Ethics, nowadays, is about the (moral) principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of a certain activity. For instance, I can ask myself whether I should adopt the moral principles of vegetarianism and abstain from eating meat and other animal products. Or we could have a discussion about medical ethics, meaning the principles that ought to inform the activities characteristic of the medical profession.
But the ancient Greco-Romans meant something far more encompassing by the terms ethics or morality (which they used as synonyms, ethics referring to the Greek root, morality to the Latin one). To think about ethics meant nothing less than to think about how to live one’s life. All aspects of it. This, of course, includes an understanding of right (or wrong) conduct, as in the modern usage, but it also encompasses our priorities, our values, how we should spend our time, pursuing what activities, and what sort of duties we have toward others as well as ourselves.
There is no question in my mind that the Greco-Roman view of ethics is far better than the modern one, which means that moral philosophy began to go wrong about the time of Kant, and hasn’t yet corrected itself. The exception is a small but increasingly influential group of contemporary philosophers (including Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Larry Becker) who have started to push back against the mainstream and have attempted to articulate a modern version of what is called virtue ethics. (Virtue ethics, incidentally, is not just a western thing. Confucianism, for instance, is an example of it among the eastern traditions.)
One of my favorite Greco-Roman philosophers, the Academic Skeptic Carneades of Cyrene, asked himself a fundamental question within the wider virtue ethical framework: what motivates ethical theory in the first place? In plainer terms: when we talk about ethics, what, exactly, are we talking about?
The first step toward an answer, according to Carneades, is to agree on what might possibly be the object of practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is one of the so-called cardinal virtues (the others being courage, justice, and temperance), and it is defined as a kind of knowledge. Specifically, knowledge of what we need in order to live a good life, what the Greco-Romans called eudaimonia, a life actually worth living.
Carneades rejected the notion—advanced by some—that the object of practical wisdom could be itself, that is, that one could coherently live a life of virtue “for virtue’s sake” as, for instance, the Cynics seemed to suggest. I guess that’s why Plato famously said of the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope that he was like “Socrates gone mad.” Carneades (and Plato before him) pointed out that to talk about virtue for virtue’s sake is circular reasoning, which is a logical sin in philosophy. Even Socrates (in the Euthydemus) had articulated the notion that virtue (or wisdom) is the chief good not because of its intrinsic value, but because it allows us to properly handle everything else that has value. In other words, as I have pointed out elsewhere virtue is instrumental toward the eudaimonic life, it cannot by itself represent eudaimonia.
But if practical wisdom has to have an object other than itself, what could this object be? Carneades, reasonably, suggested that the object has to be something that human beings have a natural inclination for. This is because, after all, we are talking about what constitutes a good human life, not the life of a cat, or a plant. And what are human beings naturally inclined toward?
There are three possibilities, said Carneades: pleasure, freedom from pain (leading to tranquillity), and natural advantages (i.e., things like health, wealth, education, reputation, etc.). To be virtuous, then, must mean to act so as to obtain one of these three natural objects of practical wisdom.
Now, it is possible to simply think that the good life is one in which we obtain one of these three objects, regardless of any consideration of virtue. Or we can use virtue to obtaining (and handle) one of the objects, with the understanding that we may or may not succeed. Or, finally, we can deploy virtue but consider our life eudaimonic only if we do, in fact, succeed in achieving one of the objects. This means that there are nine possibilities overall, as summarized in the following table:
Notice that I have also, tentatively, filled out the table itself with labels corresponding to philosophies that are characterized by any given combination of object and method. Some of the philosophies named are actual Hellenistic schools, others are more “modest” versions of the same schools (in which the attempt to obtain one of the objects is considered sufficient, whether one achieves the goal or not), and two (identified by the modifier “common”) are not philosophical schools but rather pre-reflective (that is, not the result of explicit philosophical deliberation) positions adopted by many folks. Let’s take a closer look.
