There’s a real argument happening right now among people who take Stoicism seriously, not the usual squabble about whether Ryan Holiday counts as a Stoic, but a substantive philosophical disagreement about what the tradition actually asks of us when someone says something hurtful.

The disagreement cuts to the bone of what Stoicism is for. Is it a technology for personal resilience, a way to become someone who can’t be rattled by other people’s words? Or does it obligate you to something more: to pursue Justice actively, even when the injustice isn’t aimed at you?

Both positions have ancient roots. And as of March 10, 2026, the debate got a significant new contribution from Donald J. Robertson, the CBT therapist and Stoic scholar who wrote How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. His piece “Stoicism, Insults, and Political Correctness” revisits an exchange between philosopher William B. Irvine and classicist Eric O. Scott, and identifies the passages both sides have been talking past.

The Stoic approach to insults — in about 50 words

Classical Stoics taught that insults only wound you if you give them power by valuing external opinion. But they also held Justice as a non-negotiable virtue, requiring active effort for the common good. These are not the same teaching. The tension between them is the debate Irvine and Scott have been having since 2016, and it still hasn’t been resolved.

What Irvine Actually Argues

William B. Irvine is a philosophy professor at Wright State University and the author of A Guide to the Good Life, probably the most-read contemporary introduction to Stoic practice. His 2013 book A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt, and Why They Shouldn’t is the most direct treatment of the insult question from a Stoic perspective.

Irvine’s core argument is that we should become what he calls insult pacifists: people who work hard not to insult others and who shrug off attempts to insult them. The mechanism is Stoic: if your sense of self-worth doesn’t depend on what other people think of you, their words can’t land. Irvine compares successfully dismissing a hateful remark to ignoring the barking of an angry dog. The dog is there; the bark is real; you just don’t register it as a threat.

He extends this to contemporary debates about speech: the culture of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggression sensitivity, in his view, has things exactly backward. Training people to feel more wounded by words doesn’t protect them. It makes them more fragile. The Stoic prescription runs in the opposite direction: develop the inner resources to not be damaged by what other people say.

This is not a fringe position. It’s consistent with Epictetus’s foundational claim in the Handbook: “Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.” If the opinion changes—if you stop caring whether strangers approve of you—the insult loses its grip.

What Scott Counters

Eric O. Scott’s response, published on the Modern Stoicism blog, starts from a different place. He doesn’t dispute that resilience is a Stoic goal. He disputes that it’s the only goal, and he argues that Irvine’s framing leaves something essential out.

The something it leaves out is Justice—one of the four cardinal Stoic virtues alongside wisdom, courage, and temperance.

Scott’s concern is pointed: when Stoic writers concentrate on personal resilience to insults without discussing the obligation to pursue Justice for others, they give the impression that Stoicism is a philosophy built by privileged people for other privileged people. A person who isn’t being insulted for their race, gender, or disability status can afford to practice insult pacifism with minimal cost. For someone who encounters structural hostility daily (whose “insults” aren’t random unkindness but expressions of a social order that materially constrains their options), the recommendation to shrug it off starts to sound like advice to accept a hierarchy rather than change it.

He’s not saying resilience is wrong. He’s saying Irvine’s presentation of it, at a major Stoic conference, spent considerable time criticizing social justice activism without equivalent time on the Stoic duty to pursue justice in the world. That asymmetry matters. Scott writes that Stoics must “work tirelessly for the benefit of all humanity,” and that being resilient to insults and being an active agent for Justice are not opposing objectives. They require each other.

The Robertson Contribution

Robertson’s March 10 article does something neither Irvine nor Scott did clearly: it goes looking for the overlooked passages.

He finds one in Epictetus’s own Handbook—the same text Irvine draws on. Epictetus advises students to “express outward sympathy” with someone in distress while remaining “inwardly detached.” That’s a more complicated instruction than either pure resilience or pure activism recommends. It asks you to hold two things simultaneously: emotional equanimity and genuine concern for the person suffering.

Robertson also points to Diogenes Laertius’s record of the early Stoics condemning slavery as evil—a position that requires recognizing structural injustice as such, not merely advising the enslaved person to cultivate inner freedom. The Stoics were not quietists who believed the external world didn’t matter. They believed it mattered, but that the only unconditional good was virtue.

His framing of the unresolved tension is precise: the problem is striking the right balance between acceptance and action. Go too far toward acceptance, and you’ve told victims to absorb injustice without complaint. Go too far toward action, and you’ve made emotional wellbeing contingent on external outcomes, which is a Stoic no-go. The debate between Irvine and Scott maps onto that dial. Neither of them is fully wrong. Neither has quite found the setting.

Why This Isn’t Just Academic

The reason this debate matters practically is that it shows up in real situations with some urgency.

Consider two scenarios. First: someone receives a casual, low-stakes insult from a stranger (a rude comment in a meeting, a dismissive remark at a family dinner). Irvine’s insult pacifism is an extremely useful tool here. Asking “why does this person’s opinion have the power to ruin my day?” is honest and actionable, and it works.

Second scenario: a Black employee in a workplace that operates on subtle but consistent racial hierarchy experiences microaggressions daily, not dramatically offensive individual comments, but a cumulative pattern of being talked over, having ideas attributed to others, being passed over for credit. If that employee reads Irvine and concludes “Stoicism says I should shrug this off and become an insult pacifist,” something important has gone missing. Scott is right that the advice, taken in isolation, functions as a reason to absorb a systemic problem rather than address it.

