Episode 301 - TD29 - Epicurus And The Question Of Ends Justifying Means
Date: 09/27/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4740-episode-301-td29-epicurus-and-the-question-of-ends-justifying-means/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The episode finishes Tusculan Disputations Part Three, section 20 by taking up Cicero’s third accusation against Epicurus: that he has separated the chief good from virtue. Cicero makes the point through the famous Roman political anecdote of Gaius Gracchus and Piso Frugi — both claimed to be defending the treasury, yet proposed diametrically opposite policies on the Gracchan grain law, just as Epicurus praises virtue while placing pleasure, not virtue, at the summit. Joshua traces the background of the Gracchan agrarian reforms (130s BC), the populares/optimates split, and connects this to the broader century of internecine civil war. Cassius applies Torquatus’s navigation analogy: Epicurean virtue is praised not as an end in itself but as the most reliable means to pleasure. Joshua then draws a parallel from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons — Thomas More giving the devil benefit of law — as another case where two parties share a stated goal (justice) but reach opposite conclusions about means. The episode then turns to Machiavelli’s “ends justify the means” question: could Epicurus be called a consequentialist? Joshua answers yes, in a limited sense — Epicurus’s choice-and-avoidance framework always judges an action by its consequences for pleasure or pain. The episode closes noting that Cicero’s final complaint in section 20 — that Epicurus “measures every great evil by pain” — will need to be addressed in a future episode, with section 21 next.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to episode 301 of Lucretius Today. This is a podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and 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 we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes. This week we’re moving forward in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations. We’ve been in Part Three, section 20, for quite a while now. Today we should be able to finish section 20 as we address the third of Cicero’s criticisms against Epicurus’s ethics, and it takes us back into familiar territory where Cicero is criticizing Epicurus’s views on virtue. So since it’s been several weeks since we read the second half of this section 20, I’ll ask Joshua to go ahead and remind us of Cicero’s criticisms before we begin to take it apart further. Joshua —
Joshua: Right, Cassius. So we are still here in section 20 and we’re still dealing with this three-part criticism. Cicero has criticized Epicurus on the grounds, first, that he contradicts himself — because he says he cannot imagine anything good unless the senses are in a manner tickled with some pleasure, but now Epicurus says that to be free from pain is the highest pleasure. The second criticism is that where there is naturally a threefold division — the first, to be pleased; next, to be in pain; and the last, to be affected neither by pleasure nor pain — Epicurus imagines the first and the last to be the same and makes no difference between pleasure and the cessation of pain. And we have dealt extensively over the last few episodes with those two criticisms. That third criticism that we’re going to get into today deals with this question of the relationship between pleasure and virtue.
I’m going to read again the end here of section 20. Cicero begins his third criticism like this: “The last mistake that Epicurus falls into, he falls into in common with some others, which is this: that as virtue is the most desirable thing, and as philosophy has been investigated with a view to the attainment of it, he has separated the chief good from virtue. Oh, but he commends virtue, and that frequently. Yeah, and indeed Gaius Gracchus, when he had made the largest distributions of the public money and had exhausted the treasury, nevertheless spoke much of defending the treasury. What signifies what men say when we see what they do? That Piso who was surnamed Frugi had always harangued against the law that was proposed for distributing the corn. But when it had passed — though a man of consular dignity — he came to receive the corn.”
Joshua: “Gracchus observed Piso standing in the court and asked him in the hearing of the people how it was consistent for him to take corn by a law he had himself opposed. It was replied: ‘Piso, it was against your distributing my goods to every man as you thought proper, but as you do so, I come to claim my share.’ Did not this grave and wise man sufficiently show that the public revenue was dissipated by the Gracchan grain law? Read Gracchus’s speeches and you will pronounce him the advocate of the treasury. Epicurus denies that anyone can live pleasantly who does not lead a life of virtue. He denies that fortune has any power over a wise man. He prefers a spare diet to great plenty and maintains that a wise man is always happy. All these things become a philosopher to say, but they are not consistent with pleasure. But the reply is that he does not mean that pleasure — well, let him mean any pleasure — it must be such a one as makes no part of virtue. But suppose we are mistaken as to his pleasure. Are we so too as to his pain? I maintain therefore the impropriety of language which that man uses when talking of virtue, who would measure every great evil by pain.”
