Episode 098 - The Epicurean View of Justice (Part One)
Date: 12/02/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2261-episode-ninety-eight-the-epicurean-view-of-justice-part-one/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Martin reads De Finibus Book 1, line 50 (the justice section) as a recap, having covered it at the end of last week. Charles is out this week; the panel is Cassius, Joshua, and Martin. This is primarily a discussion episode — the panel never fully moves past line 50, returning instead to Principal Doctrines 33–38 on justice.
The central question: if Epicurean justice is a convention (a compact not to harm or be harmed) rather than an absolute, does that mean there is no real right or wrong? Key discussion: the John Brown/Harpers Ferry raid as an example of how gut-level feelings about justice can be entirely opposite; Sam Harris’s torture/ticking bomb scenario and how laws should be written to handle edge cases; Thomas More’s Utopia and his prohibition on atheism within it (because contracts require belief in reward or punishment after death — and Amerigo Vespucci’s role in inspiring the work); Principal Doctrines 37–38 on how justice changes when circumstances change, illustrated by wartime copper rationing; the Declaration of Independence as an Epicurean document; Montaigne’s distress over two men executed despite being known to be innocent; Jefferson’s phrase “the earth belongs to the living”; Principal Doctrine 6 on security from other men; and the Epicurean “watchword” of peace and safety.
Cassius closes: understanding that there is no absolute justice does not mean retreating into passivity or a cave — all your work is still ahead of you.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 98 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the only complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. I’m your host Cassius, and together with our panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where you’ll find a discussion thread for each of our podcast episodes and many other topics.
At this point in our podcast, we’ve completed our first line-by-line review of Lucretius’ poem and we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today we’ll continue with that material and focus on justice, starting with line 50. Now let’s join Martin reading today’s text.
Martin:
Justice is left to complete our statement concerning the whole of virtue, but considerations nearly similar may be urged. Just as I have proved wisdom, temperance, and courage to be linked with pleasure so that they cannot possibly by any means be sundered or severed from it, so we must deem of justice, which not only never injures any person but on the contrary always produces some benefit — not solely by reason of its own power and constitution whereby it calms our minds, but also by inspiring hopes that we shall lack none of the objects which nature when uncorrupted craves.
And as recklessness and caprice and cowardice always torture the mind and always bring unrest and tumult, so if wickedness has established itself in a man’s mind, the mere fact of its presence causes tumult. If moreover it has carried out any deed, however secretly it may have acted, yet it will never feel assured that the action will always remain concealed. In most cases the acts of wicked men are at first dogged by suspicion, then by talk and rumor, then by the prosecutor, then by the judge. Many have actually informed against themselves, as in your own consulship. But if there are any who seem to themselves to be sufficiently barricaded and fortified against all knowledge on the part of their fellow men, still they tremble before the knowledge of the gods, and imagine that the very care by which their minds are devoured night and day are imposed upon them with a view to their punishment by the eternal gods.
Again, from wicked acts what new influence can accrue tending to the diminution of annoyances equal to that which tends to their increase — not only from consciousness of the actions themselves but also from legal penalty and the hatred of the community? And yet some men exhibit no moderation in money-making or office or military command or wantonness or gluttony or the remaining passions, which are not lessened but rather intensified by the trophies of wickedness, so that such persons seem fit to be repressed rather than to be taught their error.
Cassius:
Last week Martin read lines 50 through 54 of the Torquatus section of Book One of Cicero’s On Ends, and having heard that again, we’re going to discuss those paragraphs and also wrap in the Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings which are also relevant to justice.
So with that as background — we have with us today both Joshua and Martin; Charles is out this week — turning to paragraph 50, justice is introduced. It’s still there to complete our statement of the whole of virtue, but the same considerations that have applied to the prior virtues, he says, are also going to apply to justice. The main one is that just as wisdom, temperance, and courage are linked with pleasure, so we deem justice to be as well.
Why don’t we start by talking about that general consideration? What are the common denominators that we’ve seen Torquatus make so far? They’re instrumental towards the goal of pleasure — that’s the ultimate point we’re discussing. But I think there’s probably some other point I want to be sure to talk about, which is: if these virtues are not absolute, if there’s not a list of them somewhere in heaven or a list of ideal forms like Plato would suggest, what are they? Are they something that we as humans just label according to the categories we think are appropriate, or do they have any existence of their own?
