Greek Ethics

PAMELA M. RUBY, M.A.

Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Liverpool

MACMILLAN

ST MARTIN'S PRESS

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© Pamela M. Huby 1967 CONTENTS
First Edit/on 1967 Editor's Preface page vi
Reprinted 1969
I. INTRODUCTION 1
Published try
MACMILLAN AND CO LTD II. THE BEGINNINGS 3
Little Essex Street Londolt w C 2
and also at Bombay Calcutta and Madras (i) Background 3
Macmillan South Africa (Publishers) Pry LJd Johannesburg (ii) The Sophists 7
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The Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd Toronto (iii) Democritus 13
Sf Martin's Press Inc New York
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Printed ilt Great Bdtalit by IV. PLATO 26
RICHARD CLAY (THE CHAUCER PRESS) LTD.
Bunga)'. Suffolk Note on Platds treatment of Love and Friendship 39

Library of Congress catalog card no. 67-II4oI V. ARISTOTLE 41

Note on Aristotle's treatment of Friendship 62

VI. AFTER ARISTOTLE 64

(i) Background 64
(ii) Epicureanism 65
(iii) Stoicism 67
Notes 70
BibliograplrJ 74
 EDI'TOR'S PREFACE
N~w Studies in Ethics is a series of monographs by modern
phl!osophers, drawn from universities in Great Britain the
Umted States a~d Australia. Each author has been ask~d to
expound and ctlncall y examine the thought of a phil h the sixth century B.C., but the first philosophers are not known to
or h 1 f hil osop er,
sc 00 0 p osophers, representative of one type of ethical
theory. The series as a whole Covers the main types of theory
from Greekantiqnity to the present day and meets the need for a
comprehensive surv.ey of ethics from the point of view of
contemporary analyncal philosophy.
The Greeks wer~ the Brst to conduct what is recognizable
today as a systematic philosophical discussion of the nature of
morality..Mrs Huby has produced a comprehensive account of
;h~ tn~an!ngs which they gave to such expressions as 'good',
virtue ~ voluntary action', 'justice', etc.; and where there
were differences among them concerning the correct definition
of the.se terms, she has brought these to light. Greek thinkers
s~met1~es gave the same answers as our contemporaries, sorne-
nmes differ~nt ones, both to the practical question: how are
men t~ attam the good life? and to the philosophical question:
what 1S ,the ~est method .of arriving at an understanding of
morality. This study Illuminates the differences and similarities
on both counts in a discussion which is at once scholarly and
readable.
W. D. HUDSON
1. INTRODUCTION
Greek philosophy traditionally begins with Thales of Miletus in
have been interested in ethics. Ethical problems first became
prominent among the sophists, a class of professional teachers of
'wisdom', who flourished in the fifth century. We possess only
fragments of their writings, but there is enough to show that
Protagoras of Abdera (c. 485-415), Hippias of Elis (somewhat
younger than Protagoras), and Antiphon of Athens (active about
420) discussed ethical problems, and where so little remains we
are grateful for two anonymous texts, the Ano1tJmus Iamblichi, i.e.
a writer whose works were later used by Iamblichus (c. 4'0 ?), and
the Dissoi Logoi (some time after 400), a roughly written summary
of sophistic teachings, and for a fragment of the dramatist and
politician Critias of Athens (c. ,460-403). Gorgias of Leontini
(c. 483-375) did not claim to teach ethics, but his speeches Helena
and Palamedes contain some views on moral psychology. We may
fairly assume, too, that some of the arguments put into the mouths
of individual sophists by Plato are fair accounts of their views.
Democritus of Abdera (460-378) produced a sensible rule of
life in his ethical works, but only fragments are left.
Socrates of Athens (469-399)' after a lifetime of active moral
teaching, was put to death on being convicted of impiety and
corrupting the young. He wrote nothing himself, but is portrayed
in a long series of works by Plato, of which the earlier ones
probably give a faithful picture of his methods, and in the
Memorabilia and other works of Xenophon.
Plato, also of Athens (427-347), was a disciple of Socrates and
wrote a large number of dialogues, in most of which Socrates is
the chief speaker; among them the Alcibiades I - perhaps not
written by Plato, but a good introduction to his doctrines-
Hippias Major and Minor, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Eutfoidemus,
I
 Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Gorgias, Meno, Phaedo, Symposium,
Protagoras, Republic, Philebus, and Laws all contain somethinO' of
importance for ethics. b THE BEGINNINGS
Aristotle of Stagira (;84-;22) came to Athens in ;67 and studied
under and worked with Plato for twenty years. His writings cover
a wide field. The Nicomachean Ethics is his greatest ethical treatise,
and the Eud,mialt Ethics is probably also his, but the Magna
MoraNa attributed to him is in fact of later date. His Politics is also
relevant.
The Cyrenaics were followers of Aristippus (c. 4;5-;60), but
only fragments of their teachings remain.
Epicurus of Mytilene (341-27°) came to Athens in 306 and
set up a school. His influence later spread throughout the Roman
Empire. We have a Letter to Mello,cus on ethical theory and two
sets of doctrines, the Kyriae Doxae and Sententiae Vaticaltae written
by him. ' Greeks, like us, were human beings, and shared the common lot of
The Cynics were followers ofDiogenes of Sinope (c. 400-3 2 5).
Only fragments of their work remain.
The Stoics were followers of Zeno of Citium (333-264), who
came to Athens in about 310 and studied with the Cynics, but
started a less radical school of his own in about 300. This flour-
ished and developed until Roman times. Chrysippus of Tarsus
(280-204) reorganised the movement and systematised its teach-
ings, and Panaetius of Rhodes (I80-IIO) organised Stoicism in
Rome. Posidonius of Apamea (c. I ;0-46) introduced some
Platonic elements. Unfortunately we have only fragments of these
earlier writers, though we have complete works by the later
Stoics - Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65), Epictetus (A.D. 50-130), and
Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180) - and can learn much from
Cicero (106-4; B.C.), in particular from his De Finibus.
2 ;
BACKGROUND
Greeks are the only philosophical moralists commonly
stu!di"d by the Western world who were not influenced by
Glristianity, for the compelling reason that all their major ethical
systems were developed long before the birth of Christ. We have
to remember that their basic moral and religious outlook was
different from ours, and that what they valued and admired was
sometimes very different from what we value and admire. At the
same time these differences must not he over-emphasised; the
humanity, which must provide the raw material for all ethical
systems. Further, in some ways their views have greatly affected
Christian thinking; their tradition is not so much an alien as an
ancestral one, which shows differences from our own only because
the latter contains other elements as well. We can usually enjoy a
Greek tragedy in a straightforward way, and understand the
passions and the moral issues involved; the attitudes of an Orestes,
an Antigone, or an Oedipus, are comprehensible to us even when
we do not share them, and equally we are seldom really puzzled
by the outlook of the historians or the orators.
But differences do exist, and there are times when we are
genninely at a loss to understand what we read. An outstanding
example of this is in Aristotle's Ethics, where he describes a virtue
foreign to us, hut which he regarded as one of the highest. Here is
what he says:
'It would be equally out of character for the great-souled man
to run away with his arms swinging and to commit an act of
injustice. For what reason would he have to do anything un-
seemly, when nothing seems to him of great importance? ... He
is chiefly concerned with matters of honour; he is pleased, but
only to a moderate extent, when he is honoured for good reasons
and by good men, because he thinks he is getting his due, or at
least something approaching it ... but he will wholly despise
honour from the common herd and for trivial reasons. For they
are not on the same plane as he is .... He is the kind of man to do
good to others, but to be ashamed at receiving benefits, for the
latter is the mark of an inferior, the former of a superior man.
And when he repays a benefit he will give more than he has
received, so that his original benefactor will now be in his debt
and be in the position of a beneficiary. They appear to have better
memories for favours they have given than for those they have
received, for the recipient is in an inferior position to the donor,
and they wish to be superior, and they enjoy being reminded of
the one, but not of the other... .' I
These passages from Aristotle's description of the man he says
he regards as being perfect in virtue are enough to show the
difficulty. Can Aristotle really have admired a man like that, or was
he just joking? Scholars are divided about this, and not sur-
prisingly.
Another example is Socrates' statement, in Plato's Crito, of
the reasons why, when he had been condemned to death, he re-
fused to flee from Athens but remained to face execution.' It was
agreed by Socrates and his friends that his condemnation had been
unjust, and it was known that his opponents had no wish for him
to be put to death, but would have been satisfied to see him go
into exile. Socrates, however, was determined to stay, arguing that
it was a law of Athens that the decision of the judges must be
final, and that it was wrong to harm Athens by transgressing her
laws in any way. For a man's country was more deserving of
honour than his parents or ancestors, and one ought to bow to the
wishes of a wrathful country even more than to those of a wrath-
ful father, and to do whatever it commanded, even to the point of
facing death.
Here again we are all at sea. Was Socrates merely employing
arguments which he thought would appeal to the respectable
Crito? Or is Plato trying to clear his name in the eyes of the
Athenian public by means of arguments which Socrates never in
fact used? Or did he in fact accept them?
4 j
In cases like tllese the difficulties of understanding are obvious,
but there are other and more subtle problems as well. Many of
these lie in translation, for there are several Greek terms that can-
not be translated adequately by anyone English expression, and
which introduce concepts at least slightly different from any of
ours. In the course of this study such terms will be discussed as
the occasion arises.
To fill in the background we also need some knowledge of the
political systems of the Greeks and of their religious outlook.
Politically, they lived in many small independent communities. 3
Each community formed a polis, a term which we usually translate
as 'city-state'. Each of these city-states consisted of a city, with
some kind of fortification, and a small piece of surrounding
territory which might contain a number of lesser towns. Thus
Athens consisted of the walled town of Athens and the land of
Attica, covering about a thousand square miles and including
places like Eleusis and Marathon. This small independent state
was flanked by others equally independent, and wars between
them were frequent. So while all Greeks spoke a common lan-
guage and shared a common culture, and regarded tllemselves,
being Greeks, as superior to all other races, a man's primary
allegiance was to his own small city-state, which was tlle centre of
his economic, religious, social, and cultural life. The inhabitants of
such states fell into three classes: the slaves, who were usually
not Greek; the resident foreigners, who were free but took no
part in political life ; and the free citizens. Of these free citizens,
only the men had any political function, but in many states, during
long periods of their history, all male citizens could play an active
part in governing their community by speaking and voting in the
sovereign assembly, serving as jurymen in the courts, and from
time to time holding office. They also paid taxes and served in the
army as reqnired. Even in less democratic constitutions a large
fraction of the free male population had an active part to play,
and there was frequently a lively opposition. Hence nearly all
Greeks were politically conscious from childhood onwards, and
the distinction between a man's public and private life was much
less clear-cut for them than it is for us. And this explains why the
 distinction between political theory and moral tbeory was also
blurred for the Greeks, and why it so often seems to be taken for
granted that the highest virtue for a grown man is tbe ability to
govern. At the same time some distinction was made, as we can
see from the fact that Aristotle wrote separate works on ethics
and politics.
In religion the Greeks had a superabundance of deities of
various kinds.4 At tbe top weretbe gods of Olympus, Zeus and
his colleagues, immortal, gifted with superhuman powers, but all
too human in their behaviour. They came close to individual
Greeks because each city had its own patron god or goddess, who
was particularly worshipped there, as Atbena was at Athens.
Some had wider scope, like Apollo of Delphi, whose oracle was
consulted by states and individuals from far and wide. These
beings could and did arouse genuine devotion, but their example
was not such as to inspire anyone to a highly moral way of life.
