We don’t live in Ancient Rome. We are not emperors or senators. We are not professional philosophers. We are regular people.

This doesn’t mean we are far from the world of virtue, from the questions and dilemmas of Marcus Aurelius or Cato.

“We tend to think of ‘moral’ choices,” William Lee Miller writes in ​his incredible biography of Abraham Lincoln​, “as those that life forces upon us—quandaries, perplexities, choices among goods and evils that we cannot evade—and we also tend to think of such choices as concentrated in a moment or a short period of time. The lifeboat is sinking and someone must be thrown out into the sea, so shall I throw out Albert Einstein or my own grandmother? That is the stuff of ethical ‘cases’ in academies.”

He’s talking about that same preconception many of us have when we hear the word “justice.” Justice? I’m not a judge. I don’t pass laws. I didn’t come up with this standard practice in my industry. But that’s not what justice was to the Stoics, not to the high and mighty like Marcus nor the lowly like Epictetus. No, to them, justice was what a person did.It was how they lived. It was not big dilemmas or paradoxes, it was everyday decisions, it was what they chose to make happen in their own sphere. That’s what ​Right Thing, Right Now​ tried to focus on (​you can check it out here​).

Although Lincoln was a brilliant philosopher and thinker, he was for most of his life, just an ordinary lawyer and rural politician. Then, he decided to get involved—not on the global stage but in the issues around him. “There are also those latent possibilities lying all around us all the time if we bestir ourselves,” Miller writes. “Lincoln in 1854 bestirred himself.” Abstractly, slavery was a moral abomination. In reality, it was a political and economic problem.

Lincoln chose to speak up about it. He chose to get involved. It just so happened that from this small bestirring, the whole world was changed.