Ancient Ethics

Susan Sauvé Meyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415940269
• eBook ISBN: 9781135948306
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This is the first comprehensive guide and only substantial undergraduate level introduction to ancient Greek and Roman ethics. It covers the ethical theories and positions of all the major philosophers (including  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) and schools (Stoics and Epicureans) from the earliest times to the Hellenistic philosophers, analyzing their main arguments and assessing their legacy. This book maps the foundations of this key area, which is crucial knowledge across the disciplines and essential for a wide range of readers.

1
WHAT IS ANCIENT ETHICS?

This study offers a critical introduction to the tradition of ethical thought first articulated in the writings of the Athenian philosopher Plato (c.430– 347 BCE) and developed over the next several centuries by subsequent Greek philosophers – especially Aristotle (384–322), Epicurus (341–270), the Stoic philosophers Zeno (333–264) and Chrysippus (280–207) – and by their intellectual heirs in the Roman empire – most notably Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) and Epictetus (50–130 CE).

‘Ethics’ in this context does not simply mean the particular codes of conduct or systems of values adhered to or espoused by Greeks and Romans.¹ Rather, it is a type of reflective and systematic inquiry into questions of conduct and value that Plato presents as a distinctively philosophical enterprise. Just what makes the inquiry philosophical will emerge over the succeeding chapters. What makes it ethical is its focus on the ultimate practical question, ‘How should we live?’, as well as on the closely related but no less practical question, ‘How do we become good?’. At the hands of Plato and his intellectual successors, inquiry into these very practical questions requires, in addition, investigation of theoretical issues such as the nature of the good, the route to and limits of our knowledge of it, as well as the structure and nature of the human psyche.

Anyone who has struggled with the problem of how to live a good and worthwhile human life will be familiar with the concerns that motivate the ancient ethical tradition. The manner in which that tradition addresses these concerns, however, may be unfamiliar or off-putting to readers today. Even though philosophical ethics today has roots in the ancient world, it is also shaped by an additional two thousand years of religious, philosophical, and historical development. We think about ethical questions from a vantage point quite removed from that of the ancients. My goal in this study is to provide the reader with an understanding of the ancient ethical tradition in its own terms, and in consequence, an appreciation of the extent to which its projects and presuppositions overlap with or differ from those of present-day ethical thinking.

My intended audience is students and scholars of ethics or classical philosophy who seek an entry point into the field of ancient ethics, as well as the general reader who is not averse to sustained argumentation. The introduction I offer here is, like its subject matter, philosophical. My aim is not simply to describe the ethical philosophies of the ancient world, but to consider the arguments with which they were supported by their proponents as well as the criticisms that they encountered from their contemporaries. I consider also some questions and objections raised by later readers, including those of the present day; however, my focus is on the issues in the ancient debate. A proper understanding of the project of ethical inquiry as the ancients themselves conceived it should resolve at least some of the perplexity modern readers encounter when studying their texts. It may also show, at least in some cases, that the questions we bring to the ancient ethical texts are not ones we are likely to find answered there.

The ancient ethical tradition, we will see, is far from homogeneous and undergoes considerable development over many centuries. The present study therefore faces the challenge of providing sufficiently detailed coverage to meet its goals while still keeping to the moderate length that best serves the interests of its intended audience. Accordingly I have restricted my focus to the four major philosophies and schools that arose during the Classical and Hellenistic periods: those of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics. I omit the ethics of the Pyrrhonist school, whose main development (even if not its inspiration) is post-Hellenistic.² Within the targeted time period I also omit systematic treatment of some of the smaller schools – in par-ticular, the Cynics and Cyrenaics – discussing these only in relation to the Stoics (heirs of Cynicism) and the Epicureans (rivals to the Cyrenaics). Nor do I discuss the Hellenistic development of Plato’s and Aristotle’s schools, except insofar as they engaged in disputes with their Epicurean and Stoic contemporaries.

Recent decades have seen a surge of scholarly interest in the ancient ethical tradition. A huge body of valuable scholarship in many languages has deepened and broadened our understanding of virtually every aspect of the ancient ethical tradition; yet, we still lack a comprehensive account of that tradition as a whole.³ The present volume is a modest contribution towards filling that gap. Since there is still considerable disagreement among scholars about many important issues, this volume is not a textbook of received scholarly opinion, but a contribution to the ongoing interpretive project. In presenting a connected account of the development of ethical philosophy over the five centuries of this study, I have had to take a stand on many disputed issues, and have been led by my assessment of the ‘lie of the land’ to adopt unorthodox positions on others. In the interests of readers who are looking for an entry point into the vast literature on the subject, rather than a detailed foray into the complexities of the disputed terrain, I have not defended my individual interpretative decisions in detail against rival alternatives. Instead, my strategy has been to cite as fully as possible the primary ancient texts bearing on the question at issue, and to use the footnotes and bibliography to point the reader towards the range of scholarly opinion (with an emphasis on publications that are relatively recent and in English). I also hope that my various interpretive stands derive at least indirect support from the coherence and plausibility of the connected picture of the ancient ethical tradition to which they contribute.

