Bett, Richard - Sextus's Against The Ethicists - Scepticism, Relativism or Both

Sextus's Against the Ethicists:
Scepticism, Relativism or Both?

Richard Bett
In Book XI of Adversus Mathematicos, entitled Against the Ethicists, Sextus

Empiricus appears to subscribe to a form of ethical relativism. He argues
that nothing is *by nature' (phusef) either good or bad. The argument
seems to turn on the fact that different things are believed to be good by
different people (68-78,89). And the upshot of this argument is that one
can speak of things as desirable or undesirable only in relation to a certain
person (114), or on a certain occasion (118). In order for anything to be
describable as good or bad in reality, or "by nature', it is suggested, its
goodness or badness must be 'common to all' (koinon panton69,71); that
is, its good or bad effects must be uniform for everyone. That nothing
exhibits this required uniformityand hence, that nothing is Tjy nature'
good or badis what the references to disagreement about good and bad
are apparently designed to establish. Now, it is in virtue of this denial that
anything is "by nature' good or bad, and the accompanying assertion that
things are good or bad only in relation to specific individuals or circumstances, that the sceptic is described as One who suspends judgement'
(Epechon, 160; cf. Ill, 150); and it is this suspension of judgement which is
said to give rise to the sceptic's calm and untroubled attitude to life. Those
who do believe that things are good or bad by nature are burdened with a
great source of worry and concern, all of which the sceptic, through not
holding the belief, manages to avoid (110-67).
This is by no means the only place in Sextus where claims concerning
relativities are used to generate a supposedly sceptical outcome; to cite
only the most obvious example, the Ten Modes and the Five Modes both
contain a 'Mode from Relativity' (PH1135-140,167). However, Against the
Ethicists is perhaps the place where this kind of argumentative strategy is
most explicit and most fully developed. Very few scholars have taken
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124 Richard Bett
much notice of this work;1 but such reactions to it as are recorded in the
recent literature have been of two kinds. One reaction has been to accuse
Sextus of gross inconsistency. It has been held that the relativity arguments in Against the Ethicists and elsewhere, so far from being helpful to
the sceptic, are actually incompatible with anything which could reasonably be called scepticism.2 The other reaction has been to try to assimilate
Against the Ethicists to the more familiar form of Pyrrhonian scepticism
expounded at the beginning of Outlines ofPyrrhonism, in which relativities
play no essential role.3
It is my contention that both of these reactions are mistaken. Sextus's
willingness, in Against the Ethicists, to assert that nothing is *by nature'
good or bad, and to speak of situation-relative goods, is not compatible
with his official characterization of Scepticism in the opening chapters of
Outlines ofPyrrhonism. This does not, however, mean that Sextus is guilty
of a flagrant and confused violation of sceptical principles. For Against the
Ethicists presents a clear and consistent positionor so I shall suggest
and a position which can quite fairly be described as a form of scepticism.
It is not the same form of scepticism as that which is usually associated with
later Pyrrhonism; but it is a form of scepticism, and it is not obviously
confused. In fact, I shall argue, it is Outlines of Pyrrhonism, rather than
Against the Ethicists, which shows confusion and inconsistency. Once the
distinct position represented by Against the Ethicists is properly examined,
1 For example, a recent paper examining Sextus's use of the contrasting pair of terms idion and
koinon never mentions M XI 77-8, where this contrast plays a vital role in an argument
central to the whole book (discussed in sections II and IV below). See Franoise CaujolleZaslawsky, 'L'opposition Idion/Koinon chez Sextus Empiricus', in Andre-Jean Voelke, ed.,
le Scepticism Antique, Cahiers de la Revue de Theologie et de Philosophie 15 (1990) 139-49.
2 See Julia Annas, Ooing Without Objective Values: Anaent and Modem Strategies', in M. Schofield
and G. Striker, eds., The Norms of Nature (Cambridge, 196) 3-29; Julia Annas and Jonathan
Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1985); Gisela Striker, The Ten Tropes of
Aenesidemus', in Myles Bumyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley, 1983) 95-115.
3 See Mark McPherran, 'Pyrrhonism's Arguments Against Value', Philosophical Studies 60 (1990)
127-42. Julia Annas has also moved some way towards this position, though without
wholly abandoning her former stance (see the previous note); see her 'Scepticism about
Value', forthcoming in the Proceedings of Scepticism: A Pan-American Dialogue, a conference held at the Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside, February
1991. This interpretation was also pressed by my commentator at an APA colloquium
(see note 64).
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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 125
it becomes clear that the parallel ethical portion of Outlines of Pyrrhonism

III (168-279) contains elements of that distinct position, inconsistently
with its avowed conclusions. This fact raises interesting questions about
the development of Sextus's thinking, and about the order in which his
works were composed. And since Sextus is usually thought tobe drawing
heavily on earlier sources throughout his work, this comparison between
the two books may also affect our opinions about Pyrrhonian scepticism
more generally. I shall attempt, in the final section (section V), to say a
word about these issues. But at any rate, I hope to show that Against the
Ethicists (hereafter referred to by its abbreviated title M XI) should not be
dismissed either as an ill-considered or unwitting deviation from the
approach represented by the better-known Outlines of Pyrrhonism (hereafter PH), or as simply more of that same old approach.
I
I begin by focusing briefly on the second of the two reactions to M XI just
mentioned. Sextus does argue that nothing is by nature good or bad, and
he does claim, as a corollary of that conclusion, that things can be good or
bad only in some relative sense. How is this consistent with the universal
suspension of judgement which is supposed to be the hallmark of
Pyrrhonism? The answer, it has been suggested, is that Sextus does not
need to be seen as himself committed either to the negative conclusion
or to the corollary involving relativity. Rather, the conclusion and its
corollary are intended to stand as one member of a pair of opposing
positions; Sextus's intention is not to argue in his own person for the
conclusion that nothing is by nature good or bad, but to induce suspension of judgement about precisely this issue, by juxtaposing this conclusion with another, equally plausible claim to the effect that there are some
things which are by nature good or bad.4 This competing claim may be
thought to come either from pre-reflective common sense, or from the
writings of Sextus's 'dogmatist' opponents; but in any case, according to
this interpretation, it should be understood as balancing, and hence canceling out, the negative conclusion which appears in the text.
4 This argument is made by McPherran, 'Pyrrhonism's Arguments against Value', 134-5. Julia
Annas has also suggested it to me in discussion.

126 Richard Bett
Now, it is true that Sextus and other ancient sceptics may often plausibly be interpreted along these lines. The four books which together comprise Against the Logicians and Against the Physicists (M VII-X) consist
largely of attacks on the basic concepts employed by practitioners of logic
and physics, and also, in many instances, by common sense. Sextus often
sounds as if he is delivering negative dogmatic conclusions; in Against the
Physicists, for example, he tells us that "body is nothing' ( .439), that
'motion is nothing' ( .168), that 'number is nothing' ( .309) and that
'nothing either comes into being or perishes' ( .350). But he several
times tells us that these negative conclusions are to be juxtaposed with the
positive conclusions of the dogmatists, or the positive beliefs of the ordinary person; and even when he does not explicitly say so, it is unproblematic to understand this as his intention.5 However, this approach will
unfortunately not work for XI. For not only does Sextus never indicate
that his intention is to induce suspension of judgement about the existence
of things good or bad by nature; he clearly and repeatedly presents the
conclusion that nothing is good or bad by nature as one which the sceptic
himself adopts. He tells us mat one can achieve the sceptic's aim of living
happily and free from worry (eudaimonos kai atarachos .118) by
coming to hold that things are desirable, or the reverse, only in certain
circumstances, and not by nature. This freedom from distress, he further
explains, will come 'from the belief that nothing is by nature good or bad'
(EJt tou meden phusei agathon e kakon doxazein). A little later, we are told that
'when reason has proved (logou de parastesantos) that none of these things is
by nature good or by nature bad, there will be a release from worry and a
peaceful life will await us' (130). And in the same vein, it is asserted that
'It will only be possible to avoid this [i.e., tarache, the opposite of the
sceptic's aim] if we show (hupodeixaimeri) to the person who is troubled, on
account of his avoidance of the bad or his pursuit of the good, that there is
not anything either good or bad by nature' (140).
The claim that nothing is good or bad by nature is not, then, just one
of a pair of opposing arguments which together lead to ataraxia when
one suspends judgement on the merits of either. On the contrary, this
5 For explicit mentions of this strategy, see M VTI443, Vm298,476-7, IX137,191-2, X

168. For an examination of similar interpretations of the Academics Arcesilaus and
Cameades, see my 'Cameades' Ptthanon: A Reappraisal of its Role and Status',
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 7 (1989) 59-94.

claim is supposed to be endorsed by the sceptic, and it is this very

endorsement which is supposed to lead to ataraxia. According to M XI,
it is essential to one's well-being that one adopt the belief that nothing is
by nature good or bad, and accompanying beliefs concerning the relativity of goodness and badness not that one cease to hold any beliefs
one way or the other about the existence or the nature of goodness and
badness. It follows that M XI cannot be interpreted as consistent with the
familiar Pyrrhonist strategy of assembling opposing positions of equal
strength (isostheneia), and withdrawing commitment from either side of
the opposition; and it is perhaps no accident that the word isostheneia
never once appears in M XI.6
This brings us to the other reaction to M XI, the accusation that it is
simply confused. As we have seen, Sextus does talk here of 'suspension
of judgement' (epoche); is he not then contradicting himself? I want to
show that this reading, too, is mistaken, and that M XI represents a bona
fide but distinct version of scepticism. This task will occupy most of the
rest of the paper, and will require a somewhat more detailed examination of the main argument. I conduct this examination in the next section.
Section then addresses the accusation directly, and in section IV I
attempt to dispel some doubts which may remain concerning my own
contrary interpretation.
II
For our purposes, the most important portion of the book is the chapter
entitled ei esti phusei agathon kai kakon (42-109), 'Whether there are Good
and Bad by Nature'. This chapter begins with an account of some
disagreements among philosophers, which are taken as typical, concerning what things are good, bad or indifferent (44-68)7 There follows an
argument for the conclusion that nothing is by nature good (or, by
implication, bad) (69-78), in which, as already noted, the fact of disagreement about these questions is crucial. After this is a subsidiary argument
6 See the Indices of K. Janacek, vol. IV of the Teubner edition of Sextus Empiricus
(Leipzig, 1962).
7 Here and throughout, the intended scope of 'things' is very broad. It can encompass
events, material objects, states of mind or of character, achievements, etc. anything, that is, to which the epithets 'good' and "bad' might plausibly be applied.

