The Morality of Happiness

"The book is called The Morality of Happiness . It’s not devoted entirely to Epicureanism: it’s a really deep and sophisticated presentation of the way these ancient philosophers went about thinking about ethics. So Julia starts with Aristotle, quite reasonably, because in some ways that’s the first systematic approach to ethics in this vein that we have, but also takes on those schools after Aristotle. So the Epicureans are one, the Stoics are in here as well. And then she also looks at some Sceptics and various other kinds of people like that. “What you want to do is live a life that avoids the harm and maximises the good” Why I think this is potentially interesting is that it’s a way of fitting Epicurus into a broader philosophical context and showing the ways in which Epicurean ethical theory is part of a way of thinking about approaching these questions that’s shared with Aristotle and the Stoics, but also what Julia does really well is draw out the various important differences between these schools and how they go about things. So for example, there’s a really interesting section about how these schools appealed to the notion of nature, or what is natural for humans to do. Aristotle has a view of what humans are by nature, the Stoics have a view of human nature, the Epicureans do too. They all share that. Epicurus thinks of us as animals: we are basically animals, although we have rational abilities that other animals lack. Our nature as living things is such as to dictate that we have various basic needs in order to keep going. So we need to drink, we need to eat, we need to remain at a certain temperature and so on, and also we have natural reactions to the world and those natural reactions boil down, principally, into the two reactions of pleasure and pain. So certain things cause us perceptible harm and certain things cause us perceptible benefit. And if you think of that as our nature, if you want to live as good a life as possible as an animal of that kind, what you want to do is live a life that avoids the harm and maximises the good. You do that by recognising what your natural needs are. One illustration of this is Epicurus’s treatment of desires that he sees people around him have, for example the desire for political power. Just imagine having a desire for political power, thinking that’s a good thing. Well if you understand properly what you are by nature, you’ll recognise there’s nothing really in your nature that shows that that’s something worth having. That’s not a natural desire to have for Epicurus. So it’s unnecessary. Epicurus thinks that reflecting properly on what your human nature is, will lead you to recognise that that’s a completely empty desire. And therefore you will stop desiring it, with the great benefit that you won’t get upset if people vote against your motion in the Senate. Nor will you strive to attain the rank of consul or prime minister and it will make your life a much better one as a result. It is, yes. That’s another aspect that Julia draws out: the way in which all of these theories are, in a way, egoist. The driving question is always ‘How can I make my life go as well as possible?’ Now in certain other formulations that will of course involve what Julia calls ‘other concern’, so it will matter to you how other people fare, because, for example, if you’re Aristotle you say that part of what humans are by nature are animals that live in societies. So your nature is as a social animal and in that respect the good of the people in your community is something that matters for you and for your life going as well as it could. But it’s a really important question whether the Epicureans have a strong foundation for other concern. That’s something that the ancient critics do worry about too. If really the central question is what does this do for my pain and my pleasure, then do I really genuinely care for someone else? Am I only caring for them in so far as it impacts upon my pleasure or pain? And I do think the Epicureans have something of a struggle to say anything particularly in favour of what we might call genuine other concern. No, I wouldn’t. Where I don’t follow them is: I don’t think that everything that’s of value can be reduced to its production of pleasure, and I think if you are sceptical about that, then many of the Epicurean recipes are significantly undermined. Oh yes. I think the Epicureans attitude to the divine is something that lots of people might take seriously. Their attitude to death, too, is powerful and persuasive in large part. And I also think they probably are right that many of the things we desire are things that actually don’t make our life better if we get them or worse if we fail to get them. So that’s certainly something to bear in mind. But their central claim that the only good is pleasure, doesn’t carry weight with me."