Episode 099 - The Epicurean View of Justice (Part Two)
Date: 12/09/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2267-episode-ninety-nine-the-epicurean-view-of-justice-part-two/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Continuing the justice discussion from Episode 098. Charles reads lines 50–52 of the Torquatus section, focusing on the passage about trembling before the gods, the statement that unjust persons are better repressed than taught their error, and the observation that true reason beckons men of properly sound mind to pursue justice, fairness, and honor.
Discussion covers: the word “privity” in the Reid translation versus Rackham’s “the eye of heaven”; whether Epicurean justice is self-enforcing through conscience alone or also requires external punishment (both apply); Principal Doctrine 10 and the uncomfortable question of whether someone who profits from wickedness without suffering consequences represents a genuine gap in the Epicurean framework; Charles’s moral relativism; Vatican Saying 43 on the love of money; the Kids for Cash judicial scandal as an example of justice pursued for its own sake producing a wrong result; and a long discussion of Lucretius’s passage on teleological fallacy (“nature had no such aim”) — using Martin’s observation about animals sharing food to argue that even if justice emerges spontaneously across many species, that does not convert it into a universal normative law.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 99 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 the poem and we’ve turned to the presentation of Epicurean ethics found in Cicero’s On Ends. Today we continue with that material and continue to look at justice starting with about line 50 of Cicero’s work. Now let’s join Charles reading today’s text.
Charles:
But if there are any who seem to themselves to be sufficiently barricaded and fortified against all privity on the part of their fellow men, still they tremble before the privity of the gods, and imagine that the very cares 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 penalties 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.
True reason beckons men of properly sound mind to pursue justice, fairness, and honor. Nor are acts of injustice advantageous to a man without eloquence or influence who cannot easily succeed in what he attempts nor maintain his success if he wins it. And large resources, either of wealth or of talent, suit better with a generous spirit, for those who exhibit that spirit attract to themselves goodwill and affection, which is very well calculated to ensure a peaceful life. And this is the truer in that men have no reason for sinning.
Cassius:
Okay, thank you Charles for reading these lines for our discussion today. We are still in the middle of the discussion of justice that we started last week, and this is an area that is so intensely interesting to so many people, and the material here is so dense that I think it’s a good idea for us to go sentence by sentence almost through here and discuss the implications of what’s being said. Today we have the full panel with Charles, Martin, and Joshua. Does anyone have anything from last week before we get into this?
Hearing nothing on that — in the very first sentence here, we have some translation or word-choice issues that we ought to clear up. When it talks about “they tremble before the privity of the gods,” we need to discuss what this particular translator means by that word. “Privity” can mean “contract” when you’re getting legal, at least in the United States, but it may just mean something like proximity or closeness to the gods. What do you think? And we can compare the Rackham translation as well.
Joshua:
Interesting. To me, I associate it with intimacy between parties, or some kind of deprivation. Let me get a definition here.
Cassius:
Yeah, that’s why I wanted to bring that up. It is a confusing word in this context. If you were in law school and you heard “privity,” you would absolutely know that it means a contractual relationship with someone else. But obviously that’s not the only meaning. If we look at how Rackham translates it, it’s pretty dramatically different. He says: “and even if any think themselves well fenced and fortified against detection by their fellow men, they still dread the eye of heaven, and fancy that the pangs of anxiety night and day gnaw at their hearts are sent by providence to punish them.” That’s pretty dramatically different. It may actually be better for our purposes. When you read “barricaded and fortified,” that gives you a contextual idea of what we’re talking about — basically security, which is something Epicurus talks about a lot. So “privity” in that sense means proximity, intimacy, and there are parties you don’t want to be proximate to.
Charles:
That would be the archaic definition — yes.
Joshua:
Yeah. Because of the danger they pose. And so if you think you’ve got it figured out insofar as it concerns your fellow man, but you still believe in the gods — and particularly the Greek gods tend to be very capricious — then fortifying yourself against your fellow man really gets you nowhere, because your fellow man has limited power, but the gods have essentially unlimited power to trouble you and cause you anxiety. So “the privity of the gods” is really the gods finding out your secrets, even when you’ve successfully hidden them from other men. And Rackham’s “the eye of heaven” is quite good as a translation there.
Martin:
Yeah, I agree with that. That makes more sense. Otherwise it just doesn’t.