Joshua:
Okay, yeah, you make an excellent point here, Cassius, because we’ve been talking about virtues now for a couple of weeks and we seem to keep butting up against the same problem — these virtues seem to have these undefinable qualities, and we really can’t even agree on whether we agree that they are virtuous. We can’t really agree on what temperance means, or whether we should be temperate. Wisdom is another example. But today we’re going to be talking about justice, and justice, of all the virtues we talk about, seems to me to be the one that has the most obvious importance to every person who’s going to be listening to this. Everybody wants justice, at least for themselves. Everybody wants to be treated fairly. Everybody wants to do the right thing, which brings in an ethical component. But today we’re going to try to answer: what is justice? How does it link to Epicurean philosophy? And how does justice, like these other virtues, turn out to be just one more road to the ultimate goal, which is pleasure?
Cassius:
Great way of saying it. So we’ve been trying to figure out: if these virtues are not goals in themselves — and Epicurean philosophy certainly rejects the position that virtue is an end in itself — then how can we use them on our personal path to our goal, which is pleasure? And I would even ask you, Joshua: can we even know whether a thing is wise or just or courageous or temperate without knowing the result of it? In other words, do we have any way of knowing whether a course of action is wise or not without comparing it to what actually happens as a result of following that course?
Joshua:
Yeah, I’m struggling to come up with an answer that doesn’t make reference to something else. Okay, so one of the things that sort of kicked off the American Civil War was John Brown, who was a firebrand abolitionist. Where things came to a head for him — and partially for the nation — was the raid by John Brown and mostly his sons, along with a group of other people, on the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. As you can imagine, in a place as polarized as it was at that time, the reactions were totally mixed. Some people thought: this was the most damnable thing he could have done — there was no wisdom in it, whatever courage there was in it was totally marred by how badly he had screwed up doing it. Some people thought this was the pinnacle of human courage, and he had taken a stand not only for himself but for a whole nation.
So the question you raise is an important one. What bothers me here is we’re coming into the question of justice, and when it comes to justice, it’s hard to see how justice — not just as a virtue but as an institution — how it works if we don’t know ahead of time whether an action is just or unjust.
Cassius:
As we were preparing for this episode, we started talking about incorporating some of the Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings as well, and I believe those are even more clear than the section we’ve just read in Torquatus in making the point that there’s no such thing as absolute justice.
Principal Doctrine 33: “Justice is never anything in itself, but in the dealings of men with one another in any place, whatever, at any time, it is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.”
And continuing on at Doctrine 34: “Injustice is not an evil in itself, but only in consequence of the fear which attaches to the apprehension of being unable to escape those appointed to punish such actions.”
So, Joshua, what you’ve properly introduced for the beginning of this discussion is that justice is a really gut-wrenching issue for people to think about and feel about. Somebody comes to the topic with their own predispositions and their own views of what is just and unjust. Really, the word “feeling” is particularly appropriate in discussing justice, because you feel something to be just or unjust, and you can’t really discuss justice dispassionately. You can maybe discuss wisdom dispassionately, or temperance — but justice reeks of taking a stand and having a position and righteously defending that position.
Before I forget to say this — to display my trivia knowledge of old movies — there’s the Errol Flynn movie Santa Fe Trail, which is the story of the John Brown raid at Harpers Ferry. Ronald Reagan played one of the Union officers. I highly recommend it. The person who played John Brown was a character actor by the name of Raymond Massey. He exudes gravitas. When you watch that movie and see Raymond Massey portray John Brown, it’s obvious that you either believe that he is a Jesus figure, a Moses figure — he just embodies the righteousness of the goal of eliminating slavery — or, from another perspective, people will see just an absolutely radical and unhinged personality.
One of the Latin phrases in justice is, “let justice be done though the heavens fall.” When you get so passionately devoted to the justice of your cause, it doesn’t matter how many people get killed or how much destruction takes place — the old question of whether the ends justify the means, might makes right, these are very difficult to deal with.
Another preliminary comment before we get too far: at EpicureanFriends.com, what I try to do in my Epicurean material is to stay away as much as I personally can from letting my own personal preferences come through, especially as to justice. Not because I don’t think you should have these personal dispositions — I think you should. But the Epicurean philosophy position on this is so challenging that if we allow ourselves to get too identified with one particular position, people will start looking at us as a conservative or a liberal or a socialist, and it undercuts the credibility someone might have in presenting the philosophy.
