Episode 302 - TD30 - Epicurus and Roads Paved With Good Intentions
Date: 10/04/25
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4747-episode-302-td30-epicurus-and-roads-paved-with-good-intentions/
Summary
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Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 302 of Lucretius Today. This week we’re continuing in section 20 of part three of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, with Cicero attacking Epicurus’ position on pleasure, and on the ethical system that Epicurus derives from his view of pleasure and his view of the universe. We’re going to continue in that today and probably move forward into section 21, but there are several loose ends from last week and section 20 that before we go further would be good to talk more about.
First of all, we were talking last week about the dispute between the Senate and the Gracchus Brothers, which involved both sides taking opposite positions. And the point of all that was that both sides were arguing that their plans were the best way to protect the Roman treasury, even though the Gracchi wanted to spend the money while the Senate wanted to keep the money. It’s not necessary to go any further into the details of all that other than to point out that this is one of many, many examples in life where both sides of a dispute appear to have good intentions while they are advocating totally different courses of action. And we talked about the difficulty evaluating people’s true intentions from the words that they say, but I don’t think we went quite as far as we could have to discuss what happens when in actuality both sides do have what we judge to be good intentions, but differ on the way to implement them.
In other words, there’s the cliche people often say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. It’s often insufficient simply to decide whether the intention behind a course of action is good or bad because of the difficulty of really knowing where somebody’s coming from, looking into the hearts of other people to determine what their true priorities really are. There’s no reason to presume that Tiberius wanted to undermine the Roman Republic. There’s certainly no reason to presume that the Senate wanted to undermine the Roman Republic. Both of them probably had the best interest of the Roman Republic in mind. So the point to pursue further here today would be that of looking beyond intentions in evaluating courses of conduct and including not only the intentions — which are certainly relevant — but also, where Epicurus is pointing, is a matter of predicting the actual results that are going to occur as a result of the choices that are being debated.
Regardless of the intention, what are the actual results that are going to happen depending on which course of action is chosen? The Vatican sayings talk about Epicurus telling us that in every decision we should look to what will happen depending on the choice that we make. There are numerous other citations we could also mention that would support what Joshua described last week as the “consequentialist” view. In other words, what are the consequences of your actions going to be? In fact, that word is very useful for this part of the discussion, in that we’re not at all only concerned about your intentions in pursuing a particular course of action. We’re looking at the consequences that will actually occur. As Kalosyni brought up last week, it can be very difficult to predict what the consequences of certain actions are going to be. It’s impossible with certainty to predict all consequences at all times because there is no fate, there is no supernatural necessity that requires that a particular action is going to lead to a particular result.
You’re always going to have contextual circumstances that will potentially surprise you and lead to unexpected results and unexpected differences in the way you think things may turn out. The best laid plans of mice and men is another cliche that people often use to describe the difficulty of knowing what’s going to happen, but just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean that we don’t have the need to try to determine what’s going to happen from our actions. And that’s where Epicurean philosophy places stress on physics, on the study of nature and also on canon - the study of how you know things. Because what often gets dismissed as boring science or technology is actually the way that you gain confidence that your predictions about what is going to occur will actually occur. So bringing this down to today, in every decision we have to make in life, not only in our own personal lives, we have to decide who we’re going to team up with, who we’re going to work with, who we’re going to separate ourselves from, who we’re going to agree with, who we’re going to disagree with.
Listening to their intentions is certainly a strong method of deciding what the right direction is going to be. If one person tells you that their intention is to go to Mars and another one tells you that their intention is to go to the moon, then you definitely have a very clear distinction. Then you can choose among those directions the way you see fit. But in most cases, people speak in much more generic terms, and they have very high sounding ideals, and it’s going to be up to you to separate what sounds good from the actual realities of what’s going to happen depending on what they’re advocating.
Kalosyni:
If I remember from what I said last week, there are short-term consequences, medium term consequences, and long-term consequences. So it’s important to consider all of those
Cassius:
Absolutely. The mistake that most people make initially is that in evaluating consequences, they look only to the immediate results. They fail to look down the road to the longer term results. The time range of your projection is clearly one of these issues to consider. Before I turn it back over to Joshua, there was another illustration from last week, the debate between Thomas Moore and the person he was speaking with about giving the devil his due, and the argument about whether if you could get rid of the devil, even if he had not committed a crime, would it be good to do so? That illustration brought to mind the difficulty that the person speaking to Thomas Moore could have argued to him that, well, the devil is the source of all of our problems, and if we were to get rid of the devil, all of our problems would be gone.