There were also numerous lesser and more shadowy beings, like
the nymphs and river-gods of the countryside, worshipped by the
local people. And finally there were the gods of the mystery
religions, like Dionysus, who was worshipped in a frenzied way
and witb a personal enthusiasm quite different from the worship
of tbe calmer Olympians. With such a mass of material it would
not be surprising if tbe individual's views were a trifle confused;
what is surprising is that in spite of it all the gods were generally
regarded as the guarantors of morality, in tbe sense that both in
this life and the next tbey were ready to punish misdeeds and
reward the good. And tbere was enough of positive good in
popular ideas about tbe gods to enable tbinkers like Socrates and
Plato to develop tbe idea of a perfectly good divinity, stripped of
anthropomorphic accidents and caring for tbe welfare of mankind.
A related topic is that of what happens after death, and on this
too there seems to have been considerable uncertainty, but enough
positive material for Socrates and Plato to develop their idea tbat
the soul was immortal.
6 7
(il) THE SOPHISTS
The Greeks first became self-conscious about moral problems
when tbey came into contact witb peoples whose views differed
from tbeir own. They themselves colonised almost the whole of
the Mediterranean basin and parts of the Black Sea coast, and tbus
had dealings with peoples of all levels of civilisation and of widely
diJfering codes of conduct, from the Egyptians witb their already
ancient culture to tbe barbarous tribes of the north and west.
And in turn tbey were threatened by the Persian expansion of the
first half of the fifth century, which culminated in two invasions of
Greece - tbose repulsed at Maratbon in 490 and Salamis in 480
_ and made even those who stayed at home acutely aware of an
alien culture. There were also many differences of outlook among
the Greeks themselves: Athenians differed from Spartans, and
both from Corinthians, and as time passed tbere were great up-
heavals of opinion even witbin a single community, as traditional
ways of tbought came under attack for a variety of economic and
political reasons.
Two early works illustrate the kind of information educated
men had at their disposal. In his Journ0' Round the World, Hecataeus
of Miletus described tbe customs of a vast number of peoples
throughout tbe known world, from India to Spain; and the
starting-point of the famous study of the medical man Hippo-
crates (or one of his followers), Airs, Waters and Places, was tbe
fact tbat peoples living in differefit geographical situations differed
in many respects, botb physical and mental. Among otber things
it became clear tbat much tbat one set of people believed to be
right anotber thought wrong, and this led men witb enqniring
minds to ask whetber all such beliefs were just a matter of
opinion and convention. Sexual practices and metbods of dis-
posing of tbe dead differed in striking ways from one community
to anotber: Egyptian kings by custom married their sisters; many
Greek states regarded homosexuality as normal; tbe Parsees
exposed their dead on high towers and the Massagetae of Scythia
tbought it right to eat tbem.' Could anyone of such practices be
regarded as more right tban anotber in an absolute sense? And if
 in these matters what a community thought right was just what
happened to be the age-old custom of that community, what of
right and wrong in general? Might not all moral judgments be
matters of mere convention? So clever men argued, and stirred
others to argue against them, and with these arguments moral
philosophy may be said to have begun.
This first big argument is associated chiefly with the sophists,
though they were not the only people who took part in it. The
sophists were itinerant teachers who, in the fifth century, supplied
the need in Greece for some form of higher education. They were
ready to train young men who could pay their fees in the arts of
public speaking and debate which were so important to the rising
generation of democratic politicians, and the successful ones
passed from city to city with growing reputations and fuller and
fuller purses.
The best sophists were men of probity and considerable intelli-
gence who interpreted their task of teaching in the widest possible
sense. They did not limit themselves to elocution and persuasive
speaking, but strove to give their pupils a cultured background,
which might include the study of such subjects as law and history
as well as grammar and etymology. In particular they touched
on ethics and political theory; hence their interest for us. How-
ever, it is also at this point that their peculiar position becomes
most apparent. Unlike Plato and Aristotle they were not, and
could not afford to be, scholars dedicated to the pursuit of truth,
and their interest in ethics was subordinate to their main purpose
of teaching success. Not all sophists were men of the calibre of
Protagoras, for whom even Plato showed some respect, and some
of them scandalised the more sober Greeks by their apparent
readiness to undermine all moral restraint. Any and every method
that would help their pupils to succeed was valid, and some openly
boasted that they could make the worse cause appear the better.
They defended themselves by claiming that the man who suc-
ceeded, by whatever means, deserved to succeed.
This 'might is right' attitude fits in well with the general
scepticism aroused by reflection on the great differences in moral
codes found throughout tile world. It is one aspect of the out-
8
standing intellectual issue of the sophistic period, the pf;ysis versus
nomos debate. This was a wide-ranging argument over whether
characteristic human institutions sum as language, law and
morality were natural or man-made; for instance, whether there
was only one name for a thing which was its right name (pf;ysis),
or whether all names were equally good, provided only that
some group of men agreed to use them in a particular way
(nomos).
The terms pf;ysis and nomos have been discussed at length by
scholars, but for our purposes they can be explained fairly easily.
The word physis, whatever its origin may have been, can be
rendered ahnost exactly by our word 'nature'; it has the same
range and vagueness and gives rise to the same jJhilosophical
problems. Nomos is slightly more difficult, because it covers both
written laws and unwritten custom, but for us the translation
'convention' is good enough. 6
As a background to the dispute there were a number of theories
about the origins of civilisation probably taken over from the
physical philosophers, particniarly, as far as our knowledge goes,
from Anaximander in the sixth century. Certainly the idea that
men had been savages and that the arts of civilisation had been
acquired slowly was a familiar one, though our knowledge of how
it was worked outis extremely fragmentary. It was totally opposed
to the theory, familiar from the poets, that mankind's present
state was a sad decline from the original Golden Age.
Once the initial step has been taken of seeing that legal and
moral codes differ from people to people, a variety of further
moves becomes possible. We may minimise the differences, and
argue that any code is better than no code, and that what is
important is to have a settled system of law and morals of one
kind or another; or we may stress the differences, and conclude
that something is seriously amiss. But here again the roads fork.
We may argue that by nature the strong man would be aII-power-
fuI, but legal and moral codes are devices of the weak for control-
ling him; or tl1at by nature all men are equal and that these codes
are the instruments by which the ruling class imposes its will on
the rest of the commuuIty. And even that is not the end, for what
9
 course of action we recommend will depend on whether we re-
gard ourselves as strong or weak, ruler or ruled.
The:e. are two main points here. One is the notorious difficulty
of decldlUg what ought to be from a knowledge of what is. For
instance, even if we decide that nature's laws are ruthless, it does
not follow directly that men ought to be ruthless too. That is only
so if we accept that nature's ways are best. The other is that it is
anyhow very difficult to decide what really are nature's ways. Are
we to look at primitive man, or the animals, or argue in some
more complicated way, as we shall see later Aristotle did? The
~ifficulty has persisted into modern times. It is easy enough, for
lUstance, to argue that existing sexual morality is in some ways
unnatural, but extremely difficult to reach agreement about what
code would be natural.
It is not surprising, in view of all tllese complications that
different sophists should have interpreted their basic the~es in
very different ways. And for us there is the further difficulty that
we have only fragmentary knowledge of their views. Because of
this, there is a temptation to attribute to them more profound and
consistent theories tllan they are at all likely to have held. We need
not suppose that most of them preached doctrines that would
stand up to close examination: the persuasive power of an argu-
ment, and not its objective validity, was what interested them.7 I
will try therefore not to go beyond what is justified by the evi-
dence, at the cost of being rather scrappy.
First there are the views that preach nature's way, but interpret
it in different fashions. Probably the most famous of these is the
one put into the mouth of the sophist Thrasymachus of Chalcedon
by Plato in Book I of the Republic. The whole account has been
much chewed over, 8 but we may assume that Tbrasymachus really
did say that justiceis the interest of the stronger, and that he meant
by it something like this:
(i) in any community (men say that) it is just to obey the laws
of that communlty;
~~) in any con:munlty the laws are made by the party in power;
(111) the party lU power is the stronger party;
10
(iv) the party in power makes laws in its own interests;
(v) therefore justice is the interest of the stronger.
The only trick in the argument is in (i). If we add the portion in
brackets the statement seems to be true, but not if we omit it. But
it is only the shorter version, without the words in brackets, that
allows us to draw the conclusion at (v).
After (v) Thrasymachus probably ceased to argue, but the cry
'Down with justice' is his obvious final step.
Callicles of Acharnae, however, took the argument a stage
further. We know nothing of him beyond what Plato tells us in
the Gorgias. 9 He was not a sophist but a young Athenian politi-
cian who had absorbed to the full the teachings of some of the
sophists. He argues that (in a democracy) the laws and the moral
code are made by the multitude of (individually) powerless men
who are satisfied if they can ensure that all are on a dead level of
equality. But it is nature's law that the better and more powerful
should rule over and fare better than the weaker, and this we can
learn both from animals and from the behaviour of the sovereign
states of men. Outstanding men at present are deceived from
childhood by being told that equality is right and fine, but one day
a superman may arise who will throw off the shackles of morality
and obey only nature's dictates - and good luck to him!
The sophist Antiphon of Athens, in his book on Truth, probably
written about 430, attacks the laws in a slightly different way. He
points out that often obedience to the laws may be harmful to the
man who obeys, and so be against nature, which urges every man
to further his own interests. This is a criticism of the actual work-
ing of the law, because it punishes those who break it but does
nothing to reward those who obey it to their own disadvantage.
Conclusion - down with the law I
Critias, later notorious as one of the thirty tyrants who ruled
Athens for a short period at the end of the fifth century, and one of
the less satisfactory followers of Socrates, added to this an attack
on religion, saying that it was a device for making people obey the
law even when they were not being observed, because they
thought the eyes of the gods were upon them.
B II
 All these views amount to no more than an attack on existing
laws, and advice to disobey them when it is possible and advanta-
geous to do so. The relativity of laws and moral codes is not a
prominent idea in these thinkers, but it was certainly presupposed,
and it is given a thorough airing in the Dissoi Logoi, a curious
work of sophistic inspiration whose author is unknown. It was
written some time after 400.
It is possible that Hippias of Elis, another sophist of the second
half of the fifth century, held a physis theory of a more constructive
kind. He may have taught that by nature all men are equal and
should treat each other as brothers, but this is exceedingly
conjectural, and it was a long time before theories of that Idod
took root.
The great defender of the opposite view, that laws and moral
codes ought to be observed, was Protagoras, the first of the
sophists. He argued that it is in the interests of all men that laws
should be observed, because the state of nature where there are no
laws is a terrible one. Unfortunately his views have to be re-
constructed from evidence that is not at first sight consistent.
Plato gives us two very different aspects of his teaching in two
dialogues, the Protagoras and the Theaetetus. But it is probable
that he was held in sufficient esteem by Pericles to be asked to
draw up a constitution for Thurii, a new colony founded in 444
by Athens but open to all Greeks, and we may reasonably con-
clude that his views were moderate.
He started from the fact that there was a great difference
between savages and civilised men. He said that the state of nature
was an evil one and that men achieved a good life, or something
approaching it, only by living in a community under laws and
conventions of behaviour handed on from one generation to
another. Hence all laws and moral codes were civilising and
improving influences, and it was right for each man to obey the
laws of his own community. At the same time one constitution or
moral code might be rather better than another, and the wise
man would be able to appreciate such differences and to teach
them to others. As such a wise man himself, he claimed to instruct
others.
