Episode 182 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 34 - Chapter 14 - The New Virtues 05
Date: 07/15/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3174-episode-182-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-34-chapter-14-the-new-virtues-02/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 182 continues the DeWitt series through Chapter 14, “The New Virtues,” devoting the full episode to justice — the most emotionally charged virtue in Epicurean thought. Cassius and Joshua work through Principal Doctrines 31–38, establishing the central Epicurean claim that justice is not absolute, not divinely ordained, and not derivable from Platonic ideal forms, but is instead a natural covenant: a mutual agreement among creatures capable of making it not to harm or be harmed. DeWitt’s emphasis on “the justice of nature” in PD 31 and the animal evidence in PD 32 — including Pliny’s account of King Bocchus of Numidia’s elephant experiment — connects justice to prolepsis, an innate embryonic capacity that comes from nature, not reason or dialectic. Epicurus’s “original honesty” (children born morally neutral, not stained by original sin) is contrasted with the Platonic and Christian alternatives. PD 33–38 establish the circumstantial nature of justice: what is just is what produces advantage in particular circumstances and changes when circumstances change (malum in se vs. malum prohibitum). Joshua reads John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration to illustrate the opposing view — that without belief in God, atheists cannot be held to moral covenants — and follows with John Tyndall’s Belfast Address on the natural origin of awe, reverence, and moral feeling. The charge that Epicureans are moral relativists who only obey laws to avoid punishment is rebutted via Diogenes of Oenoanda Fragment 20, the Tertullian example, and a reading of Torquatus on justice in De Finibus Book 1. Callistheni’s closing thoughts center on the elephant behavior evidence; Joshua cites laboratory ape experiments (the grape/celery equity test) as further natural evidence of proto-justice. Next week: honesty.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to 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. Each week we’ll walk you through the Epicurean text and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. 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. We’re now in the middle of a series of podcasts intended to provide a general overview of Epicurean philosophy based on the organizational structure employed by Norman DeWitt in his book Epicurus and His Philosophy. Now let’s join the discussion.
Cassius: Welcome to episode 182 of Lucretius Today. We are continuing in chapter 14, “The New Virtues.” Last week we started with wisdom, temperance, and courage, and today we’ll start with justice and perhaps get to honesty, but the justice material that DeWitt includes here is very detailed and has a lot of good material packed into it, so we’ll probably spend much of the episode on justice. Before we go into the details of justice, it’s probably a good reminder that the virtues are instrumental. They are tools for the production of a pleasurable, happy life. They’re not ends in themselves, and that’s the constant problem that people get wrapped up in — thinking that they’re divinely ordained or that there are ideal, absolute versions of them floating somewhere in space. DeWitt uses the example of a standard yardstick locked up in a storage unit in a government building — that there’s an absolute version of these virtues that everybody needs to conform to and that can be identified as applicable to every person, every time, every place, that they don’t vary by time and place but they’re divinely given by God. There’s a passage in a work of Cicero that I’ll post in the forum in which he states that the nature of the law is given by God and that it applies to everyone and there won’t be different versions of it in other places and times but one single law given by God that you cannot run from. That’s the Platonic view of virtue that Epicurus decided he did not agree with, and we’ll be discussing that viewpoint and Epicurus’ reaction as we go through justice today. And of course justice is perhaps one of the most volatile things to discuss in the sense that it is so personal and everyone has a very vested interest in their own happiness and their own viewpoints, and they tend to equate their own perspective with what’s just and they like to then project their own perspective into some kind of an absolute standard which should apply to everyone. And Epicurus took the position that we need to drop back and examine the nature of justice just like any other virtue before we attempt to decide how to apply our own viewpoints.
Joshua: So DeWitt starts out in saying that the innovations of Epicurus are a violent break with both tradition and the prevailing Platonism — that in the Republic of Plato and in his Laws, Plato had devoted tremendous amounts of attention to a highly regimented state. But this approach that some of these ancient philosophers like Plato had to issues like justice, and how it’s the province of the state really to say what is just — and that power in turn comes from the position of the people at the head of the state and their connection to some kind of divinity. Of course for Epicurus he’s taking an entirely different approach. Justice like everything else is derived by nature and nature’s laws. And he talks about it constantly throughout all of the Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings — this issue of justice. But it doesn’t come from on high. And one of the key points here is that even though justice comes to us from noticing nature — and he talks about elephants later on down here, an elephant won’t harm another elephant, that kind of thing — that’s something the ancient thinkers were interested in, looking to animals who even seem to follow this very simple code. But it comes from nature. It doesn’t come from some other source of divinity. You don’t find it, like you say, in the ideal forms of Plato.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, again, in preparing for this discussion today, I thought DeWitt did a very good job — the importance that Epicurus attached to the topic is indicated by how much space in the authorized doctrines, for example, is devoted to it. Some eight items out of 40 are devoted to justice, and each of these items is in its essence an anti-Platonic aspect of the common approach toward justice at its time. A proper way to look at justice like anything else is through the prism of nature — not to just pick a political form and then decide what type of justice is going to be consistent with your desired political form of government, but to go back to nature as, again, the starting point, just like he did to a large degree in terms of looking back to nature for the observation that pleasure and pain are the guiding forces of life. DeWitt quotes PD 31: “The justice of nature is a covenant of advantage to the end that men shall not injure one another or be injured.” There are so many aspects of this that are important because when we read that one, for example, we often just immediately start talking about — well, okay, so justice in Epicurean form is a covenant not to injure or be injured by other people. And that is true and very important. But what DeWitt points out starting the discussion here is that “the justice of nature” is a particularly important aspect of it — that this is an example of how we’re looking again to nature and not to our own preferences for the proper standard. We’re not going to deduce it logically from some series of rationalistic theorems about the way things should be. We’re going to look, again, not to this dialectical basis of justice, but to nature.
