. I think every functioning human society going way back,

we find it, I think, in Stone Age communities as well, has some way of settling quarrels so the community can go on. And we see references to this, as I said, in the very earliest European literature in Homer and Eseod. But you're right, there was, there was an invention. And this happens around 508 BC in Athens, the politician Klistanis BC and Athens, the politician, Claisdeni's In vents, the concept of the people's courts, which were pretty much unique to Athens, but the people's courts consisted of Bords, really, or committees of citizens who functioned as judges in these cases.

Elsewhere in Greece, there were individual judges are very small committees, but Athens had this idea that the ordinary people could function as judges. It's a beautiful notion. You know, it's funny, I just looked across my desk, I'm going through the note cards on the book that I'm doing now, just some last minute, like things that I wanted to plug into the book. And I wrote this one down from Euripides Electra, which sort of encapsulates, I think what we're talking about.

There's a difference between justice and the right thing, I guess. But the line is, she now has her just desserts, but you have not acted justly. Yes. There's a curious ambiguity about this language. The word decay, which we often translate justice, can mean payback and in

Euripides it often does. Yeah, I'll pay you back for this. I'll give you DK You gave me violence. I'll give you violence. That's DK There's another word with the same root a Dikaia Zune which is the word that Plato uses for justice. And while Dika can mean payback, Dikaezune can't. And they're cognate, they're based on the same root. Yeah, you say early on in the book, and I've seen other, this is another classic text,

so it's sort of a time, but we sort of try to define justice as this idea of giving a person their due. What does that mean exactly? Well, is that the golden rule or is it more in the notion of payback? I have to say quite a bit about this. I can't give a short answer. We've got time. Let's do it. Yeah. I think what I'm saying there is that the community has to believe that its members are getting what is due to them.

Or the community may dissolve or divide in a violent way. And I won't say anything about, I shouldn't say very much about current events, but it does appear that a lot of people think that they are not getting what is due to them. Sure. What is due to them is going instead to people of color or people who are skipping the line or that someone else is getting is coming out of their hide or their pockets. Right. And so they respond with violence or with threats of violence. And of course, that's destructive of the community and society and of government and of the state.

So it's really important that people believe that they are getting what is due to them on the whole. And how do you, the political and in other things I've written about justice, I've written quite a bit about justice, is following Plato's line on this. And Plato, I think, emphasizes the importance of the survival of the community of the acceptance by the community of whatever kind of justice the community has adopted. And so I don't want to apply some abstract theory of what is due to people. I think the community has to work that out, and there are different ways of doing it. I suppose one of the reasons why today there's this violent conflict in Iran, is that there's a strong

difference of opinion about what is due to women who don't cover themselves up in the right-wing. This difference of opinion is so strong that they are hanging people publicly difference of opinion is so strong that they are hanging people publicly who take a view that differs from that of the government. This is a sign of a breakdown in conceivable and no doubt in history it was true that there was a consensus that Women should be published for not punished for not dressing according to a certain code This has changed in many Muslim countries But the authorities may still be clinging to the older idea. And

that, in the case of Iran, is leading to violence, which is very disturbing, but it shows, again, it illustrates the importance of this platonic idea that a community needs to build a consensus around what is due to people. Yeah, it's interesting because I guess like what is due to people, it encompasses all the different conceptions or iterations of justice. So, you know, what is due to people or iterations of justice. So, you know, what is due to people is a question that applies to distributing the spoils of something, of society, of a business, of, you know, opportunities,

which obviously you talk a lot about in the book. And then also what is due encompasses the more payback sense of justice, which is one committed a crime, one did something wrong, what is due to you in return or in punishment for that fact? Yes. Of course, there are different theories of punishment. the platonic view, which is the one I'm trying to promote here, is that a just punishment is one that makes the miscreant more just. So it's educational and reformative. Whereas there is this other view, the retributivist view that a just punishment

is an eye for an eye, a payback. Yeah, but I think that that approach is on the whole destructive of community and What we need is is Is to take more seriously the idea that justice But wherever we apply it makes the people to whom we apply it more just rather than less just and this is the opposite of what we see in our own prison system sure more spy

i'll be right and then i guess there's also an interesting component of justice there which is what does the inflicting of the punishment due to the person inflicting it right so you mentioned the u.s. public's to the person inflicting it, right? So you mentioned the US public prison system. What does that do to us, the national character? I think one of the most interesting essays in the sort of justice canon is Seneca's essay on clemency, right, his idea that providing mercy, not deliberately not punishing, letting one get away with