Thomas Moore was arguing that once you’ve gotten rid of the laws, what will happen when the devil turns back on you again? And of course the argument there would be a factual one. From the point of view of the other person, he might say that, well, once I’ve gotten rid of the devil, he’s not going to be able to turn back on me again. So that’s not a concern. And of course that would be another of infinite numbers of rabbit holes that can and do go back and forth in terms of, well, what are the terms of your hypothetical and what consequences are you talking about and do we need to consider? And that’s a very difficult road, but just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean we can dispense with it and avoid it in some way by looking to the intention or to any other single factor behind what a person is advocating.
Joshua:
So Cassius, Epicurus himself actually has in the Vatican sayings a quote that is really relevant to what we’re talking about, and that’s Vatican Saying 16: No one when he sees evil deliberately chooses it, but is enticed by it as being good in comparison with a greater evil and so pursues it. And whether the people who are listening would agree with the absolute terms that he’s putting that in — no one when he sees evil deliberately chooses it — I’m fully aware that not everyone’s going to be willing to take that on board. But I do think that everybody ought to be able to see that in our day-to-day lives, we encounter people with vastly different outlooks and opinions and advice on how we should move forward. And there’s conflict, right? And part of that conflict comes from a mismatch in values because what you want obviously depends on what you value and people value different things.
I watch a YouTube channel called Cinema Therapy where it’s a licensed therapist and a licensed filmmaker. I really recommend people watch this. I really, really enjoy it. One of the things the therapist often says on there is, it’s kind of the essence of family therapy that everybody’s behavior makes sense to them. If you want to understand the people in your life, you have to understand that the choices they’re making, the things that they’re doing, how they spend their time, that even if it seems utterly incomprehensible to you, if it didn’t make sense to them on some level, they wouldn’t be doing it. And Cicero himself when we moved today into Section 21, is more than prepared to allow that. Epicurus is just such a person that he is laying out this system of philosophy because it makes sense to him. I’ll read the first sentence here from section 21.
Cicero writes this:
And indeed the Epicureans, those best of men, for there is no order of men more innocent, complain that I take great pains to inveigh against Epicurus. We are rivals, I suppose for some honor or distinction. I place the chief good in the mind, he in the body, I in virtue, he in pleasure and the Epicureans are up in arms and implore the assistance of their neighbors and many are ready to fly to their aid. And then Cicero says, But as for my part, I declare that I am very indifferent about the matter and that I consider the whole discussion which they are so anxious about at an end. And then he’s going to launch into a discussion of the Punic war. But throughout Cicero’s works, we have from him these little asides where he’s talking about the lives of the actual people in the Garden, the people he’s arguing against, the people he spends pages and pages in all of his books arguing against because he’s so firmly rejects the idea that pleasure is the good, but he doesn’t think that Epicurus is a terrible person.
And in fact, as we mentioned many times, Cassius, he’s got Epicureans in his life. Cassius Longinus is one, Titus Pomponius Atticus, his dear friend and correspondent, is another. Presumably he wouldn’t be friends with these people or correspond with them if he didn’t see that they were choosing this, not because they thought it was a terrible thing and they were trying to destroy the Roman Republic that he was working in his own mind so hard to defend, but because they thought that it was the right thing to do. And one of the hardest things I think, is learning to appreciate that other people can reach conclusions or can make decisions that seem horrifying to us, but that they’re motivated to do so by a desire to do good, and they think that actually any other course of action would be insufficient, that any other course of action would be unwise or even terrible.
And it goes back again to that values mismatch. What do you value? Now, I don’t agree with Cicero’s framing that I Cicero place the chief good in the mind, Epicurus in the body. Epicurus places the chief good in pleasure, and pleasure affects the total experience of human life, and that is mind and body. But when Cicero says of himself, he says, I place the chief good in virtue and in the mind, and that by looking to these glorious heroes of the Greek and Roman past, we can get closer to this life of virtue. I don’t think that he is putting on airs — I don’t think that he is lying to us about his real intentions here. Cicero spent the last few years of his life — all the free time he could pull together in the last few years of his life amidst the wars of the first and second triumvirate at the end of the Roman Republic — he spent his free time on these philosophical questions because they’re so important to him and because he takes them so seriously.