Cassius: Okay, Joshua. Just as with the earlier sections, there’s a lot going on here that we can pull information out of. And today the dominant theme is this issue of Epicurus’s view of virtue. Now, we know from the same discussion in Cicero’s On Ends that the Epicureans argued that not only does Epicurus not undermine virtue, but he places virtue on a more firm foundation than do the Platonists or the Stoics or anyone else. Because from the Epicurean point of view, there are no ideal Forms, there are no supernatural gods, there is no supernatural reason to be pious, no fear of punishment or reward after death. So all of the traditional reasons to be virtuous, from the Epicurean position, are invalid — they just simply are wrong. They do not exist. And so you cannot have a firm foundation for virtue based on arguments that are simply false.
What Epicurus provides in place of false arguments are true arguments that nature tells us through pleasure and pain: how to live, that pleasure is what nature tells us is the most desirable thing in life. And given that framework, the concept of virtue involves actions taken for the purpose of securing the goal of nature, which is pleasure, rather than a shifting and false goal of piety or simply doing what the other famous Greek and Roman leaders have done in the past. Epicurus substitutes a more firm goal grounded in nature by saying: look to pleasure. And if you’re going to look to pleasure as your goal, then you’re going to have to take particular actions at particular times and places in order to achieve pleasure. And those actions which are reasonably calculated to lead to the goal are going to be the foundation of virtue from the Epicurean viewpoint.
Cassius: As Torquatus said: we don’t praise the art of navigation simply because it’s an art. We praise navigation because it teaches us how to sail our ships successfully. The same analogy applies with virtue: we’re not interested in virtue simply for the sake of virtue; we want virtue because of the practical results it obtains.
Now, as we go through Cicero’s criticisms, Cicero is simply never going to admit that pleasure and virtue have this harmonious relationship. Cicero insists that there is an absolute war between pleasure and virtue, and that they can have nothing to do with each other — because pleasure is a disreputable goal and leads to disaster from the point of view of virtue. And the two cannot coexist productively. If you’re talking about pursuing pleasure, by definition, according to Cicero, you are being unvirtuous. That’s the cliché about virtue being its own reward: if you’re looking for a reward from virtue according to the Stoic position, then you’ve undermined the entire reason for wishing to be virtuous in the first place. Virtue is its own end, its own reward.
Cassius: From that Stoic perspective, Cicero begins this section by making an assertion that though virtue is the object of our eager seeking and philosophy has been devised for the sake of securing it, Epicurus has severed the highest good from virtue. Again, that’s the King translation in the Loeb edition. When we look back at the Letter to Menoeceus, certainly Epicurus says that a life of virtue is inseparable from a life of happiness. But Epicurus is always very clear that the purpose of philosophy — the purpose of doing anything — is going to be the attainment of the life of happiness and not the attainment of virtue. And that distinction is the source of all of this dispute.
Joshua: Well, Cassius, for me, when I read this, it sounds like Cicero himself is saying that virtue is the most desirable thing, and that philosophy has been investigated with a view to the attainment of it. And Epicurus calls himself a philosopher, and yet he has separated the chief good from virtue and placed it in pleasure. So Cicero is saying this is his reading of Epicureanism — that philosophy exists specifically so that we can procure virtue. And if Epicurus is going to hold to pleasure, then he shouldn’t call himself a philosopher.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, I can certainly see where you’re coming from there. And maybe this ambiguity is a sort of example of the problem here: that Cicero often is not being clear about what Epicurus’s position actually is. Clearly he’s saying that Epicurus commends virtue and praises virtue. But the bottom line is that Cicero is complaining that Epicurus makes the chief good something other than virtue.
Joshua: Exactly. Now, in the structure of this paragraph, we have a frame narrative that’s been inserted by Cicero to make a point. So he goes through the frame narrative and then comes immediately back to his question. And at the end of it, this is where he says: “Epicurus denies that anyone can live pleasantly who does not lead a life of virtue. He denies that fortune has any power over a wise man. He prefers a spare diet to great plenty. He maintains that a wise man is always happy. All these things become a philosopher to say, but they are not consistent with pleasure.” So it’s partly this idea that Epicurus is calling himself — or allowing himself to be called — a philosopher, but he has put virtue in the backseat and he’s got pleasure driving the bus. And in Cicero’s view, you can’t imagine anything more horrifying.
