The fundamental question of Platonic ethics is ‘How should one live?’ (Republic 1.352d, Gorgias 500c). That question is not to be understood as ‘What is the morally best way to live?’, as is shown by the fact that in Rep. 1 an appropriate, though in Plato's view false, answer to it is that given by Thrasymachus, namely that one should live by emancipating oneself to the best of one's ability from the restraints of morality with a view to the furtherance of one's own interest. Rather it is to be understood as ‘How may one achieve the life which is, objectively, but from the point of view of one's own interest, the most worth living?’ (Rep. 1.344e). The Greek term for the achievement of such a life is eudaimonia (literally ‘having a favourable guardian spirit’ (daimōn)), conventionally translated ‘happiness’, but in view of its objective character better rendered ‘blessedness’ or ‘well-being’. According to Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics (EN) 1095318–20) it was universally acknowledged (a) that eudaimonia was the supreme good and (b) that the term meant ‘living well’ and ‘doing well’; nothing in the texts of Plato suggests that his use of the term conflicts with these claims. In the same passage Aristotle tells us that there were substantive disputes about what living well amounted to, some holding, for example, that it consists in acquiring wealth, others that it consists in a life of honour or of intellectual achievement; Plato depicts such substantive disputes in Socrates’ confrontations with Thrasymachus in Rep. 1 and Callicles in the Gorgias.

An outline of Epicurean ethics

Pleasure, according to Epicurus, is the single positive value, or ‘end’, towards whose attainment and maximisation all human and animal life is geared. An ideal Epicurean life gains its distinctive flavour from an orchestrated set of calculations aimed at that result, balancing in particular the relative contributions of bodily and mental pleasures, and, within those categories, of two distinct types, ‘kinetic’ and ‘katastematic’ pleasures. Bodily feeling is in a way focal, since mental pleasure and pain consist ultimately in satisfaction and dissatisfaction respectively about bodily feeling. For instance, the greatest mental pain, fear, is primarily the expectation of future bodily pain (which is the main ground, and a mistaken one, for the fear of death). And the greatest mental pleasure lies in confidence that bodily pain can continue indefinitely to be avoided or overcome. But although mental feelings ultimately depend on bodily ones, and not vice versa, mental feelings are a more powerful factor in the overall quality of a life. Someone in bodily pain – which may be unavoidable – can outweigh it by the mental act of reliving past pleasures and anticipating future ones. It is this ability to range over past and future that gives mental feeling its greater power. But misused, especially when people fear everlasting torture after death, it can equally well become a greater evil than its bodily counterpart.

Katastematic pleasure is the absence of pain.

Reactions to Stoic ethics

Stoic ethical doctrines provoke severe criticism from both ancient and modern readers. The criticism, however, expresses two sharply opposed views of the character and implications of Stoicism. These opposed views appear already in Cicero's comments on Stoicism, and they have affected interpretation and criticism of the Stoic position ever since.

Some critics attack the apparently extravagant, indeed outrageous, character of the Stoic conclusions. In the view of these critics, someone who actually accepted and practised Stoic doctrines would be so alien to us that he would be inhuman. Critics normally rest the charge of inhumanity on two features of Stoicism: (1) Since all reputed goods and evils except virtue and vice are indifferents, the sage sees no reason to be strongly concerned about anything other than virtue and vice. (2) The sage is free of all emotions, and so has no non-rational motive for being strongly concerned about anything.

When Cicero defends Lucius Murena in court, he seeks to undermine the effects of Cato's damaging and credible testimony against Murena, by ridiculing Cato's well-known Stoicism:

Although ‘ethics’ is a term that comes to us from the Greeks, Greek moral philosophy is notably different from typical modern discussions that fall under the same rubric. Some of our key moral concepts are absent or inconspicuous in Greek ethical debate. For example, much of modern ethics gravitates around the concepts of duty or moral obligation and rights, but neither of these concepts has any equivalent or close analogue in Greek speculation about how one ought to live. Similarly, the various oppositions between egoism and altruism or benevolence have no direct parallel in the ancient discussions. Since the Greeks have no counterpart to the Biblical injunction, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, the question of altruism or benevolence is not a central moral issue. The ancient gods made relatively few moral demands upon their worshippers. There is no Greek parallel to the Ten Commandments, or more generally to the Biblical notion of God as moral lawgiver. As a consequence of this fact, there is also no Greek equivalent to the Kantian notion of the ‘moral law’, as the secular, internalised version of divine command.