Cassius:
Right. So we’re in the middle of a long section that was introduced by the whole issue of how justice should work. Torquatus is explaining how an idea of justice would work because you’re not reading the ten commandments or some list that’s been prepared for you. What you should be thinking about is that if you act unjustly, you’re going to suffer consequences. And the consequences are where the rubber meets the road in terms of how people should really be making their decisions.
Joshua:
And the conclusion here in this first paragraph is: the punishment might come from outside, it might come from your fellow man — it’s not going to come from the gods of course — but the real initial persecutor of you as an individual who has committed some wrong is you yourself. It’s your own mind constantly being dogged by doubts and fears, and the fear of punishment can often be worse than the punishment itself.
Cassius:
Joshua, I completely agree with what you just said. But somewhere in the discussion, I think we do have a tendency as we read this philosophically to focus on that — on your conscience, the anxiety about being caught — so that we think what he’s saying is we should be concerned about punishing ourselves. But it would be wrong for us to think that’s exclusively what he’s talking about. As he says here, he refers to the legal penalties and the hatred of the community. So it’s not like justice is entirely self-enforcing through your mind. It actually has a very, very important practical enforcement mechanism — other people are going to react against you and perhaps exact some very unpleasant punishment on you: put you in jail, execute you, torture you, depending on what you do.
So there is both a practical side of what other people may do in reaction to your injustice, and then there’s the internal side. And sometimes I think the internal side is perhaps even more important for this argument, because people are going to argue: well, a lot of times people don’t get caught — what’s their punishment? This passage helps address that argument, because most people are going to be anxious about being caught. Even if they aren’t caught, they’re going to have a bad conscience. So there’s a spectrum of issues being addressed here.
Joshua:
Certainly. And for some people, when they finally do get caught and they finally are punished by the community, it turns out to be nothing so much as a relief to them — because they’ve been punishing themselves for however long since they committed the crime.
Cassius:
Yeah. So let’s go ahead and turn to the second sentence, which is a little bit unclear unless you really dig into it. “From wicked acts, what new influence can accrue tending to the diminution of annoyances equal to that which tends to their increase?” The whole sentence is kind of hard to understand. How do you guys interpret that?
Joshua:
I guess a superficial reading of it would be: there’s nothing you can expect to gain from wicked acts that’s going to be better than the punishment that’s going to follow you.
Cassius:
Yes. The gain from your wickedness is not going to be sufficient to compensate you for the pain that is going to arise from that wickedness. Does that appear to be the point to all of you?
Charles:
Yeah.
Cassius:
It’s probably worthwhile noting here too — if in fact the gain from your wickedness were sufficient to outweigh the pains that will come from it, then that raises Principal Doctrine 10. If in fact you do succeed in getting more pleasure than pain from your wickedness, then there’s another point Epicurus makes — that you can’t really argue against that. What about that point? Am I taking that too far?
Charles:
That’s something I’ve struggled with about how moral judgment is actually made in the philosophy. Torquatus himself even seems to struggle with it — he never fully elaborates on it in the very last sentence here.
Cassius:
I agree. Torquatus himself seems to struggle with it. But it is Principal Doctrine 10: “If the things that produce the pleasures of profligates could dispel the fears of the mind about the phenomena of the sky and death and its pains, and also teach the limits of desires and of pains, we should never have cause to blame them, for they would be filling themselves full with pleasures from every source and never have pain of body or mind, which is the evil of life.” It’s definitely difficult to think through how to reconcile those.
Joshua:
Charles, you weren’t here last week, but one of the comments I made was that the Epicurean conception of justice poses a challenge to people because we really want things to be neat and tidy when it comes to ethics, justice, and morality. But very often they’re not. And this is a perfect example of that — because some people will just get away with it, won’t they? For some people, they are going to come out ahead from wickedness in a certain sense.
Cassius:
And Charles, is that a defect in the philosophy, or is that simply the way things are — simply the truth of the universe?
Joshua:
It’s a defect in the species.
Charles:
I’m a very staunch moral relativist. I would say that’s the way things are, because those people wouldn’t adhere to a Platonic sense of justice or some virtue of justice to begin with.