You mentioned that it was war between these two viewpoints, and that is the language that Cicero himself uses. In that famous passage, he describes the Epicureans taking Italy by storm — the actual words he uses in Latin seem to imply that the Epicureans are laying siege to Italy, that they’ve got it surrounded, encircled, and it’s this pleasure-seeking idea from the east that is so corrosive in Cicero’s mind. It’s so dangerous to everything he’s trying to do in his ideal of the Roman citizen-soldier and saving the Republic and bringing up a new generation of people who are going to lead when he’s gone. And Epicurus, by placing the good in pleasure rather than in virtue, is a threat to that entire project. So the military language, this warlike terminology that you referenced — I see exactly what Cicero is doing, because he sees it as a deep, deep conflict.
Cassius: Joshua, you’re right. And the illustration that Cicero gives us in this section is worth talking about at some length. Not all of Cicero’s illustrations hit home to us given the lack of information we have about what was going on. But the one he gives here I think we can relate to better than most: it’s the example of the Gracchi brothers — the very famous episode from Roman history.
The basic situation with the Gracchan reforms was that Rome was prospering as a result of the conquests it had been making, but a lot of slaves from the conquered territories had been brought back into Italy, and as a result, the economy of the traditional Roman citizenry was being upset by the influx of what was basically free labor from the slaves. One of many problems caused by this situation was that Rome’s army itself was being undermined, because the traditional Roman citizens who supplied soldiers to the army were being displaced on their lands in Italy. And without the families of the soldiers being able to support themselves, Rome was restricted in its ability to raise as many troops as it had been traditionally able to do.
Cassius: And so the Gracchan reforms were instituted when Tiberius Gracchus passed laws intended to restrict the ability of the major rich landowners to purchase farms, place slaves on them, and displace citizens. Those reforms involved use of the Roman treasury to repurchase those lands and give them back to the soldiers and their families. This reform created a major blowback from the rich senators and others who had been profiting from the new system. And that’s where Piso Frugi comes in: as a senator who was objecting, there was a 180-degree difference in interpretation between the Senate versus the Gracchi brothers as to how the treasury was being dealt with.
The Gracchi considered what they were doing — using the public treasury to buy back land for the farmers — as something for the good of the Roman Republic and the good of the treasury itself, because they were making sure that the system that had traditionally been in place could continue and not be disrupted by the influx of slaves and money from outside. The Senate, on the other hand, which was benefiting from the influx of slaves and money from outside, considered the Gracchan reforms to be raiding the treasury — taking money that should have belonged to the state and giving it to private citizens, the worst thing you could do to undermine the treasury. And so what Cicero ends up pointing out is that the Gracchi brothers were very eloquent in claiming to be defending the Roman treasury, while at the same time the Senate — in this case Piso Frugi — said that the very same acts were undermining and dissipating the treasury. And so you had both sides of the dispute claiming that they were the ones in favor of protecting the treasury of Rome, and yet taking absolutely different approaches towards doing so. And that’s what Cicero is saying is the situation between Epicurus and his philosophical opponents: that Epicurus may say that he is defending virtue, just as the Gracchi were saying that they were defending the treasury, but in reality, the Gracchi were destroying the treasury from Cicero’s perspective, and Epicurus was destroying virtue even while praising it. Joshua, what’s your take on that story?
Joshua: Well, we could go just about as deep into this as we wanted to, and it would take us all day. But it will be helpful, Cassius, to get a bit of background about what is going on here. So we’re talking about Tiberius Gracchus and the agrarian reforms happening in approximately the 130s BC and later. And you made the point which is that we’ve already seen the development of people splitting into two factions. You have these wealthy senators who own land as the main source of their income, who profit from replacing native Italian laborers with captured slaves from foreign conquest — from the Punic Wars and so on. And then on the other side you have the plebeian class, which is dealing with wage depression, not enough work, starvation and so on. And so broadly speaking you’ve got these two political movements in Roman society that also reflect the support base of those movements.