128 Richard Bett
for the same conclusion (79-89), which eventually relies again on the
prevalence of disagreement (89); then an explicit argument, using the
same basic strategy as 69-78, for the conclusion that nothing is by nature
bad (90-5); and finally a consideration of, and replies to, Epicurean
attempts to identify certain things as naturally to be chosen or to be
avoided on the basis of the natural behavior of animals (96-109). The core
of the argument is clearly the passage immediately following the initial
retailing of disagreements (69-78), and we shall concentrate on this.
The most immediate difficulty, in trying to make sense of this argument, is to see why disagreement should be thought to show that nothing
is by nature good or bad rather than, as one might expect from PH
(e.g., 235), that we should suspend judgement about what, if anything,
is by nature good or bad. It is stated initially that if anything is good, or
bad, by nature, it must be good, or bad, 'in relation to everyone' (pros
hapantas, 71) or 'for everyone' {pasin, 69); an alternative way to put this,
as we remarked at the outset, is that its goodness, or badness, must be
'common to all' (koinon pant n, 71). And the argument then purports to
demonstrate, on the basis of disagreement, that there is nothing which
is good or bad 'in relation to everyone'. The steps are as follows.
Either whatever anyone thinks is good really is good, or this is not the
case (72). But the first alternative cannot be correct; for if whatever
anyone thinks is good (or bad, or indifferent) really is so, then, since
people's views about what is good, bad or indifferent vary widely, the
same things will be by nature good and bad and indifferent, which is
impossible (72-4). If, on the other hand, not everything which is thought
to be good really is good, there must be some way of distinguishing
between the things which are thought to be good and really are so, and
the things which are merely thought to be good but are not really so (75).
Such a distinction might be drawn either 'through self-evidence'
(di'enargeias, 76) that is, it might be a matter of plain and immediate
experience8 or through reasoning. But it cannot be a matter of 'selfevidence'. For, by definition, there is no room for error or dispute about
the content of 'self-evident' impressions; yet, as has already been said,
8 Enargeia is taken to be a mark of truth by the Peripatetics (Sextus 218), the

Epicureans (M VII212) and the Stoics ( 257). For discussion of this concept see
Michael Frede, 'Stoics and Skeptics on Clear and Distinct Impressions', in Myles
Bumyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley, 1983) 65-93, esp. 74-6.

there is dispute about what is good (76). Nor, however, can the distinction between real and spurious goods be drawn by reasoning. For each
of the philosophical schools has its own 'private' system of reasoning
about these matters (idion echei logon, 77); hence the items which each of
them designates as goods, in accordance with these systems of reasoning, are themselves 'private goods' (idion ... agathon, 77). But 'private
goods' are not 'common to all', and hence not goods by nature. So there
is nothing which is good by nature (78)9 and the same, of course,
applies to the bad.10
The argument seems easy enough to follow, and easy enough to agree
with, until the final step. In what sense is the reasoning employed by
each philosophical school 'private'? And in what sense are the things
which this reasoning declares to be goods 'private goods', rather than
'common to all'? All Sextus seems entitled to assert at this point is that
9 On the equation of 'really good' and 'good by nature', see further section OX
10 M XI90 says that the arguments offered so far, which eliminate the good by nature,
also eliminate the bad by nature. Does the same also apply to the indifferent? PH
191-3 does argue that nothing is by nature indifferent, again on the basis of the
differing views about the indifferent held by different philosophers. But XI never
offers any parallel argument, nor any acknowledgement that the arguments given
concerning the good and the bad also count against anything's being by nature
indifferent; the disagreements listed at 42-68 include disagreements about what is
indifferent, but the indifferent seems to be dropped from the argument which begins
at 69.1 think that this vacillation can be explained as follows. Statements of the form
'X is indifferent' might be understood simply as denying that X is, in its true nature,
either good or bad; or they might be understood as asserting that X has, in its true
nature, a certain characteristic, namely indifference. The concept of the indifferent,
as developed by the Stoics, is not clearly determinate as between these two options.
Now, understood in the first way, statements of the form 'X is indifferenf need not
be objectionable to Sextus, in the way that 'X is good' or 'X is bad' are objectionable;
understood in the second way, all three types of statements would be equally
objectionable. PH 191-3, which argues that nothing is by nature indifferent,
alongside parallel arguments concerning the good and the bad, clearly adopts the
second understanding. But XI is at least to some extent drawn towards the first
understanding; at 102 Sextus is apparently willing to assert that 'winning and
leading are therefore not good by nature but indifferent' (ou toinun phusei agathon estin
all'adiaphoron to nikan kai to hegeisthai). If this is so, it makes sense for him not to
include any argument to the effect that nothing is by nature indifferent; in fact, if
indifferent is taken simply to mean 'not by nature either good or bad', there will not
even be any use for the phrase "by nature indifferent'.

130 Richard Bett
different schools have different views about what is good, established

by different types of arguments. But if this is all that the reference to
'private reasoning' and 'private goods' amounts to, it is very unclear why
Sextus feels justified in inferring that none of these schools has hit upon
what is really good. He does not even bother to argue or suggest, as he
often does elsewhere, that the disagreements are unresolvable (though
even this would seem to show only that we cannot be sure what is really
good, not that nothing is really good); he seems to assume that the very
existence of disagreement is enough to prove his point.
To begin to understand this, we need to look more carefully at the
opening of the argument, where the term 'common to all' is introduced
(69-71). Here Sextus gives examples of things whose effects do qualify
as 'common to all'. Fire, he says, warms everyone, not just some people,
and similarly snow chills everyone; hence these things may be said,
respectively, to be warming and chilling by nature.11 In the same way,
he suggests, 'that which is good by nature ought to be good for everyone,
and not good for some but not good for others' (69). That is, the effects
of that which is by nature good ought to be uniform for all people, just
like the effects of that which is by nature warming or by nature chilling.
And the distinctive effect of the good is to benefit (agathopoein, 70); on
this Sextus cites Plato with approval, but the point is of course common
ground among Greek philosophers generally.12 That which is by nature
good must therefore be uniformly beneficial; it is in this sense that it must
be 'good for everyone' or 'good in relation to everyone'. There cannot,
then, be a good by nature which benefits only some people but not others.
But it is still not obvious how the fact that people disagree about what is
good is supposed to help establish that nothing is uniformly beneficial.
Could there not be something such as virtue, according to the Stoics
which is in fact beneficial for everyone, no matter what the circumstances, but which not everyone recognizes as such?
11 The use of these examples need not commit Sextus to dogmatism. He could claim
to be using them only for the sake of argument, and that counter-instances can in
fact be found (e.g., Demophon, who was cold in the sun and warm in the shade
PH182). In this connection, note the participial constructions to pur physei aleantikon
kathests and he chion psuchousa, which may be read conditionally ('fire, i/it is by
nature warming', etc.), contrary to the Loeb translation.
12 For Sextus's acceptance of this point as a commonplace, see also M XI35-6.

It looks as if Sextus's answer to this question is 'no'. That is, as he

conceives the matter, in order for something to count as beneficial to a
certain person, that person must view it as beneficial; there can be no such
thing as a benefit which the beneficiary does not regard as a benefit. This
assumption may seem curious, and it is admittedly not stated in the
passage with which we have been concerned. However, it is clear that
just such an assumption is operating in the parallel passage of PH .
The argument here is similar to, but considerably briefer than, that in M
XL Just as fire 'appears to all as warming' (pasi phainetai aleantikon) and
snow 'appears to all as chilling' (pasi phainetai psuktike), Sextus says, so
everything which possesses a certain power by nature affects everyone
equally or at least, 'everyone who is, as they say, in a natural state'
(pantos ... tous kata phusin, hos phasin, echontas) (179). Thus, in particular,
if something is by nature good, it 'affects everyone as good' (pantas kinei
has agathon); but there is no such thing, since neither philosophers nor
ordinary people agree about what is good (a point which is then supported by examples, 180-1). Now, since the existence of disagreement is
here taken to rule out the possibility that anything 'affects everyone as
good', it is evident that 'affecting everyone as good' must consist in, or
must at least include, being regarded by everyone as good; but 'affecting
everyone as good' is taken to be a necessary condition for anything's
being really, or by nature, good. A thing cannot, then, be a genuine good
without being regarded as good by those for whom it is a good.
Similarly, in the brief treatment later in M XI of whether there is
anything bad by nature (90-5), it is clear that being experienced as bad (that
is, harmful) is understood as a necessary condition for being bad. Addressing the question whether folly harms fools, Sextus says that it must
harm them 'either being evident to them' (etoi prodelos autois ousa) or
'non-evident' (adelos) (92). But the latter alternative is plainly impossible,
he continues; 'for if it is non-evident to them, it is neither bad nor to be
avoided by them, but just as no one avoids or is disturbed at grief which
is non-apparent and pain which is unfelt (ten nie phainomenen lupen kai
anepaistheton algedona), so no one will shun as bad folly which is unsuspected and not evidenced (ten anupoptoton aphrosunen kai ten adeloumenen)' (93). Uncontioversially enough, Sextus here assumes that it is
absurd to think that one could regard one's folly as bad if one is not even
aware of having itjust as absurd as the notion of an 'unfelt pain'; but
he also takes this claim, that one would not regard one's 'unsuspected'
folly as bad, as tantamount to the claim that it is not bad.
It need not be a surprise, then, to find that the same kind of assumption
is at work in the argument at M XI69-78. And if that is so, the point about

132 Richard Bett
'private goods' in the final step of that argument becomes clearer. For
something to be by nature good, it would have to be universally beneficial; but to be universally beneficial, it would have to be universally
regarded as beneficial. But the various views about what is good held by
the philosophers are arrived at by way of idiosyncratic or 'private'
schemes of reasoning; since the schemes of reasoning are 'private', the
supposed goods which they generate are 'private' as well. That is, what
is regarded by some one school as beneficial, as a result of a scheme of
reasoning peculiar to that school, will not be universally regarded as
beneficial; other schools employ different and incompatible schemes of
reasoning, yielding different and incompatible views of what is good,
and ordinary people do not arrive at their views of what is good by
reasoning at all. Since all the alleged goods arrived at by philosophical
reasoning are in this sense 'private' that is to say, none of them are
universally agreed to be goods none of them are candidates for being
a good by nature.
This reconstruction of Sextus's reasoning may still be found unsatisfactory. For it may be wondered why different schemes of reasoning
should necessarily lead to such extreme disagreement about what things
are goods. There will no doubt be disagreement in the complete lists of
what types of things are thought good by the different schools. But for
Sextus to establish his conclusion that nothing is by nature good, he must
surely establish that there is not a single thing which all the schools agree
to be good; and merely observing that different schools use reason in
different ways does not seem to establish that, since the same thing might
well be argued to be good in several different ways. In fact, one might
ask, what is there to prevent this in the cases Sextus actually cites (77)?
He says that Zeno thought virtue was good, Epicurus pleasure and
Aristotle health. These are not presented as competing views about the
highest good;13 Sextus is well aware that Aristotle does not think that
health is the highest good (cf. 51, where the Peripatetics are said to hold
13 Contrary to the Loeb translation. Julia Annas, 'Sextus and the Peripatetics', Elenchos
13 (1992) 203-31, accuses Sextus of 'an unbelievably gross error' here the error of
thinking 'that health had the role for Aristotle that virtue had for Zeno and pleasure
for Epicurus' (206). But Sextus never suggests any such thing; nor, as I shall show,
do we need to ascribe this erroneous view to him in order to make sense of the
passage.