Cassius:
I think what people struggle with is — when you said they want things to be neat and tidy — I think what that means is they want there to be an automatic enforcement mechanism. They want there to be a standard which everybody is compelled to admit is the true standard for everybody. And we’re all raised from birth to come to the conclusion that such a thing exists. But in the Epicurean universe, there are no supernatural gods, and there’s nothing that is permanent except atoms and void, by which you could have any kind of an eternal standard that applies everywhere all the time. So regardless of what we want and how uncomfortable it may make us feel, I think you’re compelled to the position that there is no enforcement mechanism for any sense of absolute justice. You can argue all day about whether nature screwed up, whether nature let us down, whether it’s a terrible thing or not. But unless you can point to the enforcement mechanism for this absolute view of justice, then it’s just a view — it’s not an eternal absolute standard. Am I going too far there?
Joshua:
No, no, I totally agree with you, Cassius. We make the rules as we go along. There is no absolute standard. And the funny thing is when we make the rules, we make them for the worst offenders. When you go into the store for self-checkout, you’ve got to stare into the camera pointing on your face — that exists as a deterrent for the people who are going to be tempted towards theft, which most of us probably aren’t. But there is no absolute standard, there is no absolute moral law.
Cassius:
We could almost take this discussion in the direction of natural law right now. Martin, do you have anything to throw in at the moment?
Martin:
No, no comment from me.
Cassius:
Okay. Well, Joshua, I think somebody could make a reasonably good point that in the nature of humans, we are made in a particular way so that there are strong commonalities among all humans — we tend to find pleasure or pain in certain consistent ways. So there are certainly arguments people extend in the direction of what they might call natural law or God’s law. But Epicurus would immediately reject the God’s law angle. You could say that because of the nature of humans — that we like to drink water, we like to breathe air, we like to do all sorts of things in similar ways — you can say that in the nature of humans it’s consistently predictable that most humans are going to react in certain ways. But nature is not standing there with a sword and a shield to vindicate somebody against injustice in any particular situation. So to me, that’s where I come back to the enforcement mechanism as maybe the ultimate answer: if you’re going to postulate an absolute standard, what is the absolute enforcement mechanism? And I don’t think there is one.
Charles:
It did for Macbeth.
Cassius:
What do you mean, Charles?
Charles:
The trees themselves moved up the hill. Although it was soldiers who had carried sticks with them — branches.
Joshua:
Yeah, this is a perfect example of self-fulfilling prophecy, isn’t it? The witch had made the prophetic announcement that when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, MacBeth would fall. And MacBeth is thinking, oh, it’s going to take the forest a long time to get all the way over here. And then the soldiers took branches to cover their movements — almost like a ghillie suit — and so you look out and you don’t see the soldiers, you just see the trees.
Cassius, I think you’re absolutely right that without an enforcement mechanism, you can’t really infer this kind of transcendental moral truth or natural law. If a person can endure the prick of their conscience, if they can avoid detection in this life, there is no enforcement mechanism and there’s going to be no punishment beyond the grave. They might just walk away and get away with it, and that’s difficult for us to hear. But there’s nothing we can do about that really. The only solution is to try to punish people when we think that’s just, to try to rehabilitate people when we think that’s the better answer. But there is no natural law, there’s no design at work from outside. These are things that develop between humans and it’s for humans to sort them out.
Cassius:
That’s a good place for me to suggest this extension of where we are. Just because there’s no enforcement mechanism, it’s not impossible at all to have a discussion about morality. That’s my transition to the next sentence in this paragraph, because here Torquatus and the Epicureans observe that you can make generalizations about things that people find upsetting and even unjust.
So the next sentence says that some men exhibit no moderation in money-making, or office, or military command, or wantonness or gluttony. I’m not sure he’s saying that simply being in office or military command is a passion, but he’s talking about how these passions are not lessened but rather intensified by the trophies of wickedness. In other words, the more they get into the pursuit of money-making and gluttony and wantonness, they just want more of it. They can’t control themselves and they’re not punished under their particular situations by outsiders. The conscience that Joshua’s just been talking about is not sufficient to restrain them. They’re not going to restrain themselves.
So what do you do with such people? And what is stated, I think in black and white in Latin words, is: “so that such persons seem fit to be repressed rather than to be taught their error.” That implies that he is endorsing the idea of punishment — of actively punishing such people and restraining them, rather than just simply doing nothing in response to their actions. What do you guys think about that?