So you have the populares, which represent the plebeian class, and then you have the optimates, which represent the interests of the senatorial class. And which side any individual Roman — particularly these aristocrats that Cicero is constantly talking about — which side you’re likely to come down on depends partly on who your family is, which gens you belong to. This is kind of like your clan. And so you end up with cases like Julius Caesar: he’s a member of a branch of the Gens Julia, which is an aristocratic family, and yet he is on the populares side of the political dispute in his lifetime. I think he’s born in about 100 BC, but we’re setting up here in the 130s and after. In another two decades we’ll get into the Marian reforms, where Marius reforms the legions. All of this — they’re dealing with deep conflicts in Roman political, social, and economic life, and the conflicts they’re dealing with don’t really find a healthy resolution. And so what it leads to is a century of internecine warfare. This is where you get the civil wars at the end of the Roman Republic, and that’s kind of the backdrop of all of this. So even though Cicero is telling the story, we have to understand: Cicero has a dog in this fight.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua. In this section, Cicero spends almost half of this discussion talking about this little anecdote about Piso opposing the Gracchan reforms, and yet when the money was handed out under those reforms, Piso asked for his own share of it. And I don’t think that’s really the point here. The point is not whether Piso Frugi was being contradictory himself. The point is this: both Piso Frugi and the Gracchi brothers were advocating for the treasury — just as Epicurus and the other philosophers advocate for virtue. And that creates problems in a lot of people’s minds, because unless you dig into the background, you say: well, everybody’s supporting the treasury, everybody is supporting virtue — why are we even having an argument? Can’t we all just get along and move on?
What Cicero is showing us here is one of the most famous examples from Roman history of where the same words, on their face, can mean totally different things. From the point of view of the Gracchi: reforming the treasury meant saving Rome by spending the money that was in the treasury. From the point of view of Piso Frugi and the senators: preserving the treasury meant not spending the money on this particular reform. That applies directly to the Epicurean versus Platonic and Stoic argument, because Epicurus is praising virtue to the stars as being extremely important and necessary for the happiest life, while at the same time Epicurus is not saying virtue is the ultimate goal. The Stoics and others whom Cicero is supporting say that it is virtue that is the goal, and that if you take anything else as a goal, then you can’t have virtue — you’ve sold out virtue just as you’ve destroyed the treasury. If you’re the Gracchi, you have destroyed virtue; if you are Epicurus.
Cassius: And of course the same type of thing continues today: it’s very easy to take a word that everybody agrees has desirable connotations and employ that word in a totally different way. So this illustration reinforces that this dispute over virtue is one of substance and not just of form. Cicero admits, as Joshua has already read, that Epicurus praises virtue in all sorts of ways — in terms of diet, and the wise man always being happy and so forth — in ways that “become a philosopher to say,” as Cicero puts it. But that takes Cicero back to the key argument: that from Cicero’s point of view, it is not sufficient to say that Epicurus does not mean only the pleasures of stimulation. Cicero says: I don’t care what kind of pleasure Epicurus is talking about. Whatever type of pleasure it is, it cannot be part of virtue, because virtue has nothing to do with pleasure.
As Cicero wraps up this argument, he asks a question that I think is echoed in Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens. Cicero says: “Therefore I say that it is not open to the man who measures the highest evil by the standard of pain to introduce the name of virtue.” The point being that it is not appropriate, from Cicero’s point of view, to state your philosophy in terms that allow it to be construed in a way so opposite to what Cicero thinks is right. And so that’s what Cicero’s argument comes down to: that Epicurean philosophy and talking about pleasure ends up being morally unworthy.
Cassius: But there are a number of essential things to point out. Epicurus has said many times that he would prefer to be misunderstood than not to say the truth that is profitable to all men. The point being that Epicurean philosophy requires a proper understanding of the things that are being studied. It’s not sufficient simply to listen to the words and have them magically take effect. Words do have multiple meanings, and it requires an active mind to understand which meaning is being referenced at a particular moment. Epicurus looks at the problem of happiness in human life, and while Epicurus was as educated and as eloquent as any of the elite philosophers, he thought that another approach was necessary for establishing virtue with a firmer foundation. And so Epicurus was not afraid to deviate from the existing method of articulating these arguments, to place them in a new and different light.
Joshua: Well, it’s the great problem, isn’t it, Cassius? Because when you first encounter an argument between two people and they both claim they’re trying to advocate for the same thing — both advocating for the good of the people, both trying to advocate for not wasting the money — but they come to wildly different conclusions. And the question is: how do you decide where to place your confidence?
I think of Lucian in his account of Alexander the False Prophet, in which you have one man claiming to speak for a god, and you have another man trying to explain to the people — who don’t want to hear it — that they’re having the wool pulled over their eyes. And it’s very difficult to know in some cases what the correct course of action is and who you should rely on and how you should vet people to understand what their motivations are.
