 Defenders of the strong Stoic interpretation suggest that Shaftesbury conceals his true beliefs in order to reach an audience that may not be ready for the unadulterated, austere message of Stoicism. According to this interpretation, for instance, Shaftesbury’s real view is that aesthetic beauty (the beauty of physical things, such as art) is of no value. He only brings aesthetic beauty into his discussion as a decoy or sugar-coating, a ploy to induce a wider audience toward a moral position that would have left them cold if it had been delivered unadorned (see Tiffany 1923; Derhmann 2014; Stuart-Buttle 2019).