So even though I’m frequently irritated by Cicero and by his framing, it’s not because I think that he’s lying. It’s not because I think that he is trying to do bad in his own mind by his own lights. He is trying to do the very best he can, and it serves us absolutely nothing to lie to ourselves about his motives, except for the service of making a cheap rhetorical point or trying to win an argument. But any counter argument we can come up with to what Cicero has to say will be stronger if we give him the benefit of the doubt, not weaker. I think on the internet today, they call this strong-manning as opposed to straw-manning. The straw man argument is this argument that you prop up as if your opponent had stated it in those terms because it’s so easy to take it down. But really any attempt to respond in this kind of dialogue is more effective if you engage with your opponent by being fully honest, by giving them credit that what they are saying and what they are doing, they are not doing to conceal bad intentions. They’re doing it because they have good intentions, because they think that this is the right course of action. That can be difficult to learn to deal with, but that’s part of growing up, that’s part of being an adult, isn’t it? It’s learning to see people for who they are, even if they’re arriving at completely different place, even if they’re starting with the same evidence, the same set of facts. Even if people agree to the same set of facts, that doesn’t mean they’re going to come to the same conclusions about them. And it comes down again to this question of values,
Cassius:
Right, Joshua. I particularly appreciate your citation of Vatican saying 16. I want to go back to that for a minute. I see that the Epicurus Reader translates that very close to this: No one who sees what is bad chooses it, but being lured by it as being good compared to what is even worse, he’s caught in the snare. That’s very similar to what Torquatus says in On Ends in section 32, where Torquatus is arguing to Cicero: Surely no one recoils from or dislikes or avoids pleasure in itself because it is pleasure, but because great pains come upon those who do not know how to follow pleasure rationally. And of course that becomes the thrust of Torquatus’ argument to Cicero that the proper pursuit of pleasure is not going to lead to the disaster, Cicero, that you claim that it’s going to lead to. This is a recurring theme throughout a lot of Epicurean philosophy. The other Vatican Saying that we’ve mentioned before is Vatican Saying 71, which is: Every desire must be confronted by this question, what will happen to me if the object of my desire is accomplished and what if it is not?
So we’re constantly looking to the end results of our actions in full to determine whether we want to pursue them or not. Evaluating someone’s good faith, whether they seem to be a nice person, what their intent is, is only a part of the picture. We probably all have grown up with older relatives in our families who in fact have what they think is our best interest at heart when they tell us to g_o to church every Sunday_ or follow the rules of society as they are, or don’t stick your head up lest it be chopped off, go along to get along, — all sorts of cliches that would lead you to ignore what you are in fact able to predict are going to be bad consequences. And their views are arrived at for the sake of considerations that you may disagree with entirely, or be just simply for the sake of immediate consequences, as opposed to the longer term consequences that you are able to see will eventually result, but that this relative or this other person is not able or not willing to see.
As you’ve started reading into Section 21, Joshua, I think Cicero is largely in agreement with us on this point. He’s willing to admit that the Epicureans have the best of intentions, and that they’re innocent and that they aren’t bad people who want bad things to result. The part you read is very interesting where Cicero acknowledges the differences. He says, I place the chief good in the mind and he and the body, but as you say, that’s not correct. That is not what Epicurus is doing. Epicurus is not placing the good of the body ahead of the good of the mind, nor is Epicurus ignoring the bigger picture that the mind depends on the body.
There are times when you have to place the interest of the body ahead of the mind. There are also going to be times when you place the interest of the mind ahead of the body. The continuing problem of Cicero’s analysis is that he comes from the perspective that there is a supernatural design, a supernatural fate, and that is a view of the universe that is simply not true from the way it actually operates. The universe is not directed by supernatural forces so that all things will work out for those who love the Lord --- that Biblical saying that all things work together for good for those who love the Lord is simply not true. If you take it out of that context of there being a supernatural divine Lord over everything, all things do not work together for good by necessity. The way the universe works is that all things work naturally, not for good. And if you count on nature to naturally be good, that kind of attitude leads to disaster, because of this very absence of Providence that would be required for the religious analysis to be correct.
Let me take us back for a moment to another point that Joshua made at the end of last week’s episode, when he pointed out that we had not yet dealt with Cicero saying that Epicurus’ evaluation of pleasure and the good and virtue was just as defective as Epicurus association of evil with pain. Cicero said, But suppose we’re 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 evil by pain.
In other words, Epicurus’s discussion of virtue is just as useless as his discussion of evil because just as Epicurus is trying to associate virtue with pleasure, he is also trying to associate evil with pain, and both of those are ridiculously improper ways of evaluating good and evil. This difference arises because Cicero comes from the religious perspective that good and evil have supernatural, providential, transcendental qualities that makes them always the same.
Epicurus comes from the opposite position - that good and evil are determined by circumstances. As Epicurus says to Menoeceus, _sometimes we consider the good to be bad and sometimes we consider the bad to be goo_d because our ultimate standard is in pleasure. The ultimate standard does not arise from the use of a word like good and evil - as if those words exist as an ideal form with meaning that never changes. What doesn’t change, and what is the standard given by nature to us is pleasure and pain, but where we find pleasure and pain is going to be very different depending on the actual circumstances that confront us over and over. That difference in view as to the location of the standard continues to be near the center of this dispute between Epicurus and Cicero.