The anonymous writer quoted by Iamblichus, who probably
wrote shortly before 400 B.C., reflects the views of Protagoras and
may have been his pupil. He replies roundly to thinkers like
Callicles that superman does not and could not exist: any indivi-
dual is at the mercy of his fellows and ought in his own interests
to obey the laws of his community. He then gives a straight-
forward account of the benefits of the rule of law and the evils of
its absence. '
There is one sophist who stands apart from the rest because
he made no claim to teach virtue, but only rhetoric. This is
Gorgias of Leontini, whose long life is said to have lasted from
483 to 375. He has left us some model speeches, which till recently
have been dismissed as mere exercises. But with works of this
period it is probably a mistake to do this: the arguments may be
treated as seriously as, for instance, the bombastic displays of
men like Thrasymachus. In the Helena and the Palamedes Gorgias
makes an incursion into moral psychology, using arguments to
show that wrongdoing is always involuntary, and that neither
Helen nor Palamedes are to blame for their midseeds. Helen, for
instance, might have been charmed by specious argument or
overcome by the passion of love, and in neither case was she the
cause of her wrongdoing. It is all somewhat superficial, but it
does raise questions that need an answer. Further, there is a close
similarity between the Palamedes and Plato's Apology of Socrates,
which suggests that Plato must have been seriously interested in
the former work. 1O
(iii) DEMOCRI"rUS
There are also similarities to Socrates in another figure of this
period, the rather puzzling Democritus of Abdera, a younger
contemporary and indeed a fellow townsman of Protagoras.
Although he was a voluminous writer our knowledge of him is
limited to a collection of fragments, from which he emerges as a
positive thinker who had no dealings with sophistry but taught a
way of life which recognised the importance of the soul and of
virtue.
 He is not primarily famous for his ethics, but for his atomic
theory of the constitution of the universe, which is the distant
ancestor of modern atomic theories and must be understood by
us as the background to his ethics. He taught that matter was made
up of innumerable small, hard indivisible bits, called atoms,
combined together in various ways, and that the soul itself, being
material, was made up of extremely fine atoms. These would be
dispersed at death, so that there need be neither fear nor hope of a
life after death. Since this life was the only one, it is not surprising
that Democritus' chief concern was to tell men how to enjoy it.
In doing so he raised the next great topic of Greek ethics, the
nature of happiness. The essence of this was a tranquil state of
mind, and to attain it a man needed to take thought, to limit his
aspirations to his abilities, to think little of worldiy goods which
are at the mercy of fortune, and to take pleasure in friends he has
chosen, rather than in having children whose characters he cannot
choose.
All this is on a straightforward prudential footing, but there
are also some fragments which bear a close resemblance to the
kind of thing that Socrates was saying at about the same time.
'Ignorance of what is better is the cause of doing wrong'; 'The·
man who does wrong is more unhappy than the man who suffers
wrong'. These fragments are tantalising, for it is not at all clear
how he reached such conclusions; but we must assume that it
was without the hard reasoning that brought Socrates to the same
point." It is also rather mysterious that though Aristotle made a
careful study of Democritus, Plato does not mention him, parti-
cularly as he anticipated one of the points discussed in the Philebus,
the recognition of a calm middle state between violent pleasures
and pains.
Democritus is important, however, chiefly for another reason:
his physical system and a good deal of his ethics were taken over
bodily by Epicurus. He used them as the foundation of one of the
two great practical philosophies of the age which followed
Alexander's epoch-making conquests.
14
III. SOCRATES
The sophists had an .unsettling influence, but this was only one
factor in the decay of morals and decency which we observe at
the end of the fifth century. Another factor was the long and
disastrous war between Athens and Sparta, which lasted on and off
from 431 to 404 B.C., and involved nearly the whole of the Greek
world. The Golden Age of Pericles, in which Athenian culture
reached its highest peak, was succeeded by war, plague, and
disillusionment. Moral standards, both public and private, slipped,
and men were uneasily aware that something had gone badly
wrong. Sober citizens blamed the new intellectuals, including, in a
blanket condemnation, physicists and physiologists, sophists, and
a man of quite a different stamp, Socrates of Athens. Socrates did
indeed resemble the sophists in his influence on the young and the
power of his intellect, but he differed by his refusal to accept pay-
ment for his work and his pure moral fervour.
It is, however, very difficult to get a clear picture of his life and
work. He wrote nothing himself, and it is one of the puzzles of
history to reconcile the accounts of him left us by Plato and
Xenophon with the comic portrait in the Clouds of Aristophanes
and the evidence of a number of lesser or more remote writers.
The Clouds" shows him as a representative of the intelligentsia,
studying the heavens like the physical philosophers, but also
educating the young to bandy words, and worse, with their ciders,
as the sophists did. Xenophon shows us a kindly, but rather prosy
old moraliser, and Plato a man of intellectual and moral genius.
Even on the factual level there are difficulties. For instance, both
Xenophon and Plato wrote an account of his Apology, the speech
he was supposed to have made at his trial, and these accounts are
entirely different; both cannot be true, and it is probable in fact
that neither is intended to be an accurate account of what was
said. The conventions of the time would allow much freedom of
15
invention, and it even became fashionable to write Socratic
Apologies. Hence we have to do the best we can with admittedly
untrustworthy material. Points to remember are that ti,e Clouds
was produced when Socrates was a middle-aged man, whereas the
works of Plato and Xenophon were probably all written after his
death, and some very long after it; that Plato was a philosophical
genius, and Aristophanes a comic genius who may well have
transmuted their material in different ways; that Plato probably
had the most intimate knowledge of Socrates; that Plato gives
many other brilliant portraits of historical figures in his dialogues
which would lose their point if they were not lifelike, even if a
littie larger than life, whereas Aristophanes might make a joke
either out of a wild fantasy or out of a close-to-life caricature,l3
One point is clear, that for a detailed account of Socrates as a
philosopher we have to go to Plato or nowhere. But the particular
difficulty about taking Plato as our source is that he was a great
philosopher in his own right, and we can seldom be sure that the
views he puts into Socrates' mouth are in fact Socrates' own and
not Plato's. I propose, however, to assume that the earlier dia-
logues give us a reasonably faithful picture of Socrates' methods,
and to treat ti,em as my main authority.
Socrates was a man with a mission, who in Christian times
would probably have achieved fame as saint or heretic. From an
early age he was puzzling over large questions, the nature of the
universe and how men ought to live in it. He seems to have won
some renown and attracted a body of devoted admirers, one of
whom asked the Delphic oracle if any man was wiser than
Socrates. 'No man is wiser,' the oracle replied; but Socrates was
too humble to believe that he had any outstanding share of wis-
dom. I4 Instead he set out to prove the oracle correct by showing
that all other men were as ignorant as he was, with the additional
handicap that they did not know how ignorant they were.
Politicians, sophists, poets, and tradesmen all received his atten-
tions; he would engage a man in conversation, ask him some
question to which the man was convinced he knew the answer,
and then show, by cunning questioning, that the answer was full
of inconsistencies. Knowledge must be sought again from the
very beginning. As given to us by Plato, much of Socrates'
teaching was negative and ended with the discomfiture of his
smug and respectable respondent, who went off muttering against
'yet another sophist'. Socrates' band of youthful followers were
of course delighted, but it was not only this that drew them to
him. Undoubtedly he had a magnetic personality; probably, too,
he held certain more positive views about life and death, and was
ready to discuss these with his intimates, among whom were some
of the outstanding young men of his time. Here, however, we are
on very uncertain ground. We know that he thought much about
the gods, and much about life after death, and I cannot myself
doubt that he had certain experiences - trances and an inner
voice - which would nowadays be called psychical. What he
made of all this is, however, far from clear.
The key to Socrates' character is perhaps this: that he had
reached certain tentative conclusions about the nature and pur-
pose of life by non-rational means and then sought to justify and
amplify them by reasoned argument. Argument for him meant
arguing with people, not the abstract setting out of proofs in a
treatise, and his first aim was to bring about conviction in indi-
viduals, including himself, not to lay down a body of timeless
truths. This is another reason why we must approach him with
caution. When we read a dialogue by Plato we have first to allow
for the fact that it is Plato writing and not Socrates speaking, and
then remember that Socrates himself would suit his arguments to
his company, arguing now on one level and now on another,
accepting at different times different sets of tacit premises, and
seldom setting forth his own views at length. Some of his argu-
ments seem to us incredibly bad; he may have recognised this, and
may not have cared, if only they appealed to others. Another
complicating factor is his well-known irony; it is always open to
us to dismiss anything that he says which we do not want to accept
literally as being said ironically, and unfortunately different people
see his irony in different places.
We need not press too far his own description of himself as
nothing but a midwife to other men's ideas, for only a man of the
strongest convictions could have lived and died as he did. But the
17
fact remains that we can have greater confidence in our reconstruc-
tion of his teaching on its lower levels, where he explores difficul-
ties in his own and other people's views, than when we try to
understand his more positive thought. This is not perhaps sur-
prising. It seems likely that Socrates himself never reached the
point where he was able to explain his position comprehensively,
and that it was left to Plato to produce a complementary philo-
sophy which would, for Plato at least, do so; though we may think
that Plato was not in all respects faithful to his master.
Socrates was himself a good man, and exemplified all the five
great Greek virtues - wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, and
piety. The Delphic oracle recognised his wisdom, he showed his
courage by saving the life of Alcibiades at the battle of Potidaea,
his temperance by his behaviour in love and his strong head for
drink," and his justice in his general dealings with his fellows,
and in particular in his refusal, at some personal risk, to take part
in illegal actions at the behest of either political party.16 Finally, he
was pious in fearing the gods and trying to obey the divine will.
If we are to understand his ethical views we must remember his
righteousness and his consciousness of it. And lastly, we must not
forget his death. The reasons for this have been much disputed,
but the simplest account seems the best. By his untiring devotion
to his mission Socrates had incurred the wrath of the political
leaders of Athens at a time when tempers were easily frayed; they
brought him to trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the
youth of the city in the hope of frightening him away into exile.
But when condemned to death at the age of seventy, he refused to
flee and remained to face execution, believing that only so could
he carry out his duty.
Socrates' basic assumption was that all men, if they could,
would do what was right, and that the sole reason for their not
doing so was some kind of ignorance. He knew perfectly well that
his famous paradox, 'No man does wrong willingly', was indeed
a paradox, and that if true it had to be proved so by lengthy
argument. The man in the street believed that one might know
what was right but do what was wrong. Socrates tried to show
that this was an illusion.
18
There are, of course, various kinds of ignorance, and it is easy
enough to show that some wrong acts are due to simple mistakes
about the facts. A case that would spring readily to the Greek
mind was that of Oedipus, who committed parricide and incest
because he did not know that the man he killed in fair fight was
his father and the woman he later married was his mother. But
this is straightforward, and Socrates was more concerned with the
kind of ignorance that is ignorance of good and evil. A man might
know all the relevant facts, but still do wrong because he was
ignorant of what was truly good. However, when we ask what
Socrates meant by knowledge of good and evil, his answer is
not very clear. This is not surprising in view of Socrates' fre-
quent protestations of his own ignorance, but it does add to the
difficulties of understanding him. What we have is a series of
approaches to the problem, in which suggestions put forward
by others are examined by Socrates and in most cases found
wanting.
A great many of his explorations were attempts to find a satis-
factory defiultion of a particular moral term like 'courage' or
'justice'. He would get one of his audience to propose a definition,
which was then scrntinised with great care, and nearly always
rejected. It was rejected either because it was not, in form, a
satisfactory definition, for example, Meno's list of different kinds
of virtue, in the dialogue named after him, or because on examina-
tion it was found to be in conflict with certain propositions which
Socrates and the company were convinced were true, as when
Cephalus suggests in the first book of the Republic that justice is
paying one's debts, but then agrees that particular cases of paying
one's debts, like returning a-sword to a homicidal maniac, are not
just. From all this one gets the impression that Socrates was
seeking a certain kind of definition, which would be illuminating
enough to give a man true knowledge of justice or virtue, but
somehow he never managed to find it. We shall see later what
Plato did with the assumption that such definition could be found.
