  Strikingly, Marcus seems to specify this communal goal in terms of indifferents rather than virtue, with the result that one should aim to bring about preferred indifferents for the whole of which one is a part. When he explains that that whatever happens to a part benefits the whole, and that what is advantageous (to sumpheron) to one person does not conflict with what is advantageous to another, Marcus writes that by ‘interest’ he means intermediate things (tôn mesôn) (vi.45; perhaps he takes this to follow from the coincidence of what is in accordance with nature for the whole and the part). Even though food is not a good and hunger not an evil, a Stoic will respond to a hungry person with food, rather than (only) a lecture that food is not a good and hunger not an evil. 