Joshua:
Well, the first thing I would do here is to make a historical notation on military command as being part of this list, because this was a serious defect in the constitution of the Roman Republic. They did not have strong civilian oversight of the military — it was basically the generals who could muster their legions, and it became really difficult to restrain them. That’s why toward the end of the Roman Republic you have an unending series of civil wars culminating with the first and second triumvirates and the end of the republic. Julius Caesar, for example, could go to Gaul for nine years and campaign on behalf of Rome. He was sent there by the Senate, but he stayed there so long and soaked up so much gold, so much money, so much power. He had the loyalty and the love of the legions, and he became so powerful that the Senate really had no way to rein him in except to conscript their own general Pompey Magnus and try to put those two head to head. And that didn’t work out very well for them. So military command might seem strange to us as an item on this list, but I think it does have a place in the context of the late Republic and early imperial period when this is being written.
Cassius:
Right. We don’t have Don here to go through the actual Latin to see if military command is specified, but it’s probably useful to compare the Rackham translation. Rackham says: “Yet nevertheless, some men indulge without limit their avarice, ambition and love of power, lust, gluttony, and those other desires which ill-gotten gains can never diminish, but rather must inflame the more, in as much as they appear proper subjects for restraint rather than for reformation.”
Charles:
Those are very, very different translations.
Cassius:
And I don’t know whether the Latin justifies the military command or not. I think everything Joshua said is absolutely applicable and was probably intended even if it’s not literal, because that’s exactly what they were living through. Cicero was doing all these trials. You had to appoint somebody the governor of a province and they would just loot it basically for their personal treasure as opposed to doing what they were supposed to be doing under the Roman system of government.
Joshua:
That was a problem all through antiquity. The reason that Rome particularly wanted to expand their empire and establish vassal states was so they could accrue more wealth through taxation. But there’s no real system other than the honor system to ensure that the guy collecting the taxes actually turned them in.
Cassius:
So the general context of where we are is that Torquatus has introduced for us the possibility that some people are simply not going to let fear of punishment — whether that’s punishment by the gods or by their fellow citizens or by their own consciences — stop them from pursuing this wickedness. And so he says: “such persons seem fit to be repressed rather than to be taught their error.” I interpret that to mean those people aren’t going to learn, they’re not going to listen. You can talk to them all day about how bad it is for them to be unjust, but they’re not going to change their minds. So what do you do with those people? You restrain them. You physically take action against them to stop them.
Joshua:
And for some people, there is no prick of conscience because they have managed to convince themselves that they’re right — that what they’re doing is the difficult but necessary thing to do from an ethical standpoint.
Cassius:
And as we go through this, I try to look for points that people don’t often talk about. So many people have the inference from reading things that Epicurus told everybody just to go live in isolation in their garden, live a very passive, pastoral type life. That was the accusation that Cicero and Plutarch and all these other people were making against Epicureans — that they’re worthless for the defense of the state, that they’re worthless in a situation where you’re being attacked from the outside or just to maintain the civil justice system.
And to me, this kind of section here is where I would point to reject that contention. Epicurus has clearly been saying all along: there are no gods or abstractions that are going to enforce morality. If you don’t enforce it yourself among your own living people, you’re not going to have it. You’ve got Principal Doctrine 6 — “whatever you can provide yourself with to secure protection from other men is a natural good” — and you’ve got the thirties about justice, and Doctrine 40: “as many as possess the power to procure complete immunity from their neighbors, these also live most pleasantly with one another since they have the most certain pledge of security.”
This might end up being a slight tangent, but since we’ve been talking about gluttony in this sentence, Vatican Saying 43 has always been interesting to me: “The love of money, if unjustly gained, is impious; and if justly gained, is shameful for its unseemly to be parsimonious even with justice on one’s side.” Would it be a tangent to address that? What is that saying? Is that an indictment of money?
Joshua:
I would say that when he says “the love of money,” I don’t think he means to say that the love of money is the root of all evil. I think the love of money here is part of a class of problematic pursuits — one of which is the pursuit of political power, one of which is the pursuit of military command, one of which is gluttony or the remaining passions. The love of money is not a special particular kind of evil, but it exists in a class of other problems. It comes from not having your priorities straight and from prioritizing that over things like justice, ethics, how you treat your fellow man.