Joshua: Right. This is not written on a stone tablet that you’re bringing down from Mount Sinai. It really doesn’t work like that.
Cassius: So you said the main part there, which is that justice, as it says here, is a covenant of advantage — neither to harm or to be harmed. And so DeWitt continues on and says that just as PD 31 makes it clear that the best way to analyze justice is through nature and not by our own preferences, the next doctrine, PD 32, makes clear that this teaching of nature is applicable and we derive it not only from human behavior but also from animals. Joshua’s already mentioned the elephants, and PD 32 says, quote: “To all animate creatures that have been unable to make covenants about not injuring one another or being injured, nothing is just nor unjust. And it also holds equally true for all humans who have been unable or unwilling to make the covenant.” Again, we tend to focus on — okay, this is talking about the covenant of justice, a social contract — and we derive our views of whether this applies to the golden rule or not. But again, the more basic point that DeWitt is focusing on is that “to all animate creatures” is the way this thing is phrased, which means that it’s, again, something that derives from the nature of living beings and not from logic.
Joshua: And of course, what people will say in response to that, Cassius, is that how are you going to trust nature — “nature, red in tooth and claw,” I think is a phrase from Alfred Tennyson — how are you going to trust nature and all of its horror and all of its alienness to humanity? How are you going to trust that as the foundation of your laws and your justice, rather than looking to something stable and solid and understandable, like divinity, like God? Like the Ten Commandments, something written in stone handed down from on high. Those are the things that are stable — but are they trustworthy would be the issue.
Cassius: And that reminds me about honesty and so forth. So it starts out the chapter by talking about that you could compare Epicurus’ view as one of original honesty versus original sin. And I think this is a reflection of that — that you can attack nature as appearing to have values that you don’t agree with, but who gets to make the decision as to what’s right and what’s wrong? Do you yourself have the ability to take priority over nature itself? And ultimately, is there a standard higher than nature that would allow you to be confident in doing so? As DeWitt says, it’s here implied — so far as the teaching of nature is concerned — that the evidence gathered from the behavior of irrational creatures is superior to that afforded by the behavior of human beings, as was found to be the case in the identification of pleasure as the end or telos. So again, that’s the point we were discussing earlier — that just as we look to nature and decide that pleasure is the guide of life, we can look at nature and see that there is nothing inherent in nature that provides a basis for justice other than that if we’re capable and willing to agree — just as even elephants or other animals or herding animals are — then you can have a concept of justice between people who agree that neither harming nor being harmed makes sense. But if you don’t have that agreement, you don’t even have the possibility of agreement. For example, is there justice between cats and dogs? Sometimes cats and dogs can agree to get along and be best friends, but sometimes they don’t. And the whole relative nature of the concept of justice makes it a very difficult thing to get a grasp on, especially for those of us who have been brought up in the standard Ciceronian Platonic method that there is an absolute justice. Even to discuss the subject, we have to get a handle on this issue that there is another perspective on justice other than that there is an absolute standard of it — which means that justice is relative and not absolute. And even taking yourself out of the absolute justice paradigm can be difficult.