But here’s where it gets genuinely difficult. Scott is also right that resilience and Justice aren’t incompatible. The same employee might benefit enormously from not letting each individual instance corrode their sense of self, while also knowing, clearly and with conviction, that the pattern is unjust and that addressing it is a Stoic obligation. Those aren’t contradictory stances. Holding both at once is exactly what the tradition, at its most honest, seems to be asking for.

What the Ancients Actually Said

There’s a cheap version of this debate that just quotes whichever ancient Stoic supports your prior position. Robertson is trying to do something harder: read the passages that complicate both sides.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius doesn’t resolve this cleanly. He writes at length about not being disturbed by what others say, which is classic insult-resilience material. He also ran an empire and took his obligations to his subjects seriously enough that he spent most of his life doing a job he reportedly found exhausting out of duty to the collective. He would have understood Irvine’s personal practice and Scott’s structural concern simultaneously.

Epictetus is usually read as the insult-resilience guy, but the Handbook passage Robertson cites is more nuanced. He doesn’t say be indifferent to other people’s suffering. He says maintain your inner compass while engaging genuinely with theirs. That’s demanding in a way that pure detachment isn’t.

Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, had his school condemn slavery. That’s not a private-resilience position. It’s a structural judgment that the world is organized unjustly and that philosophers have something to say about it.

The honest reading of the tradition is that it contains both. The Stoics built a philosophy of personal practice and a philosophy of social obligation, and they didn’t think these were in tension because they believed that a truly virtuous person (someone genuinely progressing in wisdom, courage, Justice, and temperance) would naturally do both. The problem emerges in the contemporary pop-Stoicism context, where the personal-resilience parts got extremely popular and the social-obligation parts didn’t.

The Practical Problem: Where Do You Put the Energy?

Scott raised a point that Robertson doesn’t fully resolve, and it’s worth naming directly.

Even if we agree that Stoics should both practice resilience and pursue Justice, these two activities require different things from you in a given moment. When you’re in the middle of being insulted, deploying Epictetus-style inner detachment might be exactly right. Processing what happened and restoring your equanimity is useful. It keeps you functional.

But the question of whether to address the pattern (to say something, to advocate, to pursue change) is a separate question that resilience alone doesn’t answer. It takes the virtue of courage to act when action is costly. It takes practical wisdom to judge which actions are worth taking and when. The Stoic toolkit for “how do I not be destroyed by this experience” and the Stoic toolkit for “what do I do about the conditions that produce this experience” are both real and both necessary. They’re just different.

The gap that Scott identified in Irvine’s book—the near-silence on the obligation to work for Justice—matters because one toolkit without the other is incomplete. Personal resilience practiced as a way to avoid ever engaging with structural injustice is closer to what the Stoics called a passion (a distorting emotion) than to what they called a virtue. Avoidance dressed as equanimity.

A Practice That Holds Both

If you want to actually apply this, here’s one approach that takes both Irvine and Scott seriously.

When you’ve been insulted: Before responding, run Irvine’s filter. Is this person’s opinion one that should affect your self-assessment? If not, let the emotional charge dissipate before doing anything else. This isn’t passivity. It’s the Stoic practice of not acting from reactive emotion.

After the emotional charge has cleared: Run Scott’s filter. Is this an individual bad moment, or part of a pattern that involves an injustice you have some capacity to address? If the latter, ask what the virtue of Justice asks of you here. Complicity by silence is also a choice.

For onlookers: The Epictetus passage Robertson cites is instructive. You can express genuine sympathy (make it real, not performed) while maintaining your own equanimity. You don’t have to be destroyed by someone else’s suffering in order to care about it. You don’t have to perform outrage to take injustice seriously.

None of this resolves the tension neatly. Knowing where on the Irvine-to-Scott dial you should sit in a given situation requires exactly the practical wisdom the Stoics thought was the hardest virtue to develop.

The Unfinished Business

Irvine and Scott’s exchange from 2016 didn’t end in resolution. Robertson’s March 2026 piece doesn’t end in resolution either. He thinks Stoicism contains the resources for a better answer, and he’s probably right, but the passages he cites show the tension more than they dissolve it.

That’s actually appropriate. This isn’t a question with a clean answer. The people most confident they’ve solved it (that Stoicism is purely personal resilience, full stop, or that Stoicism purely obligates aggressive social activism) are probably flattening something the tradition was intentionally holding in tension.

What the debate does make clear: reading Stoicism as simple “don’t let things bother you” is a surface reading. And reading it as simple “pursue Justice regardless of your emotional state” misses the very specific and hard-won Stoic insight about what gets in the way of good action when you’re not psychologically grounded.

If you’re working through where you fall on this, Robertson’s article is the most useful current entry point. For background on how Stoic emotional resilience connects to research on how feelings actually work, the neuroscience of Stoic practices post covers the science behind why the inner work matters. The Stoic political chaos framework picks up the structural/Justice angle from a different direction. Kathêkon and sympatheia are directly relevant to what Scott is arguing. And the debate about what Stoicism is actually for, underneath both sides of the insult argument, runs through the toxic Stoicism vs. classical Stoicism piece.

Read Robertson’s full article and Scott’s Modern Stoicism response back to back. Then pick up Irvine’s book, A Slap in the Face. The positions are clear enough that you’ll form your own view. And having your own view on this, rather than deferring to the pop-Stoicism version on either side, is actually what the tradition asks for.

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Philosophy works best as practice, not performance. If you’re dealing with situations where the insult/justice question is live and painful, that’s worth exploring with a therapist as well as a philosophy book. These aren’t competing resources.