Cassius:
I certainly think that in general what you’re saying is correct. What most of us are familiar with — I don’t know the full verse — the Bible’s reference is something about “the love of money is the root of all evil.” This Vatican Saying 43 seems to be saying it’s oddly worded, or interestingly worded, to say that if you love money, it doesn’t matter whether you gained it justly or not. The love of money itself is, of course, it uses the word “impious.” And then he contrasts it with “shameful” as the other, and then he talks about “unseemly.” Maybe this is just a reference to the idea that nobody likes people who love money for the sake of money. The idea of pursuing money for its own sake must seem to Epicurus so deeply wrong that it’s worth making a specific comment on. We don’t know the context of 43 beyond what we have it in, but I have to think it was probably in a context like the one we’re talking about today.
Charles:
It was literally found in the Vatican. That gives some good context.
Joshua:
But it’s not like the Principal Doctrines, where we have an ordered progression with the most important things first. The Vatican Sayings are just a random collection — they’re not all from Epicurus either, I think — plucked out and set in there, and it’s difficult without context to know exactly what to make of them.
Cassius:
Right. The reason I wanted to at least bring it up is I think it’s an interesting sideline and maybe an elaboration of what we’re talking about here. They specifically single out the love of money as something worth commenting on. And the word “impious” — as you said, Joshua, that’s a troublesome word in this context.
Joshua:
In fact, there’s a chapter in Norman DeWitt’s book called “The New Piety.” Believing things that aren’t true about the gods is more impious than just not believing in the gods. There is a sense that piety has a place here. When I look at 43, I can’t help but think you could substitute almost any of the other virtues in there: “the love of power, if unjustly gained, is impious; and if justly gained, is shameful.” The point seems to be that you always have to keep in mind the purpose of what you’re doing. Money is not its own reward, and if you love something that’s not its own reward, then you’re making all sorts of errors at the very beginning of your pursuit.
Cassius:
I think you’re right. It’s almost like an analogy with the virtues themselves — you’ve always got to keep in mind the purpose of what you’re doing, and not just pursue virtue as if it’s its own reward. But it’s also interesting that even if we gain the money with justice on our side, the word “shameful” still applies. Maybe the pursuit of money for its own sake must seem so deeply rooted as a problem that it’s worth making a comment on specifically.
Joshua:
I think we can almost look at this through the lens of expectation. He does say in a separate passage — I don’t know if it’s in the Vatican Sayings — “we all live in a city without walls” when it comes to death. And I think the pursuit of money for some people can stem from a deep underlying fear, and the money in some way is going to be like the golden ticket to get you out of that. But it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you’re still going to die. You might get to the end of your life and discover, as they say in the book of Ecclesiastes, that all is vanity. You’ve managed to get to the end but you missed the whole point as you were going along. There’s something deeply tragic in that. Maybe that’s where the word “impious” comes in — that you failed to use this precious gift, and you don’t have it forever.
Cassius:
I think that’s useful. And the only other thing I’d like to add is that I think I’m seeing something about the phrase “even with justice on one side” that is still worth more comment. I tend to think that in the world people think that justice is an absolute good. But here he’s pretty clearly saying that you can do something even with justice on your side that is not a good idea or a good thing to do. Maybe that’s what I’m seeing in 43 — that doing something “even with justice on your side” can still be something you shouldn’t do.
Joshua:
Yeah. Let me give you a modern example of that. This happened in Pennsylvania — there was a huge scandal called the Kids for Cash scandal. You’ve got two major players: a private for-profit prison operating under a government contract, and a judge who was taking kickbacks from the company running the prison. So he was just funneling these kids into juvenile detention for things like stealing a CD as a first offense — straight to juvie for two years. There are really cynical people who would say, well, if you don’t want to do the time, don’t do the crime. But surely this is a perfect example of a case where going for the maximum punishment to the full extent of the law is a totally outsized response, and it betrays an improper goal — money in the judge’s pocket — masquerading as justice for the state.
They eventually had to set up a whole team of people to review every case that he ever sat on, hold reparations proceedings — it was quite tragic. You’ve got the corrupt transaction between the judge and the company running the prison, but then you’ve got this third group of people saying, “Well, they got what they deserved. If they couldn’t handle it, they shouldn’t have stolen that CD from Walmart.” And that is an example of justice for its own sake — totally, in my view, wrongheaded.