Situs's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 133
that health is a good, but not the good). They are simply examples of
things deemed to be good by different philosophers, by means of different schemes of reasoning;14 but why should we suppose that all such
things can only be 'private' goods, as opposed to being acknowledged
as goods by everyone?
The discussion at this point is admittedly very compressed; Sextus
might have explained himself a good deal more fully. But if forced to
justify his elliptical remarks, he could answer along the following lines.
(To what extent he had actually thought this through is impossible to
say; but at any rate, the following answer is available to him.) First of all,
the only thing which could possibly be agreed to be a good by everyone
would be virtue. For this is the sole good recognized by the Stoics; other
things, such as Sextus's examples pleasure and health, which are widely
regarded as goods both by philosophers and ordinary people, are relegated by the Stoics, as a result of their 'private' system of reasoning, to
the category of the indifferent. And perhaps there are some who will
even argue that virtue is not a good in which case nothing will be
universally agreed to be a good. But second, even if it turns out that all
agree that virtue is good, it is certainly not true that all will agree in their
particular conceptions of what virtue is; each school, by means of its
idiosyncratic or 'private' scheme of reasoning, will in fact arrive at a
different end product, even though all of them may call it by the same
name 'virtue'. Virtue-as-conceived-by-the-Stoics, for example, is by no
means the same as virtue-as-conceived-by-the-Epicureans. For one
thing, the Epicureans regard virtue as good only in an instrumental
sense, as productive of pleasure;15 for another, the Stoics have a far more
intellectualist conception of virtue than the Epicureans, or than many
other schools; the catalogue of differences could be extended. (Similarly
14 The fact that he is thinking in terms of these examples explains his use of the singular
idion agathon in the phrase 'each will in turn introduce a private good' (idion palin
hekastos eisegesetai agathon, 77). This may make it sound as if Sextus thinks each
school only believes in one thing that is good (which may in turn tempt one to think
that he is speaking of the highest good). But his point is simply that, in designating
virtue, pleasure and health respectively as goods, each of the three sample philosophers he has mentioned will be 'introducing a private good'; he is not denying that
each of them will adhere to other 'private goods' as well.
15 See A.A. Long & D.M. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1987), texts
21 A,L,M,O,R

134 Richard Bett
though this is not required for the argumentpleasure-as-conceivedby-Epicurus is very different from pleasure-as-conceived-by-Aristotle,
even though they both say that pleasure is good.) Hence there is, after
all, nothing whatever which is agreed to be good by all the schools (let
alone by people in general); rather, it is quite true that, because each
school uses its own 'private' system of reasoning, the things which are
supposed good as a result of this reasoning are only 'private' goods.16
It has taken some time to make sense of Sextus's main argument. But
it has emerged that we are able to do so, provided we are justified in
attributing to Sextus the crucial assumption discussed above the
assumption that nothing can be good, or beneficial, for a person unless
it is regarded as beneficial by that person. I have shown that evidence
from closely related texts suggests that he accepts this assumption; I have
also shown how it fills a significant gap in Sextus's stated reasoning. But
the assumption seems at first sight arbitrary and question-begging. I do
not want to leave it aside before trying to understand why Sextus may
have felt entitled to it.
The assumption is not in fact as outrageous as it may appear. First, it
does not entail that whatever anyone regards as a benefit automatically
is a benefit for that person (it is not a form of Protagoreanism). Being
regarded as a benefit, or as a harm, is a necessary condition for being a
benefit, or a harm; there is never any suggestion that it might be a
sufficient condition. Second, Sextus is not required to deny that something may be a benefit which is not regarded as such at the time when
it is received. For example, a session with the dentist may very well not
16 It might still be argued that Sextus's view, as I have analyzed it, is problematic, on
two grounds. First, he does not even consider the possibility that one of these
systems of reasoning might be judged superior to the others and by means of
reasoning itself. Though it is true that Sextus does not discuss this possibility
(probably because he considers it an obvious non-starter), I think it is clear how he
would respond to it. He would ask what scheme of reasoning could be employed
to make this judgement which was not itself 'a party to the dispute' (meros (es
diaphonias: for this phrase, see e.g., PHI 59,90). Second, some residual discomfort
may be felt with the term 'private good'. I have explained it as essentially equivalent
to Object believed to be good by some limited group of people'; but the term 'private
good' does not sound as if it refers merely to something believed to be good. I return
to this point in section IV.

be experienced as beneficial at the time; but it may nonetheless be beneficial, and Sextus does not have to take issue with this common-sense
conception. All he needs to deny is that one may receive a benefit, or a
harm, without at any point even with hindsight, careful reflection or
any other epistemological advantages recognizing it as a benefit, or
as a harm; this is sufficient for his main argument to go through. For
given this assumption, the existence of intractable disagreement about
what is good or beneficial that is, the absence of any item which
everyone (even with hindsight, careful reflection, etc.) agrees in regarding as good shows that there is nothing whose goodness is 'common
to all'. And this, according to Sextus's conception of what it is for
something to be good by nature, shows that nothing is good by nature.
Why does Sextus make the assumption on which I have been dwelling? To judge from his dismissive remarks about a 'non-evident' harm,
it looks as if the notion of a wholly unexperienced benefit or harm simply
seems to him nonsensical. In taking this view, he is going against the
claim that, for example, folly is always and necessarily harmful, even if
fools never realize this, and cheerfully maintain their foolish way of life
until death at a ripe old age. It is not surprising that Sextus would be
opposed to claims of this kind. For, he might say, in order to claim that
fools, even those who are to all appearances happy, would be bound to
be better off without their folly, one must take oneself to have a special
insight into what is really good or bad for people, an insight which
supersedes their own experience in these matters, and which is supported by some kind of theoretical underpinning. In other words, one
would have to be a dogmatic philosopher. By contrast, Sextus might well
claim that his own assumption is simple common sense; the idea that
one might receive benefits or harms which remain entirely unregistered
in one's experience is indeed not easy to swallow.17 (It is especially hard
to swallow, of course, for one whose aim is ataraxia, which is precisely
an experienced condition; but one need not share the Pyrrhonist's goal in
order to sympathize with Sextus's attitude on this particular issue.) He
might therefore suggest, as he does elsewhere, that he is 'fighting on the
17 As even Aristotle admits, in the course of his struggles with the question whether
one may be called happy, or whether one's level of happiness may alter, after one
is dead; see in particular EN 1100al3-14,1101a34-6. Aristotle does eventually accept
this idea, but only in a very hesitant and qualified way (1101bl-9).

136 Richard Bett
side of everyday life' (toi bioi... sunagonizometha, PH 102), and against

the theoretical constructions of the dogmatists. At any rate, his assumption is quite intelligibly related to his general sceptical outlook; it is
perhaps unorthodox by comparison with other Greek philosophers, but
then most other Greek philosophers are dogmatists.18
So much for the explicit argument for the conclusion that nothing is
by nature good or bad. Now, as was observed earlier, Sextus connects
this conclusion with the notion that things may be described as good or
bad only relatively speaking that is, in relation to some people but not
others, and in some circumstances but not others. These relativity claims
do not appear until after the chapter called 'Whether there are Good and
18 The assumption is not, however, free from difficulties; consider the following cases.
1) You are exposed to a certain poisonous gas, which immediately puts you into a
coma and then kills you. Has the poison harmed you? 2) You are exposed, over a
period of time, to a less virulent but still toxic substance; you feel sick, but you do
not know what is causing this sickness. Has the toxic substance harmed you? 3) I
surreptitiously put money into your bank account at regular intervals. Since you do
not read your bank statements, you do not realize that this is happening. Your
material circumstances are thereby eased, but you do not recognize that this is the
case. Have I benefited you? In all three cases, it seems as if Sextus's assumption
forces him to answer counterintuitively in the negative. Now, the second case is
perhaps the least troublesome; the toxic substance does here have an effect which
is experienced as harmful, and so Sextus can perhaps allow that the substance does
harm you, even though you are not aware of what it is that is harming you. In the
third case, too, it might be suggested that you do, in fact, experience the benefit
and hence, by Sextus's assumption, it can after all qualify as a benefit simply in
the sense that your financial circumstances are less straitened than they would have
been without my periodic deposits, and this difference affects your life for the better.
However, Sextus cannot admit this without accepting what we have seen that he
denies, namely that folly may affect your life for the worse, even though you are
entirely unaware of any harmful effects from it. So it seems that he would instead
have to throw doubt on the idea that you are actually better off with my secret
hand-outs than you would be without them (perhaps wealth is inherently corrupting; or perhaps, if you were left to your own devices, you would work harder and
eventually become much more wealthy). Similarly, in the first case, he would have
to question whether a painless and unwitting death should necessarily be considered a harm. A good argument or at least, an argument fully consistent with
sceptical principles might well be made in both these cases. But of course, other
difficult cases might be adduced, and it is not clear that Sextus will be able to
maintain his consistency without at some point lapsing into excessive implausibility. Hence the legitimacy of Sextus's assumption is at this stage an open question.

