This chapter sums up the main argument of the book and offers a brief overview of the reception of the Epicurean theory of justice.

This chapter provides an account of the agreements that lead to the creation of justice on the Epicurean view. In doing so, the three sections of the chapter complete the argument of Chapter 1 by focusing on the textual evidence in Epicurus and later Epicurean authors. The first section elaborates on the claim that the Epicureans defend a middle position in the nomos-phusis debate. The second section describes in more detail the content and function of agreements in Epicureanism. And the third section deals with the topic of who can make agreements on the Epicurean view, including the question of whether there can be agreements with nonhuman animals.

This chapter discusses the nomos-phusis debate of the fifth and fourth century BCE and introduces the book’s main argument: that the Epicureans defend a sophisticated middle position (vis-à-vis Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and some sophists, on the other) in this debate when it comes to justice. On the Epicurean view, justice is neither fully natural nor conventional; there is a robust virtue of justice and it is always better to be just than to be unjust, but it is not always better to obey the laws.

Modern discussions of Epicureanism often use the descriptions “legal positivism” and “natural law theory” without providing clear definitions of what is meant by these terms. This chapter remedies this deficiency by characterizing the Epicurean theory of justice and law from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of law. The first section develops a clear conceptual framework by distinguishing between different theses that characterize a view as leaning more toward legal positivism or natural law theory. The second section then tests Epicurean theory against these theses, concluding that even if the Epicurean account has some legal positivist leanings, it is overall closer to a kind of natural law theory.

This chapter argues that while being just is of supreme importance in Epicureanism, obeying the law in all cases is not: the Epicureans allow that laws whose adherence is not useful and whose violation does not entail negative consequences may be violated. In arguing for this claim, the chapter discusses a question that Epicurus posed himself in a work that is no longer extant, namely, whether a sage, an ideal agent, would violate a law, knowing he will escape detection. The chapter provides a detailed suggestion on how to understand Epicurus’ pronouncement, discusses alternative readings that have been advanced by other scholars, and addresses some objections that one could raise against the suggestion of the chapter.

This chapter shows that although the Epicureans claim that justice comes to be by agreements, they also argue for the existence of a robust virtue of justice. The first section of the chapter gives a general overview of the Epicurean theory of the virtues, while the second section examines in detail the passages in which Epicurean authors discuss the virtue of justice. The third and last section of the chapter turns to the precise relationship between contractual and aretaic justice on the Epicurean view. It argues that the former is a precondition for latter, as contractual justice specifies the content of aretaic justice and provides the developmental basis for aretaic justice to emerge.

This chapter argues that the Epicureans defend a kind of ethical naturalism. The first section of the chapter, focusing on ontology, shows that for the Epicureans justice is conceived of as an accidental property (sumptōma/eventum) and is of the same general sort as the properties that are investigated in science. The second section, turning to moral epistemology, argues that, on the Epicurean view, what is just is directly perceived, showing that the investigation of ethical properties happens in the same general way as investigation in the sciences on the Epicurean view.

This chapter relates how justice comes to be on the Epicurean view by examining in detail the Epicurean account preserved in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things V. In doing so, the chapter shows that the Epicureans are defenders of a kind of social contract theory and so side with defenders of nomos in the nomos-phusis debate. Nevertheless, their conception of nomos is importantly constrained by phusis. Furthermore, the chapter also argues against those readers who have characterized the Epicurean account of the social contract as Hobbesian. If the Epicurean account is to be assimilated to a modern view, the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are a much better fit.