Common hedonism is the everyday pursuit of pleasure that characterizes the lives of a number of people. It is done without regard to virtue, meaning that virtue is not considered instrumental to it, and one would take the endeavor to have succeeded only if they actually obtained pleasure.
In the case of the second entry, Pyrrhonism, I am taking some liberty in the interpretation of that famous skeptical school. The Pyrrhonists did not talk of virtue, which is why they appear in the first row of the table; and their goal was ataraxia, or tranquillity of mind. I am taking this to be the same kind of ataraxia that the Epicureans were after, which springs from lack of physical and mental pain. I’m sure some of the rare modern Pyrrhonists will object to this characterization, but for now I’m going to leave it there.
The last entry on the first row is common pragmatism (not to be confused with the contemporary American philosophy advocated by the likes of John Dewey and William James), which is my label for a second type of pre-reflective life adopted by many: a pursuit of a particular subset of natural advantages. (To complicate things, of course, one could combine the first and third entries—pleasure and natural advantages. My father, for instance, would have squarely fallen into this blended category.)
Let us move to the last row next: a practice of virtue that allows one to achieve one of the three natural goals identified by Carneades. If that goal is pleasure, then one is a Cyrenaic; if it is lack of pain, then one is an Epicurean; and if it is a set of natural advantages like education, wealth, reputation, and so on, then one is an Aristotelian. Pretty straightforward.
Finally we go back to the middle row, which is characterized by the deployment of virtue with the understanding that the attempt to achieve one of the natural goals ought to suffice, since actually achieving the goal is not up to us and depends to a greater or lesser extent on external circumstances that are not under our control.
If the goal is pleasure this would constitute a “modest” kind of Cyrenaicism, just as if the goal is absence of pain we would be talking about a modest version of Epicureanism. Interestingly, James Allen, the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Carneades puts Stoicism in the last slot of the second row: the goal is natural advantages (what the Stoics called preferred indifferents), but it is pursued virtuously and with the understanding that one may or may not succeed. Of course, this is not how the Stoics themselves would describe their position, but it does seem to me to fit the bill.
The above classification became highly influential in antiquity, in part because it was popularized by one of Carneades’ followers, the Roman advocate, statesman, and philosopher Marcus Tullus Cicero, in his De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil, V.16-21). The system is still used today by scholars to help make sense of the Hellenistic philosophies, and it really does help a lot, in my opinion.
The table is also very useful because it allows us to make more explicit sense of our chosen (or pre-reflective, as the case may be) life philosophy. In my case, for instance, I’m happy to consider myself (largely) a Stoic, precisely because I do value natural advantages, but I very much want to pursue and use them in a virtuous manner. And I do accept Epictetus’ “fundamental rule” that some things are up to me and others are not, implying that virtue is up to me while actually achieving natural advantages is not. So I am happy (in the sense of eudaimon) if I obtain health, wealth, reputation, and so forth, so long as I do so virtuously, but I would be also “happy” (in the same sense) if I could not obtain one or more of the natural advantages while virtuously trying to do so.
What about you? In which slot of the above table do you find your philosophy of life to be? And are you happy with it?
The nine kinds of ethical life
Does a particular action or behavior only attain value AFTER it has been attempted? Hegel famously wrote that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk", and one begins to wonder at what point does the value of leading a good life arise? I wonder if there is somewhat of a lag between acting in a certain way and its subsequent labeling as a eudaimonic act. In that case, one's life can only really be evaluated after it is over, so one cannot participate in the evaluation! As Solon said, "Let no man be called happy before his death. Till then, he is not happy, only lucky."
I would be interested to see a comparative study of the concepts of ataraxia in Hellenic thought and the that of dukkha in Early Buddhist thinking. Is ataraxia simply the absence of psycho-physical pain or is it the complete absence of suffering over that pain? For the Buddha, it was possible to have pain in the body and yet not suffer over it. In fact, corporeal pain cannot be avoided and is only fully dispensed with when one attains to parinibbana. Anyway, if you could point me to anything covering the idea of ataraxia in Hellenistic thought I would appreciate it. Every good blessing to you Prof.