Bad by Nature', which is summed up with the remark 'We have sufficiently considered the fact that there is nothing by nature good or bad'
(pen men oun tou meden einai phusei agathon te kai kakon autarkes eskepsametha, 110). But they are clearly intended to be derivable from the
considerations employed in that chapter, and the nature of this connection deserves further scrutiny.
Following the sentence just quoted, Sextus proceeds to compare the
life prospects of people who believe that there are things which are by
nature good or bad, and those of people who do not (llOff.). Near the
beginning of this discussion (114), he characterizes the three possible
positions one might take. One might claim that whatever anyone thinks
is good or bad is good or bad by nature; or one might claim that there
are at least some things which are by nature to be chosen or to be
avoided. Or, thirdly, one might hold the position for which Sextus
himself has argued in the previous chapter namely, the position
that 'these things are in the relative category, and in relation to this
person this thing is to be chosen or to be avoided, but in relation to
the nature of things it is neither to be chosen nor to be avoided, but
at one time to be chosen and at another time to be avoided' (en toi pros
ti pas echein esti tauta, kai has men pros tonde tod'estin haireton e pheukton,
hos de pros ten phusin ten tn pragmatn oute haireton estin oute pheukton,
alia nuni men haireton nuni de pheukton). Sextus then argues briefly that
the first position is simply unlivable, and the second position, while
capable of being incorporated into a life, will lead to a highly disturbed
life (115-17). After this he restates the third position (118), and argues
that it will produce the most trouble-free life. Specifically, one will
achieve such a life 'if one says that any given thing is by nature no
more to be chosen than to be avoided nor any more to be avoided than
to be chosen, every event being relative and, in accordance with
differing states of affairs and circumstances, turning out as at one time
to be chosen and at another time to be avoided' (ei de me mallon tis
legoi ti phusei haireton e pheukton mede mallon pheukton e haireton, hekastou
fn hupopiptontn pros ti pas echontos kai kata diapherontas kairous kai
peristaseis nuni men hairetou kathesttos nuni de pheuktou). It is only in
these two passages that the relativity claims are advanced; and Sextus
seems to be regarding these claims as simply equivalent to, or as an
amplification of, the conclusion that nothing is by nature either good
or bad.
There is no difficulty in understanding the claim, which appears in
the first of these two passages (114), that goodness and badness are
relative to persons. As we have seen, Sextus states at the outset that for

138 Richard Bett
something to be by nature good is for it to be good for everyone, not just

for some people; and the argument we examined earlier is designed to
show that nothing fits this description. But to say, as he does say in 114,
that things are good only in relation to some individuals (but not in
relation to other individuals) is simply to say that they are not good in
relation to, or good for, everyone, and hence that they are not good by
nature; the two points are simply alternative sides of the same coin. What
is less clear is how the claim that goodness and badness are relative to
times, or to circumstances, which appears in both of the two passages
(114, 118), is supposed to have been justified by any of the previous
discussion. Sextus appears to be taking for granted that 1) if what is good
varies from person to person (that is, the same thing may be good for
some people but not others), it also varies from situation to situation (that
is, the same thing may be good at one time but not at another, even for
the same person19). He also seems to be taking for granted that 2) being
good only in some situations, and not in all, disqualifies something from
being good by nature, just as being good only for some people, but not
all, disqualifies something from being good by nature.
To make sense of 2), we must suppose that Sextus's conception of
what it is for something to be by nature good is slightly more restrictive
than he explicitly announces. His view must be that, for something to be
by nature good, it has to be invariably and unqualifiedly good that is,
good for everyone and in all circumstances. He never explicitly states this
condition all he says is that, for something to be by nature good, it
must be good for everyonebut it is an easy extension of what he does
say. Moreover, this kind of conception of what it is for something to be
by nature a certain way is not especially uncommon in the ancient world;
I shall come back to this point in the next section. 1) is also perhaps
unsurprising; but it too is without support in the text as it stands. For the
argument for the conclusion that nothing is good by nature proceeds
solely by demonstrating that nothing is good for all people; it relies on
19 Variability from person to person is of course one case of variability from situation
to situation. However, it is clear from 118 that Sextus is also thinking of cases where
the same thing may be at times good and at times bad for a single individual. For
his point here is that one will be relieved from distress if one gives up thinking that
the things which happen to oneself arc unequivocally either good or bad, and instead
adopts the view that the same type of thing may turn out either good or bad,
depending on the circumstances.


the existence of disagreement about what is good,20 coupled with the
assumption that, for something to be good for some person, it must be
regarded as good by that person. At no point does Sextus attempt to
establish that nothing is invariably good for any single person in other
words, that things are good, even for a single person, only in some
circumstances but not others; nor does this follow from anything which
he does establish. Even if, as just suggested, he holds that 'X is by nature
good' entails both 'X is good for everyone' and 'X is good for any given
person in all circumstances', it does not follow that a) 'nothing is by
nature good' entails both b) 'nothing is good for everyone' and c)
'nothing is good for any given person in all circumstances'. Sextus argues
for b), and thereby establishes a); but neither a) nor b) allows him to infer
c) he simply helps himself to c) without warrant. Of course, he might
make up the deficiency relatively easily. That the goodness and badness
of things varies with circumstances is hardly a new thought in Greek
philosophy; in particular, arguments along these lines were commonplace among the fifth-century Sophists, and Sextus could appeal to that
tradition if pressed.21 But the fact remains that his train of thought in its
present form is incomplete.
Ill
Now that we have examined M XTs central argument, we are in a

position to tackle the accusation that the book fails to present a coherent
or viable scepticism. This charge has to do not with infelicities or lacunae
in the details of Sextus's argumentof which, as has emerged, there are
several but with his fundamental approach. The confusion which
Sextus is alleged to have committed is a crude confusion between
20 It is sometimes suggested, in contemporary moral philosophy, that apparent disagreements about values can be reduced to, or explained away by reference to,
differences in circumstances among the apparently conflicting parties. But there is
no hint of this kind of strategy in Sextus; in fact, one could scarcely point to anything
of which Sextus is more certain than that disagreements, on values as on a great
many other topics, are real and fundamental.
21 On the Sophists' interest in relativities of the kind discussed in this paragraph, see
my The Sophists and Relativism', Phronesis 34 (1989) 139-69, esp. section .

140 Richard Bett
dogmatism and absolutism. A dogmatist is one who makes pronouncements about the way things really are, and the sceptic's characteristic
attitude is suspension of judgement about any such pronouncements.
But M XI, the critic will say, fails to maintain this suspension of judgement. As we have seen, Sextus endorses the denial that anything is good
or bad by nature. This is a rejection of ethical absolutism that is, of the
belief that things can be designated as unqualifiedly good or bad; but it
by no means suffices to absolve Sextus of dogmatism, for it is, precisely,
a pronouncement about the way things really are. Again, he is willing to
describe things as good or bad in certain relative or qualified ways;
despite the qualifications, this too seems to violate the sceptic's suspension of judgement. Both the denial of absolutism and the assertion of
relativity ought, it is claimed, to be anathema to a sceptic, and Sextus
should have avoided them. I shall take up these points one by one.
The critic is certainly right that the denial of absolutism is inconsistent with the scepticism described at the beginning of PH. For, as has
been clear since section I, Sextus does commit himself to the claim that
nothing is good or bad by nature. His answer to the question 'is
anything good or bad by nature?' is not suspend judgement about
that question', but 'no'. Thus he cannot claim to be making no assertions
whatever about the real nature of things, as he does in PH; in particular,
he cannot claim to be 'making no determinations about things that are
good or bad in respect of their nature' (aoristn pen tn pros ten phusin
kaln e kakn, PH I 28). But it does not follow, from the fact that Sextus
is not here suspending judgement in precisely the manner proposed
in PH, that he is not suspending judgement in any meaningful sense.
Given the assumptions examined in the previous section, the assertion
that nothing is good or bad by nature is fully consistent with the
Pyrrhonist rule that one should assent to no claims regarding 'non-evident' matters (adela, PH I 197). As we saw, Sextus may best be
interpreted as holding 1) that, in order for something to qualify as by
nature good or bad, it must be invariably good or bad good or bad
for everyone without regard to circumstances and 2) that for
anything to count as good or bad for a certain person, it must be
regarded as, or experienced as, good or bad by that person. It follows
from these two propositions that the non-existence of anything good
or bad by nature can be established without any troublesome commitments concerning the 'non-evident'. That nothing is universally regarded as good or as bad is, at least in Sextus's view, a matter of plain
experience; it follows that there is nothing which is good or bad
invariably, and hence that there is nothing which is good or bad by

nature. This result is not achieved by some dubious inductive inference

from the evident (enarges) to the non-evident (adelori), such as Sextus
criticizes the dogmatists for making (PH 95); the failure of anything
to measure up to the standards for being good or bad by nature is
simply 'given', as we might now put it, within the realm of ordinary
experience.
It is important to note that, in denying that anything is good or bad
by nature, XI commits itself to no definite positive assertions about
the nature of things. To deny that something is by nature good as
Sextus is here quite willing to do is not to assert that, by nature,
that thing has some quality other than goodness; in particular, it is not
to assert that the thing is by nature not-good. To repeat, something
which is by nature good must be invariably good. But then for something to qualify as by nature not-good, its lack of goodness would have
to be similarly invariable; and there is no reason to think that Sextus
would be prepared to agree that anything invariably fails to be good,
any more than he agrees that anything invariably is good. (To recall,
he says that, as far as goodness and badness is concerned, everything
is relative (118), being sometimes to be chosen and at other times to
be avoided; and in any case, the truth of universal statements of the
form 'X is invariably not-good' unlike their counter-instances
could not be simply given in experience). Similarly, when he denies
that anything is by nature bad, he is not asserting that things by nature
have some feature other than badness. Given his conception of what
it is for something to be by nature F, 'X is not by nature F' entails
nothing whatever about the nature of X except that F-ness would not
belong in an objectively correct account of X's nature. To say, then,
that nothing is by nature either good or bad is to block certain attempts
to specify the nature of things, but it is not to make an alternative
attempt at the same task. Nowhere does Sextus himself offer any kind
of answer to the question 'What is the nature of things?'; if that question
was posed to him, he could quite legitimately reply "The dogmatists
are the ones who think they know the answer to that question, not me;
I suspend judgement'.
The suspension of judgement practised in XI is, then, less extreme
than the kind normally associated with later Pyrrhonism; it does allow
one to assert that certain claims about the nature of things are wrong,
rather than forbidding one to take any definite stand on their validity.
Thus far the critics of XI are correct. But this is not enough to show
that, when Sextus says here that he is suspending judgement, he is
either muddled or disingenuous. Suspension of judgement in XI

142 Richard Bett
consists in refusing to put forward any positive account of the nature

of things, and in committing oneself to no claims concerning the
'non-evident'. Someone who claims that certain things are by nature
good violates this suspension of judgement; someone who denies that
anything is by nature good does not, since no statements of the form
'X is by nature F' follow from this denial, nor are any other commitments regarding the 'non-evident' entailed in making it. This is how
Sextus can say both that freedom from distress comes from suspension
of judgement (111) and that freedom from distress comes from the
belief that nothing is by nature good or bad (118).
What of Sextus's willingness to describe things as good or bad for
certain people (though not for all people), or in certain circumstances
(though not in all circumstances)? To restrict oneself to such relativized
claims, it may be said, is by no means to avoid commitment to the
view that anything is really good or bad. 'Tylenol is good for people
with headaches' is a perfectly genuine assertion about what is really
the case; the qualification 'for people with headaches' restricts the scope
of the assertion, but does not alter its status as an assertion about the
way things are. Hence, even if Sextus can deny that anything is by
nature good or bad, and maintain a legitimate form of suspension of
judgement, he may still seem plainly inconsistent on another count.
But this depends on what it is for something to be really a certain
way (for example, really good or bad). We have seen that, according
to M XTs conception, for something to be F by nature is for it to be
invariably F. Its F-ness must not be limited to specific circumstances;
nor can its F-ness be discernible only by certain people it must
instead be 'common to all'. Thus anything which is (for example)
good only for some people but not for others, or only in certain
situations and not in others, is thereby deemed not good by nature.
But now, as we noted in passing in the previous section, Sextus takes
the question what things are like by nature as equivalent to the question
what things are really like. Throughout his main argument that there
is nothing good by nature, he shifts between the phrases 'good by
nature', 'in truth good', 'really good', and simply 'good', assuming all
four to be interchangeable,22 and the same pattern is repeated else-
22 Phuseiagathon, M XI69,71,78, etc.; tais aletheiais agathon, M XI72,75; ontos agathon,

