A distinctive and fundamental feature of Stoic ethics is the idea that all human beings are constitutively capable of carrying out two kinds of ethical development, one relating to the progressive understanding of categories of value, the other to forms of relationship. In the first kind, human beings move from instinctive attraction to natural goods, such as health, to ‘selecting’ between such things in a rational way. Finally, if they progress properly, they will come to understand that what matters, ultimately, is not obtaining these natural goods but doing so in the right way, that is, in
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