Blogosophy

EthicsEthics attempts to answer questions

Ethics

Ethics attempts to answer questions along the lines of "What is good?" and "How should I live my life?" Epicurus held that pleasure was the highest good, but he had a pretty complex understanding of what pleasure was. Firstly, pleasure is not just the active satisfaction of desires (eating when one is hungry), but also--and perhaps more importantly--pleasure is the static state of satisfaction you reach once you have satisfied your desires (the feeling of having satisfied one's hunger). Secondly, avoidance of pain and fear is a necessary part of pursuit of pleasure. That being said, there are pleasures that a prudent person will forgo in order to avoid the pains that will likely follow, just as contrariwise there are pains and difficulties that we deem worthwhile to bear in order to achieve resulting pleasures. The real goal is ataraxia : tranquility or peace of mind. The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together. - Epicurus

Pleasure, properly understood, as life's primary goal can be explained by combining an Aristotilean definition of "good" as that which we value for its own sake with the psychological observation that in point of fact the only thing that we clearly value for its own sake is pleasure/absence of pain (and not, say, self-actualization or any such working out of our distinctly human telos). The fact that pleasure is desirable and pain undesirable is something we can directly perceive, just as we perceive that fire is hot. However, when it comes down to satisfying our desires, "The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity." In other words, between the strategies of extending ourselves further and further in pursuit of pleasure or reigning in our desires to what is actually necessary, Epicurus would advocate the latter. There is nothing wrong with small luxuries, provided they can be had without too much trouble, but it is unwise to make one's happiness depend on them, since you necessarily thereby increase your chance of unhappiness and your current anxiety over whether you can continue to obtain happiness. Anxiety and fear for the future are the chief sorts of mental pain, and the biggest obstacles to the life of pure pleasure.

When it comes to the treatment of others, many people found (and still find) Epicurus shockingly immoral, for holding that there is no absolute standard by which injustice towards another is wrong but "only in consequence of the fear which is associated with the apprehension of being discovered by those appointed to punish such actions." Critics ask what kind of morality is it that says if you're sure that you'll never be caught there's no reason not to behave badly? Nevertheless, Epicurus argued that since you can never be free of the fear of discovery and retribution, no matter how many times you've gotten away with injustice before or how long you've remained undiscovered, and this sort of anxiety about the future is the worst sort of mental pain, "It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life."

Personally, I'm not completely convinced that there's no more solidly grounded rational reason to avoid injustice than fear of punishment, even with the understanding that the apprehension is in itself an ill and worth avoiding (i.e. that's it not just a calculus of the expected punishment versus the expected gain, but that there's an ongoing an perhaps large cost to having behaved unjustly). On the other hand, 2300 years later it's still controversial whether you rationally ought to be able to count on better behavior from self-interested people (or, indeed, anyone) than what you can exact through threat of sanction, and it seems clear that you cannot as a matter of fact rely on people behaving justly where there is no chance of being caught. It may be that you can show that people who cheat even when they won't be caught are behaving irrationally (at least in certain systems of justice), or even that there is an absolute standard of ethics, or both (e.g. when you assume that an all-powerful and all-knowing God will invariably punish transgressors against his universal law), but in practice neither of those seems to be a better guarantor of people's virtuous behavior than does Epicureanism. Posted by joshua at May 19, 2003 08:35 AM