M XI76; agathon, M XI76.


where.23 Hence what is not F by nature, according to the conception
we have examined, is also regarded as not really F. We may indeed
refer to things as F for certain people, or at a certain time to jogging,
for example, as good for some people (but not good for everyone), or
to the surf as good today; but such claims, simply because they are
relativized to people or to situations, do not count as claims about the
real character of the things in question. So in restricting himself to
relativized claims of this type, Sextus is indeed suspending judgement
about the way things really are; given the above conception of what
it is for something really to possess a certain property, his use of relative
qualifiers allows him to avoid any definite commitments about the
properties things possess in reality.
This conception of what is involved in things' really being a certain way
is no doubt substantially different from that which would normally occur
to us. But it is not by any means unique to Sextus. The same sort of
conception may be attributed to the Stoics regarding the concepts of
goodness and badness, at leastand also, as Sextus himself points out, to
Plato.24 The Stoics argue that virtue is the only true good, and vice the only
thing truly bad, precisely on the grounds that virtue and vice, and they
alone, are invariably beneficial and harmful respectively.25 And Plato, in
a famous passage at the end of Republic Book V (476a-80a), argues that
things in the sensible world no more are (for example) beautiful than they
are not beautiful, on the grounds that whatever we may under certain
conditions call beautiful may equally well, under other conditions, be
called the opposite. For anything truly to be beautiful (or large, or heavy26),
its beauty (or largeness, or heaviness) would have to belong to it without
qualification. Nothing in the sensible world meets this standard; only the
23 See, e.g., M XI114, where tei phusei and toi onti are treated as parallel and synonymous phrases; and M XI 79, 89, where ei esti ti agathon and oude ... ti estin agathon
respectively are treated as equivalent to eiesti ti phusei agathon and oude ...tiesti phusei
agathon.
24 For Sextus's reference to Plato on this topic, see M 11 70.
25 See sections 58, 60 of Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, especially 58A
(=DL VII101-3), which contains the same analogy with heat employed by Sextus,
and 60G (=Sextus, M XI22-6).
26 As is well known, it is not clear just how far, or in precisely what directions, Plato
means this list of predicates to be extended.

144 Richard Bett
Form of Beauty, and the other Forms, are whatever they are without
qualification, and so only the Forms count as true beings.27 For Plato as for
Sextus, relativity or variability disqualifies a thing from being part of
reality in the full or strict sense. In addition and this is of more direct
relevance for the history of scepticismit has recently been argued that
a similar conception was adhered to by Aenesidemus.281 shall return to
this point in the final section.
But to cite precedents for Sextus's conception is not, of course, to show
that it is defensible; and scholars have insisted not only that Sextus's
conception is confused, but that it had already been shown to be confused
long before Sextus's time. In support of the latter point, they have
adduced an argument by the third-century Epicurean Polystratus, to the
effect that relative qualities are no less real than non-relative qualities.29
It is true, Polystratus says, that the same things are not, for example,
invariably healthy; many things are healthy for some people but unhealthy for others. But this does not in the slightest suggest that the
healthy effects of such things, in the cases where they do have healthy
effects, are unreal. In fact, he continues, one might just as well argue that
the intrinsic properties of a thing, which do not vary from case to case,
are unreal; to use lack of variability as an argument for unreality would
be no more absurd than to use variability, as do the opponents Polystratus is imagining. In view of this sophisticated and considerably earlier
argument, Sextus's continued reliance on the assumption that relative
properties are somehow less real than intrinsic properties displays lamentable philosophical naiveteor so it has been claimed. Although Sextus
never mentions Polystratus, and shows no evidence of knowing anything
about him, a comparison between the two will be helpful, both for
clarifying Sextus's conception and for evaluating it.
27 The end of Rep V is probably the dearest and most extended example of this line of
thought in Plato. Other examples are Pfoir247d-e, Symp211a-b, Ph 78d-e, Hipp Ma 289a-c.
28 By Paul Woodruff, 'Aporetic Pyrrhonism', Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6
(1988) 139-68, who also discusses the Platonic precedent at some length.
29 De Contemptu Inani, 21-8, part of which forms passage 7D in Long and Sedley, The
Hellenistic Philosophers; for the full text (with Italian translation and commentary), see
Giovanni Indelli, Polistrato sul Disprezzo Irrazionaledelle Opinion! Popolari (Naples, 1978).
My translations and quotations follow Indelli's text, which is in places conjectural. For
discussions of this book in the present context, see again the works died in notes 2 and 3.

Does Polystratus's argument show up Sextus as naive? This is by no

means as obvious as is usually assumed. We do not know who was the
original target against which Polystratus's argument is directed.30 But
one thing is evident: Polystratus presumes his opponent to be claiming
that attributions of relative properties are all false. That is, the opponent
is imagined as claiming that because, for example, a certain type of action
can be deemed fine (kalori) only in certain circumstances, and not in all
circumstances, it would be false to assert that that type of action is fine
even in those circumstances in which the assertion would normally be
considered appropriate.31 Such a position has absurd consequences, as
Polystratus aptly demonstrates. However, Sextus does not make any
such claim. He does not say that attributions of relative qualities are false;
what he says is that relative qualities are not part of the nature of the
things in question. But Polystratus himself distinguishes between relative qualities and those which belong to things by nature. In fact, his
point is precisely that one should not condemn 'relative predicates' (ta
pros ti kategoroumena) for not behaving in the same way as 'those things
said in accordance with the object's own nature and not relatively' (tois
kata ten idian phusin legomenois kai me pros ti); the two types of predicates
are fundamentally different, and each is perfectly admissible in its own
terms.32 So far there is no quarrel between the two positions.
There is, of course, a point at which Sextus's and Polystratus's positions are incompatible namely, on the question what is to qualify as
truly real. As we saw, Sextus counts only what belongs to a thing by
nature as being truly real, and he counts only what belongs to a thing
invariably as belonging to it by nature. By contrast, if something can be
considered (for example) good or bad only in a relative or qualified way,
then the thing cannot be described as really being good or bad at all. This
does not mean that it is wrong to speak of the thing as good or bad even
just in certain circumstances; it means that, when one does so, one is not
referring to genuine features of reality. Polystratus's standard, on the
30 For various conjectures on this, see Indelli, Polistrato, Introduction, ch. 5; David
Sedley, review of Indelli, Classical Review, N.S. 33 (1983) 335-6; Long and Sedley, The
Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. II, commentary on text 7D.
31 This example occurs at de Contemptu, 24; cf. 25,26,27 for other instances.
32 De Contemptu, 25; cf. 21

146 Richard Bett

other hand, is considerably more accommodating. For him, things which
are 'falsely believed in' (pseuds nomizomena) are contrasted with things
which 'truly exist' (aleths huparchei), or things which 'are' (eitwi), or
things which 'are in truth' (kat'aletheian en);33 thus anything which it is
correct to Tjelieve in' truly exists, or is truly real and this encompasses
both relative qualities and qualities which belong to a thing by nature.
Now, does either thinker have the better of this disagreement? I cannot
see that this is so. Given Sextus's conception of what it is for something
to be truly real, it does not follow, from the fact that one may correctly
speak of something as good for someone, on some occasion, that the
goodness of the thing in question is truly real; given Polystratus's conception, it does follow. Certainly Sextus's conception of reality is less
familiar to us than Polystratus's. However, as I suggested, it is not an
unprecedented conception in the ancient world. And Polystratus makes
no attempt to argue against this conception; from the point of view of
someone who adheres to it, Polystratus is simply begging the question.
One part of Polystratus's argument may seem to cut deeper, and to
create a problem for Sextus. Towards the end of this argument, Polystratus says that variability is not confined to the class of relative properties;
some non-relative things the examples given are medical remedies
and actions have variable effects as well. It is obviously not true that
the same medicines, or the same actions, are good for everyone; rather,
'different ones benefit different people, not being all falsely believed [to
have these effects], but according to the difference in the nature and
properties of each'.34 That is, because the same types of medicines or
actions do not benefit everyone, it does not follow that the belief that a
certain type of medicine or action benefits a certain person (but not all
other people) is false; rather, it is due to the nature of a given medicine
or action, and to the nature of a given person, that the medicine or action
either does or does not benefit the person. Now, the first part of this point
that variability does not introduce falsehood is familiar and, as we
have seen, unproblematic for Sextus. But the second part introduces a
more interesting issue. Polystratus is disputing the idea that the effects
33 De Contemptu 25,26
34 Allots alia [sumpherei is understood from the previous clause]', [o]u pse[u]do$ doxazomena panta, alia kata ten diaphoran kai tes phuseo[s] hekastou kai tn [s]umbebekotn
de Contemptu, 27. (Letters in square brackets are reconstructed.)

of a thing which are due to its nature must be uniform and invariant.
Sextus seems to hold that those features of a thing which are part of its
nature must manifest themselves in a way which is 'common to all';
Polystratus seems to be employing a more subtle conception of a thing's
nature. To return to an earlier example, both would agree that Tylenol
is good for people with headaches and various other ailments, but not
good for everyone all the time. But, while Sextus will infer from this that
Tylenol is not by nature beneficial (or by nature not-beneficial), and will
not say anything more about the nature of Tylenol, Polystratus will say
that Tylenol is by nature such as to benefit people with headaches, etc.,
but not other people. For Polystratus, then, the variable effects of a thing
may themselves be accounted for by aspects of that thing's nature; and
this will no doubt strike us as a much less crude and a much more
sensible conception than Sextus's.
Once again, though, it is by no means clear that Sextus is touched by
Polystratus's polemic, and it is instructive to see why. Both thinkers
would agree that the natures of things are, in a certain sense, fixed. That
is, whatever properties a thing possesses by nature, it must possess those
properties at all times (or at least, as long as it remains the type of thing
that it is); something which is in some circumstances F and in other
circumstances not-F cannot be by nature F. The difference between them
is simply that Sextus's examples of actual or possible natural properties
of things are all, in a broad sense, phenomenal properties; they are all
properties which are inherently such as to affect us in some way or other
a thing's being warming or chilling, beneficial or harmful, desirable
or the reverse. Now, with properties of this type, it is of course true that
their effects on us must be uniform and invariant if they are to be
considered properties which belong to things by nature. If it is part of a
thing's nature to be good that is, beneficial then its goodness is
'fixed', in the sense just explained; hence it must benefit us invariably.35
Polystratus does not deny this; he never suggests that something can be
by nature good without being in all circumstances beneficial. However,
Polystratus is prepared to speculate about properties of things beyond
those which figure in our experience; and it is this which makes it
possible for him to talk of things being by nature such as to affect
different people differently. It is something about Tylenol's nature not
35 That is, in all circumstances in which the thing is in a position to affect us at all.