Joshua: Certainly, yes, and people are highly resistant to it. One of the things we find in Lucretius, and some people might be surprised to see that it’s there, is this extensive treatment of humans in prehistory as they rise from their condition as basically apes — or he’s got some rather fanciful terms which approaches that issue. But this question of how humans overcame this barbaric past to found cities and civilizations — and he still didn’t think they’ve gotten very far — but he’s putting this structure in place so that we really understand not only what’s at stake here, but what our origins really looked like in a world where people thought that there was an original paradisaical Golden Age. That if we could only imitate the age of heroes — the age of Achilles, the age of Perseus or Pericles or Theseus — that if we could only look to these great men and pattern our lives on what they were doing, then we could find our way to the answers to some of these questions. Of course, today people aren’t going to be looking to those names. They have different names like Moses or Abraham that they’re looking to for some of the answers. And of course, one of the features of life in the United States of America is that the Founding Fathers begin to take on this kind of unapproachable, unassailable standing in terms of government and justice and law. But Lucretius builds up this prehistory of the human race in which you cannot find any of that there. There is no golden age from which we are all fallen. This is the idea in Christianity that we were in the Garden of Eden and everything was perfect, and then they ate of that fruit whereof they should not eat, and now we live in a fallen state. It’s one of the more radical claims of Epicurus, given all of the claims that are made on this issue, that that’s simply not true — that nature is red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson says — and that part of it is there, because part of nature will always lie outside of the bounds of justice. Justice — you couldn’t apply those terms to certain aspects of nature. But there’s another part of it, and the animals he’s talking about here — this history of domestication, for example, this history of how we overcome all the tribal warfare problems in the past and come together and build cities — is very interesting in Lucretius, and I think it’s important for this discussion, because it really does get to the heart of that question of where does justice come from. And not just justice, but these other virtues as well.
Cassius: The last thing you said is exactly where I was going to go next, Joshua, because again, this is not something set off on the side as a special subject handed down by God. It is considered to be a virtue, and it’s dealt with just like wisdom, temperance, courage, honesty, any kind of virtue that you would like to think about. We may think of the law as something special that is of particular importance to us to follow because it is so immediate to us — that if we violate the law, we’re going to suffer punishment — but this idea of being just in general is not just a matter of following the law. In fact, most people pretty readily understand that sometimes justice requires you to violate the law of a particular time and place. That’s not a particularly controversial statement to make. Even Epicurus himself talks about — for example, in sexual relations and so forth — you should consider whether there’s going to be punishments of the law when you do something. But again, within the larger framework of everything, it is the practical consequences of your action that ultimately determines whether it’s desirable to do or not — and not the form of it. There is no form of wisdom and there’s no real form of justice to which you can look and comply, and if you comply to the form, you will be guaranteed the right result, because that’s not the way nature works. People tend to be very critical — like you say, that nature is red in tooth and claw. They talk about the horrors of the way animals and nature treat each other at various times, but that is the way things are. And to the predator, eating the lamb is the way he survives. The lamb doesn’t like it, but that’s the way nature is. And if there’s anything in Epicurean philosophy that is consistent, it is the desire to understand the truth about the way things are and then use that information about the truth to live more happily and adapt ourselves to reality and not try to force reality to adapt to us when we don’t have the ability to do that. Sometimes we do have the ability to change the reality around us to produce a more desirable life, but in examples like death and so forth, we do not have the ability to change reality. And so it’s a constant struggle to determine from moment to moment what any virtue is going to be because of the circumstances. DeWitt in that next paragraph talks about the elephants again that we’ve mentioned previously and says that this is something that was discussed — that even the elder Pliny informs us that King Bocchus of Numidia decided to make a test of whether elephants had a notion of justice or not and apparently pitted a herd of specially trained elephants against another herd, and those elephants refused to attack each other despite their training. And that Pliny therefore credited elephants with, quote, “a divination of justice” — which DeWitt relates, probably with some good foundation, to the Epicurean idea of prolepsis or anticipations. That justice exists as an innate embryonic capacity which exists in advance of experience and anticipates experience, and in the case of human beings is capable of development by instruction and reflection — but its validity as a criterion comes from nature, not through reason or dialectic.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s a very good passage right there. It’s kind of amazing to me though that people in the ancient world — for example, it quotes Pliny here — that these people look to these elephants who refuse to fight each other and it doesn’t pass within the realm of possibility in their minds at all that maybe the elephants just have their own reasons for why killing other elephants is not conducive to good health or longevity or whatever, that the elephants might be acting on an instinct that is not divinely inspired or is not a “divination of justice,” but that simply has evolutionary reasons for helping their herd to survive — that we come by this stuff not because there’s some mind out there, some mind of great power that is inspiring us to understand these things, but because there is a kind of understanding in nature — although we wouldn’t put it in those terms — in which we, after millennia of trial and error, figure out this is what works. And not just killing each other whenever we see each other is what works for us.