Joshua:
So we are broadly speaking currently in the third section of Tuscan Disputation. We’ve already been through section two, and that was all about pain, and Is pain an evil? So we have dealt with that at some length, but it is good to revisit it, and I’m going to tie this back in. Let me go to a work that’s been on our minds recently, Cassius, Thomas Moore’s Utopia, because there’s an argument in that book that he makes (or that he says The Utopians made). This book was inspired in many ways by an attempt to explore Epicurean philosophy in a way that was safe for a deeply devout Catholic, as Thomas Moore was at a time when religious freedom was not really anyone’s priority. And so this idea which Amerigo Vespucci had sort of engendered in Thomas Moore’s mind was that on these other continents in the New World where Vespucci had traveled to (in one of the letters that survives and may have been falsely attributed to him) Vespucci reports that the way of life, the manner of living of the Native Americans that he encountered was Epicurean.
And that created this sort of germ that settles into Thomas Moore’s mind, and he thinks I might have a way to be able to talk about this stuff, because Thomas Moore was reading the same books we are. He’s reading Lucretius, he’s definitely reading Cicero as well. He’s got these books in front of him. He’s working through this stuff in his own mind, and now he has a safe way to explore these ideas — without committing to them — on the subject of the chief good and on pleasure. Thomas Moore says this, he says:
The Utopians say that the first dictate of reason is the kindling in us of a love and reverence for the divine majesty to whom we owe both, all that we have and all that we can ever hope for in the next place. Reason directs us to keep our minds as free from passion and as cheerful as we can, and that we should consider ourselves as bound by the ties of good nature and humanity to use our utmost endeavors to help forward the happiness of all other persons. For there has never been a man who was such a morose and severe pursuer of virtue, such an enemy to pleasure that though he set hard rules for men to undergo much pain, many watchings and other rigors yet did not at the same time advise them to do all they could in order to relieve and ease the miserable and who did not represent gentleness and good nature as amiable dispositions. And from this, the Utopians infer that if a man ought to advance the welfare and comfort of the rest of mankind, there being no virtue more proper and peculiar to our nature than to ease the miseries of others to free from trouble and anxiety in furnishing them with the comforts of life in which pleasure consists. Nature much more vigorously leads us to do all of these things for ourselves. A life of pleasure is either a real evil, and in that case we ought not to assist others in their pursuit of it, but on the contrary to keep them from it all we can as from that which is most hurtful and deadly, or if a life of pleasure is a good thing so that we not only may but ought to help others to it, why then ought not a man to begin with himself?
So we have that question. First of all, if virtue means at least in part easing the misery and pain of others, why is it not virtuous to ease our own misery and pain? This is in Thomas Moore’s Utopia how they get to pleasure, and he expresses it even more clearly than this. He says, Since no man can be more bound to look after the good of another than after his own for nature cannot direct us to be good and kind to others, and yet at the same time to be unmerciful and cruel to ourselves. Thus as the Utopians define virtue to be living according to nature. So they imagine that nature prompts all people on to seek after pleasure as the end of all they do.
Now, that is not at all a bad starting place if you’re interested in identifying the chief good. And you could imagine reading some of this directly out of Epicurus, that virtue means living according to nature, and nature prompts all people on to seek after pleasure as the end of all they do. That’s why pleasure is the chief. good. And moreover, since virtue means to ease the pain and hardship of others, it also must be virtuous to ease our own pain and hardship.
I can see this kind of argument posing a real challenge to Cicero in his criticism of pleasure. But this is where we run into an issue which is: For Cicero, he is okay, as we’ve talked about in the past, talking about pleasure even under dire circumstances. Even when Marcus Regulus returns to the Carthaginians to be tortured — and he does so of his own free will under his own power — Cicero can say that he is happy when he is making that decision. Cicero is never going to say that pleasure is the chief good — we’re not going to hear that from Cicero ever. But he is willing to acknowledge that pleasure is desirable. He’s not so obtuse that he’s going to suggest that there’s no reason to even desire pleasure. Of course, Cicero desires pleasure. He goes to his villa in the country to get away from it all for a while and to do the things he enjoys doing. So even though he’s never going to acknowledge that pleasure could hold a position as the chief good, he is willing to make some compromise on the position of pleasure within a philosophy that is focused on virtue as the proper end (by his lights) of human life.