Another suggestion is explored in the Protagoras, that the know-
ledge needed is knowledge of how to estimate pleasures and pains
accurately. If, as many people think, hedone (pleasure) is the only
truly good thing in life, and pain the only bad, we want to do the
actions that will produce the greatest possible amount of pleasure
and the least possible amount of pain. But men are deceived by
temporal perspective: they are misled, for instance, by a prospect
of immediate pleasure so that they fail to see that by pursuing this
they will miss the chance of greater pleasure in the future. They
need to learn to perform a hedonic calculus. This suggestion is
found, however, here and here alone and it does not seem to have
been Socrates' final thought.'7
The most attractive suggestion is that what is needed is know-
ledge of oneself. The motto of the Delphic oracle was 'Know
thyself' and Socrates clearly took it to heart. But this advice may
be interpreted in at least two ways. On a mundane level, it may
mean, as Critias in the Charmides suggests, knowing oneself as an
individual, with all one's strengths and weaknesses. Xenophon,
also, shows Socrates giving advice to Euthydemus on exactly
these lines. But this does not take us far enough. To know what
you can do does not by itself tell you what you ought to do, and
so the other possibility must be explored. Here we must treat
ourselves not as individuals but as members of the species Man,
and ask ourselves what we as men ought to do. The answer to
this takes us deep into Socrates' positive thought, and so I pro-
pose to leave it for the moment and turn to a number of topics
connected with his original search for the knowledge that is the
basis of virtue.
If virtue is knowledge, we would expect it to be teachable. But
Socrates is far from happy about this. Against the view that
it is teachable he can point to a number of facts: that rich men who
have their sons taught other skills do not have them taught virtue;
that there do not appear to be any teachers of virtue, though
possibly the sophists and the older members of the community
may each in their different ways claim to be such teachers; and
that the Athenians in the assembly are ready to take advice on non-
technical matters of policy from anyone who cares to speak,
because they do not believe that there are any experts in political
virtue. And yet in the MenD, from which these arguments are taken,
Socrates is still hankering after the view that virtue is teachable.
20
Not only is virtue knowledge, but each individual virtue is
knowledge, and from this it would seem to follow that all virtues
are ultimately one. But this is in opposition to the popular view
that a man may be, for instance, brave without being just, or
generous without being self-controlled. In the Laches Socrates
tackles the particular case of courage, on which even popular
thought leads to paradoxes. Is it the man who faces danger un-
afraid who is truly brave, or the one who feels afraid but stands
his ground even so? Socrates argues that the brave man is the man
who feels no fear, but not on the one hand from lack of imagina-
tion nor on the other through mere technical knowledge, like the
trained fireman, but because he has the knowledge of what is or is
not rightly to be feared. This comes down to the knowledge of
good and evil and such knowledge is also at the heart of all other
virtues.
In the Hippias Minor we meet another Socratic paradox: that a
man who does wrong on purpose is better than one who does
wrong unintentionally. This, again, is in complete contrast to
popular morality. But Socrates argues that if someone deliberately
does wrong, he is capable of doing right, but chooses not to do
so. For only if he knows what is right can he be sure of avoid-
ing it. But the man who makes an involuntary mistake has not
the ability to correct it, and is therefore inferior. It is, however,
clear that Socrates does not mean that anyone does in fact do
wrong willingly, and on his own theory this is impossible; all he
claims is that if there were a man who did wrong on purpose he
would have to be a good man.
It is now time to say something about what Socrates meant by
'virtue'. To begin with, the English word has some misleading
associations, and the Greek word are!e would sometimes be more
aptly translated by' excellence' or even' success'. The emphasis of
'virtue' tends to be on good intentions, but that of are!e is on good
results; the English word is almost, though not quite, limited
to moral goodness, but the Greek covers goodness of many
different kinds. A knife that cut well, and a horse that ran well,
both had are!e, and the are!e of a man was displayed as much by
his achievement in any kind of human endeavour as in his upright
2'
behaviour towards others. In particular, arete often means skill in
governing. In the Meno (9,a), for instance, Socrates asks about 'the
wisdom and virtue (arete) by which men can run the affairs of a
household or a city well, and take care of their parents, and receive
and send off visitors from home and abroad in worthy fashion'.
And the typical 'good men' referred to again and again in the
dialogues are the leading politicians of Athens - Themistocles,
Aristides, Thucydides the son of Melesias, and Pericles - to
all of whom, except perhaps Aristides, who was nicknamed
'the Just', we would be more ready to give the title' great'
than 'good'.
Both arete and 'virtue' are words with a complex meaning.
Both refer on the one hand to a disposition of the individual, and on
the other to certain things that he does. A man could have neither
arete nor virtue if he was not of a certain kind, and if he did not do
certain kinds of things. Where the terms differ is in regard to the
kind of person and the kind of action required. And it is peculiarly
difficult to say exactly how they differ because neither for the
Greeks nor for speakers of English is there complete agree-
ment about what the virtuous person is or does, and much of
Socrates' enquiry was concerned with elucidating this very
point.
What does the virtuous man do? The superficial answer is that
he does good deeds. Or, in particular, the brave man does brave
deeds, the just man just deeds, and so on. But, as Socrates saw, we
will, at least on reflection, only call a deed brave or just if we also
regard it as good, so the basic question is, 'What are good deeds?'
Good deeds are frequently, though not always, taken to be those
that produce good results. If so, what are good results? Many,
though not all, would say they are the achieving of conventional
good things like riches, pleasure, power, knowledge, and health.
But are all these things really good? Is there anything else of a
different kind that is good in this sense? Is virtue itself good in
this sense?
Socrates had no difficulty in showing that some conventionally
good things, such as health and riches, could be abused, in the
sense that they may harm their possessor. On the other hand, he
zz
recognised that pleasure was regarded by many people as the only
really good thing, and the goal of human life. He was not satisfied
about this, but it is by no means clear what he himself regarded
as the goal. It is at this point that his intultion probably out-
stripped his powers of analysis: he could show by example what
true virtue was, but he seems to have encountered grave difficult-
ies in explaining his positive thought to the full. This is indicated
not only by the difficulty we have in finding it in the pages of
Plato, but also by the fact that his followers developed many
different lines of thought, all of which they claimed to be Socratic.
Antisthenes taught that virtue was the sole good, but Aristippus
founded the pleasure-seeking school of the Cyrenaics. Socrates
thought hard about life and death and the gods; he believed that
the gods were good and would care for a man who himself was
good; and he had at least some faith that man had a soul which
was itself divine and immortal. It followed that the welfare of a
man lay in the welfare of his soul, but here again we are in doubt.
Wherein lies the soul's welfare?
There is a passage in the Euthydemus that gives us some indica-
tion of Socrates' difficulties. The immediate question is, 'What is
the techne - the skilled lmowledge - that will make men
happy?' The argument proceeds thus: the art of ruling - which,
as we have seen, was frequently equated with virtue - can make
men prosperous and free, but prosperity and freedom in them-
selves are neither good nor bad. To achieve a good end we must
also make men wise and give them knowledge. But what kind of
Imowledge must they be given? It seems that it is the kind that
makes other people virtuous. But if virtue is the art of making
other people virtuous, it makes them acquire the knowledge of
how to make people virtuous, which gives those people the
knowledge of how to make people virtuous - and so on. Clearly
we have not reached a satisfactory account of what virtue is, and
we may conclude this section with the suggestion that Socrates
firmly believed that virtue was knowledge of something, but was
not sure what.
Let us return to the other aspect of virtue, that of what a man is.
Here again Socrates' answer is the same, the virtuous man is the
man who has a certain kind of knowledge. But here again diffi- for the first time stated in detail the view that the soul is a non-
culties arise. If we draw an analogy between this kind of know- material but fully real entity, identified with the reasoning and
ledge and other Idnds, for example, the knowledge possessed by morally responsible part of man. It is in the Phaedo that the theory
the physician or the accountant, one big difference leaps to the eye. of the soul as immortal is worked out in detail, and much of the
The physician, by his special skill, is uniquely in a position to kill elaboration is probably due to Plato, but the basic thought is
as well as to cure, and the accountant can make a better job of surely that of Socrates. 'S
cooking the books than the man who is not an accountant. But, as
we have already seen in connection with the Hippias Minor, it is
paradoxical to suppose that the just man is particularly well-
fitted to be unjust. Socrates plays on this difficulty again and
again, without producing any solution to it. We are left to con-
clude only that we are looking for a very peculiar kind of know-
ledge.
The answer Socrates may have given is the one mentioned
earlier, that what we need is knowledge of ourselves as men. If we
really understand the nature of men, we may gain insight into
what we, as men, ought to do. There is again a logical difficulty
here; that of passing from what is to what ought to be. But by
itself I do not think it would have troubled Socrates. The argu-
ment is psychologically satisfying, even if it is not formally
valid.
Man is a soul imprisoned in a body. At death the soul will be
freed, but its destination will depend on how pure it has kept it-
self from contamination by the body. Contamination arises from
the influence of bodily desires, and the wise man will try to free
himself from these. He will view life as a preparation for death and
what comes after death, and the knowledge he needs is knowledge
of immortality. This in itself was a contribution of great impor-
tance in the history of thought. It is true that the Greeks before
Socrates had some notions of survival after death, but he was
probably the first to put them in reasoned form. Homer spoke of
phantoms dwelling in Hades which drifted aimlessly and longed
only for life under the sun. Some of the mystery religions, like that
of Bleusis in Attica, of which we know deplorably little, probably
believed in something much more satisfying, but the beliefs were
couched in picturesque language and lacked complete develop-
ment. Socrates amplified and clarified these lines of thought, and

2)

IV. PLATO
Plato was intellectually the greatest of Socrates' followers, and
resembled his master in his enthusiasm for virtue. If the force
of his personal moral character is not as great as that of Socrates,
that may be explained on the grounds that he was more of a poli-
tician than Socrates ever was. He was born, in 427 B.C., into a lead-
ing Athenian political family, and was expected to take an active
part in politics himself. But standards of political behaviour
declined during the long war with Sparta that occupied most of
his childhood and early manhood, and he became disgusted with
both parties for their unworthy treatment of Socrates. He there-
fore devoted himself to interpreting Socrates' message in his
writings, and to improving political life at one remove by
educating others to become good rulers. For this purpose he
founded the Academy, a school for young men which has been
described as the first university. Since he agreed with Socrates
that virtue must have an intellectual basis, he tried to work out a
system of education that would lead to Socrates' goal, the know-
ledge of goodness. His personal qualities are shown chiefly in
his activities as administrator, teacher, and thinker, but there is
one episode that shows that he also bad considerable courage.
At the age of sixty, in 367, he was invited to undertake the educa-
tion of the young ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius II, who controlled
the most powerful Greek state in Sicily. Dionysius, being already
thirty, but completely uneducated, was hardly good material for a
philosophical education, and Plato koew this, but he felt that
the opportunity to put his own principles into practice should
be taken, poor as it was. The venture was a risky one, and in fact
failed, but not before Plato had suffered considerably from
it.I9
The difficulty we met with in deciding what Socrates' views
really were has its counterpart in Plato. Apart from a few letters,20
26
the only works of Plato that we have are the dialogues, and in most
of these Socrates is the leading speaker. They were written over a
period probably of about fifty years, from soon after Socrates'
death in 399 to Plato's own death in 347. We cannot give them
exact dates, or even arrange them in an accurate chronological
order, though we are reasonably sure which are late and which are
earlier." If we regard the earlier dialogues as being truly Socratic
in the sense that they give us a faithful picture of Socrates' ways of
thinking, we may go on to assume that in the later works there is
more of Plato's own thought, in which Socrates' views are ampli-
fied and given certain metaphysical and political twists which are
alien to him. It is impossible to be sure where Socrates' thought
ends and Plato's begins: even Plato himself could not have
distinguished between the two. But in what follows I give what I
take to be most probably Plato's own contribution.