For me, one of the great passages that deals with this comes from a play by Robert Bolt called A Man for All Seasons. And hopefully this gets us closer — without going into Roman history and all that — closer to an idea of what Cicero is trying to convey here. So in this story, you have Thomas More, who is Lord Chancellor of England, and he’s in conversation with a prosecutor. There’s a man who just left the room who is under heavy suspicion, but More is not going to arrest him. And this is the exchange. Alice — Thomas More’s wife — says: “While you talk, he’s gone.” And Thomas More says: “And go he should if he was the devil himself, until he broke the law.” And then Roper, this prosecutor, says: “So now you’d give the devil benefit of law?” And Thomas More says: “Yes. What would you do — cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?” And Roper says: “I’d cut down every law in England to do that!” And Thomas More says: “Oh? And when the last law was down and the devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper? The laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”
Joshua: In this little narrative, we have two people speaking about justice and accountability. The impression you might get is that Roper — in saying “I’d cut down every law in England if I could go after the devil, if I could hold him accountable, if I could bring him to justice” — you might think that it’s Roper who is the true defender of justice and reasonable accountability. But from More’s point of view, what Roper is proposing is actually far more unjust and more likely to breed unaccountability than the situation as it is. More says: when you cut down every law in England and the devil turns round on you, where are you going to hide? It’s very easy to talk about this stuff when it’s another person being accused. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself: if we do what you are suggesting, this is a rod being made for your own back.
So even though Thomas More in this passage is saying that he’d give the devil benefit of law — which sounds particularly crazy to a pious Christian — he’s actually with his more measured and moderate approach taking a stand which is much more protective of justice and accountability than what Roper is trying to do. The idea is: when you have two wildly divergent propositions and they’re both rooted in the same stated desire, how do you know who’s telling the truth? You can’t see the future. How do you evaluate which claim or which claimant has the best interests of the most people at heart? How do you determine who’s acting merely out of selfish self-interest? These are real and serious questions, and I don’t have a great answer to them.
Joshua: The way that Cicero relates this back to Epicurus is by saying: if you read Gracchus’s speeches, you’ll pronounce him the advocate of the treasury. But in fact it’s Piso Frugi who didn’t want to distribute the money from the treasury in the first place — it’s Piso Frugi who was against distributing his goods to every man as Gracchus thought proper. And the conclusion that Cicero comes to is: just because you read Gracchus’s speeches and it seems like he’s advocating for the treasury, you can’t rely on your first impression. Just because Epicurus is saying that he cares about virtue doesn’t mean he actually does care about virtue. If you look at the rest of what he’s doing, he places virtue in conflict with philosophy itself by placing pleasure — and not virtue — at the center of the whole story.
Cicero, I think, is trying to evoke a feeling of disgust, and we’ve encountered this feeling before in On Ends — from Cleanthes, in that story where he asks the reader to conjure up in their minds an image of a painting: the painting is of Pleasure sitting on her throne, and clustered all around her are the Virtues acting as her handmaidens. And we’re supposed to be horrified by this, because the idea that the Virtues serve as handmaidens to Pleasure means — from the point of view of Cicero and Cleanthes — that you’ve completely turned philosophy on its head. The entire purpose of what we’re trying to do has been flipped upside down, and it’s been flipped upside down in the service of selfish and sensual self-interest.
And as I listen to all of this and read through Cicero here, it does occur to me that just as Cicero is saying: sure, Epicurus says that he is an advocate of virtue, but when you read his work, he’s actually creating great problems for people who hold virtue to be the good — he’s actually placing pleasure in the position of the good.
Cassius: Joshua, your example of Thomas More and giving the devil his due is an analogy I think we should carry forward to what is probably an even more famous way of asking the same question, which is Machiavelli’s references to the ends justifying the means. What do we think Epicurus’s perspective on the general suggestion that the ends justify the means would be? Is the argument that the ends justify the means something that is always correct, always incorrect, or contextual? Would Epicurus recoil in horror at the suggestion that ends justify means, or would Epicurus say: obviously, that’s the case?
Joshua: Well, we’ve been dealing with the question from Cicero of why philosophy was devised in the first place, and we’re not going to be able to answer that fully. But philosophy by the time of Epicurus’s life is trying to do a whole different number of things. You have people like Plato writing his Republic, or Cicero writing On the Republic, On the Laws, and so on — philosophers who are thinking about what the ideal state should look like. Epicurus is not at all interested in that. He’s not writing about what the ideal state or the ideal setup of government should look like. He is focusing his efforts on teaching individual people how to be happier, how to live lives that are more pleasurable and more blessed than what they’re doing right now.