But this is where pain comes in, and this is why on the question of pain is even more difficult for Cicero to accept Epicurus’ opinion on pain than Epicurus’ opinion on pleasure. Pleasure is desirable. We all feel that pleasure is desirable, and Cicero is not denying that he has moralistic or legalistic reasons — virtue-based reasons — for rejecting the instinct that motivates us toward pleasure. He’s not going to deny that pleasure feels good or that we’re strongly motivated by it. But when it comes to pain, Cicero comes to a very different position with regards to what Epicurus has to say. Cicero is willing to allow certain movement on the question of pleasure. He is not going to budge on pain.
And we’ve been through the section two of Tusculan Disputations about pain, and we’ve talked about this at length, but for Cicero, saying that pain is the greatest evil is the death of virtue, because you’re saying when you say that pain is the greatest evil, you’re saying that pain is a worse evil than dishonor, you’re saying that pain is a worse evil than immorality. You’re saying that pain is a worse evil than living entirely without virtue. So the idea that pain is the greatest evil is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that virtue is the supreme good. Cicero can get along with pleasure. He’s okay talking about pleasure, and he’s at least willing to consider some of what Epicurus has to say about pleasure. But on the subject of pain, he can’t agree because Epicurus’ view of pain is so in conflict with Cicero’s view of virtue. The two cannot coexist. You cannot hold both of these ideas, that pain is the greatest evil, when Cicero thinks that the greatest evil is to live a wretched and immoral and dishonest and dishonorable, absent any virtue. Cicero thinks that clearly any philosopher who thinks that it’s worse to be in pain than to behave without virtue is not a philosopher at all from Cicero’s point of view. And we’ll have to bring up that quote, which I will look for now Cassius if you want to get started on some of this. But I think that it’s so important to zero in on what he has to say here about pain because he reaches a different conclusion about pain than he does about pleasure.
Cassius:
Yes, Joshua, while you look for that, I would remind us of the example Cicero has brought up relatively recently about the Stoic philosopher who when confronted by pain gave up his views of Stoicism, because he realized that pain was such a problem that he could not take the Stoic position any longer — that pain is not an evil, as Stoicism required him to maintain. These issues are basically two sides of the same coin, but depending on which one you’re looking at at a particular moment, one can appear to be much stronger than the other. And I think you’re right that now that Cicero is speaking about pain, he is even more inflexible than he is about pleasure. It’s an essential part of Cicero’s argument that pleasure is entirely disreputable, ignoble, unworthy, and that therefore it should not be any part whatsoever of the goal of life. Sort of in a reverse way, he’s doing the same thing with pain, in that pain cannot be considered to be evil because pain is such an important part of what Cicero is going to advise his Roman citizens to pursue. He’s going to advise them to become soldiers, to train themselves in military affairs, to be willing to do the things that Marcus Regulus did in undergoing pain for the sake of the ideals that Cicero espouses. And so therefore it’s particularly offensive to Cicero for Epicurus to consider pain to be an evil.
Joshua:
In section five of part two of Tuscan Disputations, this is the passage and he immediately goes into as he criticizes all of the philosophers who have come to the contrary opinion. And of course, Epicurus’ name comes up, so let’s look at that for a moment. It starts when the student says, I look on pain to be the greatest of all evils, and Cicero his gives his cool and lofty question in reply, Even greater an evil than infamy? And the student says, I dare not indeed insert that. And I blush to think that I’m so soon driven from my ground. Then Cicero says, you would’ve had greater reason for blushing had you persevered in it for what is so unbecoming, what can appear worse to you than disgrace, wickedness, immorality to avoid which, what pain is there, which we ought not, I will not say to avoid shirking, but even of our own accord to encounter and undergo and even to court that.
In other words, Cicero is saying that if you’re faced with the choice of disgrace, wickedness, immorality, and infamy, it ought to be obvious to you that you should be willing to suffer any pain — any pain of the body or of the mind — rather than fall into dishonor and disgrace. And in section six of part two he goes on, he says, First then I will speak of the weakness of many philosophers and those two of various sects, the head of whom both in authority and antiquity was Aristippus (the pupil of Socrates and the founder of cynicism). And after him, Epicurus easily gave into this effeminate and innervated doctrine. It’s interesting also that when Cicero wants to use language to imply that Epicurus is effeminate for holding these views, I suspect that if you go through these texts, he is much more likely to use this kind of language when Epicurus is talking about pain being an evil than he is when Epicurus is talking about pleasure being the chief good.