Plato began by accepting nearly all that Socrates had taught,
but he soon became aware that there were gaps and loose ends
which had to be dealt with somehow. Most of the earlier dia-
logues may be taken as attempts at setting out Socrates' views
clearly and getting to know where the difficulties lay. Starting
from Socrates' claim that virtue is knowledge, we may see Plato
developing the concepts of both virtue and knowledge beyond
anything that Socrates had achieved.
Let us take knowledge first. Plato produced a highly sophisti-
cated theory, which takes us far from the realm of ethics, and we
cannot therefore go into it in detail. But we must have some
understanding of it if we are to grasp Plato's ethical position.
Socrates had been constantly asking questions like 'What is
courage?' and 'What is beauty?', and it was but a short step to
assume that there really were things called courage and beauty,
distinct from courageous acts and beautiful objects, about which
such questions could be asked. Plato postulated a world of Ideas
which were more real than the things of the world of sense and
were the patterns and origins of all the things in that world, and
he believed that these were the sale possible objects of koow-
ledge. In particular there were Ideas of courage, justice, tem-
perance, and all other virtues, and if one could attain koowledge
c
bf these one would become brave and just and temperate and so
on; if one went further, and achieved knowledge of the Idea of
Goodness, which was the greatest and best of these Ideas, one
would be virtuous in every respect and would know how to lead
others to virtue.
This argument was criticised at length by Aristotle, and I
propose to leave discussion of it until we reach Aristotle. But we
may see now how Plato used it to answer Socrates' problems. He
believed that knowledge of the Ideas was only to be achieved by
men who started out with great gifts of character and intellect
and were then given an immensely long training in mathematics
and philosophical reasoning. At the end of this, some few might
reach the highest point of all, the vision of goodness, and they,
and they oniy, would be qualified to be rulers 'of the rest and to
lead them in the paths of goodness that they could not find for
themselves. Details of the kind of education Plato thought neces-
saryare to be found in the Republic, and it is reasonable to suppose
that he taught something on these lines in the Academy.
Plato~s answer to Socrates is a discouraging one in two respects:
on the one hand, it meant that very few could be virtuous in the
fullest sense, and, on the other, that few could have even a
theoretical understanding of what goodness was. In particular
we ourselves, who can only read the Republic and do not have the
benefit of a full course of Platonic education, cannot hope to
understand what is meant, and all we can do is to try to reconstruct
a general outline of what Plato had in mind. It seems to have been
something like this: knowledge of goodness involves knowledge
of how and why the world is constituted as it is, and also of how
men ought to act in order to fit in with the goodness of the whole.
The knowledge needed to be virtuous is knowledge of this
metaphysical kind, and lesser men have to be guided by others
because they are incapable of it. Again, as with Socrates, we are
left unsatisfied, for we cannot say, for all to know, what a man
must do to be good.
Plato's general theory has had immense influence, but it is and
must be essentially a political theory, and as such is beyond the
scope of this study. He does, however, have a great deal to say
28
on the personal level about the nature of virtue in the Republic,
which shows him grappling with the same problems as Socrates.
One of the big questions raised is 'Why ought a man to be right-
eous ?', and for all its political trimmings the work does give an
answer which holds good for individuals.
First we must say something about the word here translated
'righteous'. It is dikaios, and there is a related noun dikaiosyne,
which is sometimes translated 'justics', sometimes 'righteous-
ness'. It covers that very large part of virtue that is concerned with
our general dealings with others, including keeping the law. Of all
virtues, with the possible exception of courage, this is the one that
most obviously brings disadvantage to its possessor, as the
sophists had so clearly seen. The unscrupulous tyrant flourished,
while the upright Socrates was sent to his death. On what grounds
could justice be defended?
Plato's answer to this shows him to be the true pupil of his
master. Only the righteous man can be happy, because only the
righteous man has his soul in such a condition as to be happy. To
prove this, Plato had to give an analysis of the soul; this he does,
but unfortunately his account is probably adjusted to the general
political theory of the Repttblic. It is not very plausible in itself, and
does not seem to have survived into his later thought,22 However,
it remains an interesting theory, and a number of the points made
are valid. He divides the soul into three parts,>' reason on the one
hand and the passions and an intermediate part which he calls the
'spirited element' on the other. With the distinction between
reason and the passions we are all familiar, and there is nothing in
Plato's account that need detain us, but the spirited element is
more difficult to understand. Plato tells us that children too young
to reason and many animals possess it, and gives two examples of
it in action: the first when a certain man had a ghoulish desire to
look at some freshly executed corpses, but was restrained for a
time by the feeling that it was an indecorous thing to do: and the
second when someone thinks he is being treated unjustly, and
bears all kinds of suffering to attain justice. The term cannot be
translated adequately by any single English word: suggestions
include' mettle', 'anger', 'righteous indignation', and 'sense of
honour'. But I think we have to accept the fact that this concept is
not really a viable one.>4
In the Republic, however, the spirited element forms part of a
neat pattern. To begin with, Plato analyses three of the main
Greek virtues as virtues of the three parts of the soul, wisdom of
reason, courage of the spirited element, and temperance of the
passions. Before we continue we should notice another difficulty
of translation: the word sophro[Yne, here translated' temperance'.
Ids sometimes equally well translated' self-control', being in fact
rather narrower than the latter term, but wider than the former as
it is commonly used in English. Although exact translation is
impossible, the concept is a fairly easy one to grasp.
The remaining great virtue which Plato now wants to place is
justice, and this he finds in the individual who has the three parts
of his soul in a proper relationship, with reason controlling the
passions and being alded by the spirited element. It follows, of
course, that a man cannot be just without also being wise, brave,
and self-controlled, and so Socrates' view that virtue was a unity
is vindicated. But we may still ask why a man whose soul is in this
condition should be happy, and Plato's answer to this is perhaps
more complicated than convincing. Shortly, it amounts to the
fact that only so is the soul as it should be, in a state of mental
health, and only so can a man be happy.
There are two big unexamined steps in the argument, and a
third point which must be stated at length. The big steps are
(i) that it is a good reason for being just that it makes a man happy,
and (il) that happiness depends on mental health. Plato does not
really attempt to prove either, the first because it would seem to
him to need no proof, and the second perhaps because he cannot
prove it. However, both may reasonably be accepted. The third
point is concerned with the relations between the parts of the soul.
Plato maintains that they must be related correctly, but how are
we to decide what is the correct way of arranging them? It was
quite clear to Plato that reason must be supreme, but it is less clear
to us why this must be so. Here are, however, two possible
approaches. We may argue, like Socrates, that virtue is know-
ledge, and it will follow that reason, the part of us by which we
;0
attain knowledge, must control us; or, again like Socrates, we
may argue that reason is that part of us that is most divine, and
therefore it ought to be in control. Probably Plato accepted both
lines of thought.
We have then a tidy scheme in which the virtues are linked and
all are dependent on reason and knowledge; and the accounts of
wisdom, courage, and temperance are unexceptionable. But justice
is very odd. The definition Socrates is made to accept is 'minding
one's own business', and this, as applied to the individual, means
having each part of the soul doing its proper job. Now this is not
at all the kind of definition of justice that one would expect,
because justice appears to be a virtue that is particularly concerned
with one's relations with others, and this definition deals entirely
with the inner make-up of a single person. What Plato is giving us,
as he realises himself, is an account of what the just man is, com-
pletely ignoring what he does. He therefore has to claim indepen-
dently that a man of this kind will not in fact commit typical un-
just actions like embezzling money or committing sacrilege, but he
gives no proof of this."
It is clear, however, why Plato has to take this line. He has cut
himself off, during the course of the argument, from defending
justice on any external grounds, such as that it helps one to avoid
punishment after death or to acquire a good reputation. And it
would have appeared nonsensical to the Greeks to argue, as Kant
might have done, that there is an absolute duty to be just. So he is
left with the task of defining justice as a disposition, and showing
that this disposition is a condition of happiness.
In the Republic, then, we have Plato's answer to two of the
big questions raised by his predecessors. He claims to have found
the kind of knowledge that Socrates was seeking as the basis of
virtue, and he claims to have replied to the sophists that justice is
profitable to the man who practises it. We must now turn aside to
look at a curious dialogue which reflects Platonic influence
though it was probably not written by Plato himself. This is the
A!cibiades 1. It is a remarkable tour de force, weaving together
practically every topic to be found in the earlier dialogues of
Plato. But on one point it goes beyond them: the question of the
meaning of knowing oneself has again been raised, and with great
clarity the point is made that the body is only a tool used by an
agent, the soul, which is the real self. How, then, does one get to
know the soul? The eye cannot see itself, but can see other eyes,
or itself in a mirror; so the soul can learn about itself either by
gazing at the soul of a friend or at the brightest mirror of all, God.
It would take us too far from our main theme to work out this
point in detail, but it introduces a note which we shall meet again
in Aristotle. Here we may treat it as a variation on the theme of the
Idea of the Good; by gazing on God we learn about the divine
nature and about our own souls, and so learn what we ought to do.
Besides the discussions of pleasure in the Protagoras and the
Gorgias, which we have already mentioned, Plato devoted some
attention to it in the Republic, but his great dialogue on pleasure is
the Philebus. This is one of the very latest of the dialogues, and
its background seems to be this: the Academy had attracted men
of learning from all parts of the Greek world, who shared Plato's
interests but held widely differing views on some topics. In parti-
cular there seems to have been a lively debate on the nature of the
good for man. The astronomer Eudoxus maintained that pleasure
was the sale good, but others, like Speusippus, that both pleasure
and pain were evil. 26 The young Aristotle, as we shall see, must
have taken a great interest in this discussion, and Plato himself,
now an old man, wrote the Philebus as his contribution to the
controversy. This is one of the most thorough studies of pleasure
ever made by a philosopher, and in some respects has never been
superseded.
Unlike the Republic, and unlike Plato's very last work, the
Laws, the Philebus has nothing to do with politics but is concerned
solely with the good of the individual. 27 And although it has a
metaphysical setting, the ethical arguments may be detached
fairly easily from it. The question at issue is, 'What is the good for
man?', which may be interpreted as 'What is it that each man
really desires, and will give him complete satisfaction if he attains
it?' The main candidates under discussion are pleasure and
thought, and Plato begins by showing that neither is sufficient by
itself. On the one hand, no one would be satisfied with a life of
thought if he derived no pleasure from thinking. Possibly, he says
later, the life of a god might be like this, but it is not the best life
for a man. On the other hand, what would be the satisfaction
gained from a life of continuous pleasure, if there were neither
consciousness of present pleasure nor memory nor anticipation
of pleasure to accompany it? He concludes that the best life will
be one in which both pleasure and thought are found. But that
does not take us far enough. We want to know more exactly how
the two are to be combined.
Plato has now admitted that some pleasure is good, but he
does not want to go all the way with the hedonists and say that all
pleasures are good. He has therefore to make a close study of
pleasure in order to draw distinctions, and to show that while
some kinds of pleasure are good, others are bad, and not fit to be
found in the good life. First, however, he points out something
that all pleasures have in common: that they, and their opposite,
pains, can be more or less intense. A big question in what follows
is how this intensity is to be estimated.
