Later Greek and Roman ethics

The Stoics

Stoicism originated in the views of Socrates and Plato, as modified by Zeno of Citium (c. 335–c. 263 bce) and then by Chrysippus (c. 280–206 bce). It gradually gained influence in Rome, chiefly through Cicero (106–43 bce) and then later through Seneca the Younger (4 bce–65 ce). Remarkably, its chief proponents include both an enslaved person, Epictetus (55–c. 135), and an emperor, Marcus Aurelius (121–180). This is a fine illustration of the Stoic message that what is important is the pursuit of wisdom and virtue, a quest that is open to all human beings because of their common capacity for reason, no matter what the external circumstances of their lives.

Today, the most common meaning of the word stoic is a person who remains unmoved by the sorrows and afflictions that distress the rest of humanity. This is an accurate representation of a Stoic ideal, but it must be placed in the context of a systematic approach to life. As noted above, Plato held that human passions and physical desires are in need of regulation by reason. The Stoics went farther: they rejected passions altogether as a basis for deciding what is good or bad. Although physical desires cannot simply be abolished, the wise person will appreciate the difference between wanting something and judging it to be good. Only reason can judge the goodness or badness of what is desired. If one is wise, he will identify himself with reason rather than with desire; hence, he will not hope for the satisfaction of physical desires or worry that they might not be satisfied. The Stoic will feel physical pain as others do, but he will know that physical pain leaves the true reasoning self untouched. The only thing that is truly good is to live in a state of wisdom and virtue. In pursuing such a life, one is protected from the play of fortune that afflicts those who aim at physical pleasure or material wealth, for wisdom and virtue are matters of the intellect and under the individual’s control. Moreover, if matters become too grim, there is always a way of ending the pain of the physical world. The Stoics were not reluctant to counsel suicide as a means of avoiding otherwise inescapable pain.

Perhaps the most important legacy of Stoicism, however, is its conviction that all human beings share the capacity to reason. This led the Stoics to a fundamental belief in equality, which went beyond the limited Greek conception of equal citizenship. Thus, Seneca claimed that a wise person will esteem the community of rational beings far above any particular community in which the accident of birth has placed them, and Marcus Aurelius said that common reason makes all individuals fellow citizens. The belief that the capacity to reason is common to all humans was also important because from it the Stoics drew the implication that there is a universal moral law, which all people are capable of appreciating (see natural law). The Stoics thus strengthened the tradition that regarded the universality of reason as the basis on which to reject ethical relativism.

The Epicureans

Although the modern use of the term stoic accurately represents at least a part of the Stoic philosophy, anyone taking the present-day meaning of epicure as a guide to the philosophy of Epicurus (341–270 bce) would go astray. True, the Epicureans regarded pleasure as the sole ultimate good and pain as the sole evil, and they did regard the more refined pleasures as superior, simply in terms of the quantity and durability of the pleasure they provided, to the coarser pleasures. To portray them as searching for these more refined pleasures by dining at the best restaurants and drinking the finest wines, however, is the reverse of the truth. By refined pleasures, Epicurus meant pleasures of the mind, as opposed to the coarse pleasures of the body. He taught that the highest pleasure obtainable is the pleasure of tranquillity, which is to be obtained by the removal of unsatisfied wants. The way to do this is to eliminate all but the simplest wants; these are then easily satisfied even by those who are not wealthy.

Epicurus developed his position systematically. To determine whether something is good, he would ask if it increased pleasure or reduced pain. If it did, it was good as a means; if it did not, it was not good at all. Thus, justice was good but merely as an expedient arrangement to prevent mutual harm. Why not then commit injustice when we can get away with it? Only because, Epicurus says, the perpetual dread of discovery will cause painful anxiety. Epicurus also exalted friendship, and the Epicureans were famous for the warmth of their personal relationships; but, again, they proclaimed that friendship is good only because of its tendency to create pleasure.

Both Stoic and Epicurean ethics were precursors of later trends in Western ethics: the Stoics of the modern belief in equality and the Epicureans of a utilitarian ethics based on pleasure (see below Utilitarianism). The development of these ethical positions, however, was dramatically affected by the spreading from the East of a new religion, Christianity, that was rooted in a Jewish conception of ethics as obedience to a divine authority. With the conversion of Emperor Constantine I (c. 280–337) to Christianity by 313 ce, the older schools of philosophy lost their sway over the thinking of the Roman Empire.