The idea that pleasure is the chief good is not nearly as rankly offensive to Cicero as the idea that pain is an evil. And I suspect, and I haven’t done the work, but I suspect if you go through Cicero’s texts as we’ve been doing, you’re going to find that he reserves his sharpest barbs for what he perceives as the effeminate and innervated doctrine that pain is the greatest evil. So this is one half of Epicurus view on pleasure and pain, but for Cicero, this eclipses everything that Epicurus says about pleasure. It really seems that what he finds so distasteful about Epicurean philosophy has much more to do with this question of pain. And in that same paragraph, he says, What disgrace, what ignominy would he not submit to that he might avoid pain when persuaded that it was the greatest of evils? So the question he sets up here is, are you going to endure pain to avoid infamy and disgrace, or are you going to endure infamy and disgrace in order to avoid pain?
Cassius:
Yes, Joshua, you are highlighting an extremely important issue. Let me at this point bring in another source that we’ve gone over in the past, which is where Frances Wright deals with this issue. In chapter three of her A Few Days In Athens, she has Epicurus speaking to a student by the name of Theon and they have this exchange: If you ask me, I shall say that I feel myself virtuous because my soul is at rest. And the student says, If this be your criterion, you should with the Stoics deny that pain is an evil. And she has Epicurus say this:
To deny that pain is an evil is such another quibble as the alien’s denial of motion that must exist to a man which exists to his senses and as to existence or non-existence abstracted from them. Though it may afford an idle argument for an idle hour, it can never enter as truth from which to draw conclusions. In the practical lessons of a master, to deny that pain is an evil seems more absurd than to deny its existence, which has also been done, for its existence is only apparent from its effects upon our senses. How then shall we admit the existence and deny the effect, which alone forces the admittance? But we will leave these matters to the dialects of the portico.
So to get back to your point, Joshua, yes, Cicero is focusing on how ridiculously offensive it is to say that evil is defined by pain. Cicero wants to define evil by something that transcends pain. He wants to say that evil is established essentially by the gods or an absolute and a Platonic ideal, and that to tie evil to pain is to trivialize the entire concept of evil.
Joshua:
Yeah, I think that’s right, and it’s not to say that Cicero would stroll into a children’s hospital where these kids are suffering from horrible maladies that they certainly didn’t ask for and didn’t deserve and mock them for it because they’re in pain. It’s not that he’s in love with pain or he wants to cause it to others or to experience it himself. This goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of today’s conversation. His intention here is not to celebrate pain or the endurance of pain as such, his position is that if you have a choice between feeling pain and living in infamy, living with dishonor, living a disreputable life, it’s morally incumbent upon you to choose to endure pain rather than experience this other feeling, which may not hurt as much in the moment, but which from Cicero’s point of view is so much more degrading and life destroying than just the feeling of pain is by itself. I think that’s the way I could spin what he’s saying and put it in the best possible light. He’s not an advocate for pain. He sees himself as an advocate for virtue, and sometimes living according to virtue means not just living with pain, but embracing pain, making decisions that you know are going to result in pain because you’re looking for something out of that that is going to help you live virtuously.
Cassius:
Yeah, Joshua, at this point in our discussion, I’m reading forward into section 21, and I think I would like to see us defer the discussion of the Punic War reference and the rest of what Cicero says into next week, because I think that there is a really important issue involved in Cicero’s argument that pleasure is so disreputable that we would never be willing to talk about it in front of the senate or in front of the people or in front of the army. I want to come back to that next week because ultimately I think that really goes to the heart of everything we’re doing with the podcast and with EpicureanFriends.com. Is it possible to defend pleasure and Epicurean theory in public and not be embarrassed? But let’s come back to that next week because we really have to deal with that at length and separate from today.
You’ve been focusing on the correct point that so much of the dispute that we’re talking about — so much of what’s important in predicting the future and in actually making choices in real life — is to put aside the fact that Cicero may have had the greatest of good will in pursuing the philosophy and the arguments that he did. It’s not necessary for us to conclude that Cicero or Plato or any of these other philosophers are bad people. Certainly some of the reasons that we think that they adopted the philosophies that they did, we would condemn and say they are bad, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they had nothing but the best of intentions behind their philosophies. The reason we would embrace Epicurean philosophy, and reject the academic skepticism or the Platonism of Cicero and his friends, is because of the results that they produce.
And so when Cicero, as he does at the end of Section 20, concludes part of his argument by saying that it’s improper to talk about virtue the way that Epicurus does — it’s improper to talk about evil the way that Epicurus does — in the final analysis it’s not a question of what’s proper or improper. We’re not evaluating the nice sounds of these words. We’re not evaluating whether they appeal to us in terms of glory and honor and other high sounding words. We are evaluating the choices and the different perspectives on what they produce as a result in actual human life? What do they end up bringing into existence in our lives and the lives of the people around us? Does it really lead to a productive response to postulate there being divine providence or realms of ideal forms that may evoke all sorts of beautiful ideas within our minds, but which when we attempt to apply them lead to disaster in actual human life?