And so there’s not as much of a temptation for Epicurus to claim that some people are born to rule and others are born to serve — Epicurus doesn’t even have to address that stuff, really, because he’s not wading into those waters. He’s not saying this is what the ideal city-state should look like.
Joshua: Thomas More, interestingly enough, wrote Utopia of course, in which he takes Epicurus’s idea and does try to build a society on it. It’s a society that doesn’t exist and will never exist — that’s what “utopia” means: no place. But Epicurus himself is not trying to build the ideal city. He’s not trying to build the best kind of city-state or the best kind of group of human beings working toward a common goal.
That being said, I do think it’s possible in some respects to emerge from Epicurean philosophy with the view that Epicurus may have been a consequentialist — even though he certainly never called himself one. I say that because he talks so much in his works about choice and avoidance — this is kind of the bread and butter of consequentialist thought: how do you know what to choose and what to avoid? And for Epicurus, it leads to more pleasure. You quoted last week, Cassius, that Epicurus said when you go to a dinner: “I choose not the larger share and nothing else; I choose the most pleasant.” He’s saying that he is judging his behavior, choosing which behavior to follow based on the consequences of that behavior. And so in that particular instance, the telos of pleasure justifies the means of eating the most pleasant dish. He is laying out what I could interpret as a consequentialist view.
Joshua: His prime motive in all of this is not to establish one particular view of justice or of politics or anything else. He’s talking to individuals. And as we’ve been saying for weeks, when you’re talking to individuals, you’re talking about pleasure — and pleasure is something experienced and judged on an individual level. So my answer, to answer your question more directly: no, Epicurus does not lay it out as a law by fiat that the ends always justify the means. But he does say things that can be interpreted through this consequentialist lens — that something should be judged based on the results. And the shortest path to that is through choice and avoidance. We choose not the larger share but the most pleasant. We choose not the longer experience but the most pleasant. When the play ceases to please us, we exit the theater. He’s saying: you try to envision what the consequence is going to be, and if the consequence is greater pleasure, that’s something to choose; if the consequence is greater pain, that’s something to avoid. That is the consequentialist view — a discussion of the ends and of the means.
Cassius: Yeah, Josh, we kind of veered into that question perhaps unintentionally, and now I see that it’s probably the most interesting aspect of what we’ve been discussing today. You’re using the term “consequentialist,” I think, as a way of categorizing the view that the ends do justify the means. And you can point to a series of quotations — whether it be Principal Doctrine 10, or the Vatican Saying about always asking what’s going to happen to you if you pursue a course or choose not to pursue it — it’s relatively easy to construct the argument that that’s the direction Epicurus is going: that he places his end, his chief goal, in pleasure, and that Epicurus is not going to allow any subordinate goal to override the ultimate goal, which is pleasure. And it’s pretty easy to categorize Cicero’s objections to Epicurus as being based exactly on this ground — that Epicurus is placing his chief good in pleasure and saying that whatever you have to do to get to pleasure is acceptable in his philosophy. And that is a very challenging viewpoint, to say the least.
Kalosyni: If your goal is pleasure, there are so many choices that can come forward that it’s almost as if you need an example — a specific situation to examine the whole thing. But there can be different consequences depending on the amount of time that passes. So if you’re not clear about the ultimate results that you’re after, you could get caught up in looking at your choices incorrectly, because you’re only focusing on certain consequences and ignoring other results that may actually be more pleasurable.
Cassius: Yeah, I think you’re going in exactly the right direction. You said it’s almost as if you need a particular set of circumstances — and I think that really is the answer: you have to evaluate these questions in the context of a particular set of circumstances. And it’s the attempt to form a general abstraction — that the ends always justify the means — that becomes the problem, because clearly sometimes the ends do justify the means, but you have to be specific about what end and what means. Because there is no overriding ideal Form, fate, or necessity that allows you to take a rule like “ends justify means” and apply it to every situation.
We’ve had several great examples already today. The Gracchi brothers may well have sincerely thought that they were preserving the Roman treasury for a longer period of time by taking the actions they did to spend it. In the Thomas More argument — if you could, from this Christian perspective, take out the devil by violating every existing law in England, arguably, depending on the terms of your hypothetical, that might be worth doing. Thomas More is pointing out all of the bad results that could come from that. But there’s no way to answer that question in the abstract without looking at the individual circumstances.