148 Richard Bett
any phenomenal property, but something about its underlying nature

which makes it beneficial in some circumstances but not in others; since
he is an Epicurean, Polystratus would presumably say that this 'something' is Tylenol's atomic structure. This atomic structure is certainly
'fixed', and the natural effects of Tylenol are all due to its atomic structure. But these effects may differ depending on the physiology of the
person it is interacting with.
The reason why Sextus does not engage in explanations of this kind
should be obvious enough. It is not because he is in principle opposed
to the abstract claim that the natural features of a thing may sometimes
have varying effects. Rather, it is because alleged natural features of this
kind can only be conceived as part of some 'non-evident' or underlying
reality; a property which is 'fixed', but which nonetheless affects us in
varying ways, must be a property which is specifiable quite independently of any effects it may have on us. As a sceptic, Sextus will avoid
all conjectures about such 'non-evident' properties of things (as we saw,
this is no less true of M XI than of PH, despite some differences in their
respective conceptions of suspension of judgement); and he will pick
holes in any account, such as Polystratus might offer about the nature of
Tylenol, which does appeal to the underlying structures of things. Sextus
and Polystratus do not, therefore, differ fundamentally on what it is for
a property to be part of something's nature; they merely differ in the
adventurousness of their hypotheses about what, in particular, the nature of things might be. If, on the particular point just discussed,
Polystratus's account seems to us the more congenial of the two, that is
not because of some embarrassing mistake or inadequacy in Sextus's
account; it is simply because, unlike Sextus, we are confident that we
have a large body of knowledge about the underlying structures of
things, and are accustomed to explanations of a thing's effects, variable
or otherwise, in terms of its underlying structure. In other words, it is
because we are not sceptics. It is fair to say that, in the ancient context,
such confidence was far less obviously justified.36 However, it is not part
of my program here to undertake a defense of the sceptical attitude itself.
36 Another case raising issues similar to those discussed in the last few paragraphs is
the inconclusive and very lengthy debate between the Rationalists and the Empiricists in medicine; on the history of this debate, see Michael Frede, 'Philosophy and
Medicine in Antiquity' and "The Ancient Empiricists', both in Frede's Essays in

IV
We cannot, then, easily convict Sextus of naivete or confusion. His argument may be flawed in some of its specifics; but his approach is not
globally problematic. Given the conception of reality with which he is
operating, his willingness to talk of the relative properties of a thing, and
his claim that to talk of relative properties is not to talk about the nature
of reality, both appear quite defensible. Nonetheless, there may still be
a reluctance to believe that this position is compatible with any properly
sceptical suspension of judgement. For relativism and scepticism are
usually seen as incompatible with one another;37 it may therefore seem
that, by countenancing talk about relativities, Sextus must be abandoning any legitimate claim to be sceptic.
But the matter is not so simple. It is true that the position generally
known as relativism nowadays is incompatible with sceptical suspension of judgement. To suspend judgement about the real nature of things
is to assume that there is (or at least, that there may be) a real nature to
things, independent of our representations of them, but that we are not
in a position to determine their real nature. Relativism, on the other hand,
dispenses with the very concept of 'the way things are independently of
our representations of them'. Instead, it claims that we can talk of the
way things are only as viewed from some perspective, or in some conceptual framework; and it claims that statements about the way things are,
made from some perspective, are statements about the real nature of
things, in the only sense we can attach to that idea.38 But relativism, so
understood, is not the position Sextus is offering here. Sextus does not
dispense with the concept of a thing's real nature, independent of any
perspective. On the contrary, he regularly makes use of the concept of a
thing's underlying, intrinsic nature; he simply does not accept any of the
attempted specifications of the underlying nature of things. And as we
Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1987). For Sextus's own involvement in this debate,
see in particular the second of these two essays, which defends the view that Sextus,
true to his name, was an Empiricist despite PH1236-41, which seems to suggest
a preference for Methodism.
37 See, e.g., Annas and Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism, esp. 97-8.
38 For further discussion of this, see my "The Sophists and Relativism', section I.

150 Richard Bett
saw, the relative statements which he allows are statements of the form
'X is good for one person but not for another', or 'X is bad in some
circumstances but not in others'. Making such statements is perfectly
compatible with accepting the concept of a perspective-free reality;
relativity to persons or to circumstances is not at all the same as relativity
to a perspective or a conceptual framework. Yet, as became clear in the
previous section, relative statements of the kind which Sextus allows in
M XI are not themselves statements about reality at least, not if one
grants Sextus his conception of reality; so they are not incompatible with
sceptical suspension of judgement.39
It is true mat these relative statements are not merely claims about
appearances; Sextus is quite willing to use esti, rather than phainetai, in
statements of the form 'X is good for A' or 'X is good at time f'.40 But this
does not negate the previous point; for M XI does not require that the
sceptic should restrict himself to claims about appearances. We are accustomed from PH to thinking of 'following the appearances' as a centerpiece
of Pyrrhonian scepticism;41 but in this respect as in others, M XI does not
conform to the expected pattern. The relative claims permitted by M XI
qualify as sceptical despite going beyond the realm of appearances. On the
M XI conception, that which is really the case and that which only appears
to be the case are not exhaustive categories. M XI never says that sceptics
confine themselves to appearance-statements;42 what it does say is that
39 It is true, however, that Sextus also seems to accept such relative statements at
certain places in PH, which does not share M XTs conception of reality, or M XTs
conception of suspension of judgement. Annas and Barnes (see note 37) are right to
object that this is inconsistent. On the other hand, the inconsistency may tell us
something about the history of scepticism; it should not simply be dismissed as an
aberration. I say a little more about this, with reference to PH , in section V below.
40 M XI114; cf. 118, kathest tos.
41 See, e.g., PH 115,17,19-20,22 191,196,208.
42 M XI17-20 does say that 'are' can sometimes mean 'appear'. But the point is made
in a highly specific context. Sextus has been discussing the basic division on which
all ethical thinkers are more or less agreed, the division of things into good, bad and
indifferent (3-17). He wants to accept this traditional classification that is, to use
these categories as an organizing principle for discussionbut without conveying
the impression that he actually believes that there are any items which are, in their
real nature, good, bad or indifferent. It is as a way of making this point that the
special use of 'are' to mean 'appear' gets introduced. Sextus says, 'When we say

sceptics avoid statements claiming to specify the true nature of things, and
the permitted relative statements are fully consistent with this. Sextus here
regards the relative rather than the apparent as the key to living well. But
this does not mean that he is violating his scepticism either because it
commits him to a relativism which is inconsistent with that scepticism, or
for any other reason.
It will be objected that Sextus's references to a person's 'private good'
do not allow him to be exonerated so quickly. To recall, a 'private good'
is a good generated by way of some 'private' system of reasoning. Sextus
seems to admit that there are such things as 'private goods', as opposed
to goods by nature; and he has sometimes been taken to be recommending that our own 'private good' is what we each should pursue.43 This
may look very much closer to the modem form of relativism which I
have agreed is incompatible with scepticism; for 'private goods' may
seem to be, precisely, goods which are relative to a certain perspective
or scheme of thinking.
But the references to 'private goods' are a red herring. They occur
only in one passage (M XI 77-8), and it is never suggested that 'private
goods' are what the sceptic will rely on. A 'private good' is simply what
is thought by the members of some philosophical school to be good,
as a result of some 'private' scheme of reasoning pursued by that
school. Sextus's point in this passage is that none of the goods believed
sceptically (hotan legomen skeptikos) "Of the things that are, some are good, some are
bad, and some are between these", we insert the "are" not as indicative of reality
but of appearance' (19). That is, he may refer to the standard categories by saying
'some things are good, some things are bad and some things are indifferenf. But
since he is 'speaking sceptically', this is not to be understood as making any claim
about the real nature of anything; he is simply acknowledging that things strike us
as belonging to one of these three categories, and proposing to conduct his examination of ethics on this basis. This passage does not, then, indicate (as suggested by
McPherran, 'Pyrrhonism's Arguments against Value', 135) that whenever, at any
place in the book, Sextus uses the word 'are', he should be taken to mean 'appear';
the point is restricted to his claim about the fundamental ethical division. It is
sometimes suggested that PH I 135 gives us blanket permission to substitute
'appear' for 'are'. I am not sure if that is true (entuutha risper kai en allots need not
mean liere as everywhere else'); but in any case, PH I is not M XI.
43 This is explicit in Annas and Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism, 164, and implied by
Annas, 'Doing without Objective Values', 9, and McPherran, 'Pyrrhonism's Arguments against Value', 132.

152 Richard Bett
in by the various schools are anything other than 'private'. They are
'private' in the sense that they are believed to be good only by the
particular schools which have proposed them, as a result of those
schools' own particular systems of reasoning; other schools have other
schemes of reasoning, and hence other supposed goods.44 And, according to the assumptions which we examined earlier, this shows that
none of them can qualify as goods by nature. They are not goods by
nature because they are not 'common to all'; they are not 'common to
all' because they are not regarded as good by all. The entire argument
from 69-78 is focused on the question whether any of the things which
appear good to, or are supposed good by, any particular person are
real goods, or goods by nature;45 the term 'private good' is simply one
more name for these apparent or supposed goods specifically, for
those things supposed good by some philosophical school, employing
a mode of ethical reasoning not shared by the other schools.
Why, then, does Sextus use the term 'private good' at all? If I am
right that 'private goods' are simply a species of apparent goods, the
term seems highly misleading; 'private good' sounds as if it refers,
rather, to a good which is genuine, though in some way restricted. But
Sextus's usage makes good sense in the context in which it is employed.
As we have seen, his argument proceeds on the assumption that there
can be no genuine goods which are merely 'private'; and the term
'private good' is an oxymoron, coined precisely to emphasize this point.
The possibility being considered is that one might be able to distinguish
real goods, or goods by nature, from merely apparent goods "by reason'
(logi, 77). Sextus says that if that is so, then, since each set of thinkers
reasons in their own 'private' way, 'each will in turn introduce a private
good' (idion palin hekastos eisegesetai agathon, 7T).4* That is, since the
44 On the legitimacy of this inference, see section , note 16 and immediately preceding
text.
45 The phrases used are 'that which appears good to someone' (to tini phainomenon
agathon, 74, 75) and 'that which is supposed good by someone' (to hupo tinos
doxazomenon agathon, 72, cf. 75). See also M XI89 (recalling the argument at 69-78),
where Sextus says that each of the parties to a dispute about the good 'thinks good
that which appears so to himself' (hekaston to phainomenon auti agathon hegeisthai).
46 On the use of the singular idion agathon, rather than, as one might expect, the plural
idia agatha, see again note 14.