something, but not engaging in retribution as being one of the higher forms of justice. And yeah, you think about Iran and literally hanging someone to death for a protest about what women should be allowed to wear. It's not just that that punishment is cruel and damaging to the common good and the people who are the victims of that punishment, but the perpetrators are also staining and undermining and implicating themselves in the process there. I think that's right. They're damaging themselves all up from all up and down the hierarchy from the the tyrant down to the hangman because all of them are, well, in a way, there are all of them violating what I think is the most fundamental stoic precept, which is not to try

not to try not to work against what is natural. And this might bring us to talk about anger. Anger at some level, at a low level, is natural to all of us. It occurs in every culture. And it would be a violation of this precept to try to suppress anger. Totally, you're going to feel it when you feel that wrong has been done to you. But the stoic, I think, would avoid, would try to avoid feeling it as a passion and would insist as, and the stoics are Plateness, it's too. Right.

So I'm not that far from the stoics. The stoic would insist that reason not be overcome by anger, because that would be to give way to passion. And as at least as I understand it, I don't know if I told you, but the very first book of philosophy I read when I was 13 was Marcus Aurelius. And that is not the book ever since. really is. I mean, it's an interesting book. If you think of it, for what you've ended up writing about, which is, you know, he talks about justice constantly. He was in a, he was a person who was regularly in a position where he had to dispense justice, give people their due. And it seems like in meditations,

he had a bit of an anger problem that he was working on or working through in the pages of that book, talking about not losing your temper, not being angry, not making decisions out of anger, because that's not good for himself or for other people. Right. That's a wonderful book. It's one of the most surreal and strange books ever written, I think, because, you know, it has no idea of the reader in mind.

Yes. Well, he is his own reader, I guess. And we see how a man with real challenges who was committed to socialism tries to face those challenges in line with socialism. Well speaking of the Stoics and Plato, one of my favorite lines and meditations which I've talked about many times on podcasts is where he says, don't go around expecting Plato's Republic. He's saying that he doesn't live in Plato's Republic.

He lives in Rome in the second century. Right. Oh, yes. That's a very important sentence. Yeah. Plato himself is not waiting for the Republic. It's a thought experiment. Yes. It's it's not even an ideal. I

If you if you read carefully the way the Calipolis is introduced that's Often said to be the ideal city for Plato, but it really isn't. Calipolis, I would translate the snazzy city. It's a city in which people have appetites that they would better off not have. Apitites that lead to warfare and require having

a military class. But the first city, the one he talks about earlier, doesn't require a military class because the people's appetites are more reasonable than they are in the snazzy city. So the Calipolis, which is a very important model for Plato in many ways. It's a thought experiment, but it doesn't represent an ideal. It represents perhaps an ideal way of dealing with a community that has non-ideal desires and passions. What do you think struck you about as you try to go back to you reading Marcus really is for the first time and then I'm sure you've returned to it since then. What strikes you most about Marcus or what is stayed with you the most?

What I find most helpful from Marcus and really is that I frequently apply it in my old knife. It's a way of reducing or eliminating angry feelings. I'll give you a slightly humorous example. Yeah. I love bird watching, and I have a bird feeder. And for a while, I found myself getting angry at the squirrels that would try to steal birdseed from the feeder. And I know many bird lovers who are just fuming with anger at squirrels. And I thought about this and I said to myself, you know, I'm actually very closely related to squirrels, they're mammals. Certainly.

Maybe what they need to get food. Everything they're doing is entirely natural to them. And as Marcus really says, to them. And as Marcus really says, it's inappropriate to be angry at anyone for doing what's natural for them to do. And of course, it's natural for the squirrels to do this. So instead of being angry at them, I should just order a little more bird seed, which I did. And actually, I like watching squirrels, too. There are a lot of fun to watch. And I've decided, I try to feel the same way about politicians I disagree with.

They're just doing, they're like the squirrels. They do what's natural to them. This is very much Mark as a Rides way of doing with people he finds objectionable. Yeah, it's there, it's their nature. And it would, it's wrong for me to get fussy about people doing what comes naturally to them. Their selfishness, their ignorance, this is, unfortunately, natural to them. I shouldn't be angry at it. The Bahamas.