Ethics in the New Testament

The Apostle Matthew (5:17) reports Jesus as having said, in the Sermon on the Mount, that he came not to destroy the law or the prophets but to fulfill them. Indeed, when Jesus is regarded as a teacher of ethics, it is clear that he was more a reformer of the Hebrew tradition than a radical innovator. The Hebrew tradition had a tendency to place great emphasis on compliance with the letter of the law; the Gospel accounts of Jesus portray him as preaching against this “righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees,” championing the spirit of the law rather than the letter. This spirit he characterized as one of love, for God and for one’s neighbour. But since he was not proposing that the old teachings be discarded, he saw no need to develop a comprehensive ethical system. Christianity thus never really broke with the Jewish conception of morality as a matter of divine law to be discovered by reading and interpreting the word of God as revealed in the Scriptures.

This conception of morality had important consequences for the future development of Western ethics. The Greeks and Romans—and indeed thinkers such as Confucius—did not conceive of a distinctively moral realm of conduct. For them, everything that one did was a matter of practical reasoning, in which one could do either well or poorly. In the more legalistic Judeo-Christian view, however, falling short of what the moral law requires was a much more serious matter than, say, failing to do the household budgets correctly. This distinction between the moral and the nonmoral realms now affects every question in Western ethics, including the way the questions themselves are framed.

Another consequence of the retention of the basically legalistic stance of Jewish ethics was that from the beginning Christian ethics had to deal with the question of how to judge the person who breaks the law from good motives or keeps it from bad motives. The latter half of this question was particularly acute, because the Gospels describe Jesus as repeatedly warning of a coming resurrection of the dead at which time all would be judged and punished or rewarded according to their sins and virtues in this life (see Last Judgment). The punishments and rewards were weighty enough to motivate anyone who took this message seriously, and the warning was given added emphasis by the fact that the resurrection was not going to be long in coming. (Jesus said that it would take place during the lifetime of some of those listening to him.) This is therefore an ethics that invokes external sanctions as a reason for doing what is right. At the same time, it is an ethics that places love above mere literal compliance with the law. These two aspects do not sit easily together. Can one bring oneself to love God and neighbour in order to be rewarded with eternal happiness in another life?

The fact that Jesus and the Apostle Paul too believed in the imminence of the Second Coming led them to suggest ways of living that were scarcely feasible on any other assumption: taking no thought for the morrow, turning the other cheek, and giving away all one has. Even Paul’s preference for celibacy rather than marriage and his grudging acceptance of the latter on the assumption that “it is better to marry than to burn” makes some sense, once one grasps that he was proposing ethical standards for what he thought would be the last generation on earth. When the expected event did not occur and Christianity became the official religion of the vast and embattled Roman Empire, Christian leaders were faced with the awkward task of reinterpreting these injunctions in a manner more suited for a continuing society.

The new Christian ethical standards did lead to some changes in Roman morality. Perhaps the most vital change was a new sense of the equal moral status of all human beings. As mentioned earlier, the Stoics had been the first to elaborate this conception, grounding equality on the common capacity to reason. For Christians, humans are equal because they are all potentially immortal and equally precious in the sight of God. This caused Christians to condemn a wide variety of practices that had been accepted by both Greek and Roman moralists, including many related to the taking of innocent human life: from the earliest days Christian leaders condemned abortion, infanticide, and suicide. Even killing in war was at first regarded as wrong, and soldiers who had converted to Christianity refused to continue to bear arms. Once the empire became Christian, however, this was one of the inconvenient ideas that had to yield. Despite what Jesus had said about turning the other cheek, church leaders declared that killing in a “just war” was not a sin. The Christian condemnation of killing in gladiatorial games, on the other hand, had a more permanent effect. Finally, but perhaps most important, while Christian emperors continued to uphold the legality of slavery, the Christian church accepted enslaved people as equals, admitted them to its ceremonies, and regarded the granting of freedom to enslaved people as a virtuous, if not obligatory, act. This moral pressure led over several hundred years to the gradual disappearance of slavery in Europe.