As far as I know, Epicurus did not take a position on the American Civil War or on communism or capitalism or any of those things. The value of Epicurean philosophy is to open your eyes to the possibility that all of these perspectives you’ve been taught as the common morality throughout your life may be wrong — that you need to evaluate them for yourself. And the way to evaluate them is to go back to the fundamentals.
So — Martin, you’re the physicist, the scientist. How do you approach the whole topic of justice?
Martin:
Today it’s actually somehow made easier, at least superficially. We have a set of laws and regulations within the legal system which basically define the context of the communities we live in. But there are many lawsuits, which shows that this is not enough to really define justice to the point that it would be obvious to everyone from the beginning. And in fact maybe that’s one of the premises — that it’s impossible to do that. That it may not even be a reasonable goal to try to define something that’s obvious to everyone that it is just. Is it even a practical goal that everyone should have the same sense of justice?
Cassius:
And Martin, I want to use the advantage of your being European and based in Germany. The European court system is less based on juries and more based on judges — does that apply to criminal cases, civil cases, or everything?
Martin:
There is also an element of having juries, but I don’t think I see them as prominent. Normally when a case is reported, juries are never mentioned. So they seem not really that critical as they sometimes are in the United States. So there’s something about the European system of justice that relies more on the position of experts — judges are supposed to be experts in the law. And of course there are panels of judges rather than just single judges. But the European idea seems to be that justice can be dealt with as a matter of science to some degree, as a matter of study by an expert in the field of justice.
Cassius:
Whereas the American system seems to be the opposite — we insist that the decisions be made by non-experts in justice. And that reminds me of a Thomas Jefferson quote I use a lot — he was talking about how he believed that justice was better found in plowmen and farmers rather than in teams of highly educated and trained people. Is justice a matter of something that can be reduced to a science? Or is it something that’s always going to be a feeling in the hearts of the local people who are involved? Is justice ultimately rooted in feeling, or can we define it scientifically?
Joshua:
The way I would frame this discussion is that Epicurus’s conception of justice actually presents a challenge for a lot of people. I remember this about myself when I was getting into Epicurean philosophy — the idea that you couldn’t count on moral absolutes is a real challenge for quite a lot of people. You want to believe that there’s a way things should be, but Epicurus is saying: there’s not. Nobody has carved these rules into the clouds. The only way to get at it is for a group of people to come together from time to time, in different places, and sort of come up with their own conception of what justice is and what it means for them. This is very difficult for people who were raised believing that there was absolute justice or absolute morality, or that your enemies would be punished in another lifetime. But they won’t be. And you’re going to have to find a way to live with that.
The question you asked earlier, Cassius — can we know ahead of time whether an act is just or unjust? — when I look at the law in the country I’m most familiar with, the United States, there’s a particular area that’s been carved out as an exception to the general rule. When it comes to freedom of expression in particular, there’s this concept called prior restraint — it’s not possible to know ahead of time whether speech can be defined as a crime. That’s an argument against self-censorship: you can’t refrain from speaking because you don’t know in advance whether you’ll be prosecuted for it. This is why the United States, to my knowledge, has the most robust freedom of expression anywhere in the world.
Cassius:
Joshua, another example of what you’re talking about is the famous Supreme Court Justice who said something about pornography — that he knows it when he sees it. Which implies that you don’t have the ability to define even something like that until you see it, until you react to it.
And in so many areas of the law, including self-defense — which comes up over and over again — there’s always this escape valve in the law of justification. If somebody comes at you with a gun, you’re justified in self-defense. The American system wants juries to make that decision because they always have the viewpoint that what’s been done may ultimately be justified by the facts. But to know that ahead of time and include it in a statute is impossible.
Joshua:
Yeah. Let me give you another example here — a concrete example of one person’s idea for how we should enact a sense of justice and review it after the fact. Sam Harris has said, on the subject of torture — because people often try to justify torture because of the ticking bomb scenario: “I need to torture this guy now so he can give up the information so I can go save 100,000 people” — Sam Harris’s view is that torture should always be illegal. It should always be considered an unjust act. And then if you do torture someone, you know that you run the risk of yourself being imprisoned for life. But there are cases in which you might run that risk and then feel yourself justified in presenting your case before a jury later on. For the purposes of having a civilization, we need to agree right up front that torture should be illegal in all cases, and the people who are in the position with the ticking bomb — who need to run the risk of doing it — will operate under the presumption that they are going to be punished for what they’re doing, and they have the alternative of presenting it to a jury and maybe being exonerated.