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Hey, prime members, you can listen to episodes Add Free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. You had an operative sentence there that struck me right out of meditations where Marcus says, you know, I recognize in the wrong doer a nature similar to my own. So I love that you said, hey, I'm related to the squirrels.

There's a little bit of squirrel in me too. I'm not going to judge them, take it personally. And so it's like seeking to find the connection in similarity and empathy as opposed to the difference, the distinction, the otherness. Are you put that beautifully? Yes. That is a lovely thing, recognizing a common human nature with the person that you find obnoxious. Yeah, I too can be selfish. I too can be ignorant. I've just ignorant of different things.

And so I need to be, I shouldn't be ashamed of my first angry impulse, but I do think I should be ashamed if I let it govern my actions and start shooting the squirrels with a pellet gun. I'm doing the right thing by buying more bird seed. And you can apply the same thing, I think, in politics and trying to be more open to other people's actions and attitudes. It's also interesting in meditations. Marcus talks about zooming out. He talks about taking Plato's view and you zoom out far enough. He's saying that me and these armies fighting over this scrap of territory or these resources, it's not really that different than the squirrels

you know fighting over the bird seed or the birds fighting with the squirrels or the squirrels fighting with the birds or the squirrels fighting with each other that you know you zoom out big enough and these things that feel very important to us start to look a little small and silly. us start to look a little small and silly. Yes. I love thinking of it that way. Well, let me ask you a question. So, you know, Marcus Aurelius is, you know, the decision maker, he's the leader,

he's having to make, you know, decisions pertaining to justice in the real world, in an imperfect decision,, sorry, in an imperfect environment, you know, it's obviously one thing to talk about justice as a philosopher, but when you were an officer in the army, you were, the shoe was on that foot. You were not thinking about these ideas in the abstract. you were having to make real decisions, sometimes decisions with the potential for life and death implications. What did that teach you about how you now conceive of this idea of justice? You know, I can't stop thinking about my experience in the combat zone in Vietnam.

And the feelings I had and the actions that I took, it's... And you know, in war, moral injury is almost unavoidable because there are so many conflicts that we enter. And you have to decide, am I going to... I think I'm under attack. Am I going to shoot a back? Or am I going to wait to make sure there are no civilians there? Sure. These are hard, hard decisions to make.

What I remember is that hardest of decisions were anger. In my case, didn't have a whole lot to do with them. You know, we're just trying to survive and do what needs to be done. I think I probably ought to have been more angry at our command, because they were making such stupid decisions. Sure. We're destructive of the Vietnamese people. I was an advisor, and so I became close to some Vietnamese people and I felt, it sounds like a cliche, to some extent I felt their pain and discomfort and I was upset that I couldn't do anything that would change the way we were mistreating people.

This, you know, I've just, just this week, seen copies of my my new book, which is called Living Toward Virtue, which is largely informed by that experience and my Socratic concern for finding ways of living that don't expose us to moral injury. One way to keep yourself from being exposed to moral injury is not to go to war. Sure. There are still plenty of opportunities for moral injury outside of warfare. Well, I've been thinking about this recently and I've asked a handful of adenrals and generals that I've been lucky enough to interview on this podcast, but you might be in a unique position to answer. I'm obviously fascinated by Admiral James Stockdale,

who, you know, a unique sort of the philosophical warrior. He's introduced to Epic Titus. Epic Titus is what guides him, you know, through his later years in the service, guides him through his time as a POW. But he has this interesting set of experiences in that he was in the Gulf of Tonkin, the night of the so-called incident.

And he has this famous quote, he goes, nothing happened, I literally led the initial strike of a war I knew was under false pretenses. I, you know, I remain fascinated by this sort of heroic philosophical figure who was clearly put in an impossible and extremely, you know, you talk about moral injury. That is a, you know, and extremely, you know, you talk about moral injury. That is a, you know, a situation in dynamic to moral injury. But how do you think about that? What is, what is that, that quote, bring up in your view?

Well, to my mind, one of the principal responsibilities of leadership is to try to protect people from that kind of moral injury. What happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, there was an incident, right? Had it been correctly understood, it would not have led to war. Yes. But it was initially misreported to Lyndon Johnson from what I understand. And then, and he communicated this false view to the world. And then when he got correct information, he suppressed it. He didn't want to go back on what he said earlier. This is my understanding from people who have

been involved with the LBJ Library, my good friend Betty Sue Flowers was director of it for some time. And Johnson was distracted very much by his quest for civil rights. He wasn't really paying attention to the Gulf of Tonkin, but he made a terrible decision when he didn't walk back the story he told about the Gulf of Duncan. And we pay for that. I'll give you a piece of my own story if it's okay.