various schools all use reason to derive their views of what is good,
each of them will be able to put forward as really good whatever it
deems good as a result of such reasoning; anything which is reasoned
to be good will count as a genuine good. But since each school's
reasoning is 'private' to that school, the items which thus pass for
genuine goods will all be 'private' as well. And in this case, of course,
the suggestion that reason can discern what is really good is contradicted; for a 'private good', an item which only some particular school
conceives of as good, is automatically not a genuine good as Sextus
immediately goes on to say. The reification suggested by the phrase
'private good' is, then, a piece of irony on Sextus's part. If we were to
grant the supposition that reason can discern what is really good, the
things argued to be goods by the various schools would be real goods
yet goods which would be 'private' to the schools in question. This
purported state of affairs is inherently contradictory; and it is to play
up this point that Sextus introduces the oxymoronic term 'private
good'. 'Private goods', then, are simply apparent goods which are
mistakenly deemed to be real goods by their adherents namely, the
various philosophical schools. They do not belong in some problematic
variety of relativism; nor do they play any role in Sextus's view of
what the sceptic should concern himself with.
I do not pretend to have covered M XI exhaustively.47 Nor do I claim

that its argument is entirely free from difficulties. But I have said
enough, I believe, to show that the position which Sextus offers in M
XI is not fundamentally confused, and that it is not a mistake to regard
this position as sceptical. So what is the answer to the question posed
in my title? If I am right, Sextus's position here is not scepticism of
precisely the form which he presents at the beginning of PH I, the text
which is usually taken to be definitive of later Pyrrhonism. But he does
47 For one thing, I have said nothing whatever about the chapters on the 'art of living'
(168-256), whose subject-matter is quite separate from the topics discussed here.

154 Richard Bett
in a genuine sense suspend judgement about the way things really are.
His position, then, can quite reasonably be considered a form of
scepticism, in the ancient understanding of that term even though
it is not the most familiar form. And it is a form of scepticism which
makes legitimate use of arguments concerning relativities even
though, as we have just seen, it is not relativism, as that term is usually
understood in contemporary philosophy. Several ancient authors who
are not themselves sceptics claim that the Pyrrhonians 'say that everything is relative'.48 Whatever may be the case with Sextus's other works,
or the lost works of other Pyrrhonians, M XI shows that this characterization is not wholly deluded.49
It does not seem to have been noticed that some passages of PH IE
conform to the position presented in M XI. Though it is M XI which has
been accused of inconsistency, it is in fact PH ffi which is internally
inconsistent; for the M XI position, as I have emphasized throughout, is
distinct from and incompatible with the version of Pyrrhonian scepticism officially presented by PH. I shall conclude by briefly amplifying
these assertions.
As we noted earlier, PH also contains an argument to the effect that
nothing is good by nature (179-82). As in M XI 69-78, the comparison is
made between fire and snow, which are invariably wanning or chilling,
and goods, none of which are invariably (viewed as) beneficial. The
inference is that while fire and snow are, respectively, warming and
chilling by nature, nothing is good by nature; and the rest of the passage
illustrates the wide divergence in conceptions of what is good, both among
ordinary people and among philosophers. Though the argument is
simpler than in M XI, it is dearly of the same general design. The same
conclusion is stated following the next stretch of argument (190), which
concerns the connection between goodness and 'the choiceworthy7 (to
hairetori); this argument pursues broadly the same course as the one in M
XI which immediately follows 69-78 (compare PH 183-90 with M XI
79-89). It is then argued that nothing is by nature bad, and that nothing
is by nature indifferent (PH 190-3); again, the conclusions are generated
48 Anon Comm Tht, Col. 63; Aristocles in Eusebius, Praep Evang XIV 18.12; Aulus
Gellius, Attic Nights XI 5.7 (where the view is also ascribed to the Academics).
49 As suggested by Annas and Barnes, The Modes of Scepticism, 97.

from the fact that people do not all regard the same things as evil, or
as indifferent.
The difficulty here is that the official conclusion in PH is not that
nothing is by nature good, bad or indifferent, but rather that the sceptic
will suspend judgement about whether anything is by nature good or
bad (epechei men peri tou phusei ti agathon e kakon ... einai, 235). And
these two conclusions are incompatible with one another; the latter is
clearly what one would expect from Sextus's programmatic remarks
about scepticism at the opening of PH I, but the other conclusion, or
set of conclusions, is present in the text as well. Now, it might be
suggested that this incompatibility can be removed by the device which
we unsuccessfully tried with M XI in section I. When Sextus says that
nothing is by nature good, bad or indifferent, perhaps he is not offering
us his own conclusions, but is simply arguing on one of the many sides
of the issue, with a view to inducing suspension of judgement owing
to the many conflicting but equally persuasive positions which have
been or might be taken. Much of the ethical portion of PH is devoted
to listing outlandish ethical views and practices and pointing, out their
inconsistency with Greek views and practices. Perhaps the arguments
to the effect that nothing is by nature good, bad or indifferent are
designed simply to give us one more conflicting conception, this time
a purely negative one. We are then faced with the idea that A is good,
the idea that B is good, the idea that C is good, ...., and also the idea
that nothing is good (and similarly for the bad and the indifferent);
given the 'equal strength' (isostheneia) of these many conflicting conceptions, we cannot but suspend judgement about the whole question.
In this case the argument will hang together perfectly well.
It would be nice if PH could be read in this way. However, the
place occupied in the text by the conclusions that nothing is good or
bad or indifferent does not allow us to do so. These negative conclusions are not on a par with the multiple positive views about the good,
the bad and the indifferent, so that the positive views and the negative
conclusions together induce suspension of judgement. Rather, as we
have seen, the negative conclusions are themselves inferred from the
disagreement among the positive views; nothing is, for example, good
by nature because people do not all view the same things as good. In
arguing for the negative conclusions, then, Sextus is not just creating
one more party to the disagreement; instead, he is extracting a lesson
from this disagreement, just as he does in M XI. Yet the very same
types of disagreement (treated at somewhat greater length at PH
198-234) also motivate suspension of judgement concerning whether

156 Richard Bett

anything is by nature good or bad.50 Sextus is drawing two incompatible morals from the same set of observations.
The confusion is particularly acute and obvious at the end of the
first argument that nothing is good by nature (182). Having stated that,
since people do not regard the same things as good, there is nothing
good by nature, he immediately goes on to say that the conflicting
views just mentioned that is, the conflicting views, among philosophers and ordinary people, about what is good lead us to suspend
judgement. This latter point is introduced by the connective kai gar, as
if the conclusion that we must suspend judgement about what is good
complements the conclusion that nothing is by nature good, being an
additional result motivated by the same considerations.51 But this is
not the case; the two conclusions are at odds with one another, and
belong to different versions of Pyrrhonian scepticism. Sextus recognizes
that there is a problem here; for he introduces this argument by saying
that goodness and badness and indifference are 'perhaps non-existent
matters' (anupostatois tacha pragmasi, 178), and that 'some argue' (tines
epilogizontai) that nothing is by nature good or bad or indifferent. But
he does not succeed in creating a place for the contention 'nothing is
by nature good or bad or indifferent' which coheres with his official
strategy; and by 190 'some argue' has become 'as I have argued' (has
epelogisamen).
It is interesting that Diogenes Laertius, summarizing the same
stretch of material, commits a similar confusion (IX 101). His argument
is identical in structure to that of M XI69-78, though much more briefly
stated.52 But though the argument is introduced as showing that 'there
50 M XI does, as we saw, also talk of suspension of judgement. However, to repeat, M

XI's suspension of judgement is not suspension of judgement about whether anything is by nature good or bad. M XI's form of epoche is compatible with the negative
conclusions, whereas PH's form of epoche (the better-known form) is not.
51 On the function of kai gar, see J.D. Denniston, The Greek Particles (Oxford, 1934),
108-11; Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar (rev. Gordon M. Messing: Cambridge,
Mass., 1956), 640.
52 The extreme similarity may be explained either by supposing that Diogenes is
copying Sextus (whom he postdates by at least a generation see IX 116), or that
both are following the same source extremely closely. If, as is usually assumed, M XI
is later than PH HI, the former hypothesis is more likely. For if M XI69-78 is drawing

is not good or bad by nature' (phusei te me einai agathon e kakon), because

what is good or bad by nature would have to be 'common to all' (koinon
panton, as in M XI), it ends by stating that 'the good by nature is
unknowable [or, "unknown"]' (agnoston own to phusei agathon), owing
to 'the equal strength of the arguments' (ten isostheneian ton logon).53
Diogenes, like Sextus in PH, is trying to force the argument into the
on some earlier source, PH ID 179-82 must be drawing on the same source; this is dear
from the similarity of their argumentative strategy and from the number of examples
which they share. Yet, while DL EX 101 corresponds move by move with M XI69-78,
its correspondence with PH m 179-82 is much looser. Thus, if DL IX 101, M XI69-78
and PH 179-82 were all following the same earlier sceptical text, we would have to
suppose that Sextus first, in PH, followed this text relatively loosely, and then later, in
XI, followed the same text very closely indeed. Given the way authors usually
develop, one would expect the later work to exhibit more initiative and independence
man the earlier; the hypothesis of a common source for XI69-78 and DL IX101 would
stand against this. If, on the other hand, XI precedes PH HI (which I raise as a
possibility below), both explanations for the exact correspondence between XI69-78
and DL IX101 seem equally plausible. The hypothesis of a common source is advanced
in Karel Janacek, Diogenes Laertius IX101 und Sextus Empiricus M XI69-75 (-78)', in
F. Steibitz and R. Hosek, edd., Charisteria F. Novotny Octogenario Oblata, Opera Universitatis Purkynianae Brunensis (Facultas Philosophica), vol. 90 (Prague, 1961), 143-6. But
Janacek relies here on a controversial broader thesis about Diogenes's and Sextus's
sources; for criticism of this thesis, as well as for a general account of Diogenes's
treatment of Pyrrhonism, and its proximity to Sextus, see Jonathan Barnes, 'Diogene
Laerzio e il Pirronismo', Elenchos 7 (1986) 385-427.
53 Janacek (see the previous note) claims that the concept of isostheneia, even if not the
term itself, is present in M XI76-8. But this is not so. Though the focus of this passage
is indeed on the lack of a method for distinguishing between genuine and counterfeit goods, its strategy is radically different from that which employs the concept of
isostheneia. The point is not that, given the lack of any such method, all the various
conflicting views of what is good have an equal and non-negligible claim to be
correct, so none of them can be dismissed, and none can be favored over the others,
and so we must suspend judgement about what is really good; this would be the
isostheneia strategy. Rather, as we saw (see section ), the point is that the very
existence of disagreement makes plain the hopelessness of the quest for such a
method, and that, given that no view about what is good is universally agreed upon,
all of the many competing views about what is really good must be dismissed, and
so we must conclude that nothing is really good.