Cassius:
My response to that would be that you’re right — having a law against torture makes a tremendous amount of sense. But the law also should enshrine justification as well. You’re talking about what you’d expect the judge and jury to do with your situation looking ahead into the future after you came up with your scenario of torture in order to save large numbers of people. What would you want that person to think would happen to them later on? I would want that person to think not only that there’s a law against torture and they’re going to be examined for whether they violated it, but also that there’s a law in favor of justification — so that the jury or tribunal that saw their case would have the right to look at the facts and decide whether they were in fact justified.
Martin, do you have a comment on that scenario?
Martin:
Of course it’s best if the law is written in the way that it’s clear what is just and what is unjust, so that everybody knows what is the right thing to do and what is not. But there’s a phrase: hard cases make bad law. And the point of all that is that hypotheticals are by nature limited in what you can include within them and don’t reflect reality, and you can twist yourself into positions that are ultimately rabbit holes.
Joshua:
Well, that’s the point — and that’s the American system of justice, where we don’t have that continental system of writing it all out in a statute. What Martin has just represented is the continental system, or what I understand they have in Louisiana — the French system, the Napoleonic code or the Roman code, the Code of Justinian — you try to be as clear as you can in setting out exactly what the law is and exactly what it’s not. And surely that is a desirable goal. But the American system seems to be that there are limits to that, and so we have this common law system, where we go back to particular cases and analogize them to the current one.
There really is a philosophical divide here: how much specificity can the law really have within it? Because again — in the Epicurean view — you cannot have the same law everywhere, all the time, in all places.
And let’s go ahead right now and read Principal Doctrines 37 and 38, which might as well try to unwind this a bit. “Among the actions which are sanctioned as just by law, that which is proved on examination to be of advantage in the requirements of men’s dealings with one another has the guarantee of justice, whether it is the same for all or not. But if a man makes a law and it does not turn out to lead to advantage in men’s dealings with each other, then it no longer has the essential nature of justice. And even if the advantage of the matter of justice shifts from one side to the other but for a while accords with the general concept, it is nonetheless just for that period in the eyes of those who do not confound themselves with empty sounds but look to the actual facts.”
Cassius:
I don’t know how you could be much more clear — justice is constantly shifting according to context and circumstances. And as if that wasn’t wordy enough, Doctrine 38 says largely the same thing: “Where provided the circumstances have not been altered, actions which were considered to have been shown not to accord with the general concept in actual practice are not just. But where when circumstances have changed the same actions which were sanctioned as just no longer lead to advantage, they were just at the time when they were of advantage for the dealings of fellow citizens with one another, but subsequently they are no longer just when no longer of advantage.”
I don’t see how you could be more clear as a refutation of the goal of attempting to write a law that is the same for everybody at all times in all places in all situations. As soon as the circumstances change and the results of that law are no longer just, the law is no longer just.
Joshua:
But Cassius, there’s a way to flip that around on the American system as well. If you’re trying to maximize freedom and liberty by not writing a list of things restricting what people can and cannot do — let’s say you’re free to buy as much copper as you want. That’s considered justice — we don’t restrict the sale of copper. Then we go into a great war, and it turns out copper is very important and we don’t have enough for the war effort. So now we’re going to step in and tell you you can no longer buy copper freely — you’ve got a ration card. Then the war ends and now we’re back to the original: you can buy however much you want.
Cassius:
Exactly — the easy access to copper is advantageous in men’s dealings because everybody gets what they need to start their business or wire their house. Then the calculus changes when you get into a war where suddenly it’s no longer advantageous in men’s dealings for you to use up all the copper in your business, because we need copper wire more than we need HD televisions. So we’re going to change the law, restrict your access to copper because it’s more advantageous to do this other thing for a while — and then the war ends and we go back, and now it’s more advantageous to return to the earlier system.
And everything I’m hearing you say is an illustration of exactly what Epicurus is saying in 37 and 38: you can have any system of law you want, whether it’s about economics or free speech or anything else. It’s just only so long as the result is for the actual benefit of the fellow citizens who are involved. When because of some change in circumstance the facts change, the existing law is no longer just.
Martin, the European context may give you a different perspective.