Please. This is fascinating. One of my responsibilities in Vietnam was to write reports about the success, and it had to be a success, apparently, of the Phung Wong or Phoenix program, which was designed to detain or intern civilians who were supporting the communists. And this is not an unreasonable thing to do. After all, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and ordered to deign people who were supporting the Confederacy and Maryland and some other states It's essential I think in any civil war that you have some kind of detention Program because you're dealing not only with soldiers, but also with civilians, so it's not in itself

a terrible thing. But as I found these reports, I began to see a pattern that I interpreted as the detention of innocent people who may have been accused of supporting the VC because they'd annoyed somebody or because at night the VC would come into the village and if you didn't do something for them, your family might be severely punished. And that doesn't make you the sort of person who should be detained. The people we were trying to detain were kind of a communist shadow government for the villages and hamlets. And what I began to realize is we weren't getting those people at all.

And by the way, I was right. You know, at the end of the war, it became apparent. We learned that those people that we were trying to detain and claiming to have detained were all living quite safely in caves on a certain mountain, which is now a kind of public park where they have a statue of Mickey Mouse there, that children are taken around the caves and shown where these shadow governments were surviving in the caves. And it's almost an amusement park.

And the people you were detaining, you were probably making more sympathetic to the communists by the nature of how they were treated. And not only that, but it was deeply unjust, and the camps where they were being detained, which were being run by contractors, were violent and miserable places. Anyway, I reported what I found that this program was not working.

I wrote up a report. I sent it up through channels, which is the only way to send up a report in the Army. And it was stopped by the Colonel in command of my advisory unit who said, I can't send this forward. This program has had glowing success under my predecessors. You're telling me that in my watch, it's gone downhill. I can't report that. So it didn't go forward. And I couldn't figure out a way to send it forward. I think maybe there was a way, but I didn't know what it was. And also I have to confess.

I also have to confess. I was afraid to anger my commander in a serious way because of what he might do to me. You know, it's not unusual for an angry commander to send a young officer to his death. And I didn't want that. Wow. So for one reason or another, I let that report lie. And I suspect that's probably, you know, part of the explanation in Stockdale's case,

which is he saw this thing, he had this sort of suspicion of this thing. It probably hardened into a clarity later, obviously, when it was confirmed by subsequent events. But, you know, I think he was a commander in the Navy at that point. So he had some power, but it's not like he could call Lyndon Johnson himself and say, Hey, man, nothing happened. You've been given the wrong news and it's tricky when you have seen something Exactly how one should go about saying something. Yes, and a commander is a fairly low rank Yeah, what I'm the point I'm leading towards here is that these are examples of terrible leadership Right These are examples of terrible leadership. Right.

The White House should have reached out to Stockman and used his story in a positive way. And the Colonel should have recognized that I had some information and intelligence that he should do something that he had an obligation to do something about, but he didn't. I think a very important responsibility of leadership is to pay attention to what people lower in the ranks know. Yeah, and we see failures of that lead to moral injury to those lower ranking people. Well, this is where justice and wisdom are interrelated or intersectional, if you will, because it's hard to do the right thing when you don't know what's actually happening and also deliberately not learning what's happening

is a way to insulate oneself from having to face or deal with an injustice that one is complicit in or responsible for potentially in a position to do something about. You don't want to know. Yeah, you put that very eloquently. Let me give you another kind of example. This is an example that I took from a novel.

And I wrote about it in a draft of my book and showed it to a philosopher friend who said, that's exactly what happened to my mother. So the story is about a social worker who faces this difficulty. She's responsible for observing the care, the state of two children who are being brought up in a rather ramshackle trailer by parents who have no money and no education and really don't know how to raise children. So the social worker requires them to go to take a course on how to raise children.