Pleasures and pains may first be divided into two groups, those
that are of physical, and those that are of mental origin. In the
first class are the pleasures of eating and drinking. The body is an
organism which contains ingredients of many kinds, and there is a
certain optimal proportion of these ingredients. If this is dis-
turbed, as it is when a man's body has too little liquid in it, he will
feel thirsty, and if he is able to drink the drinking will give him
pleasure. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose, as some
philosophers have done, that all pleasures are like this. The second
class is one of purely mental pleasures and pains, as when a man
who is now free from bodily pains is yet expecting to be hurt, and
therefore suffers mental pain. Here it would be inappropriate to
speak of depletion and repletion, as one can of the body, but the
pleasures and pains are true pleasures and pains none the less.
Further, in both cases there is an intermediate state between
. pleasure and pain which is itself neutral. This may be the condi-
tion of the gods who live a life of thought without feeling, and is
also that of a man whose pain has been relieved and who is back
to his normal state of equilibrium.
 The mental pleasures considered so far are those of anticipation,
and anticipation is closely linked with desire. Plato now gives an
analysis ofhoth. Both depend on memory. When a man is thirsty,
he feels a desire for drink, but this is only because he has heen in a
similar physiological state in the past, and found the pain then to
be relieved by drinking. He now has memories of such ex-
periences, and, when thirsty, has a mental image of drinking
accompanied by the desire to do so. Without memory there could
be no desire, and it follows that all desires are mental. Plato is
making a distinction here between conscious desire and the mere
state of depletion. The first time a body is short of water, for
instance, no desire for drinking will be felt, but merely a state of
pain without any idea of what will relieve it.
What are we to say of those states in which a man is, for
instance, in pain because he is thirsty, but at the same time is
confident that he will soon be able to drink, and so has pleasure in
the thought of drinking to come? Is his state painful or pleasant,
or what? Plato's reply is that it is a mixed state, in which he is
feeling both pleasure and pain at once. Similarly, when he is
thirsty but has no hope of drinking, he will feel two pains, one
physical and one mental.
So much by way of preliminaries. Plato has been stating a
number of points necessary to his argument, most of which we can
accept as soon as they are stated. His further points are both
difficult to understand and difficult to accept, and there is still
considerable disagreement among scholars about some of them.
His stated aim is this: to show that there are some pleasures that
may fairly be described as false, and that these pleasures at least are
bad. He seems to realise that this is a claim that most people will
reject out of hand, and goes to considerable trouble to state, and
make, his case. We can only guess at why he chose this method,
but the following is perhaps relevant: it would not be enough
to state that some pleasures, or even some named pleasures,
are bad. There was a school of thought in the Academy that
would have denied this. Aristotle notes the paradox that its leader,
Eudoxus, was a man of virtuous life, but that would not have
prevented him from claiming, in theory at least, that even the
34
most profligate pleasures, because they are pleasures, are good.
Arguments of some kind or other, then, Plato had to find. The
particular form he chose may have been due to previous discussion
in the Academy of his treatment of pleasure in the Republic. There,
too, he had spoken of false pleasures, arguing that since the body
is less real than the soul, so the pleasures of the body are less real,
and the man who is the slave of his passions will make even his
reason pursue false pleasures that are alien to it. Possibly what he
said here had been taken up and criticised, and he may have hoped
to clarify its meaning while at the same time producing an argu-
ment which might convince even Eudoxus that some pleasures
are bad.
What he does in the Philebus is to try to show that there are a
number of ways in which pleasures may be false. All are mental
pleasures, and in each case there is some kind of judgment or
estimate that is mistaken. The first example he gives is of a bad
man who dreams of possessing great riches, and takes pleasure in
the thought. But the pleasure is false because it rests on a false
judgment. Unfortunately it is not entirely clear what the false
judgment is supposed to be about. Some scholars believe that the
man is indulging in idle day-dreams of riches he will never in fact
attain, but others that even if he attains them he will not derive
from them the pleasure he anticipates. Whichever it is, Plato does
not dispute that some pleasure is felt, but he maintains that it is a
false pleasure and therefore a bad one because of the falsity of tl,e
judgment.
The second example is of a man who is in a mixed state of
physical pain and mental pleasure, due to desire for relief and the
expectation that relief will soon come. Now the pleasure of
anticipation ought to be proportionate to the intensity the future
pleasure actually will have. But it is very difficult to estimate
this, owing to the pain the man is now feeling, which makes the
pleasure of relief seem greater than it will in fact be. 28 In this sense
the pleasures, and equally the pains, of anticipation may be false.
A third kind of illusion occurs when men mistake the neutral
state between pleasure and pain for either pleasure or pain. This
may occur, for instance, when relief follows great pain; the change
35
is so great that a man helieves he is now feeling pleasure. This case
is slightly different from the other two: there some pleasure was
indeed felt, hut it was, for one reason or another, inappropriate.
Hete there is no pleasure, only a false helief that one is having it."
Then follows a general argument, the point of which is not
entirely clear. Plato no longer speaks of false pleasures and pains,
hut of mixed states in which hath pleasure and pain are found. He
may still he developing the theme of false pleasures, or he may he
making another point, that the most violent states of feeling are
those in which pleasure and pain are mixed. In any case, his general
aim is clear: hath false pleasures and mixed states are to he shown
up for what they are, different from the ideal pleasures which alone
are truly good.
There are violent emotional states of the hody, of the soul,
and of hath. A man in a fever gets intense enjoyment from
drinking, and a man with an itch, from scratching, hut only
hecause of the contrast with the discomfort or irritation he is also
feeling. Mixed states in which hodily pleasure or pain is accom-
panied hy anticipation of the opposite we have already discussed.
There remain the states of mental pleasure mixed with pain, as
when we wallow in our grief, or laugh at a comic situation while
at the same time feeling distress for the man who is making a fool
of himself.
Whatever one may feel ahout Plato's method of arguing here,
there is no douht that he has succeeded in producing a very mixed
hag of apparent pleasures which one might well hesitate to call
good. It is no longer possible, after Plato, for the philosophical
hedonist, as distinct from the rake, to pursue an unexamined life
of pleasure.
There are a few pleasures left which may he called pure and
true. These include the pleasures gained from sight, hearing, and
smell, by seeing beautiful colours and shapes, smelling pleasant
scents, and so on, and also the pleasures of acquiring knowledge.
In these there is no admixture of pain, and so, even if less intense,
they are more truly pleasures than the mixed kind. If it is pleasure
that is good and beautiful, then a small pure pleasure will be better
and mote beautiful than a more intense mixed one.
'There is one final argument against pleasure of any kind being
the good for man. Pleasure has been described as a process in
which something is coming into being, not a stable existent. Now
for Plato, as for most men, it seemed a truism that what is most
valuable must be most real, and what is most real must be a
substance, an unchanging thing. For this reason pleasure cannot
be the most valuable thing. We will see later the comments Aris-
totle had to make on this argument.
Plato is now ready for his final answer to the question about
the composition of the good life. It will contain knowledge and
skills of all kinds - no one, he says, wants to argue about this-
and a selection of pleasures. All pure pleasures will be admitted,
and any others that are necessarily bound up with the normal
conduct of life. But violent pleasures that interfere with the
activity of thought are to be excluded. Plato leaves us in no doubt
about his conviction that the highest life for man is one of intel-
lectual activity, tempered with such other activities as are desirable
for man as a biological creature. He still hankers, like Socrates,
after the disembodied and passionless life of a god, but has come
to realise that this is an impossibility for man, who must make do
with the second-best.
After the Philebus comes the Laws. This was Plato's last work of
all, left unrevised at his death. It is a great contrast to the Philebus,
which for mildness and sober good sense reminds us of the works
of John Stuart Mill. Mill could never have written the Laws, with
its passages of savage illiberality and despair of mankind. And yet
the difference between the Philebus and the Laws is not in-
comprehensible. By setting his sights lower for the individual,
Plato abandoned his hope of an ideal state ruled by godlike
individuals - godlike in knowledge if not in body - who could
guide the rest of mankind to the best possible way of living. The
dream was abandoned, and a different constitution had to be
devised, in which the baser elements in man were more fully
recognised than in the Republic. A further link is that the Laws is
much concerned with the use of pleasure and pain to guide men's
actions, and the Philebus would have helped to clear his mind on
these topics. The Laws is mainly concerned with political ques-
 ...,
tions which we cannot deal with here, but it has some sections of
ethical interest.
One great innovation is the attempt to give some account of
the notion of moral and legal responsibility, which had so far been
ignored by Plato and Socrates. This is understandable, because if
it is true, as Socrates maintained, that no man does wrong
willingly, it seems to follow that no man is responsible for wrong
actions, because they are done unwillingly. In the Laws Plato has
to face this paradox because he introduces laws which distinguish
between voluntary and involuntary wrongdoing. This distinction
was a commonplace of the legal systems of the Greece of Plato's
time, though at an earlier period any wrong act, however in-
voluntary, had been considered culpable. The Laws contains very
carefully worded provisions covering homicide of many different
kinds in all its details. Unintentional killing, unpremeditated
killing, and deliberate killing are dealt with separately, with many
subdivisions for each. Plato bad therefore to justify such distinc-
tions, while still maintaining the Socratic paradox.
Unfortunately his account contains some obscurities, and
scholars differ over its interpretation. The first step, however,
seems straightforward enough: we must distinguish the guilt
incurred by someone who does wrong, from the harm inflicted by
his action on someone else. One would like Plato to say that the
loss or harm must be made up as far as possible, but that no other
punishment is called for. This, however, is not what he says.
Compensation is adequate in the case of what most people would
regard as involuntary wrongs, which are not really wrongs at all,
but punishment is necessary, in spite of Socrates, where the
wrongdoing is regarded as voluntary. There must be some kind of
penalty that will improve the soul of the criminal. Punishment is
not therefore to be retributive, inflicted simply and solely because
there is guilt, but deterrent or reformative, aimed at ensuring that
a similar crime will not be committed in the future. Plato's point
seems to be that a man only does wrong when his soul is not in the
state in which he would really wish it to be, and this is again
Socrates' position. Plato adds a careful analysis of the causes of
this: a man may do wrong when he is carried away by anger or
fear, or again when he is overmastered by desire and the search for
pleasure, or, finally, by ignorance, which may either be simple
ignorance, or ignorance accompanied by the conceit of know-
ledge.
Now this seems to land Plato in a mess. Where passion or desire
are responsible for crime, he seems to imply that a man may know
what is right but be unable to do it. To blame these things is to
return to the position of Gorgias in the Helena, and give up
Socrates. Plato may still maintain that all wrongdoing is in-
voluntary, but he cannot still claim that it is all due to ignorance.
The difficulty arises, of course, from an attempt to come to terms
with the accepted way oflooking at crime and punishment in the
legal codes of his time. He could not do this and be faithful to
Socrates. As we shall see, Aristotle took up the same point and
developed it further.
NOTE ON PLATO'S TREATMENT OF LOVE AND FRIEND-
SHIP
Friendship and love are not often discussed by modern moral
philosophers, but both Plato and Aristotle wrote on them, and
our study would not be complete without some account of what
they said. Plato devoted the dialogue Lysis to friendship, and the
Symposium to love, and the Phaedrus is also relevant. 'Friendship'
and' love' are not exact equivalents of the Greek terms philia and
eros, but they are near enough to indicate the kind of problems
Plato chose to tackle. Eros referred to a passionate relationship;
philia to something less intense. 30 The main problem with regard
to both, at least for a Greek, is that there are two terms to the
relationship, and that when a man loves (in the widest sense)
something else, this suggests that there is some deficiency in him
which he hopes to remedy by means of the object of his love. If so,
he cannot be perfectly good himself, and this seems to rule out the
possibility of love and friendship between those who are perfectly
good.