Martin:
I mean, this would then lead to a situation where it would be good to change the law. And maybe you end up just talking about the system of government — whether you have a democracy or a republic or an oligarchy or whatever. If laws change in virtually any system, the king changes the law. So it really doesn’t necessarily validate one system of government over another as long as the law changes to fit the circumstances and the results are for the benefit of the people involved. I don’t know that there’s even an endorsement of a particular system of government here. It’s just the endorsement that the law should change according to the circumstances.
Cassius:
But you know, at the same time, there’s a lot of discussion out there as to whether this is the social contract. In fact, it is — Principal Doctrine 33: “Justice is never anything in itself but in the dealings of men with one another in any place whatever and in any time it is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.”
Joshua, the compact itself is just only so long as it is for the mutual benefit of both, and as soon as it is no longer — for some contextual reason — for the benefit of both, it ceases to be just. So the question I want to throw out: even though you may call Epicurean justice a compact, and in Doctrine 35 it says “it’s not possible for one who acts in secret contravention of the terms of the compact not to harm or be harmed to be confident he’ll escape detection” — does it sound to you like the compact can be dissolved at any time as soon as one of the people in the compact decides it’s no longer for their benefit?
Joshua:
The whole Declaration of Independence, from an American perspective — there’s a line in there: “When the government becomes injurious of these rights, it is the right and duty of the people to throw off the government.” So that’s your clear link there to Thomas Jefferson as an Epicurean: the circumstances have changed. It was just for us to be British subjects while it was to our advantage to be so. But when, given the change in circumstances, it’s now just for us to have a revolution.
Cassius:
But there’s no objective perspective at any point from which you could look at this and say — that’s just. It’s all subjective. It’s all a group of people coming together to make the rules for themselves. Really, isn’t it?
Joshua:
I think yes — and in the most basic example you could give, you may have formed a contract with someone else to do some work for you, but even in contract law, circumstances can arise in which it is just to break that contract. The law doesn’t hold you responsible for following the contract which circumstances have rendered oppressive or impossible to fulfill.
Cassius:
But let me tell you what does make agreeing to a contract impossible in the minds of some people. Because before you had the Declaration of Independence, before you had an American justice system, you had an explorer named Amerigo Vespucci. He came over to the New World — he was an explorer, a cartographer — and he wrote a book in which he describes his encounters with the native Americans, a certain group of them. And he says their manner of living could be described as Epicurean.
He goes back to Europe, writes this book, publishes it — it’s widely read. In fact it’s so widely read that Thomas More — who was at the time High Chancellor to Henry the Eighth of England — read this report from Amerigo Vespucci (whose first name, by the way, is where we get the name “America” — it was named after him when a cartographer wrote his name on a map, and that just stuck). Thomas More was totally intrigued by this idea of a group of Epicureans living in the New World. So he wrote a book called Utopia, which in his own mind was heavily based on Epicurean philosophy — the idea that there’s no monarch, this is a democracy or a republic, people are coming together to make their own rules. You can believe in any religion you want. There’s no national church. Separation of church and state. But he does say there are two things you cannot believe in Utopia: you are not allowed to believe that the soul dies with the body, and you are not allowed to believe that there is no reward or punishment after death. Those are the two prohibitions. You can believe in any religion you want, with those two exceptions.
And the reason he said in Utopia you’re not allowed to believe those two things is because they make contracts impossible. If somebody can’t be convinced that they will be rewarded or punished beyond the grave, there’s no incentive for them to keep a promise they’ve made in this lifetime. So from Thomas More’s position, Epicurean philosophy — which was kind of the inspiration for his whole Utopia book to begin with — actually makes it impossible to live in a society based on the social contract. Because somebody who doesn’t believe in God, somebody who doesn’t believe in heaven and hell, cannot be made to keep a promise.
Joshua:
That is fascinating. I have never read Thomas More’s Utopia — it’s one of those books you hear about your whole life.
Martin:
I’m not familiar with it either, but I wanted to get one fact right on how America got its name. It was not Amerigo Vespucci himself — it was a European cartographer who didn’t know of Columbus having arrived there before him, and thought it was Amerigo’s discovery, and then issued that map. Later on others who knew about this pointed it out to him and he tried to correct it, but already the name was given and so enshrined in the public mind it could not be changed back.