And in other ways, tries to help the parents. The mother of these kids has a brother who is often indigent and who, when he can't stay anywhere else, stays in the ramshackle trailer with the family and abuses the children. So the social worker tells the parents, you have to kick this guy out. If you let him back in the trailer and he abuses the kids again, I will have to take the kids away. Well, of course, these parents have no way of keeping,

they can't even lock the door on this trailer, right? They have no way of keeping the uncle out. And so, the children on this trainer, right? They have no way of keeping the uncle out. And so the children are abused again, and she has to take them away and put them in foster care, which is terrible for the kids. Sure. They're much better off with their parents. And so she feels,

whichever, if she'd left the kids with the parents, that would have been wrong. If she takes the kids away from the parents, that's wrong. And she feels terribly morally injured. And this, she could cope with this by closing her mind to what she knows about foster parenting. Right. But in this case, she doesn't. I'll give you another case, which is also true. The Marines, when they first went to Vietnam, under the command of General Krulock, who was predicted to be the commandant of the Marine Corps.

I just read a biography of Krulock, actually. He's a very interesting man. Did you know he was Jewish and he spent his whole life denying that he was because he was worried about anti-Semitism in the Marine Corps? Yes, I do know that. In other ways, he was a very brave man. As you know, he realized right away that in Vietnam, the way to cope with a counterinsurgency

was to protect the civilian population so they could develop social and democratic institutions. Protocols. And so he stationed marine units in the villages with local troops to protect the population. General Westmoreland, who was the stupidest general in American history, I think, found out about this and said, what are you guys all cowards staying in the village? Just get out there and kill something at Kong. He mistakenly thought that this was a war of attrition. And so the Marines had to leave the villages and go out into the jungle, And so the Marines had to leave the villages and go out into the jungle, where they took enormous casualties, and they had no damage to the other side that was serious.

Kruelok went outside the chain of command, as you know, went to the Oval Office and talked to LBJ about this and said, you're just wasting marine lives for no good purpose. And LBJ, who was probably about twice the size of crewlock, literally through him out of the Oval Office, and denied him his promotion to come and don't. I'm not gonna throw you a leadership. I think of that photo of LBJ and crew lock where you have you have photographic evidence of what speaking truth to power looks like and power does not like to hear truth. Yes and that's bad leadership. Power should want to hear you. Right.

You know, so, you know, there's much to admire in LBJ, but there's also much to deplore. And it's tragic, I think. Krulok, I think, kept his honor by speaking truth to power. Yes, yes, he did. He is a fascinating character. You know, his son did become commandant. Yes. The Marine Corps and was a very successful one.

Yes, I read, I interviewed Robert Korum on the podcast who wrote the biography biography of crew lock It's called brute and it was it was fascinating and interesting and Crew lock I'm not sure I would have wanted crew lock to be my father I guess that was one of the takeaways that I took from the book. I think you're probably right But he turned out very well.

It seems good things for the Marines. So to go to this idea of crew lock speaking to LBJ, et cetera, you talking about, you know, you have this information, you know, how your supervisor, your superiors can respond to it. That's one of the themes you talk about in the book is the relation ship between justice and courage, you know, knowing the right thing and then doing the right thing when there's going to be consequences, you use the example of a senator, you know, taking

a vote that may or may not cost them the reelection. Yeah. And I can imagine I would hope that that senator, if he's, if he really has done wrong in order to be reelected, yeah, would be aware of the moral injuries done himself. Yes. And of course, I think right now we're seeing a number of politicians take steps

that I'm sure they'll regret later on. Isn't it interesting, like in the case of a politician or a general, how often someone might be brave under fire, they might not be intimidated by physical risk, but the other kinds of risks managed to stop that person. I think Kruelak is rather an interesting case because I think by the time he'd reached the highest rank he reached, he could have said.

And by the way, I'm Jewish. And look what a good marine I've been. But he didn't have whatever it took to do that. Well, I think he probably internalized, as I guess they say, he'd internalized a kind of a self-hatred or a self-loathing that oppressed groups occasionally do or often do. He internalized perhaps that there was something wrong with him, that there was something to be ashamed by in his Jewishness, which of course is not correct. But this is true of many oppressed peoples, that they internalize the attitudes that

they are oppressors. Yes, very sad. It is. It is. Yes, it's tragic. What's the difference or what's the relationality between courage or sorry justice and fairness. Are they the same thing? Well, thank you for asking that. Most people think they are the same and the philosopher John Rawls is famous of our arguing that justice really just is fairness. I think this is a mistake and the ancient Greek thinkers clearly do not identify justice and fairness because justice is fundamentally whatever it takes to keep a community from tearing itself apart through anger, the passion of anger, whereas fairness is abstract. And it would translate something

like esoteis or equality.cis is treating like cases alike. And that's a good thing on the whole. But what makes like cases alike is rather complicated. And in fact, in real life, every human being is a little different. And every human mistake or crime, again, is a little different. And applying universal rules to these cases can be just, but isn't always, because people are so different and have different values and different motivations.