The Christian contribution to improving the position of enslaved people can also be linked with the distinctively Christian list of virtues. As noted above, some of the virtues described by Aristotle—for example, greatness of soul—are quite contrary in spirit to Christian virtues such as humility. In general it can be said that, whereas the Greeks and Romans prized independence, self-reliance, magnanimity, and worldly success, Christians emphasized meekness, obedience, patience, and resignation. As the Greeks and Romans conceived virtue, a virtuous enslaved person was almost a contradiction in terms; for Christians, however, there was nothing in the state of slavery that was incompatible with the highest moral character.

St. Augustine

At its beginning Christianity had a set of scriptures incorporating many moral injunctions, but it did not have a moral philosophy. The first serious attempt to provide such a philosophy was made by St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Augustine was acquainted with a version of Plato’s philosophy, and he developed the Platonic idea of the rational soul into a Christian view in which humans are essentially souls, using their bodies as a means to achieve their spiritual ends. The ultimate objective remains happiness, as in Greek ethics, but Augustine conceived of happiness as consisting of the union of the soul with God after the body has died. It was through Augustine, therefore, that Christianity received the Platonic theme of the relative inferiority of bodily pleasures. There was, to be sure, a fundamental difference: whereas for Plato bodily pleasures were inferior in comparison with the pleasures of philosophical contemplation in this world, for Christians they were inferior to the pleasures of spiritual existence in the next world. Moreover, Christians came to regard bodily pleasures not merely as inferior but also as a positive threat to the achievement of spiritual bliss.

It was also important that Augustine could not accept the view, common to so many Greek and Roman philosophers, that philosophical reasoning was the means to achieving wisdom and happiness. For a Christian, of course, wisdom and happiness can be had only through love of God and faith in Jesus Christ as the Saviour. The result was to be, for many centuries, a rejection of the use of unfettered reasoning in ethics.

Augustine was aware of the tension between the dual Christian motivations of love of God and neighbour on the one hand and reward and punishment in the afterlife on the other. He came down firmly on the side of love, insisting that those who keep the moral law through fear of punishment are not really keeping it at all. But it is not ordinary human love, either, that suffices as a motivation for true Christian living. Augustine believed that all human beings bear the burden of Adam’s original sin (see Adam and Eve) and so are incapable of redeeming themselves by their own efforts. Only the unmerited grace of God makes possible obedience to the “first greatest commandment” of loving God, and without it one cannot fulfill the moral law. This view made a clear-cut distinction between Christians and moralists of ancient Greek and Roman religions, no matter how humble and pure the latter might be; only the former could be saved, because only they could receive the blessing of divine grace. But this gain, as Augustine saw it, was purchased at the cost of denying that humans are free to choose good or evil. Only Adam had this choice: he chose for all humanity, and he chose evil.

St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics

After Augustine there were no major developments in ethics in the West until the rise of Scholasticism in the 12th and 13th centuries. Among the first significant works written during this time was a treatise on ethics by the French philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142). His importance in ethical theory lies in his emphasis on intentions. Abelard maintained, for example, that the sin of sexual wrongdoing consists not in the act of illicit sexual intercourse, nor even in the desire for it, but in mentally consenting to that desire. In this he was far more modern than Augustine and more thoughtful than those who even today assert that the mere desire for what is wrong is as wrong as the act itself. Abelard recognized that there is a problem in holding a person morally responsible for the mere existence of physical desires. His ingenious solution was taken up by later medieval writers, and traces of it can still be found in modern discussions of moral responsibility.

Aristotle’s ethical writings were not known to scholars in western Europe during Abelard’s time. Latin translations became available only in the first half of the 13th century, and the rediscovery of Aristotle dominated later medieval philosophy. Nowhere is his influence more marked than in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–74), who is often regarded as the greatest of the Scholastic philosophers and is undoubtedly the most influential, since his teachings became the semiofficial philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church. Such is the respect in which Aquinas held Aristotle that he referred to him simply as The Philosopher. Indeed, it is not too far from the truth to say that the chief aim of Aquinas’s work was to reconcile Aristotle’s views with Christian doctrine.

Aquinas took from Aristotle the notion of an ultimate end, or goal—a summum bonum—at which all human action is directed; and, like Aristotle, he conceived of this end as necessarily connected with happiness. This conception was Christianized, however, by the idea that happiness is to be found in the love of God. Thus, a person seeks to know God but cannot fully succeed in doing so in this life on earth. The reward of heaven, where one can know God, is available only to those who merit it, though even then it is given by God’s grace rather than obtained by right. Short of heaven, a person can experience only a limited form of happiness through a life of virtue and friendship, much as Aristotle had recommended.