An ethics of virtue?

The two central notions invoked in ancient ethical theory are those of aretê (excellence, or virtue) and eudaimonia (happiness, or the good life). It is common these days to refer to the ancient ethical tradition as an ‘ethics of virtue’. The succeeding chapters, however, will reveal less homogeneity within the tradition than this categorization would seem to imply, and indeed a closer connection between the notions of aretê and eudaimonia than is usually recognized in contemporary philosophical scholarship.

We shall see that the ‘virtue’ pursued by the ambitious young Greeks portrayed in Plato’s dialogues is not the excellent moral psychology (or state of character) that goes by that name in contemporary virtue ethics. It amounts, roughly, to success in life, where such success is measured largely if not entirely in external terms – in the extent to which one has acquired the typically recognized good things in life: wealth, power, friends and the like. On this pre-philosophical understanding of aretê, there is little difference between excellence (aretê) and happiness (eudaimonia). To quest for one is to quest for the other.

It is largely as a result of the philosophical theorizing of Plato and Aristotle that aretê is internalized and redefined as a state of character. This theoretical reorientation of the notion of aretê opens up conceptual space between ‘virtue’ (the goodness of a person) and the success in life that is captured by the label ‘eudaimonia’ (happiness). However, I shall argue, this ‘space’ is not recognized or at any rate explored by either Plato or Aristotle. So great is the pull of the pre-philosophical considerations that identify the life of excellence with the happy life that it is not until the Hellenistic period that philosophers clearly formulate and debate the question of whether a person living a virtuous life might still fail to be happy.⁴ Even then the affirmative answer is the minority opinion, held by Aristotle’s Hellenistic successors. Both the Stoics and Epicureans conceive of the virtuous life as necessarily happy. If their reasons for doing so are unconvincing to modern readers this is at least partly due to the fact that we moderns lack access to the considerations that make such conclusions attractive.

While the internalized conception of virtue as a state of character is adopted by all the philosophers in our study, it is still misleading to characterize their ethical philosophies generically as an ‘ethics of virtue’ – at least to the extent that this designation attributes a central explanatory role in their theories to the notion of a virtuous state of character. At best, this characterization is true of Plato and, to a certain extent, Aristotle. But even Aristotle subordinates the virtues of character to the virtues of intellect – hence his notorious claim that the best life is the life of reflection (theoria) disengaged from all practical concerns.

‘Virtue ethics’ is even less apt as a characterization of Epicurean ethical philosophy. As a critic quips, one is hard pressed to find an Epicurean talking about virtue – except in fighting a rearguard action against critics.⁵ On the Epicurean view, the virtues are only instrumentally valuable – hardly an ethical theory that takes virtue of character to be a fundamental notion. The Stoics, by contrast, do take virtuous activity to be valuable for its own sake. Even so, the central notion of their ethics is not virtue as a state of character, but rather virtuous activity – where such activity is conceived not as an expression of human psychology, but as an assimila-tion to cosmic nature. For both Stoics and Epicureans the fundamental explanatory notion in ethics is that of eudaimonia, which they understand according to Aristotle’s clarification as the ‘goal of life’. The Stoics and Epicureans are ‘eudaimonists’ rather than virtue theorists.

A morality of happiness?

The common feature of ancient ethical theory (to the extent that there is one) is its assumption that happiness (eudaimonia) is our goal in life, and its organization around the question, what is happiness (eudaimonia)? Ancient ethics is an ethic of eudaimonia – or, as Julia Annas has aptly characterized it, a ‘morality of happiness’ (Annas 1993). The term ‘moral‑ity’ comes to us via the Latin translation of the Greek term from which we get the English term ‘ethics’; yet, there are those today who balk at identi‑fying the project of ancient Greek ethics with that of morality.⁶ Morality, on such a view, is intrinsically bound up with conditions of autonomy and motivation that are either inconsistent with or absent from the conception of human agency delivered by the eudaimonist tradition. The assumption, within that tradition, that every action is ‘for the sake of happiness’ is taken to imply a self-interested motivation inconsistent with genuinely moral motivation, and the emphasis (at least in Plato and Aristotle) on the social conditions necessary for forming a virtuous character is taken to preclude the autonomy that in the modern tradition is the hallmark of moral agency. We shall see, however, that autonomy is a very important feature of the ethics in the ancient tradition (especially for the Stoics, but with roots going back as far as Plato), and that the motive of the virtuous agent is no more self-interested than the modern conception of properly ‘moral’ motivation.