Cassius:
I think that’s a good example. And as I listen to you, this is where we wrap back and go into the text where we started. The reason I wanted to bring up 43 is: you can be virtuous and still be doing something you should not be doing. In fact, here is an example of having justice on your side and yet doing something that clearly, from the Epicurean viewpoint, you should not be doing. Can you substitute the other virtues in there too — even with wisdom on your side, even with courage on your side, can you still be doing something wrong?
Joshua:
Not at all. Not at all. The love of courage, if unjustly pursued — no, I am going to have to think about that for about six hours before I can give you great examples.
Charles:
The love of pain.
Cassius:
That’s the other substitution — the love of pain. Well, somebody is going to say, and if Don were here I’m sure he would be saying this: look at Principal Doctrine 5 — “it is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently, honorably, and justly.” That would almost imply that if you are being just, you’re living pleasantly. The contrast I’m trying to raise is that 43 is almost saying even with justice on your side, something you’re doing may be inappropriate. So in that sense, justice alone is not sufficient to produce you pleasure ultimately, according to 43. Maybe there is a combination of them all that’s required, or maybe again it’s just something that is totally relativistic and you can’t judge until you know what the result is.
Cassius:
Charles, is that a defect in the philosophy or is that simply the way things are?
Charles:
Wisdom seems to be the counterpoint to all of it.
Cassius:
I mean, people frequently want to say that there are certain things that are just absolutely unjust, and it is almost like 43 is saying that — the love of money is just going to always be a bad thing, even with justice on one side. I detect a very deep point in that: you can’t just look at justice and say that even though you know this is just, it’s going to produce the result you want. We may just be so deep in the weeds here that there’s no way to do anything other than move on for the moment.
Martin, I’m sorry — we haven’t had you in the conversation as much as we need to.
Martin:
Yeah, I’m listening and trying to put something together, but I’m still not yet ready to say anything about that.
Cassius:
Well, this is why I think this subject is so deep and we need to stay with it for a while. I know that we’ve tended to methodically go through a couple of paragraphs per episode, but this is something we haven’t really addressed in depth in the past, and we can stay with it as long as we need to. So let’s see — where are we? That’s the last sentence of 52 that we’ve been talking about, and I think we’re close to the end of where we ought to conclude for the day. That would mean not tackling 52. Before I ask for closing comments — anybody want to say something we ought to be sure to include today?
Cassius:
Charles, I’m really looking to you for some contribution on this material because you’re so much younger than the three others of us on the panel, and I worry that my perspectives have gotten to be out of touch with younger people. I just want to make sure that we incorporate as many different perspectives as we can.
Charles:
Yeah, I mean — what we’re discussing right now is kind of what I’ve really been wanting to get into.
Cassius:
Well, you’ll be back next week. We’re in the Christmas season, so I’m sure we’ll have some interruptions in our schedule. But I do think our discussion today will spur some new thoughts that we need to talk about next week, and hopefully we’ll get some comments and questions from people who hear the podcast and can post in the thread on EpicureanFriends.
Joshua:
Yeah, I think the challenge we’re having right now is trying to decide which door to open. Because when you open a door you’ve got to go through it, and there are so many side issues and tangents on this problem that you could spend a lifetime talking about it.
Charles:
And I’ve been grappling with the concept of absolute justice — or the lack thereof — and if there is none, how does one determine that someone is being wicked, and how do they go about actually punishing that? The same issue that Torquatus ran into.
Cassius:
Well, I keep coming back to the view that this is not just an abstract question we can leave on the shelf indefinitely. It’s probably one of the most important day-to-day issues of life — to decide what kind of enforcement mechanisms, what kind of rules are out there that people should follow. Most people have an impression that there is some absoluteness to things that is deeply contradicted by Epicurean philosophy, by Epicurus’s view of the universe. And that’s not something that’s safe to leave unaddressed indefinitely.
Joshua:
You did briefly mention the way the universe works, and that’s something I kind of did want to talk about — how we can relate the Epicurean conception of justice to the Epicurean conception of physics, which I think really is the root of Epicurean philosophy. To get a handle on this, I found a particular passage in Lucretius — I don’t have a citation because I couldn’t find it in my Loeb edition, but here’s the quote and I think it’s the Rolfe Humphries translation:
“Another fallacy comes creeping in whose errors you should be meticulous in trying to avoid. Don’t think our eyes, our bright and shining eyes, were made for us to look ahead with. Don’t suppose our thigh-bones fitted our shin-bones and our shins our ankles so that we might take steps. Don’t think that arms angled from shoulders and branched out in hands with fingers at their ends, both right and left, for us to do whatever need require for our survival. All such argument, all such interpretation is perverse, fallacious, puts the cart before the horse. No bodily thing was born for us to use. Nature had no such aim. But what was born creates the use.”