158 Richard Bett
mould represented by the familiar form of Pyrrhonian scepticism;54 but

the argument was not meant to fit this form of scepticism.55
Who originated the argument that there is nothing good or bad by
nature? It was not Sextus himself, as his embarrassment in PH shows;
he is drawing on a source which does not conform to the version of
Pyrrhonism officially offered by PH itself. Yet in PH, the argument is
uneasily juxtaposed with the official version of Pyrrhonism. And this
suggests that its source was one which Sextus feels some obligation to
follow that it comes from a work which he expects to be propounding
Pyrrhonian scepticism, but which, in this case at least, is not giving him
Pyrrhonian scepticism as he himself is accustomed to it. An obvious
candidate for the author of such a work would be Aenesidemus. This is
for two reasons. First, Aenesidemus is cited in M XI (42), at the beginning
of the chapter arguing that there is nothing by nature good or bad; and
the point on which he is taken as an authority, having to do with a lack
of consensus about what is good, appears to be a foreshadowing of the
crucial argument at M XI 69-78. Second, there is other evidence to
connect Aenesidemus with the variety of scepticism, non-standard with
respect to PH, which we have been considering. In the chapter of
Photius's Bibliotheca which is our most extensive and detailed source of
information about Aenesidemus,56 we are told that he argued that nothing is the cause of anything (nieden men medenos aition... einai, 72L4), that
there is no such thing as the ethical telos (72L7), and that there are no such
things as 'signs', in the philosophical sense of reliable indicators of the
non-evident (72L3). It also appears from this passage that Aenesidemus
54 Diogenes's conclusion that the good is unknowable is, of course, a further error;
Pyrrhonian scepticism of the familiar variety will not endorse this conclusion any
more than the conclusion that the good can be known. But this is an error to which
Diogenes is frequently prone in his summary of Pyrrhonism; he concludes three of
the Ten Modes by saying that the real natures of the things in question are not or
cannot be known (IX 85, 86, 88), instead of saying that we are forced to suspend
judgement about their real nature.
55 My view is thus the exact opposite of the one proposed by Julia Annas, 'Doing
without Objective Values', n. 11, who says the M XI is confused, while PH and DL
are free from such confusion.
56 169bl8-170b35, which appears as passages 71C and 72L in Long & Sedley, The
Hellenistic Philosophers; my references to this text follow Long & Sedley's numeration.

favored locutions of the form 'X is sometimes F, sometimes not-F' and

'X if F for this person, not-F for that person' (71C6-7), and that he avoided
issuing any assertions 'unambiguously' (anamphibol s, 71C5,11) that
is, without these kinds of relativizing qualifications and accused the
Academics of doing so, and thereby of failing to exemplify any serious
sceptical outlook.57 Finally, Photius tells us that Aenesidemus applied
the same kind of analysis to good and bad, things to be pursued and
things to be avoided, as to causes, signs and the telos (72L5). Though
Aenesidemus says that the Pyrrhonists are thereby 'free of all dogma'
(pantos apolelumenoi dogmatos, 71C6), and that the Pyrrhonist 'determines
nothing' (ouden ... horizei, 71C8), this position looks substantially different from the Pyrrhonism of the opening chapters of PH. However, it
conforms closely to the Pyrrhonism of M XI, if my analysis of that view
has been correct.58
But if, as seems likely, the source of the argument we have been
examining is Aenesidemus, there is an interesting implication for our
views about the order of composition of Sextus's works. It has been
generally held that the single work which we now refer to as M VII-XI
was written later than PH. Traditionally, this was because of a number
of passages in VII-XI referring back to previous discussions of some
topic ( 1, 29, 345, IX 195, 144, 167); these could only be
understood, it was thought, as references to PH. This orthodoxy was
seriously challenged by the studies of Karel Janacek, who argued that
- is incomplete.59 According to Janacek, these books were
originally preceded by a more extensive treatment of the material also
dealt with in PHI (that is, the 'general account' of scepticism katholos
logos, PH 15); if so, the back references in M VII-XI could more plausibly
be taken as references to this lost book or books. But Janacek still
57 It had always been assumed that Aenesidemus was himself originally a member of
the Academy, and that the Photius passage is declaring the reasons for his break
with the school. For a powerful rebuttal of this view, see now Fernanda Decleva
Caizzi, 'Aenesidemus and the Academy', Classical Quarterly 42 (1992) 176-89.
58 For a more detailed discussion of Aenesidemus, to which I am indebted in this
paragraph, see Paul Woodruff, 'Aporetic Pyrrhonism'. Woodruff does not, however, suggest any correspondence with XI.
59 Karel Janacek, 'Die Hauptschrift des Sextus Empiricus als Torso Erhalten?', Philologus 107 (1963) 271-7

160 Richard Bett
insisted, on stylistic grounds, that PH must precede M VH-XI. Now, if

my argument has been correct, it looks as if this view of the order of
the two works deserves to be questioned (and it is far more open to
question if, as Janacek holds, it is supported by nothing but stylistic
arguments).60 For, if M XI was later than PH El, then Sextus would
later in his life be reverting to an earlier version of Pyrrhonism. In M
XI, as we have seen, Sextus is comfortable with, and throughout
remains consistent with, the position which can be plausibly attributed
to Aenesidemus. In PH III, on the other hand, he is uncomfortable with
this same position, and tries, albeit unsuccessfully, to fit it into the alien
mould of his own later variety of Pyrrhonism, as represented by the
opening chapters of PH I. That Sextus should revert to the earlier,
Aenesidemian form of Pyrrhonism after previously having espoused
a distinct and later variety would be surprising, to say the least. Such
a development is perhaps not inherently impossible; and our knowledge of Sextus's personality, career or contacts with other philosophers
is so paltry that no conception of how his ideas changed would be
inconsistent with it.61 Nonetheless, a development from the position
espoused in M XI to that of PH seems historically and philosophically far more natural than the reverse.62 The fact that M VII-XI is much
more detailed than PH - has no tendency to show that it is the later
of the two works. Sextus may have written a preliminary sketch which
was then expanded into a larger work, but he may equally well have
60 That XI preceded PH III is postulated by Gisela Striker, 'Ataraxia: Happiness as

Tranquillity', The Monist 73 (1990) 97-110. However, Striker's attitude to the two
works is very different from mine; her contention is that PH is designed to address
'the more obvious objections' (104) to the argument in M XI. I cannot, therefore,
draw any support for my own position from this article.
61 On the flimsiness of our knowledge of Sextus, see O.K. House, "The Life of Sextus
Empiricus', Classical (Quarterly 30 (1980) 227-38.
62 Scholars often seem reluctant to speak of developments in Sextus's ideas, or even
to admit that Sextus had any ideas of his own. I see no reason for this squeamishness.
The fact that he draws heavily on earlier sources does not show that he is a mindless
copyist devoid of opinions or originality any more than one would say this, on
the same grounds, of Virgil, or Shakespeare, or T.S. Eliot. Whatever the extent of his
debt to other writings, Sextus's works are his own productions, put together for his
own purposes, and deserve to be assessed as such.

written a large work which was then condensed into a shorter version.
The latter possibility is at least worth exploring.63
These historical issues are no doubt tendentious, and I cannot pursue
them here. At any rate, what I hope to have shown is that M XI is of
considerable interest in its own right, as a work which presents a form
of scepticism distinct from the later Pyrrhonism to which we are accustomed, and which does so without inconsistency. We may find the view
which it offers unattractive and remote from our own ways of thought.
But it is neither naive and confused, nor a mere rehash of (or warm-up
for) ideas which Sextus presented more accessibly elsewhere. As such it
deserves a more prominent place in the history of Greek scepticism.64
Department of Philosophy
Johns Hopkins University
347 Gilman Hall
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218-2690
U.S.A.
63 More troublesome is the apparent discrepancy between M XI and the other books
in the same work; as we saw, there seems to be no need to interpret any of M Vn-X
as presenting a position distinct from that of PH. I suspect that this has to do with
the fact that VTI-X, unlike XI, do not deal solely with phenomenal properties
of things (in the sense discussed at the end of section DT). In any case, it cannot be
said that M VTI-XI as a whole presents an Aenesidemian position. For example, M
Vin 298 suspends judgement regarding the existence of 'signs', rather than arguing
that there are no such things; the preceding argument cites passages of Aenesidemus as part of the negative side of the equipollence ( 215, 234), but
equipollence, rather than a negative conclusion, is what Sextus arrives at on this
topic. It is only XI which commits itself to negative conclusions. However, I
cannot attempt to discuss this issue adequately at present.
64 A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the (Pacific Division),
San Francisco, March 1993.1 would like to thank my commentator on that occasion,
Don Blakeley, for his helpful comments. I also thank Julia Annas, and the anonymous referee for Apeiron, for valuable suggestions.



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Sextus's Against the Ethicists:

Scepticism, Relativism or Both?

In Book XI of Adversus Mathematicos, entitled Against the Ethicists, Sextus

124 Richard Bett

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 125

it becomes clear that the parallel ethical portion of Outlines of Pyrrhonism

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126 Richard Bett

5 For explicit mentions of this strategy, see M VTI443, Vm298,476-7, IX137,191-2, X

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 127

claim is supposed to be endorsed by the sceptic, and it is this very

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128 Richard Bett

8 Enargeia is taken to be a mark of truth by the Peripatetics (Sextus 218), the

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 129

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130 Richard Bett

different schools have different views about what is good, established

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 131

It looks as if Sextus's answer to this question is 'no'. That is, as he

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132 Richard Bett

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Situs's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 133

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134 Richard Bett

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 135

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136 Richard Bett

side of everyday life' (toi bioi... sunagonizometha, PH 102), and against

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 137

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138 Richard Bett

something to be by nature good is for it to be good for everyone, not just

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 139

Now that we have examined M XTs central argument, we are in a

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140 Richard Bett

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 141

nature. This result is not achieved by some dubious inductive inference

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142 Richard Bett

consists in refusing to put forward any positive account of the nature

22 Phuseiagathon, M XI69,71,78, etc.; tais aletheiais agathon, M XI72,75; ontos agathon,

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 143

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144 Richard Bett

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 145

Does Polystratus's argument show up Sextus as naive? This is by no

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146 Richard Bett

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Sextus's Against the Ethicists: Scepticism, Relativism or Both? 147