The blend of Aristotle’s teachings and Christianity is also evident in Aquinas’s views about right and wrong and about how one comes to know the difference between the two. Aquinas is often described as advocating a “natural law” ethic, but this term is easily misunderstood. The natural law to which Aquinas referred does not require a legislator, any more than do the laws of nature that govern the motions of the planets. An even more common mistake is to imagine that this conception of natural law relies on contrasting what is natural with what is artificial. Aquinas’s theory of the basis of right and wrong developed rather as an alternative to the view that morality is determined simply by the arbitrary will of God. Instead of conceiving of right and wrong in this manner as something fundamentally unrelated to human goals and purposes, Aquinas viewed morality as deriving from human nature and the activities that are objectively suited to it.

It is a consequence of this natural law ethics that the difference between right and wrong can be appreciated by the use of reason and reflection on experience. Although Christian revelation may supplement this knowledge in some respects, even pre-Christian philosophers such as Aristotle could understand the essentials of virtuous living. One is, however, likely to err when applying these general principles to the particular cases one confronts in everyday life. Corrupt customs and poor moral education may obscure the conclusions of natural reason. Hence, societies must enact laws of their own to supplement natural law and, where necessary, to coerce those who, because of their own imperfections, are liable to do what is wrong and socially destructive.

It follows too that virtue and human flourishing are linked. When people do what is right, they do what is objectively suited to their true nature. Thus, the promise of heaven is no mere external sanction, rewarding actions to which one would otherwise be indifferent or which may even be against one’s interest. On the contrary, Aquinas wrote that “God is not offended by us except by what we do against our own good.” Reward and punishment in the afterlife reinforce a moral law that all humans, Christians as well as others, have adequate prior reasons for following.

In arguing for his views, Aquinas was always concerned to show that he had the authority of the Scriptures or the Church Fathers on his side, but the substance of his ethical system is to a remarkable degree based on reason rather than revelation. This is strong testimony to the power of Aristotle’s example. Nonetheless, Aquinas absorbed the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the Aristotelian system. In particular, his attempt to base right and wrong on human nature invites the objection that one cannot presuppose human nature to be good. Aquinas might reply that it is good because God made it so, but this merely pushes back one step the issue of the basis of good and bad: Did God make human nature good in accordance with some independent standard of goodness, or would any human nature made by God be good? If one gives the former answer, then one needs an account of the independent standard of goodness. Because this standard cannot be based on human nature (for then the argument would be circular), it is not clear what account Aquinas could offer. If one maintains that any human nature made by God would be good, then one must accept that, if God had made human nature such that humans flourish and achieve happiness by torturing the weak and helpless, that would have been what humans should do in order to live virtuously.

Something resembling this second option—but without the intermediate step of an appeal to human nature—was the position taken by the last of the great Scholastic philosophers, William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347/49). Ockham boldly broke with much that had been taken for granted by his immediate predecessors. Fundamental to his approach was his rejection of the central Aristotelian idea that all things have an ultimate end toward which they naturally tend. He therefore also spurned Aquinas’s attempt to base morality on human nature and with it the idea that goodness is closely connected with happiness, which is the ultimate end of human beings. Ockham was thus led to a position that contrasted starkly with almost all previous ethical doctrines in the West. Ockham denied all standards of good and evil that are independent of God’s will. What God wills is good; what God condemns is evil. That is all there is to say about the matter. This position is sometimes called a divine approbation theory, because it defines good as whatever is approved by God. As mentioned earlier, it follows from such a position that it is meaningless to describe God himself as good. It also follows that if God had willed humans to torture children, it would be good to do so. As for the actual content of God’s will, according to Ockham, that is not a subject for philosophy but rather a matter for revelation and faith.

The rigour and consistency of Ockham’s philosophy made it for a time one of the leading schools of Scholastic thought, but eventually it was the philosophy of Aquinas that prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church. After the Reformation, however, Ockham’s view was influential among Protestant theologians. Meanwhile, it hastened the decline of Scholastic moral philosophy, because it effectively removed ethics from the sphere of reason.