Cassius: Yeah, the point you’re making there — I think I’ll emphasize it this way: DeWitt’s leading us through this in a way that’s different, I think, than most of the discussion of justice out there on Epicurean views on this subject. We’ve talked now about PD 31 and 32, and the point he’s emphasized is not to simply say — well, justice in Epicurean terms is a social contract not to harm each other, end of subject, let’s move on. He’s starting out in PD 31 and 32 by emphasizing to us that the Epicurean view of justice comes from observation of nature, and it’s looking to nature as the basis of it, rather than something that is absolute or given to us by the gods or through ideal forms. And where DeWitt goes next in PD 33 is to emphasize — after we’ve identified that it comes from nature — that, quote, “the next pronouncement of Epicurus is the denial of the theory of ideas which presumes the existence of absolute justice.” And the way DeWitt translates PD 33: “Justice never was anything in and by itself, but in the dealings of men with one another from time to time in regions, however large or small, it is a sort of covenant about not injuring or being injured.” So again, the standard observation — Epicurean justice is a covenant not to injure or be injured. But the important point in implementing this or applying it is the first section: “Justice is never anything in itself.” It does not exist as an ideal form. And as we’re going to see later on, it’s different in various circumstances. Whatever the time and whatever the place, it becomes this compact not to harm or be harmed, but it does not exist in an absolute form which we can always look to and expect it to tell us — these are your circumstances, this is exactly what you should do. Nature is not going to tell you — as DeWitt uses an example later on here — nature is not going to tell you whether to drive on the right side of the road or the left side of the road. Nature is going to tell you that it’s a good idea — if you’re able and willing to do it — to have a compact with other men to form agreements like that, and then you all get along better and you have fewer accidents if you decide which side of the road you’re going to drive on. But that is the compact aspect of this, and it’s not stated by nature that there’s anything intrinsically better in England to drive on the wrong side of the road versus in the United States to drive on the right side of the road.
Joshua: You know, Cass, just one of the things that occurs to me — we’ve been talking a lot about how some of these other ideas of justice are divorced from an understanding that it comes from nature, but they can’t quite let the nature aspect go, right? Which is why we see things like: when a hurricane happens, it’s “oh, that’s God’s judgment for whatever.” When an earthquake happens, it’s the same thing. The nature in their view — while it does not furnish an understanding of justice — it is used in a retaliatory way by the arbiters of justice to punish us for what we’ve done wrong. It’s a totally wrongheaded view of this stuff, and it’s kind of disappointing that we still see people trafficking in it.
Cassius: That’s right, and DeWitt continues immediately on that same topic by saying that the companion to the doctrine we just read, PD 33, is PD 34 — which DeWitt translates as: “Justice is not an evil in and by itself, but the evil lies in the fear arising out of the uncertainty that he will not escape detection by those appointed for the punishment of such offenses.” This is a way of emphasizing that justice is not a thing in itself — it’s not absolute — but it has a very real manifestation in the fact that if you violate the idea of justice that the people around you have, you’re subject to being punished for that violation. So it says, by the converse reasoning, the good of justice will not adhere in the act but appertain to the consequences. Justice means serenity and injustice means unrest in the soul. So DeWitt continues, quote: “The unity of justice is not to be found in any heavenly model, preserved among the gods like a standard yardstick in government vaults, but in the omnipresence of advantage.” And then he quotes PD 36: “So far as the universal concept is concerned, justice is the same for all, for it is a kind of advantage in the life they share with one another. But in respect of the particulars of place and all affecting circumstances whatsoever, it does not follow that the same thing is just for all.” In the law of the Latin that people like to quote at times, there’s a difference between malum in se — a thing that’s bad in itself — versus malum prohibitum — it’s bad because it’s prohibited. And that would be the example that DeWitt uses about you may get a ticket for driving on the wrong side of the road depending on the country you’re living in, but nobody really alleges that it’s bad in itself to drive on the right or the left of the road. People want to say that there is something bad in itself perhaps about murder and things that are more emotionally gripping like that, but then even there, it depends on the circumstances and there’s justifiable homicide and so forth. It all gets very complex.
Joshua: Yeah, it’s very messy, isn’t it? And when you look at it through the rose-colored glasses of absolutism, it looks like we’re doing it very wrong. But in fact, to look at it through an absolutist lens would be doing it wrong, because that would be to take something that is not absolute and make it absolute. And I guess part of the problem wrapped up in all of this is that when you take justice as an absolute, what you’re implying — what you’re asserting really — is that there is some standard. And he mentions these measuring sticks that governments used to make or commission in order to have a standard measurement of something. For example, I told a story recently about how the British government had a set of sticks like this — measuring sticks, usually they’re made of metal — but that the building in which they were housed burned down. So now they’ve got them in three different places throughout the city, and I think one of them is in Trafalgar Square in London — this is the city of Westminster — but anyway, Trafalgar Square is this square in London with a great column and on top of that column is a statue of Horatio Nelson, and then you’ve got museums around that as well. And on this sort of out-of-the-way wall where most people are not likely to see it, there’s a plaque on the side of the wall that contains these measuring sticks that are meant to be the standard measurement in their time. Of course, Martin has since told me that this has all changed and it’s all based on atomic physics now, but that’s the idea — that you put it in multiple different places throughout the city so that not only the government has access to it and we know they won’t be burned down because three different buildings in the city are unlikely to all burn down at once, but also any citizen can go up to it and check the measurement themselves. But the problem is that when you look to justice as being absolute, there really is no yardstick — so people have to make a yardstick to pile all of their intimations of justice upon. And sometimes that’s God — like I’ve read recently from that horrible sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Sometimes it’s governments. There are all different kinds of ways that people go wrong about this idea of absolute justice. But the real problem with all of these systems is the horrors that are done to humanity in their name. That’s just my opinion.