Cassius:
Very interesting. Thank you for that, Martin. Columbus has not been shortchanged, though — his name is all over everything over here. Columbus, Ohio. The Columbia River. All that.
I know Utopia is a word that has such a negative connotation today, because it’s supposed to be impractical and idealistic. And the word itself is a play on words between Latin and Greek — in Greek, the prefix eu- like in eudaimonia means “good.” But in Latin, u- is used to negate something. So “utopia” in Greek would mean “good place,” but in Latin would mean “no place.” There’s no place where this could work — that’s Thomas More’s irony. And in the Diogenes of Oenoanda inscription there’s something similar — it’s ridiculous that people don’t refrain from crime because they’re scared of the gods of the Greeks, and much less are they going to refrain from crime if they’re concerned about the gods of Socrates or Plato, because people don’t refrain from crime even though those gods are supposedly threatening them every day. The issue of whether justice requires a belief in punishment after death is something already in the Epicurean texts, but I had no idea that Thomas More would link that specifically to a contract rule.
Joshua:
Yeah, I think it’s actually about promises and contracts specifically in the text.
Cassius:
This is actually an enduring legacy in the United States — swearing in on a Bible has become almost a sacred institution. If you don’t add “so help me God” at the end of the oath, people feel you can’t be trusted. And then the bar just keeps getting higher and higher — you’ve said the words but you’re not wearing a flag lapel pin, so I can’t trust you for that reason.
Let me also say something on the word “utopia” — in Thomas More’s opinion there really is no place in which people could be so liberal-minded and relaxed. There’s a lot more freedom in Utopia than there was in Europe at the time — but you still could not claim that the soul died with the body, or that there was no reward or punishment after death, or that there was no God. You had to believe in those things.
Joshua:
I’m going to have to read that book at some point.
Cassius:
So where does that leave us? It leaves us at the moment with a couple more points that I want to make before we even begin to move to the next paragraph.
This issue — the contract aspect of it — there is an article out there that I’ll add to the episode notes about the contractarian basis of Epicurean justice. I think I’m generally fairly critical of that article. Because when you read Epicurus’s Principal Doctrines, it’s very clear to me at least that where the contract is, you can get out of the contract as soon as it becomes disadvantageous to you to continue to follow it. So anybody who simply says that Epicurus endorses the social contract and thinks that answers the question — I don’t think that answers the question at all. Because in normal terms, when we think about a contractual basis, we presume that breaking the contract is unjust. And it does not appear to me that in general, breaking a contract amounts to injustice in Epicurean terms. That requires a lot of thought.
Joshua:
I guess to some extent what it amounts to in my mind is that just as there’s no God and no supernatural nature out there that has a list of things that are just and unjust, neither can we by our contracts create an absolute justice. We can’t write something down and sign it with someone else and thereby create a law for all times that will govern us no matter the circumstance. We can’t do that ourselves, any more than a god could — because it’s just not the nature of the way things work.
Cassius:
And that’s such a deep subject that I don’t have the ability to go much further with that right now. But I don’t want to leave this subject without saying one thing to Joshua and anyone listening — because justice is such a gut-level emotional topic, some people are going to say: “You’re saying there’s no absolute justice, so these ideas I believe in with such passion are just arbitrary, and I should just forget them?” And to me the answer is no. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re not saying that your deeply held, passionate sense of what’s just and unjust is irrelevant or something you should forget.
What we’re saying is: if you feel strongly that something is unjust, then you should go out and do everything you can to promote and vindicate that justice, because you have to deal with your feeling there. And the Epicurean justice system works because, as Epicurus continues to talk about in his doctrines and as we’re reading in Torquatus, we know that if we commit injustice towards other people, other people are going to punish us. We’re not looking to God to punish us. We don’t think Plato’s absolute forms are going to zap us from heaven. But what we do know is that in society, people are going to react negatively to us if we are oppressive towards other people. And so the way the system works as Epicurus understands it is that people respond against injustice. People who are oppressed need to stand up for themselves, need to make sure that when they are harmed, some consequence happens as a result. We’re not saying: walk away from your passionate attachment to your sense of justice. We’re just saying that if you feel that strongly about it, it’s up to you — or the people working with you — to do something about it. Because there’s no god who’s going to take care of it for you.
Joshua:
Which turns out to be a good thing. Because if we were all stuck living under the rules that were established by a primitive deity in Judea 3,000 years ago, there’d be no room to even talk about justice. You follow the rules and that’s it, period.