That really is the key for me: nature had no such aim. This is the underlying problem with so much of what we’ve been talking about — with natural law, with the idea of absolute morality. When you start with nature, and Epicurus always starts with nature, what you realize is that these things are happening spontaneously. There’s no design, no purpose. The mutation that allowed the first light-sensitive cells to happen didn’t happen so that it could sense light. It just happened randomly. It was a particular sequence of DNA that mutated in one specific way, it happened to be useful, and therefore it was passed on — but it wasn’t designed to be useful. There’s no architect.
And I think we have to view justice in much the same way. Justice emerges spontaneously. It comes spontaneously out of the interaction of people. There is no absolute standard of justice, no absolute standard of morality.
Is my analogy between the Epicurean conception of justice and the Epicurean conception of nature correct, do you think?
Cassius:
I was waiting to see — go ahead, Martin.
Martin:
Almost — because we see in animal experiments there is something like a feeling of symmetry that relates to justice. So if one animal, which is okay with reasonable food, sees the animal in the next cage gets better food, it rejects the food it gets before. So that might be interpreted as something like a hint of justice emerging out of nature.
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah — that’s exactly the point. Because we always view these things through a human lens. But as you just said, even animals experience these things. Another example: if you put one chimpanzee in a cage and you have other chimpanzees outside the cage and give them food, what they’ll do quite often is actually take food to the chimpanzee that’s in the cage and doesn’t have any. And that’s to me a sign that this is not something written in the stars necessarily — this is something that is spontaneously knitted into us as we develop as individuals, as our species develops, and as life develops over an even longer timeline.
Martin:
But that means we cannot outright reject all aspects of natural law. Of course, a natural law assigned to God or to something really absolute — that one will not hold up in Epicurean philosophy. But if you find something like this in nature, it’s at least one point in favor of the idea that there may be some rudimentary form of natural law.
Cassius:
Martin, I have a question for you based on what you just said. What is the error that Lucretius is warning you not to commit?
Joshua:
And the way he puts it is: “Another fallacy comes creeping in whose errors you should be meticulous in trying to avoid… Nature had no such aim, but what was born creates the use.”
Cassius:
So Martin, do you see why I’m asking that question? What is the error that Lucretius is warning you against?
Martin:
Okay, so this is then attributing things abstractly to “what nature intended.” That is not what I’m pointing out. I’m pointing out what we actually see — how animals behave, and how this relates to justice. So that means it’s a spontaneous generation of justice which, at least in the species we have here on Earth, among the higher ones, seems to be there.
Cassius:
I think you’re basically agreeing with what Joshua was saying. But the point that has to be made really, really clear is this: yes, it’s certainly true that you can look statistically at animals and people and see that they behave in a particular way. And because over a statistical sample you see the same thing occurring, you can then conclude that that’s the way nature has implemented some kind of mechanism that produces this result consistently. But I’m thinking that the error Lucretius is warning you against is going from that point — which is simply observing statistical uniformity — to concluding that nature is an intelligent God that intends this result. Is that the point?
Martin:
Of course — yes, exactly.
Joshua:
Yeah, I might illustrate that with the following point. If you’re going to look at chimpanzees sharing food and try to derive some kind of natural law out of that, then the only logical conclusion is that that’s a natural law that applies to chimpanzees. But now we’re just talking nonsense — there is no moral law that applies to chimpanzees in my view, because they don’t have the kind of higher-order intelligence that would be necessary to even grapple with the question. It doesn’t make sense to punish a chimpanzee for not sharing its food. In the state of nature of chimpanzees, there’ll be an instinct to sharing because the preservation of the tribe is necessary for the preservation of the individual. But there’s no moral law that you can establish for chimpanzees to tell them what they should do. And if you can’t infer a moral law from that for chimpanzees, I don’t think you can infer an absolute moral law from chimpanzees and apply it to humans.
Cassius:
I agree that that point assists us in the point we were making. Just because chimpanzees have a particular nature, you can’t apply that to humans necessarily. You could say the same thing about mosquitoes or ants or anything else that’s living.