Cassius: Cicero himself got into the very same dilemma with his handling of the Catilinarian conspiracy — Cicero had the Catilinarian conspirators executed even though it was against Roman law to execute Roman citizens. So this is a classic question of philosophy: under what circumstances do the ends justify the means? Cicero, Plato, the Stoics are going to take the position that virtue is inviolable — virtue can never be trumped by anything else. There’s a saying in the law: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall asunder.” There are all sorts of ways of stating that same cliché, that some things are so important they must never be violated no matter what the circumstances. And it’s very easy to construct hypotheticals that point out the problems with that approach.
As we begin to come to a close with today’s episode, I think we are seeing another one of these arguments by Cicero pulling at heartstrings in favor of virtue and implying that virtue, as an abstraction, is so important that we can never allow any other consideration to come close to it. And the very idea that pleasure should be compared to virtue as an equal or even a superior goal is for Cicero revolting to think about — we can never allow these two things to come into conflict. We’re always going to choose virtue over pleasure. And that’s the problem with Epicurus’s philosophy: he seems to say — and in fact does say — that pleasure is more important as the ultimate goal than virtue. Cicero will not accept the Epicurean perspective that virtue is a necessary condition for happiness. He thinks that any attempt to take virtue off the throne is doomed to create disaster.
Cassius: And so we get to the end of this argument almost where we started: it’s essential to look at the circumstances, the facts you’re talking about at a particular time and place and situation, and not allow a Platonic abstraction — that virtue transcends everything else — to take the place of practical reason in judging the effects of the choices in front of you as an individual human being at a particular place and a particular time. Joshua, as we begin to close today, how do you see this resolving?
Joshua: There is one aspect, Cassius, of Cicero’s criticism here that we haven’t really touched on today. We’ve dealt with the pleasure side of his criticism, but he does raise at the very end of section 20 another objection. He says: “I maintain therefore the impropriety of language which Epicurus uses when talking of virtue” — not just because he holds pleasure as the good, but because “he measures every great evil by pain.” We haven’t really talked about the pain side of it, and as you say, we’re running out of time today. We have a lot of loose ends here to go through, and every episode we seem to produce more rather than resolve them. So I don’t have a good way to wrap things up here at the end with any kind of resolution, except to say that what I’ve learned from dealing with Epicurus is: I try to give him the benefit of the doubt when I’m reading, to make sure that I’ve understood what he’s saying and I’m not running off in some direction he wasn’t even going in.
Joshua: And I think, Cassius, I see you trying to hold to this standard all the time as well. Because of what I mentioned earlier: when you’re dealing with two people who both claim that they’re doing the right thing — both claim to be acting virtuously, honorably, justly — but they’re proposing two wildly divergent ideas about what to do going forward, it’s not possible always to know what people’s motivations are. And so we talk about skepticism in the ancient sense of that word quite a lot, but having a healthy dose of what we sometimes refer to as lowercase-s skepticism I think is essential in going through some of this stuff. And also being able to withhold judgment until we have better evidence is a big part of it as well — and taking the time to think it through, and particularly taking the time to think it through with other people. I know I don’t have a mind that can provide every answer. That’s why this kind of conversation is so helpful.
Cassius: Thank you, Joshua. As we close, this reminds me of the cliché that there are at least two sides to every story. Cicero points that out in regard to the Gracchi and Piso. We’ve talked about other instances posing questions about ends justifying means. But while there may be at least two sides to every story, one thing that is true is that we only have a limited amount of time in which to live, and we are going to make decisions — even when we choose not to take an action, that is a decision of its own, and all of our decisions have consequences for the rest of our lives and the lives of our friends. So the last thing we can allow to happen is to get analysis paralysis and simply refuse to make decisions or take actions because we are not sure of all the consequences that are going to take place.
What’s important is to have a philosophy and a general approach to living that makes the most sense for us and seems most likely to lead to the best result. That’s what Epicurus presents. That’s what we talk about here in the podcast, and that’s what we’ll continue to pursue next week when we come back and move into section 21 of Part Three of the Tusculan Disputations. As always, we invite you to drop by the forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or our other discussions of Epicurus. Thanks for your time this week. We’ll see you again soon.