Cassius: And so Joshua, those horrors that you were just discussing are what make it so emotionally gripping and compelling, I think, for people to want to believe that there is a correct way and a wrong way of doing everything. That there is some kind of absolute standard that would allow us to say that something is right versus something is wrong. And it’s really interesting how Epicurus seems to hit perhaps that part of this as much as he hits anything else in these last doctrines in the 30s here. We’ve discussed already that there’s nothing in and of itself right or wrong in justice, there’s no absolute standard of justice, that injustice is not an evil in itself — which is something we’d come back to as we close — and that the real impact of justice is in the consequences that justice or injustice brings. And those are the issues that we normally talk about — again, the social contract that appears to be implied, that it’s best in terms of the happiness of everyone for people to agree to live in harmony and not harm each other and not allow themselves to be harmed. But Epicurus is also drilling home in PD 36, 37, 38 something that we don’t talk about so much, but which is equally important. PD 36: “In its general aspect, justice is the same for all. But with reference to individual peculiarities, the same thing does not turn out to be just for all.” That’s 36, but then 37 and 38 are two of the longer of the entire set of 40 authorized doctrines. PD 37: “Among 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’s 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 in 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” — which is a kind of confrontational statement: “nonetheless just for that period in the eyes of those who don’t confound themselves with empty sounds.” Because Epicurus knows that there’s something really controversial here. Then PD 38: “When, provided the circumstances have not been altered, actions which were considered just have been shown not to accord with the general concept in actual practice, then they 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.” It’s hard to even read 37 and 38 in a way that makes them understandable and obvious as to the meaning, but it sure seems clear that he’s trying to hit home the issue that the circumstances are what makes something just or unjust and the results during the time of those circumstances — and that when the circumstances change, your notion of justice is going to change too. So DeWitt says, according to Epicurus, the child is not conceived in sin but born in honesty. If not perverted by education or otherwise, he lives in harmony with nature and enjoys serenity of mind. By perversion he means the acquisition of false opinions — chiefly ascribed to the conventional education — which mislead men into thinking that the path to happiness is through wealth, glory, and power. And it’s the desire for such prizes that tempts men to commit injustice, and those desires are neither natural nor necessary.
Joshua: Yeah, that can hardly be overstated — the importance of this idea that children are not born in a state of original sin and guilt. They’re born in a state of honesty as he says here, and if they’re not born good, they’re at least born morally neutral. It’s another moment in all of this where when you trace it back to its origin in nature, you get a very different understanding than some of the prevailing modes of thought as it relates to all of these issues. And by the way, I should mention this, since we’re saying that children are born at the very least basically honest — we’ll definitely be doing this whole passage on honesty, if not today, then next week.
Cassius: So then DeWitt says the connection between justice with peace of mind and injustice with anxiety is as stated in VS 12: “The just life is marked by the greatest quietude, but the unjust overflows with the greatest unrest.” And that the cause of the unrest is described by Epicurus as fear combined with uncertainty. When I was reading that this morning, I remembered “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” — the acronym FUD — the particular combination of fear combined with uncertainty seemed particularly poisonous to happiness, and Epicurus believed that it’s even worse to feel uncertainty regarding the truth of the myths than it is to actually believe them. At least when you believe them, you have a way of placating the gods — as a statement that’s made in the Letter to Menoikeus. But if you just learn a little bit about, for example, the stars and you see the vastness of the universe, but then you don’t come to an understanding of how that happens without supernatural gods threatening you, then you can actually be worse off than if you did not have the information in the first place. There’s a famous quote from Alexander Pope where it says, “A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.” If you only go a little way, then you haven’t really won the fruit that philosophy promises to you in eradicating fear.
Joshua: Yeah, people use that a lot — you know enough to be dangerous. You can easily think you know more than you actually do when you’ve learned a little bit and yet not understood the full picture.
Cassius: And so DeWitt says that in the case of injustice, Epicurus believed it was the uncertainty of escaping detection that above all keeps the soul in a state of disquiet. PD 35 says, quote: “It is impossible for the man who does one of those things which they’ve covenanted with one another not to do in order to avoid injuring and being injured to be confident that he will escape, even though for the moment he shall escape numberless times — for till the end it will be uncertain if he will really escape.”
Joshua: Right. And of course, Epicurus doesn’t explicitly mention this idea of conscience — or what Socrates called his daimon. He doesn’t explicitly mention it, but I do get the feeling there that it’s the nip of the conscience at your heels that really is a huge part of the problem here.