In the dialogues Plato explores with great thoroughness the
various kinds of deficiency which might be relevant. The first
39
 question is whether friendship arises between those who are alike
or those who are unlike. One might expect like to cleave to like,
but equally one might expect opposites to fill each other's
deficiencies. Plato's final conclusion, in the Laws, is that both
kinds of friendship exist, as a matter of common observation. In
the case where there is some deficiency, is the deficient man a bad
man? Plato struggles hard to avoid this conclusion. It may be, he
says in the Lysis, that the lover is neither good nor bad, but is
sufficiently affected by evil to desire its good opposite without
being so far gone as to be indifferent to goodness. This is de-
veloped in the Symposium into the view that the lover desires what
is good and beautiful at various levels, according to his philo-
sophical development, and that what he is ultimately seeking is
that which is denied to mortals, immortality. By love he can get
near to it by the procreation of children or by producing and leav-
ing behind him other, more enduring, beautiful things.
V. ARISTOTLE
Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. at Stagira, a city on the northern
outskirts of the Greek world, but at the age of seventeen he came
to the Academy in Athens to study under Plato. For the next
twenty years, from 367 to 347, when Plato died, he was a member
of the Academy, and took part in its research and teaching. After
a period away from Athens, during which he made some serious
biological studies, and also, for a time, was tutor to the future
Alexander the Great, he returned to found his own school, the
Lyceum. Like Plato, he wrote a number of works for publication,
but all these have perished, though the main outlines of some can
be reconstruCted. What we have left to us is a vast collection of
'Aristotelian papers', connected with the lectures which Aristotle
gave to students at various periods of his life. These papers were
edited in ancient times and given the form in which we now have
them, and it is a matter of conjecture how much was written by
Aristotle himself, and how much by editors or pupils. It is also
difficult tQ make any chronological arrangement of them, because
it is probable that passages written at very different dates are
found next to each other in many works.
Three ethical treatises have come down to us in the collection.
One of these, the Magna MaraNa," is certainly not by Aristotle,
but must have been written by a member of his school some time
after his death. The other two, the Nicomachean Ethics and the
Eudemian Ethics, have three of the central books in common, and
there is still no agreement among scholars about their proper
relationship, about the time at which they were written,3. or even
about the authenticity of the Eudemian Ethics, though the majority
now accept it as genuine. Fortunately, however, these points afe
not of great importance to us, as on most subjects the philo-
sophical outlook is the same in both works. They might be
described as collections of essays, not particularly well arranged.
4I
 iI.
!)
,
',I
There are, for instance, two differing and unconnected discussions
of pleasure in the NicofJJachean Ethics. But their disjointedness
must not be over-emphasised. It is a fair assumption that Aristotle
gave courses of lectures in a definite order, and that the present
arrangement of his works largely reflects that order. Over a period
of years changes would be made, and old presentations be replaced
by new, both of which were later piously preserved. But the basic
structure remains.
By temperament Aristotle was a very different man from Plato,
though he was profoundly affected, both emotionally and intel-
lectually, by the latter's views. Perhaps because he spent the
greater part of his life in a city of which he was not a citizen, and
where he could take no active part in politics, he had no burning
interest in political reform. At the same time his intellectual
interests ranged widely, and he was the editor of a collection of
constitutions of Greek and non-Greek states, which provided
material for the Politics. This, like the Ethics, is a collection of
essays, and contains a certain amount of material which is of
interest to us. It is surprising that, for all their attraction for the
romantic makers of legend, the years spent with Alexander seem
to have had singularly little effect on either Aristotle or Alexander,
though they probably remained on terms of distant friendship.
Aristotle had probably taken part in the debate which led up to
the writing of the Phi!ebus, and had certainly read and pondered
on that work, as indeed he had all the other dialogues of Plato.
There is hardly a question raised in the Ethics, or an answer given,
that cannot be found somewhere in Plato, but Aristotle's method
of approach is so different that the work still has great originality
and freshness. By the use of the dialogue form Plato had been
able to give expression to a number of differing views on the
subjects under discussion, but his aim was to refute most of them,
and the very success of his characterisation tended to limit the
range of his argument. By giving formal lectures, on the other
hand, Aristotle was able to cover as many views as he wished, and
he aimed to bring out what was true in the theories of other
thinkers and also in the less explicit views held by the majority
of mankind. Whereas Socrates and Plato tended to think of most
other men as ignorant and confused, Aristotle felt that there must
be at least a grain of truth·..ln every sincerely held opinion. In
particular we must take account of -our own moral intuitions,
provided that we have. received a sound moral training. From
these we draw statements that are true but unclear. It is the busi-
ness of the philosopher to proceed from these to something
clearer; but we cannot hope for the same exactness in ethics as we
can in mathematics.
This in itself is a criticism of Plato's methods, or at least of the
hope he had of achieving a scientific knowledge of good and evil.
But Aristotle also gives us a detailed criticism of Plato's Idea of
the good. This is an excursion into meta-ethics, the study of the
use and function of ethical terms. Plato had argued something
like this: there are a great many things which we call' good', and
we do so because we recognise in them a common characteristic.
To explain how they came to share in this characteristic, he
postulated an Idea of goodness which existed independently of
them, but in which they somehow participated. To know what
, good' meant one needed to get to know the Idea of goodness,
and this, as we have seen, could only be done by a few gifted
souls after years of rigorous study.
Aristotle attacked this theory on a number of grounds, for
example, that it was unhelpful and. unnecessary, but his most
compelling argument depends on making distinctions between
various uses of the word' good'. Some things are good in them-
selves, but others good only in relation to something else. For
instance, one knife may be good for spreading butter, and another
for sharpening a pencil, but neither is good in itself. These, then,
are two different though related meanings of the word. Again,
things of many different kinds are called good: God is good in
one sense, virtue is good in another, the right moment is good in a
third, and so on. It is hard to believe that one Idea of goodness can
CQver all these. The Idea might be saved, it is true, if we confined
ourselves to one single use of the word, that describing things
that are pursued and desired on their own account. But when we
look at the different kinds of things that are called good in this
sense, it is difficult to pick'Qut any one common element. What
D 43
 have pleasure and honour and wisdom in common, for instance?
At the same tiine it is not a mere coincidence that all these things
are called good. At this point Aristotle drops the argument, with a
few undeveloped suggestions, saying that it is more suited to
another branch of philosophy. He does, however, produce his
own answer in the next chapter, saying that things are called good
because they are the things at which men aim.
The background of all this is some quite complicated theories
of meaning that Aristotle was engaged in working out." I-Ie no
longer believed, as Plato had, that a word must either mean exactly
the same thing on every occasion when it is used or else be plainly
and simply ambiguous, as is the word 'bar' used of chocolate and
of music. There are more complicated cases in which the meanings
are not identical, but are related. For instance, a man and fresh
air are healthy in different but related ways. It is the same, he
suggests, with' good '. And if so we can perhaps select a primary
usage from which all the others are derived.
Now in one sense Plato had already done this. He was certainly
fully aware of the disrinction between good as means and good as
end, and was not such a rigorous formalist as to exclude Aristotle's
approach. Unless he committed himself more deeply in his un-
pu~lished lectures than he does in the works we still possess,
Arlstotle's attack here seems misconceived. But he is on firmer
ground with the final criticism, that when we gather together all
the things that are good in themselves they are a heterogeneous
lot, and their only common factor is their relationship to men's
desires. Such a common factor is not enough to form a basis for
the kind of science of goodness Aristotle thinks Plato had in
mind.
This criticism of Plato gives us some idea of Aristotle's method.
It is a method that has a considerable resemblance to the methods
?f mo.dern linguistic analysts. He takes a term which is important
~n ethics, and studies how it is in fact used. He then tries to classify
lts usages, and show how they are related. He also sometimes
recommends changes in common usage, because he does not think
that the latter quite fits the facts; for instance, in his treatment of
voluntary and involuntary actions. The result achieved is a great
44
clarification of our moral ideas. Aristotle's work does not have the
tremendous impact that Socrates achieved, and it leaves many
difficulties unsolved, but as a scholarly exercise it is unrivalled.
We will begin, as Aristotle himself does, with a study of the
term 'good'. Men are active creatures, constantly doing things,
and most of their activity has some purpose. Sometimes we are
making things, as when we build a house or sew a garment, and
sometimes we are aiming at something less tangible, as when we
walk to be healthy or again when we walk for the sake of walking.
Many of our purposes can be arranged in a hierarchy: we make
needles and thread in order to sew, and sew in order to make
clothes to wear. If nobody wanted clothes we would not need to
sew, and if nobody wanted to sew, there would be no need to
make needles and thread. Each activity aims at producing some-
thing good, and some things will be good if they serve a purpose:
a good needle is one that is suitable for .ewing, and a good gar-
ment one that fits its wearer and is suitable for his activities.
When we say that health is good, however, or that we have just
had a good walk, we cannot name some particular purpose which
health or that walk has served. Here the disrinction between
means and ends come in. Needles and clothes are good if they are
suitable means to other ends. Of health or a pleasant walk we
tend to say that they are ends in themselves. But if the hierarchy
is to be complete there must be one further end still, which is the
final good. In fact we can discover one such thing, happiness.
Health and a pleasant walk may both be treated as means to happi-
ness, but happiness itself is not a means to anything else.
The /ioal good for man has thus been discovered by considering
how man in fact behaves.
However, the word 'happiness' does not take us very far, for
while all men are agreed that the aim of life is happiness, they do
not agree about what it consists in. People say that it is money, or
pleasure, or health, and change their minds from time to time. The
difficulty Aristotle recognises here can be explained if we see
that there is a two-way relationship between the terms' good' and
'happiness'. It is true that the good for man is happiness, but that
is only half the story: it is also the case that happiness consists in
D2 45
having and keeping the good for man, whatever that may be.
'Happiness' is a blanket term covering any and every thing that is a
part of the good for man. And so we are enclosed in a .circle that
can only be broken by finding some other method of discoverIng
what either the good for man or happiness is.
This brings us to a slight difference between the word 'happi-
ness' and the Greek word eudaimonia which it is used to translate.
'Happiness' tends to cover two different things, which we may
describe as a state of well-being and the consciousness of well-
being. So we may say tbat a man is happy if he feels happy. But
this is not so with the Greek word. In the story of Solon and
Croesus, Croesus believed that he was happy, but this was no
evidence for Solon. 'Call no man happy till he is dead,' he said,
for only a complete life could be judged. This was indeed an
extreme view, but it is echoed in Aristotle. Again, there is a ten-
dency in English to use the terms 'happiness' and 'pleasure'
indiscriminately. This would be much less likely to happen in
Greek. We may regard a lunatic as bappy, and call the euphoria
produced by some drugs happiness, but all this would be impos-
sible with the Greek term.
Aristotle approaches the problem of the content of happiness
by asking about the function of man, a topic in which as a man
with a biological training he would be particularly interested.
There are functions at various levels: each organ, like the eye or
the stomach, has its peculiar function, and each man who is a
skilled professional has a function, the flautist to play the flute
and the shoemaker to make shoes. It is reasonable to assume
, man has a function too, and what this is is to be
that man aua
discovered by finding out what it is that is unique to man and
not shared with other creatures. Life is shared with animals and
plants, and even sensation with animals. The only thing not shared
is reason, and we conclude that the peculiar function of man is to
exercise his reason. Now any function can be exercised well or
badly, but satisfaction follows only when it is done well: we may
conclude that man will only be completely satisfied when he is
exercising his reason well, and that in tbis he will find his happi-
nesS. A definition of happiness or the good for man will be 'an
activity of soul in accordance with virtue'. It may well be asked at
this point how Aristotle manages to bring virtue in here. The
answer lies in the peculiar meaning of that term, which we have
already discussed. If arele is expressed in doing something well,
and happiness also lies in this, then arele naturally finds its place in
the definition." But we are again far from a statement, in terms of
a.ctual deeds, of what man's arete is.