So much for the absence in Greek thought of some of the concepts that structure modern discussions in moral philosophy. On the other hand, the Greek moral vocabulary is dominated by three pairs of opposite terms that have no direct equivalent in modern terminology. The basic terms of moral evaluation are good–bad (agathon–kakon), admirable–shameful or noble–base (kalon–aischron), and just–unjust (dikaion–adikon).

In the last twenty years or so, the account of happiness given in the Nicomachean Ethics (EN) must have received as much scholarly attention as has ever been given to any philosophical treatment of anything. Not all commentators, however, are agreed that what Aristotle has to say there about happiness is sufficiently interesting to merit intense critical scrutiny. So, Sir Anthony Kenny, who has himself written quite extensively on the topic, concludes that

On Kenny's reading of the EN, Aristotle begins by assuming that the good life will be one in which the agent centres his life on a particular good and finishes by identifying that good as the activity of theōria, intellectual activity. Understandably, Kenny finds this view of happiness far from compelling.

In reading Aristotle in this way, Kenny stands on one side of a longrunning debate about what conception of happiness underlies the argument of the EN. In contrast to Kenny, many scholars have maintained that the conception of happiness in place until book x is rather an ‘inclusive’ one – i.e. one which would allow many goods to be included within happiness as its constituents.

A morally responsible agent is someone who is properly subject to the demands, expectations and evaluations of morality. In practice, we subject only normal human adults to these expectations and evaluations. We exempt non-human animals, inanimate objects and the insane from them and we subject children to them only to a limited degree (a degree that increases, of course, as they grow older). While praise and blame are not restricted to agents who are morally responsible, only morally responsible agents merit praise or blame for their actions. It may be appropriate or useful to praise and blame (or reward and punish) agents who are not morally responsible – for example as a means to controlling or altering their behaviour or dispositions. But such attitudes and treatment are not merited or deserved by these agents. Only morally responsible agents merit praise and blame for what they do. The task of a philosophical account of moral responsibility is to explain why some agents merit praise and blame for their actions. To execute this task is to identify the criteria for inclusion in the moral community.

There is no expression in Classical or Hellenistic Greek that corresponds to the English expression ‘moral responsibility’. However, the topic of moral responsibility was the subject of lively discussion and debate in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. For it was generally agreed by all major figures and schools that agents whose activity is properly evaluated in moral terms – that is, as virtuous or vicious – are distinguished by possessing the capacity of reason.

1. Action that displays the ethical character of its agent does so by virtue of the purposiveness that is operative in it. (See Nicomachean Ethics (EN) 1111b5–6.)

The category of purposive behaviour, behaviour that can be explained by giving its end, extends to brutes as well as human beings. But human beings are special among animals in having a capacity for articulable thought. Purposive behaviour in brutes is an immediate response to an opportunity for gratification of non-rational motivational impulses: its explanation draws only on those impulses and unconceptualised perception. The peculiarly human capacity for thought allows for purposiveness without that immediacy; thought can mediate gaps between project and execution. Thought that bridges such gaps is what Aristotle calls ‘bouleusis’ (‘deliberation’): see EN 111.3.

Deliberation as Aristotle discusses it seems to be a process of thinking engaged in before acting. But we can sometimes make sense of human behaviour in an importantly similar way, even though the agent did not actually deliberate. The form of deliberation is a form into which we can cast an explanation by reasons, and such an explanation can be appropriate for actions that did not issue from prior deliberation. And it is the nature of an agent's reasons, whether explicitly thought through or not, that reveals his ethical character.

Before doing philosophy, we tend to think that people, actions and institutions are good or bad, praiseworthy or deplorable. That we are wrong to have these beliefs is a point on which ancient and modern sceptics appear to agree. Ancient sceptical arguments about proof, say, or perception, are different from modern analogues, and in important respects less radical. But when we read the arguments that Sextus Empiricus retails to the effect that nothing is by nature good or bad, they appear familiar.

The appearance is misleading, however; ancient and modern uses of, and reactions to, sceptical arguments about value are profoundly unalike. If this is so, then pointing it out is of more than historical interest; it alerts us to a number of interesting possibilities about value, and moral value in particular.

I shall begin by looking at the ancient arguments (few and easily surveyable, it turns out) which try to undermine our confidence that people and actions really are good or bad. I shall also look at the ancient sceptics' account of the benefits of having been convinced by these arguments. Then I shall consider what seem to have been the standard ancient objections to moral scepticism, and the strength of the sceptic's defence. Doing so will, I hope, bring out the radical difference between ancient and modern attitudes to sceptical arguments about moral value.