So the understanding that there’s no absolute sense of justice — that actually gives you space to maneuver, space to stand up to oppression. Because if justice is absolute, then you just take your lumps and live your life as an outcast or a peasant forever — that’s your lot. But because justice is not absolute, we’re not stuck with any particular arbitrary set of rules. We can always put our energy and thought into making things better, into making things more advantageous for us and for our fellow citizens.
Cassius:
That is exactly what I think is the conclusion that comes from these observations of Epicurus. Everything that’s been handed to us when we were born as “right and wrong” — as a law, as some kind of alleged absolute form of justice — is nothing more than what people who were alive before we were decided, however they came up with it, to enforce as the law.
And I will put this in the show notes as well — there is a passage from Cicero’s De Re Publica that I learned in law school. I can’t quote it exactly, but Cicero says that true law is right reason in accordance with nature — the same everywhere, in Athens and in Rome, at all times and all places — and you can’t run from it because it’s enforced by God. That is exactly the opposite of what Epicurus is saying here. There is no God, there is no absolute enforcement mechanism, these rules that we follow are conventions that humans have come up with in the past according to their best sense of the best way to live. And the idea that those conventions are frozen in time — that there’s an absolute tablet that all those laws must be continued to be enforced in exactly the same way forever and ever amen — is just totally bogus, absolutely without foundation. And I think that’s what Epicurus is pointing out in these passages about justice. And frankly, that’s one of the reasons Epicurean philosophy has been frowned upon for so long by the establishments of all governments and all types of societies — because it holds open the idea that if a system that’s in place is seen by the people at a particular time to be unjust, they have a right to change it.
There’s another Jeffersonian phrase: “The earth belongs to the living” — in a letter he wrote to Madison. That phrase rings to me of this Epicurean viewpoint. It doesn’t belong to God because no supernatural God exists, and it doesn’t belong to our ancestors because they’re not with us anymore. It belongs to the living.
Joshua:
Let me give another historical example here, because I’m just full of these today. Montaigne was a great reader of Lucretius — he absolutely loved Lucretius and quoted him throughout his works. I wouldn’t call Montaigne an Epicurean necessarily, but he was heavily influenced.
There was a case that came up while Montaigne was active in the legal and political sphere in the part of France where he lived. One or two people were accused of murder. Montaigne was heavily in favor of reforming the law, so that’s the background. What ends up happening is it was eventually proven that these two people were innocent and didn’t do it. The opinion of the justice system — to put it starkly — was: “We have to execute these two anyway, even though we know they’re innocent, because otherwise that’s going to set up bad precedent. People are just going to start appealing our decisions all the time. People are going to get the idea that we’re not the absolute standard of justice.” Montaigne was heavily against this. I think this was part of the reason he retired to his château with his books — he was so fed up with politics and the law.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s something that happens a lot at all levels of government. And another phrase from American history: “We have a government of law and not of men.” That’s a line that has always been considered almost a holy concept in the United States. But I’m not so sure it should be accepted without a lot of subtle reasoning.
I’ve totally lost track of time and how far we’ve gone. I think we probably are at the point where we need to wrap up for today. We can come back and continue to deal with this topic as long as we need to.
Martin, any thoughts before we wrap up?
Martin:
I have two things to notice. One thing is: of course if conditions have changed, we cannot just break the contract on a whim. We need to change it through a just process — we change the law through a new process and create a new law, or if it was a private contract, we make a contract to dissolve the old contract. I had to deal with this myself — I went through a divorce this year, and it was based on Thailand’s law. We essentially made a contract to dissolve our marriage contract in mutual agreement, which made this whole process easy — we didn’t even have to go to court.
The other thing I wanted to mention — connected to Montaigne’s example — there was a very weird case in Germany where there was a gap in the law that prevented an unjust sentence from being reversed. The way the law provides for reversal is if there’s new evidence, but the problem was the judge had wrongly assessed the evidence and made the wrong decision based on that accurate evidence. There was no way to correct this according to German law. Those who were unjustly sentenced were clearly harmed — so this was greatly unjust — and it’s really a gap in German law. I don’t know whether after this case came up whether that gap has been changed.
