Providence Could Not Have Erred
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οὔτε δὲ κατ’ ἄγνοιαν οὔτε εἰδυῖα μέν, μὴ δυναμένη δὲ προφυλάξασθαι ἢ διορθώσασθαι ταῦτα ἡ τῶν ὅλων φύσις παρεῖδεν ἄν, οὔτ’ ἂν τηλικοῦτον ἥμαρτεν ἤτοι παρ’ ἀδυναμίαν ἢ παρ’ ἀτεχνίαν, ἵνα τὰ ἀγαθὰ καὶ τὰ κακὰ ἐπίσης τοῖς τε ἀγαθοῖς ἀνθρώποις καὶ τοῖς κακοῖς πεφυρμένως συμβαίνῃ.
Neither through ignorance, nor through knowing yet lacking the power to prevent or correct it, would the nature of the whole have overlooked such things; nor could it have erred so gravely — from want of power or of skill — that good and evil should fall on good men and bad men alike, all mingled together without distinction.
Continuing his argument that death is not an evil, Marcus reasons that the providential "nature of the whole" — being neither ignorant nor powerless — could never have let good and bad fall on good men and bad men so indiscriminately.
Marcus builds a dilemma to defend providence. If the nature governing the whole had allowed good and bad to fall indiscriminately on good men and bad men alike, the fault could only lie in ignorance, or in knowledge paired with an inability to prevent or correct it. Since neither failing is credible of a well-ordered cosmos, Marcus concludes that no such error has in fact occurred.
The quiet payoff is definitional rather than consoling. If a competent nature would never scatter genuine goods and evils so carelessly, then the things that do fall so carelessly on the just and the unjust — wealth, sickness, death — cannot be goods and evils in the strict sense. That verdict, spelled out elsewhere as the doctrine of ἀδιάφορα (indifferents), relocates the real good and bad from circumstance to the mind's own use of it, which is the very reasoning 2.11 opens by asking whether death should be feared at all.
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