The Aristotle introduces this notion of epichecha, which I translate appropriate-ness, and insists that—I mean, his concept is that there's justice, and then there are these two kinds of justice. There's the kind that is equivalent to fairness, and Epi-Akaya, appropriate-ness, is trying to make your actions appropriate to the circumstances in the case. And he understands it as doing what the original lawmaker would have you do if the original lawmaker had thought of this particular case. So, it does seem to me that justice involves looking at particular features of cases and taking them into account, where fairness involves thinking of everything under the, under universal principle.

And, and probably your experiences as a military officer, you know, it gives you a sense of how, fairness is this rule that you apply in any and all situations, or in a like situations, it probably was an interesting lesson in how unalike or unique every situation is and how insufficient rules or orders or standards can be. Yes, I, but I learned most about this from my experiences department chairman or chair, or I discovered that if a colleague

we're unhappy with his salary or his or her treatment in some other way, with his salary or his or her treatment in some other way, explaining and proving to this colleague that in fact the treatment was entirely fair. It was what everybody else was getting. That just made them more angry than ever. Yes. And children teach you the same lesson. Yes, I know.

I've had them and grandchildren too. So I, I realized that, fairness simply is not enough to defuse anger. And a good leader finds a way to defuse anger, anger. And a good leader finds a way to defuse anger to keep the community together. And I lost one wonderful colleague, because I simply was unable to convince him that he had been treated justly when all we had done is treat him fairly. So, well, you know what's interesting? I think it was Plutarch. Plutarch said something like kindness is bigger than justice, because kindness extends to animals

and the environment and things which are beyond justice. And so maybe there's fairness, if we're thinking about sort of a hierarchy or concentric circles or whatever, there's fairness, most important virtues is the capacity for compassion, which we just mentioned. And I write about this in almost every book I've written because the more I think about it, the more important I think compassion is. And I think compassion is a responsibility for leadership. Groups tend to be ruthless to outsiders. But the leader of a group can insist on compassion.

Yes. Yes. By the way, this theme of leadership and compassion shows up in a lot of of Sophocles plays. That's one reason I love Sophocles so much. It doesn't show up much in the governance of the state of Texas. I imagine you would you would agree. No, I'm afraid not. But there's an old puzzle which goes way back in Christian ethical thinking. How could it be that God is the most compassionate and the most just possible being? Because if God is maximally just and maximally compassionate, then it would seem that compassion

and justice have to be compatible. But if justice is fairness, then it's not compatible with compassion, because fairness can't be compassionate. It has to treat every case exactly the same way. Because fairness is blind. So this is the main reason really why I want to argue for a separation between fairness and justice. I think justice has to be compassionate. I think that's right. And to go to where we sort of begin, if it's just, but it is without compassion, you're simply giving everyone their due, which means hanging people for this crime

or locking them up for a life sentence for that crime. Eventually, that creates moral injury to the person giving the so-called justice or fairness, to be without compassion ultimately eats away at the person who is lacking the compassion, I would feel. It eats away at your humanity and your sense of being part of the same species, if you will, of these other people for whom you lot compassion.

I firmly believe that when you do violence to other people, you are doing some kind of violence to yourself. I think that's the most beautiful and probably consistent theme in meditations. And I think it surprises people because, you know, they see Marcus as this sort of unfeeling robot as the embodiment of what stoic means. But I think what's most beautiful is how often he talks about the common good, he talks

about forgiveness, he talks about putting himself in other people's shoes, he talks about seeing the common nature between people. I think one of the more underrated themes of meditations is precisely the compassion and connection that you're talking about. I agree. Well, Professor, this was a real honor for me and I loved your book and will you send me the new one when it comes out? I would very much love to read it. Well, it just came out this week. Oh, congratulations. It's okay. We're living toward virtue.

All right, we'll all get it. And maybe we can do this again. Yeah, be fun. I live, I live out in Bastrop. So not far from you. Maybe we can do it in person. Well, I'm so glad to meet you. You're someone who's read widely and thought deeply about these subjects that I care about, though I'm delighted to know you. Why I'm honored to hear that.

Thank you very much. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years. We've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music,

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