Cassius:
One reaction I have to all of your examples is: you’ve been talking about examples of how we are human and we do things as best we can, but we’re going to fall short at times no matter what system we have. And the system may grind over people in ways that if applied mechanically we’re going to conclude to be unjust. Epicurus is really just dealing with the philosophical question — in those situations you’re talking about, there’s justice under the law and then there’s justice in a deeper sense. The result that the system created is an unjust result. It may have followed the procedure properly according to the law as it existed. But that doesn’t mean that just because someone received the due process of the system that the result is something we would all agree to be justice.
One way that’s addressed in the American system — I should have mentioned this earlier — is that we have courts of law and we have courts of equity. And in equity courts, the judges are specifically charged with applying what you might consider to be common-sense ideas of justice. You’re not really held to the law — everything is considered and the person who makes the decision comes to a rough sense of justice regardless of what the actual law might be.
Joshua:
We’ve discussed it a little bit, but there’s this question of security that comes in, doesn’t there? Because in the Principal Doctrines, Epicurus talks about this quite a lot — security from other men. Somehow he balances this with justice and injustice.
Cassius:
Oh yeah. Injustice only affects you insofar as you failed to secure yourself against it. Thank you for making that point, because I made sure to add to the list of Principal Doctrines the very first one that probably applies here — Principal Doctrine 6, which is a very high one on the list: “Whatever you can provide yourself with to secure protection from men is a natural good.” That one rings of some kind of endorsement of self-defense or self-protection as something so important that it’s included within the top ten doctrines. Epicurus is putting this out there as one of the most basic aspects of his philosophy — you’ve got to protect yourself from other men.
And that security goes right along with peace and tranquility. Norman DeWitt describes these two words — “peace and safety” — as something that became a watchword among Epicureans. So the question becomes: living in what you may consider from your point of view an unjust society, how do you secure peace and safety for yourself and for your friends? That becomes a whole separate question. There’s a question of what is justice, and then there’s a question of how should a person — with no power and no ability to change the law — go about arming themselves to deal with people around them who might support laws that are unjust from their point of view.
Joshua:
And that’s something we see on the forum — people come in and get into Epicurean philosophy a little bit and then they’ll say something like, “Oh, this really reminds me of objectivism.” You do see this where it’s the idea that Epicurus is attempting to justify one of these totally modern political or economic or philosophical movements that weren’t even around when he was alive.
Cassius:
I personally definitely think that each of us can and should take these principles and apply them in our individual circumstances, and that’s going to end up leading us to become involved in our communities and take particular positions that are going to end up looking and being political. But you’re just short-circuiting the whole process if you don’t start out by thinking about the way the world operates. If you at least start with the foundation that Epicurus was presenting, then I think you end up with a much more intelligent result, no matter what your circumstances are.
Joshua:
Once you’ve understood Epicurus’s conception of justice — that there’s no absolute morality, no absolute eternal law, no absolute sense of justice — it’s great that you’ve got that far. But all of your work is now ahead of you. Because now you have to decide: “Okay, justice is a compact that people make for advantageous dealings between themselves, and it’s going to change as circumstances change.” All your work is now ahead of you. You’ve got to decide how are you going to live in a world where there is no absolute justice or morality.
Cassius:
Joshua, that is a great place to end the episode today, with that phrase in mind in particular: all your work is still ahead of you. There are so many people who want to take Epicurus and say: “Once you understand Epicurus, you’ll understand the goal of life is tranquility — go find yourself a cave, find some bread and water, and sit there and do nothing, because all you want in life is absence of pain.” I think that is just absolute hogwash. When you understand Epicurus, your phrase is what applies: all your work is still ahead of you. You understand Epicurus and you understand that you don’t go sit in the cave. You understand that your one shot in eternity is the 70-or-so years that you’re going to be alive on this earth, and if you don’t go out and use that time — enjoy it, make the most of it, apply the information that Epicurus has shown you — then you’ve just wasted the only thing you really have, which is your time in your life. You don’t sit in the cave. You go out and you make use of the information and you pursue happiness and pleasure in the best way you know how, with all the vigor that you can invest in it.
Okay, we’ll go on and on forever if we don’t call halt. So we’ll call a halt for today. I’ll get this posted as soon as we can, and we invite comments and suggestions and questions that we’ll try to incorporate in future episodes as we continue to discuss these issues. But for today we’ll close. Thanks, everybody, and we’ll be back soon. Thanks and bye-bye.
Martin:
Thanks, and bye.
Joshua:
Bye.