There are all sorts of circumstances in life where our ideals come into conflict with what we can see are going to be the effects in reality of pursuing those ideals. The trolley problem is just one of many examples. How do you make decisions when all courses appear to lead to bad results, when there is no option which is all fun and games and entails no pain whatsoever, where all choices appear to be bad? In those cases, it doesn’t help to simply dwell on the meaning of good or the meaning of bad. The only thing you can do is attempt to evaluate the actual consequences, the actual results of your actions, as best you can — ALL of them short-term, long-term, medium term — and make your choice depending on what you think is actually going to happen. The words good and evil do not answer the questions for you. There is nothing inherent in those words, good and evil, which answer for you which goods and which evils are the appropriate to choose in any particular circumstance.
Cicero thinks it’s inappropriate to talk about virtue the way Epicurus does and to talk about evil the way Epicurus does. Epicurus is looking beyond those labels —beyond good and evil — because he realizes that the application of labels does not ultimately answer the questions that have to be answered in human life. You only have a certain amount of time to live. You must proceed to take action regardless of the labels that are floating out there. Vatican Saying 29 says I would certainly prefer as I study nature to announce frankly what’s beneficial to all people, even if none agrees with me, rather than compromise with common opinions and reap the frequent praise of the many. Compromising with common opinions is where Cicero is going when he’s insisting that words like virtue and evil have an absolute meaning that everyone understands all the time. Epicurus is going to look beyond the labels to the actual results.
Joshua:
Well, we have covered a lot of ground today, Cassius, and no doubt these are issues we’re going to have to keep coming back to again and again and again, particularly as we go through these works by Cicero. Cicero is motivated by what he thinks are just and honorable and virtuous desires, and the choices he makes are consistent with those motivations. So when we’re engaging with other people in dialogue, we have to realize that even though their behavior, their choices, the decisions they make, even though they don’t make sense to us, they might very well make sense to them. And in fact, it’s hard to imagine how someone could so consistently act a certain way unless it did make sense to them on some level — unless they could rationalize it as we ourselves no doubt have many things that we rationalize.
At the end of last week’s episode, we had a brief conversation about whether the ends justify the means, and whether that was something reasonable to talk about in the context of Epicurean philosophy. Looped in with that is something that we touched on but didn’t go into too much depth on. And that is the ethical theory of consequentialism. And it would be fair to point out that there is a line from Epicurus in the ancient world through modern thought on precisely this question. It’s all through utilitarianism, which was hugely interested in what Epicurus had to say about pleasure and pain. Jeremy Bentham in his principles of morals and legislation says this nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong on the other, the chain of causes and effects are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, and in all we think.
In other words, Bentham is saying that if pleasure is the goal and if pain is something to be avoided, then you choose the course that yields the most pleasure or the richest pleasure, and you follow the course that hopefully furnishes the least amount of pain. But as Cicero has clearly demonstrated for us today, it’s not easy to get people with very different values and very different views and very different opinions to come together to agree to this stuff. And I think one area that we could talk about from modern life, hopefully without causing too much trouble, is the question about how we should feel and what we should do, what we should advocate for on the relationship between causes and their effects. I can think of at least one example that really to me encapsulates the consequentialist view and why it works the way it does and why it can sometimes to some people seem like a horrifying choice. This is just like Cicero was horrified at the idea that you would suffer infamy rather than suffer pain.
The example comes from one problem in modern societies, which is widespread dangerous recreational drug use. Part of that is using syringes to inject the substance into the body. And so you’ve got a big difficult thing to talk about on that front. But then you also have the problem of, well, if two people use the same syringe or the same needle to inject the substance, then you also have the infectious disease side of the problem. And this is a rich field for consequentialism to look at because what governments have started to do in response to this is to sponsor programs to distribute clean syringes, needles. By using them, you are dramatically reducing the risk of the spread of infectious disease. But from the other point of view, you’re also enabling a practice that could be seen as destructive, recreational hard drug use, and how you navigate all of the different issues that are involved here.
Number one, should we prioritize the problem of infectious diseases over the problem of drug use? Should the state have a role in enabling people to make these choices that the state also wants people to stop making? And so there’s a lot of really difficult issues at the core of this, and people because of their values, because of their experiences come to wildly different conclusions about them. But a consequentialist might look at this and say it’s true that by distributing clean paraphernalia, let’s call it that we are not doing anything on that front to prevent recreational drug use, but what we are doing and what we can demonstrate that we’re doing using statistics and epidemiology and so on, is reducing the risk of the spread of these terrible, terrible diseases, these afflictions that cause so much pain and so much suffering for so many people.