Such a promissory note can only be fulfilled by a detailed examination of the ancient tradition itself. So let us now turn to that task.

Notes

1 Greek ‘ethics’ in this sense is well described in Dover 1974, den Boer 1979, Bryant 1996, and Carter 1986: chapter 1. On Roman ethical attitudes, see Kaster 2005 and Earl 1967. The Memorable Doings and Sayings by the Roman Valerius Maximus (translated into English in Shackleton Bailey 2000) is a compendium of examples illustrative of Roman ethical standards. On the Roman genre of exempla, see Roller 2004. Thanks to James Ker for assistance on this point.

2 The figurehead of Pyrrhonism is Pyrrho of Ellis, a shadowy figure of the fourth or third centuries BCE about whom little is known. Early in the first century BCE ‘Pyrrhonism’ was reportedly revived by the skeptical philosopher Aenesidemus of Cnossus; however, the philosophical school seems to have had little impact during the Hellenistic period. Only in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, two centuries later, do we have any extended discussion of Pyrrhonism as an ethical philosophy. On Pyrrhonist ethics, see Bett 1997.

3 Julia Annas’s magisterial study The Morality of Happiness (Annas 1993), which is organized thematically rather than historically and omits a discussion of Plato, is not intended to present such a history. Prior 1991 is highly selective, giving only a cursory treatment of philosophers later than Aristotle, and discussing only one text of Plato.

4 While Aristotle is clearly familiar with and takes a stand on the issue of whether a person who lacks the external goods can live a happy life, we shall see that this a different issue from whether a virtuous life might fail to be a happy one.

5 Cicero, Fin. 2.51.

6 For statements of the distinction between ethics and morality, see Williams 1985 and MacIntyre 1984. For further discussion of the relation between ancient and modern ethics or morality, see Striker 1988, Annas 1995, Broadie 2006, and Kraut 2006a.

2
PLATO AND THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE

Plato and his predecessors

We begin our study with Plato, but this is not because Plato’s predecessors failed to address ethical questions. Indeed, Plato and his contemporaries inherited a rich literary tradition in which poets such as Homer and Hesiod (eighth and ninth centuries BCE), Archilochos and Solon in the seventh century, Simonides in the sixth and Pindar in the fifth, as well as tragedians such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in the fifth century, articulate ethical ideals and attitudes.¹ An educated person would learn many such poems by heart, thereby internalizing the ethical attitudes they expressed.² As a character in Plato’s Republic says, it is from the poets that one gathers ‘an impression of what sort of person he should be and of how best to travel the road of life’ (Rep. 365a–b). That is, the poets offer answers to the central questions in Greek ethical inquiry. Ethical inquiry of the sort that this study concerns, however, consists not just in consulting traditional authorities for ethical advice, but in subjecting those answers to critical scrutiny by considering and evaluating the reasons that can be offered in their support.

Greek city states during the fifth century BCE saw a great rise of interest in the use of reason as a critical tool and an instrument of argumentation and persuasion, especially as applied to ethical questions. Relish for the give and take of argument, either as a participant or a spectator, was a feature of popular culture.³ Itinerant intellectuals (known as ‘sophists’, sophistai) such as Protagoras, Hippias and Prodicus – as well as teachers of rhetoric such as Gorgias – wrote and lectured on ethical subjects. They attracted large followings among ambitious young men who wished to become persuasive speakers.⁴ The Athenian Socrates (470–399 BCE) was among those who had a reputation for being a clever speaker (Ap. 17a–b), and he too attracted a significant following among Athenian youth (Ap. 23c, 33d–34a; Phd. 59a–c). These included Plato and a number of others who like him later wrote dialogues in which Socrates is the main speaker.

The ‘sophists’ were viewed with considerable suspicion and hostility by more conservative members of society, who feared that the verbal techniques and logical pyrotechnics they taught undermined traditional ethical values, and thus ‘corrupted’ the youth.⁵ Among his contemporaries, Socrates was generally perceived to be just another sophist. In fact, he was eventually charged with corrupting the youth, tried and convicted by an Athenian jury, then executed. Plato goes to great lengths in his dialogues to defend Socrates against the charge of corruption, and to distinguish Socrates’ brand of inquiry and argumentation, which he labels ‘philosophy’, from those ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 WHAT IS ANCIENT ETHICS?
• 2 PLATO AND THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE
• 3 ARISTOTLE AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
• 4 EPICURUS AND THE LIFE OF PLEASURE
• 5 THE STOICS: FOLLOWING NATURE
• Appendix 1 Freedom and What is 'Up to Us' in Stoicism
• Appendix 2 Intellectual Excellences in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
• Bibliography