But really, I think where you ultimately end up is the same place regardless. The question is: no matter what statistical percentage of these organisms act in a particular way, do you then convert that statistical observation to a religion? Do you convert it to a universal commandment of a supernatural God and look at it as something mystical that we must comply with? And I think that’s kind of where we’re going here — back to Lucretius: don’t make the mistake of just because eyes are used by us to see, don’t make the mistake of thinking that from the beginning of time nature had this intention of setting out a scheme of existence in which eyes would develop so that we could see. That’s a significant part of the issue.
Joshua:
Yeah, I think I agree. So for example, if you see chimpanzees sharing their food, you’re not supposed to look at that and then think, “Thou shalt share your food — that’s a universal law.” The way Lucretius ends this long passage is: “Never think that the senses and the limbs could have been created for the sake of being used. They arose spontaneously in nature, and then the use was created when they arose. They weren’t created to furnish the use. There’s no purpose, there’s no design.”
Cassius:
Yeah. There’s so many different things going on here because this is one of the passages that people want to talk about in terms of evolution — Lucretius and Epicurus looking ahead to modern theories of evolution. And so you get wrapped up in the question: isn’t it intuitively strange to think that something as complicated as eyes could develop randomly? So therefore, how did they develop? But I do think that maybe the bigger issue is this question: don’t make the mistake of concluding that nature is a living, intentional being that has a plan for your life and that has created you from the beginning of time to love God and to love other people and to live in a heaven strumming harps. I think that’s part of the issue at least, and maybe the most important part.
So Martin — when you say that you can observe chimpanzees and apes and all sorts of animals acting in ways that imply some kind of inborn sense of justice — yes. You can say that they’re acting consistently with their nature, with their instinct, and that somehow they have developed over the eons with an instinct to live in a particular way. You can certainly reach that conclusion. But does that translate into a religious commandment that these things were intended from the beginning of time by the Almighty Zeus? Of course not. When stated in that way, the answer is of course not.
Charles:
I’m here.
Cassius:
I know we’re getting close to where we ought to stop for today’s episode. Justice is probably the best of these virtues to talk about these issues in this context, because it’s so emotional and you get passionate. You believe that justice is this divine commandment of God — or if you’d like to think in terms of nature, you think that there is a natural law of justice, like the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or the American way of looking at things.
There is natural law in the Epicurean text — it even talks about the laws of nature. But those laws of nature are physics.
Joshua:
And they’re descriptive — not normative.
Cassius:
Right.
Joshua:
They’re an observation about how things work, and about how we have yet to experience an example of something working in a contravening way to those laws. They are laws because they aren’t violated in our observation.
Cassius:
I think, Joshua, you’ve summed it up well as we come to our close here: nature is a spontaneous process, and part of that process — at least for humans — is that we emerge from nature and are now in a position where we have to try to get a handle on justice. Epicurus had a particular idea about justice and about the way that it emerges and comes to be — because of agreements and covenants made between people — and there is no aim, there’s no design.
Martin, what else would you like to add for today?
Martin:
I have nothing to add.
Cassius:
Alright, Charles?
Charles:
I don’t have anything.
Cassius:
And Joshua — that wasn’t necessarily intended to be your final statement for today. Do you have anything else?
Joshua:
I will register what I just said as my final statement for today.
Cassius:
I think that was a great summary of where we are at the moment. I clearly think it’s much easier to eliminate certain things from contention than it is to actually figure out exactly what the right answer is, or even to determine if there is a right answer. But it is relatively clear from Epicurean physics and our view of the nature of the universe that some things are simply not possible. And that’s an important first step: regardless of what we determine justice to be, it is not something that was handed to us by a supernatural God. And it’s not something we can learn through geometry or mathematics like Plato would have suggested. It’s not an ideal form that exists universally and eternally either. So we’ve made a lot of headway just by simply identifying what justice is not.
We can continue next week and in the episodes to come discussing what we think justice might be. But for the day, that’s probably the place to stop. Like you said last week, Joshua — you’re just beginning when you get to these points.
Joshua:
Yeah, yeah. Everything we just said was just prelude. The podcast starts now.
Cassius:
That’s all right. Okay, well, we’ll be back next week and we’ll talk some more about it. Thank you for your time today and thanks for listening, and join us in the future and we’ll continue to look into these subjects. Thanks very much. Bye.