And so from that point of view, it would seem like yes, we should also have other programs to help people recover from substance abuse, but we shouldn’t worry that we are enabling the problem. We’re doing this in order to solve a very difficult problem. So that is one example of what this can look like in practice. Utilitarianism is built on consequentialism and its results, and I think this is something that we should keep in mind, something we would be fruitful for us to talk about. Epicurus obviously doesn’t use the word, and might not embrace it for himself if he knew it, but it’s certainly adjacent to everything that we’re talking about here.
On the other side of consequentialism you have virtue ethics, which would say, for example, that enabling recreational substance abuse is a greater evil than the spread of disease from recreational substance abuse. And so from the virtue ethicist point of view, looking at the consequences of distributing the needles is looking at the wrong side of the problem. What you should be looking at is the morality of the choice you’re making and what you are saying, what you are signaling to other people by doing this. Because if you’re going to cooperate in distributing clean needles to these people, you are by your body language, by the choices you’re making, essentially saying I think this is okay. I think it’s okay to make this choice to use these substances in this way. And the consequentialist would say, no, that’s not at all what I’m trying to do. What I’m trying to do is to solve the problem that I can solve. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t work on the other problem at the same time. But the virtue ethicist point of view and the consequentialist point of view are in conflict on so many issues that are visceral and deep and heartfelt and passionately argued by people on both sides.
And as we’ve been saying all morning long now, the idea that you could just denounce the motives — what I perceive to be the motives — of the other person, and that’s as good as having dealt with the argument — you have to be able to be willing to acknowledge that people’s motives can be good and they can still disagree with you. I think that’s kind of our big summary of today’s episode, that people’s behavior makes sense to them, the choices they make sense to them. And it’s not easy as we have multiple competing views and values in different people all trying to get in there and fix the problem. We don’t fix the problem by lying to ourselves about the motives of the people who disagree with us, I guess is my upshot here. I’m not saying trust everyone, give people the benefit of the doubt. Assume that they take their own views, their own values very seriously, just as seriously as you take yours, and you may not come to an agreement, but you’ll be in a much better position to have a dialogue on that point. And as in the case of these horrible diseases that we’re talking about, some of these issues are deadly serious.
Cassius:
They’re definitely deadly serious, Joshua, and I think you’ve given us a good illustration that brings up to date the error of Cicero’s analysis. Cicero would look at your example and say that it is not virtuous to distribute needles in a context like that, and therefore I’m not going to do it no matter what the result in terms of the spread of disease. Cicero looked at the Gracchan reforms and said, you’re violating the treasury, and I’m not going to approve of that, no matter how many Roman soldiers are displaced from their farms. As I cited previously, it’s the height of irony for Cicero to take that kind of position, because he himself violated the constitution of Rome by executing the Catiline conspirators, which was totally against Roman law to do. But Cicero looked in that instance in his own context to what he thought was the ultimate result that would happen if he did not execute them, and he went with the long-term actual result as opposed to following existing Roman law. That is the limitation of Cicero’s approach. There is no ultimate law of virtue. There is no ultimate law of evil to tell us and answer these difficult questions about how to actually make decisions in life. Epicurus tells us to look to the actual results and not to the labels of words like good and evil. That’s ultimately the point that Cicero either misses or refuses to acknowledge.
Now next week, Cicero is going to argue that it is impossible in respectable company to advocate Epicurean ethics. It’s impossible, according to Cicero, to advocate Epicurean ethics in public to the Senate, to the people, to the soldiers, and I want us to deal with that at length, because I think he’s dead wrong, and we need to show why he’s wrong and how he’s wrong.
The source of his error is in this issue that we’ve been discussing today. Calling something good, calling something evil does not answer the question. Looking to the final results of any action places good and evil on a stronger foundation by pointing out that good and evil depend on actual reality and not on your ideals, not on your intent, not on the way you frame the words so that you sound good when you’re talking in public like Cicero likes to do.
So let’s hold the thought at that point for this episode. This has been an important topic, and we’re going to get into it even deeper next week. We will finish section 21 and then we’ll start moving a lot faster as Cicero turns his attention away from Epicurus onto some other philosophers that we can go through at a much faster pace. But these recent sections — 18, 19, 20, 21, — are full of Epicurean theory that’s important to understand, and by hearing it stated from the wrong point of view — from Cicero’s point of view - we can get a lot better understanding of the way we should actually interpret Epicurus.
We’ll come back and do more of that next week. As always, we invite you to drop by the Epicurean Friends Forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions about this episode. Thank you for your time today. We’ll be back next week. See you then. Bye.