Cassius: Yes. As we begin to close this subsection, this is going to take us back into something you’ve mentioned numbers of times, Joshua — about Thomas More’s Utopia — about people who are Epicurean not being able to be trusted, that you really don’t even want them in your society because they’re going to be uncontrollable people who have no morals of any kind. DeWitt goes into this subject in the last paragraph of this section by saying that the shifting of the good and the evil in conduct from the action itself — saying it’s bad or good just by labeling the action — to the effect, by looking to the result of the action, and the emphasis upon advantage and disadvantage marks Epicurus as a utilitarian in ethics. And as DeWitt says, utilitarianism is a vulnerable creed. It laid Epicurus open to the charge of recommending obedience to the laws solely as a means of avoiding punishment. And that’s the issue that we’ll close on with various responses here. DeWitt says the charge is specious because the true advantage to be gained is peace of mind of the soul and that this is a positive objective. But I think even more importantly than that, it’s a specious charge for other reasons as well. Diogenes of Oenoanda talks about this on his inscription — that people allege that the fear of the gods is necessary for people to be moral, but Diogenes points out that the fear of the gods doesn’t seem to stop immoral men from committing crimes and so forth, and fear of these false gods doesn’t stop them. Certainly fear of ideal forms like Plato or other philosophers might suggest is not going to stop them either. What really stops people from doing bad acts and promotes them doing good acts is the results of those acts — and that’s not a cop-out. That’s not a sign of moral turpitude that you don’t have some connection with God that tells you what’s right and wrong. That’s a sign of reality — to acknowledge that this basic honesty position is correct. That nature is not laying out right and wrong. What we have to do is look at the circumstances, determine what our actions are going to lead to, and make intelligent decisions based on those circumstances and the results that we can expect to occur. If you really need to save a hospital from burning down, are you going to stop at the front door because it’s locked and say, well, I don’t want to break a lock, I better just follow the law? That would be universally condemned as something that would make no sense. Nobody really likes somebody who wins the game on technicalities. Nobody likes the referees to get so closely involved in the football game or the basketball game that they change the result because they’re overly enforcing the technicalities of particular rules. It is the result that counts in life, and that’s not something to be apologized for. It’s a higher moral position than looking to some false, absolute standard that doesn’t exist.
Joshua: Right. Now, since you mentioned Thomas More, I’m actually going to take a different approach here and quote John Locke. This is his Letter Concerning Toleration, and he’s arguing in favor of tolerating other religious beliefs here. He says: “For no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another. All the life and power of true religion consists in the inward and full persuasion of the mind, and faith is not faith without believing. Whatever profession we make, to whatever outward worship we conform, if we are not fully satisfied in our mind that the one is true and the other well-pleasing unto God, such profession and such practice, far from being any furtherance, are indeed great obstacles to our salvation. For in this manner, instead of expiating other sins by the exercise of religion, I say, in offering thus unto God Almighty such a worship as we esteem to be displeasing unto Him, we add unto the number of our other sins those also of hypocrisy and contempt of His divine majesty.” So he’s arguing in favor of toleration of religion, but then he goes on to say: “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. As for other practical opinions, though not absolutely free from all error, if they do not tend to establish domination over others or civil impunity to the church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.” In other words, these other theologies, these other approaches — they’re not right, they are not free from error, there’s a small amount of danger there — but the only real danger comes from tolerating those who deny the existence of God in the first place, because they cannot be held to a standard of justice. They cannot be held to a standard of morality and they cannot be held to the law, really, because if they don’t have fear of punishment or hope of reward beyond the grave, then how do we know they’re going to do the right thing when it comes down to it?
Cassius: Yeah, if they don’t think that they’re going to burn in hell for violating the law, then you just can’t trust them — because it’s only because they might burn in hell that anybody would choose to follow the law. It seems to be his reasoning — that they would follow the law in those circumstances in which they think that they won’t be found out, especially. You know, DeWitt says here that utilitarianism is vulnerable because people think that, oh, you’re only following the law to avoid punishment. But isn’t that what the whole framework opposed to all of these ideas is doing? They’re doing the same thing. I think it was Tertullian who said that his greatest pleasure in heaven is going to be watching the souls of the damned as they’re hurled into the lake of fire. It’s going to be the pleasure of watching other people get punished that’s going to give them the most relish in heaven. So setting up hell as this horrible place — and if you don’t follow the law, if you don’t act morally or justly, you’re going to go there — isn’t that the same problem? That they’re just doing what they’re doing to avoid punishment? But it’s an even worse and more horrible punishment.
