The Stoic Archer

The scenario and the Stoic doctrine

An archer prepares for a competition. They train for months. On the day, they account for wind and distance, settle their breathing, and release the arrow with a technique that cannot be faulted. A gust of wind deflects the arrow. They miss.

The Stoics argued that this archer acted well. Fully well. What the arrow does after leaving the bow is not up to the archer. What is up to them is everything that falls under the Greek term prohairesis: the faculty of choice, intention, and rational will. Virtue consists entirely in the exercise of prohairesis. It is corrupted only by bad intentions, poor preparation, or failure to use reason. External outcomes are, in Stoic terminology, indifferent.

Cicero, explaining this Stoic position, compared it to a physician: the goal is to heal the patient, but the physician's virtue lies in the quality of care they provide, not whether the patient lives. A good physician can lose a patient without being a bad physician.

What this means for moral evaluation

The Stoic archer presents a disturbing reversal of how most people actually judge.

We routinely evaluate people by results. The general who won is praised; the one who lost is blamed, even when the losing general's strategy was sounder. The entrepreneur who got lucky is called a genius. The one who made every correct decision but faced bad conditions is called a failure.

The Stoic position says: all of that is confused. You can do everything right and fail. You can do everything wrong and succeed. If outcomes are allowed to determine our moral assessment, we end up praising and blaming people for luck, which is not moral assessment at all.

The only question worth asking is: did they exercise their rational will well? Did they reason carefully, prepare honestly, and act with integrity? Everything else is noise.

Anticipating moral luck

Thomas Nagel, writing in 1979, made a version of this problem central to contemporary ethics under the name resultant luck: two drivers run the same red light in the same reckless state, but one hits a child who runs out and one does not. We punish them differently. Nagel thought this revealed a tension in our moral practices: we want to evaluate people only for what they control, but we don't.

The Stoics had already proposed the resolution, even if most people find it counterintuitive: drop the outcome from moral evaluation entirely. Judge the archer by the draw, not by the landing.

The challenge is that this requires giving up a lot of ordinary moral vocabulary: luck, credit, blame in their usual senses. Whether that is a cost or a clarification is where the argument really starts.