No branch of philosophy has been more influenced by serious consideration of ancient writings in the past quarter of a century than has moral philosophy – or ‘ethics’, as it is often now called (a change in nomenclature which is itself a sign of that influence). This has made it more difficult to delineate helpful contrasts between ancient and modern moral philosophy. Had one set out to write an overview of ancient ethics some twenty years ago, it would have been relatively easy to contrast the sorts of issue which concerned ancient writers with those to be found in contemporary discussion. Whereas modern moral philosophers were still largely wrestling with the competing merits of utilitarian and ‘deontological’ accounts of moral action, the key notions in ancient ethics were rather those of virtue and eudaimonia – and although ‘eudaimonia’ has standardly been translated by ‘happiness’, it plays a very different role in ancient ethics from that given to happiness by utilitarians. For the ancients, to give an account of eudaimonia was to specify what made a life valuable – and, at least generally, the accounts they offered were far removed from the sort of reductive theories offered by utilitarians in terms of pleasure and pain or the satisfaction of people's desires. More generally, whilst modern moral philosophers focused on the question of how to determine the right action in any given circumstance, the ancients were primarily concerned with issues of character and the evaluation of a person's life considered as a whole.

Introduction

Socrates has asked the Eleatic Stranger whether people in his country consider sophist, statesman and philosopher one, two, or – there being three names – ‘divide’ (diairoumenoi) them into three ‘classes’ (genē) and ascribe a class to each name (So. 217a). The Stranger answers, ‘three’, but says that it is not a small or easy thing to ‘define’ each ‘clearly’ (So. 217b): he undertakes first to search for and ‘make plain by argument’ what the sophist is. The implication is that the inquiry set by Socrates will require the establishment of definitions of sophist, statesman, and philosopher. This task is undertaken and achieved for sophist and statesman in the eponymous dialogues: definition is what they set out to give and claim to have achieved.

Both inquiries contrast the definition sought with the mere assertion of a name, though the having of the name in common (So. 217c) is the starting point for the argument. Both involve separating the expertise in question from a host of rival arts, or forms of expertise, claiming the name for themselves. (Some of these are assigned roles as subordinate or collaborative kinds of expertise, while others are unmasked as impostors). And both define a paradigmatic example in order to originate, or complete, their search. Definition is achieved by dividing kinds of knowledge in order to connect them in an analytical account (logos) giving common meaning to the name.

Introduction

The fundamental political perspective explored in the Statesman is the authority of political expertise (considered a form of knowledge) in a dynamic temporal context. This theme accounts for its obsessions as well as for its limitations: its treatment of conflict, law, persuasion and possibility are all relative to, and radically shaped by, the fundamental and exclusive commitment to the authority of political expertise. (The construction of the dialogue as a whole reflects its own methodological commitment to the teleological, and so provisional, pursuit of inquiry.) The statesman is a cypher. His only relevant characteristic is the possession of the right sort of knowledge, and no interest is taken in his acquisition of, emotion about, or motivation in utilising this knowledge to rule.

Such sustained argument about the nature of the political expert's authority as related to the nature of his knowledge, is unique to the Statesman. That there is such a thing as political expertise (a politikē technē) is explored and asserted in other dialogues. That knowledge should have political authority – that because philosophical knowledge of the Good is required to order the soul and the city, philosophical knowledge should be ipso facto politically authoritative – is the burden of the Republic. That political knowledge (technē) should be used in forming the laws – and that the authority of the laws, its nature and mode of exercise, is therefore the authority which matters – is the burden of the Laws.

Introduction: story-telling and self-criticism

In Part I, we saw that the early divisions concluded with a logos of statecraft given by a systematic division of theoretical expertise: the statesman was defined as the herdsman of the human herd (267a8–c4). Young Socrates was contented with that definition. But the Stranger faulted its completeness and adequacy (267c8–dI). Whereas other herdsmen, for example the cowherd, practised all the arts their herds required – feeding, medicine, matchmaking, midwifery, music – the human statesman is challenged by a competitor in each of these domains. Though the interlocutors had awarded him the title, his claim to it is not secure so long as the challenges of rivals go unanswered (267e1–268c10).

That is as much as the text gives as the occasion for introducing the story. To avoid the disgrace of such an incomplete argument, the Stranger announces, ‘we must travel some other route, starting from another point’, adding when queried, ‘we must bring in a large part of a great story’ (268d5–e2). Yet the resumption of division is envisioned even as the story suspends it. The Stranger continues, ‘we must then – as in what went before – take away part from part in each case and so arrive at the furthest point of the object of our search’ (268d8–e2). The special reason for appealing to a narrative just at this point in the divisions is perplexingly unclear.

Such perplexity is only heightened upon reading through the story thus introduced.