Joshua: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And this is a point that really deserves to be hit home very hard. This is the accusation of Stoics and most other people against Epicureans — that they’re not morally strong because they’re pure pragmatists and they have no sense of ultimate firmness in their character that can be depended upon when the chips are down and when you have to really count on them to do things that you are expecting them to do. And that’s why the charge deserves to be just swatted as hard as we possibly can swat it, because in fact the reverse is the case. These people who are relying on false religion and false ideas about absolute rules are totally wrong in their orientation toward understanding the whole subject. And that ought to be the place where you would question the firmness of resolve of someone — is when they’ve adopted something that they have no proof of, that they have no evidence of other than their own desire to believe a particular way. How reliable really is that when the chips are down?
Cassius: Lucretius talks about how no matter what people say about whether they’re afraid of death or not, that when they start thinking about being dead, they get scared out of their wits and just do everything that they can to avoid it. And the most devoted religious people, under trying circumstances, lose their faith in their God or their religious beliefs — because they think that, well, the Lord was there to protect them, but God has abandoned me. Lots of famous lines about: where are you, God? Why have you left me alone in these circumstances? And so in terms of confidence in the way a person is going to act, it seems to me you can have much more confidence in a person who understands the way the world works in the first place and who doesn’t have false ideas and false perspectives about how to approach it — that you can rely on them in trying circumstances much more than you can rely on someone who has basically lived on faith their entire life without evidence to support it.
Joshua: So I have one more thing to read here. This comes from John Tyndall’s Belfast Address, which is a document I just love. It starts out here: “Further, the doctrine of evolution drives man in his totality from the interaction of organism and environment through countless ages past. The human understanding, for example, is itself a result of the play between organism and environment through cosmic ranges of time.” And then he goes on to say: “It is a result, for example, of the play of organism and environment that sugar is sweet and that aloes are bitter, that the smell of henbane differs from the perfume of a rose. Such facts of consciousness, for which, by the way, no adequate reason has yet been rendered, are quite as old as the understanding.” And then he goes on here again to say: “Then there are such things woven into the texture of man as the feelings of awe, reverence, wonder — and not alone the sexual love just referred to, but the love of the beautiful, physical and moral in nature, poetry and art.” So we talk a lot about nature, but I think it’s also just as important to consider that literature and art have a role here in determining justice, partially because it’s the kind of thing that we need to talk about. We need to argue about it. We need to debate it. We recently had a conversation about this rocky outcropping in the city of Athens called the Areopagus, the great hill of free speech. And there’s that passage in the Acts of the Apostles when St. Paul goes into the city of Athens — his friends haven’t joined him yet — and the Epicureans and the Stoics drag him up to this hill, this hill of free speech, because they want to hear what he’s saying. As it even says in that passage, these people spent all of their time and nothing else but to learn or to hear some new things said, right? It’s all they’re interested in — ideas and hearing them and thinking about them. So a compliment to the city of Athens in my view. But it’s this idea of taking him up to this hill of free speech and that it’s there that we’re going to have the kind of argument, the kind of debate in which we are really trying to figure things out and to determine things. And it doesn’t help at all to have some guy come down the mountainside with two tablets and just say, oh, don’t worry about it, I already know everything. That’s the opposite of helpful in these conversations. Justice, just like everything else, is something we have to talk about. We have to write books about it. We have to argue every aspect of it before we can come to anything like a good conclusion about how we should begin to establish it in our societies.
Cassius: I think what you’re saying, too, is the reason you’re having this examination of the issues, the reason you’re having this discussion and really questioning the authority of these things is that in the end you decide what is right and wrong — and what’s important to you — basically by the force of the feeling that you get after examining these things. There’s not a formula, there’s not a way to establish that a particular formula is just to be followed regardless of the result. It’s only by applying the discussion to particular circumstances, looking at what results it’s going to produce in your own situation, that you can then get a feel for what is just and unjust in the particular situation. It’s not by reading something in a book that you’re going to be able to reach a just verdict in a criminal trial, for example. You’ve got to know the circumstances. You’ve got to know whether there were justifications for deviations from prior formulas in order to determine what the just result is. It’s not something that just comes out of a book or through dialectic or through an ideal form. The Diogenes of Oenoanda reference from earlier is Fragment 20, which I’ll paraphrase here — I won’t read the whole thing, but I do recommend the whole thing because it contains a lot of interesting detail. Diogenes of Oenoanda said: “It’s obvious that wrongdoers do not fear the penalties imposed by law, because if they were afraid they’d do no wrong. So on account of what kind of gods then will humans be righteous, for they’re not righteous on account of the real gods or on account of Plato’s and Socrates’ judges in Hades? We are left with this conclusion: why would not those who disregard the laws scorn fables much more? So with regard to righteousness, our doctrine does not do harm, and in fact the opposite — it not only does no harm but it also helps, because our doctrine removes disturbances while the other adds disturbances.”
Joshua: Yeah, it’s always useful and important I think to return to Diogenes of Oenoanda — this strange, strange man on the coast of Asia Minor inscribing in something like 40 square yards of wall this fine anthem — as he calls it, Epicureanism. He’s got such interesting and strange stuff in there, stuff we don’t really see necessarily — we see kernels of it in the other works — but he usually finds a way to express things in a way that is new and more interesting.
Cassius: That’s right. And while we’re talking about other Epicurean texts, it would also be good to review Torquatus’ section in Book One of De Finibus, which is a long discussion. After all the other virtues have been discussed, he talks about justice, and I’ll quote a few sections of it here:
“Justice still is left to complete our statement concerning the whole of virtue, but the considerations that we’ve talked about previously can also be urged. Just as I’ve proved wisdom, temperance and courage to be linked with pleasure so 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 hope 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 a trust 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, and many have actually informed against themselves. True reason beckons men of properly sound mind to pursue justice, fairness, and honor. For the passions which proceed from nature are easily satisfied without committing any wrong, while we must not succumb to those which are groundless, since they yearn for nothing worthy of our craving — and more loss is involved in the mere fact of doing wrong than the profits that are produced by the wrongdoing. So one would not be right in describing justice as a thing to be wished for on its own account, but rather because it brings with it a very large amount of agreeableness. For to be the object of esteem and affection is agreeable just because it renders life safer and more replete with pleasures. Therefore we think that wickedness should be shunned not alone on account of the disadvantages which fall to the lot of the wicked, but much rather because when it pervades a man’s soul it never permits him to breathe freely or to rest.”
So let’s talk about closing thoughts on the topic of justice and bring the episode to a close. Callistheni, any thoughts on justice?
Callistheni: Yes, my thoughts are still on the story about how elephants refuse to kill each other, so that’s something I’m curious to look into some more — about the nature of animals and their sense of things. So that was interesting.
Cassius: Thank you. Yeah, that’s definitely something we can pursue in the show notes. We’ve had lots of threads in the past about concepts of justice and inferences of justice in the way that different animals — monkeys, elephants, and so forth — work, and so we’ll bring some of those together in our show notes as well. But that definitely plays into what DeWitt is emphasizing here — that we look for a proper understanding of justice by observing nature and not by just coming up with dialectical reasoning and logical formulas about it. Martin, any thoughts today on justice?
Martin: Nothing to add, thanks.
Cassius: Thank you, Martin. Okay, Joshua?
Joshua: Yeah, in fact, I’ll kind of echo what Callistheni said, which is this issue of looking to animals which I do find interesting. And we didn’t even really talk about it, but these many, many laboratory experiments with apes, for example, that have been tried — where if you give one ape grapes and you give the other one celery or whatever and they all want the grapes, you’ll sometimes have these weird moments where the one who gets the grapes refuses to eat them or even throws them back until they both get grapes — that you have to look to these kinds of interactions for the source of where we find our own sense of justice or morality.
Cassius: Yeah, that issue that Callistheni raised is really probably a good place to bring the episode to a close, because if there’s anything about the whole concept of justice that is important, it’s the lack of an absolute standard. And so that doesn’t mean — as with these other virtues — it doesn’t mean that Epicurus throws out the concept of justice or throws out the concept of virtue. What he consistently does is look for a sound, natural basis on which to construct a reasonable understanding, a beneficial understanding of the concept. And so rather than continuously obsessing over whether we have violated some constitution or some document written 500 years ago, it’s easy to think about elephants and the different ways we do admire the conduct of certain animals. It’s hard to think that an elephant is concerned about some constitution, some piece of paper written before he was born. When we look at the animal kingdom and look at elephants or any other animal that we want to talk about, we see that they don’t have any concept of agreements that were made before they were born, and yet they’re able to — in their own circumstances, every moment — conduct themselves in ways that nature is prompting them to do. And nature, depending on the world, depending on the situation, does prompt them to live in herds or to respect each other among their own groups at least. So the proper foundation of morality is going to come from observation of nature and not from contemplation of the gods or contemplation of ideal forms. So next week we’ll come back and discuss honesty, but it’s been worthwhile to devote the full episode to justice because it’s such an important topic, such an emotional issue, something that really causes people to step back and say: whoa, what’s going on here with Epicurus? And why is he saying that there’s no such thing as absolute justice? Why is he questioning not only the gods, but why is he questioning my deeply held beliefs that there are certain ways that humanity should operate? And it causes people problems to have to confront that, but it’s really important to understand where Epicurus is coming from. And with justice, as much as with any other virtue or with any other conduct, he’s telling you to look to nature, think about the reality of the way the world works — that there are no supernatural gods, there are no eternal forms — and come up with concepts and applications of justice, just like any other virtue, that are going to lead to happy living. So okay, we’ll close the episode on that point. We’ll come back next week on honesty. And as always, let us know if you have any comments or questions on the forum. That’s all for this episode; we’ll come back next week.