Aristotle is not unaware of the difficulty, and does later in the
Ethics give accounts of the various aretai a man may have, but
at present he remains on tbe level of generalities and turns to
consider what other things are necessary to happiness. His list is
a common-sense one, except for the provision we have already
referred to, that happiness cannot be achieved in less than a
complete lifetime. Prosperity is needed, passable good looks,
reasonable birth, relatives and children who are alive and of good
character. These are things that in the Eudemian Ethics he regards
as necessary conditions, but not parts, of happiness.
After this it cannot be denied that Aristotle havers. He tackles
the crucial question as to whether a man crushed by misfortune,
like Priam in his old age, can be said to be happy. At first he denies
it, but later says that the happy man can never become unhappy,
'though he can hardly be supposed to enjoy supreme felicity if his
sorrows are like those of Priam'. We need not be driven here to
the view that these two passages were written at different times,
for Aristotle's method made him liable to inconsistencies of this
kind. They are the inconsistencies inherent in common ways of
thought and speech. We do, on the one hand, believe that a great
many external Circumstances can affect a man's happiness, and
we do, on the other hand, have faith in a kind of inner and per-
haps more real happiness that is independent of changes of
fortune.
So we come to the final definition: 'The happy man is one who
is able to realise perfect virtue in action, and is snitably furnished
with external goods, and that for a complete lifetime. And his
death shall be in accordance with his life'.35 This is not an inspir-
ing definition, but it is the result of careful thought about all the
relevant facts.
47
 T
The next step is to study virtue in greater detail. First, we must
understand human psychology. The soul has two parts or aspects,
the rational and the irrational. The irrational may again be sub-
divided into a vegetative part concerned with nutrition and
growth, which is most active in sleep and is also found in all other
living things, and an appetitive part in which the desires and pas-
sions are to be found. It is this that is of particular interest to us.
On this basis virtues may be classified into two groups, the
intellectual, which are virtues of the rational part of the soul, and
the moral, which are of the irrational. Wisdom and prudence, for.
instance, are intellectnal virtues, generosity and self-control moral
ones. The moral virtues are particularly connected with p.leasure
and pain in various aspects, and the following discussion is con-
cerned solely with these. Pleasure and pain pervade human life,
and men seek the one and avoid the other, but the virtuous man
is one who is able to resist them when it is right to do so. Moral
education consists in giving the child practice in this by adding
further pleasures and pains as rewards and puulshments for
behaviour. :In this way virtuous habits are formed, and a man
becomes virtuous, Aristotle says, by doing virtuous acts. This
account owes much to Plato's Laws, but it deserves some study
here. If a child is frightened and runs away, we must inflict pain to
counter the pain he is afraid of, and so induce him to face the
dreaded thing. If we do this often enough, he will form a habit
of facing things he is afraid of, for fear of being punished if he
does not. And by facing things he is afraid of, he will become
brave But for Aristotle bravery involves not merely facing
dange~, but feeling pleasure in so doing, and there is a gap in his
account which will not cover this. We might fill it by using the •
idea of the conditioned reflex, but the full answer must be that for
Aristotle good habits were an essential part of virtue but not the
whole, and that reason had also its part to play.
It is at this point, and with regard to moral virtues alone, that
Aristotle introduces his famous doctrine of the Mean, elaborating
a hint thrown out by Plato in the Philebtls. Let us take an example.
We regard some men as brave, others as cowards, and yet others
as foolhardy. The brave man is not one who ignores any and every
danger, because there are some risks that it is stupid to run. The
brave man faces danger on those occasions when it is right to do
so, and thus on fewer occasions than the foolhardy man does and
on more occasions than the coward. In every moral virtue,
Aristotle claims, it is possible to find some aspect that makes of it
a mean between two extremes, and he works out this doctrine
with some thoroughness. It cannot be denied that sometimes his
treatment seems artificial and he has to strain hard to make his
point, even to the extent of inventing names for non-existent
vices to fill out his table of virtues and vices neatly. 'Insensitive-
ness', for instance, is the name of the supposed vice that goes with
the virtue of temperance and the opposite vice of self-indulgence,
but Aristotle admits that it is unlikely that there are in fact
any insensitive. men. Further, Aristotle does not make much
use of the Mean once he has worked it out in detail. It is indeed
a link between the moral and the intellectual virtues, but this
point is treated rather superficially. His discussion does, however,
have a value of a different kind. He produces with gusto sketches
of virtues and vices that give us a unique insight into Greek moral
sentiments. From them we learn with more certainty than we can
anywhere else what kinds of characters the Greeks, or at least
the more cosmopolitan Greeks of the fourth century, admired.
He does not in fact feel himself bound to keep too strictly to a
discussion of the Mean. He adds to his study of courage, for
instance, a survey of five related states that are sometimes also
called courage. As a result, we feel much more at home with the
Greeks.
I do not propose to study this section of the Ethics in detail.
In the Introduction we glanced at one of the most controversial
parts, the description of the 'great-souled' man. Many have
claimed that Aristotle's account must be ironical, because they
cannot see how this quality can possibly be treated as a virtue." I
would venture to suggest that we should forget about its being a
virtue in our sense, and think that it is rather something that we
may admire in another way. If we call the quality concerned
'greatness', and think of the characteristics referred to when we
!;lay of someone, for instance, 'She was a very great lady', we may
49
come nearer to understanding. We may admit that there are sly
touches of malice in the portrait, but we need not doubt Aristotle's
general sincerity. Humility is a Christian virtue, and was not
admired by the Greeks.
A virtue to which Aristotle devotes much attention is the one
which we usually call 'justice'. We have already seen in our dis-
cussion of Plato that the word dikaios and its derivatives are not
only difficult to translate lnto English but also rather elusive in
Greek. Aristotle makes a masterly attempt to cover its various
uses and show what its basic meaning is. This is one of the places
where there is a clear difference between Aristotle's method and
that of Socrates. Socrates and Plato were never pleased when
presented with a list in place of a definition: all these things, they
would say, have something in common, and what we are interested
in is just that common feature, and nothing else about the list.
Aristotle, belng more aware of the possible complexities of mean-
lng of a single word, looked at different applications of the word
'just' and tried to classify them. He found, for instance, that a man
who wanted more than his fair share of good things In his dealings
with others was called unjust, and his opposite just, and again
that these terms were used In a strictly legal connection of those
who broke or observed the law. And here we may look back at
Thrasymachus. 'The laws aim at the advantage of allln common,
or of the best, or of those who have power or something of this
kind,' says Aristotle. This is what Thrasymachus claims, except
that he picks out the case where only the lnterests of the party in
power are fostered. Aristotle goes on to say that the law requires
of us a great many virtues such as courage and self-restraint,
which we display In obeylng one or other of the laws, and for this
reason justice covers all the other virtues. This is a bit artificial,
but it makes the connection needed to explaln Thrasymachus'
argument. There is only one difference between justice in the
broad sense and arete. Arete is primarily a state of soul, but when
we use the term 'justice' we are thinklng also of relations with
other people. And the fact that both types of justice are concerned
with other people is another link between them.
The palnstaking discussion of particular justice which follows
50
is part of the general catalogue of virtues, and need not detaln
us here. After it Aristotle returns to the old question raised by the
sophists, whether justice is natural or conventional. By his method
of making distinctions Aristotle is able to answer that it is both.
Unfortunately what he says is brief and rather obscure. He
recognises that where legal systems differ, the basis of the laws
which differ must be conventional, but he also allows for the
existence of natural justice, though he is not very clear as to where
it is to be found. Some light may be thrown on this by a passage
at the beglnning of the Politics, where Aristotle tries to demon-
strate that the state is natural. Individual men are not self-
sufficient, and they have a social lnstinct which leads them to
combine. It would seem to follow that law and justice are natural
in the sense that they arise in this way.
Aristotle has claimed that the purpose of studylng ethics is
not to learn what goodness is but to become good. But there are
many passages where he forgets this, and lndulges in the pleasant
logic-chopping of the professional philosopher in a way far
removed from the spirit of Socrates. The paradoxes that were
matters of deadly earnest for Socrates become for Aristotle
opportunities for a display of virtuosity. Can a man suffer wrong
voluntarily? Can a man wrong himself? Such questions provoke a
dazzling display, but on the level of head rather than heart.
In the first part of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle
takes up the question of moral responsibility already broached
by Plato in the Laws. He studies a range of cases and tries to
decide which types of action are voluntary and which not. At the
one extreme are acts done through physical compulsion, which
are entirely lnvoluntary, and also acts done through ignorance.
But there are different klnds of situations In which ignoranoe
plays a part, and further distinctions must be made. If a man
does somethlng in ignorance, i.e. not Imowlng the full nature and
circumstances of what he is doing, but does not regret havlng
done it when he later discovers his mistake, he cannot be said to
have acted lnvoluntarily In the technical sense In which we are
now uslng that word. We ought rather to use a different term,
. 'non-voluntary'. Then there is the distinction between acts done
)I
in ignorance, and those done through ignorance. A man may be
ignorant of what he is doing because he is drunk or blind with
rage. But as his ignorance is due to these conditions he is not
acting throtl,gh ignorance pure and simple, only in ignorance, and
his act cannot fairly be considered as involuntary. Nor is ignorance
of right and wrong enough to make an action involuntary and
therefore blameless. The only kind of ignorance that will do this
is the simple ignorance of some fact about what is being done,
like not knowing that the gun is loaded, or that the person with
whom you go through a ceremony of marriage is married already.
Next there are some tricky cases where a man does something
he would not normally choose to do through fear or some other
inner compulsion. He does choose to do it, and yet he does it
unwillingly, as when a man betrays his country for fear of what his
children in enemy hands may suffer otherwise. It would he a
mistake to call such actions involuntary, since they are chosen,
hut they can hardly be called voluntary without qualification.
Aristotle in effect suggests apart from the others a new classifica-
tion that they need.
Finally, Aristotle dismisses the suggestion that acts done from
anger or desire are involuntary. Throughout it has been clear that
he has been writing with the question of legal responsibility at the
back of his mind, and on that basis it would be impossible to
admit that acts of these kinds were involuntary. If we refuse to
punish actions that are involuntary, and then say that anything
done in anger or from a desire for pleasure is involuntary, our
whole legal system will collapse. There may be room for argument
over details, and perhaps the recognition of a special status for the
crime passionel, for instance, but the majority of such actions must
be treated as voluntary. 1
In the Etddemian Ethics Aristotle amplifies his treatment by ask-
ing why it is that we say that both the man who gives way to
desire and the man who refuses to give way are acting voluntarily.
He answers that in each case the soul as a whole acts voluntarily
'.
and is the spring of action, though one part of it is under con-
straint from the other. In the first case desire overcomes reason,
and in the second reason overcomes desire. But these are episodes
52
within the sou~ and the soul itself acts voluntarily. He seems to
he on the verge of saying that we apply the terms 'voluntary'
and 'involuntary' only metaphorically when we use them of the
parts of the soul, and that the primary use must be of the soul as a
whole. That is, he treats' voluntary' as meaning by definition' that
which originates from a man's soul' and any application below
that level is therefore ruled out.
Aristotle now passes to a related question. Voluntary acts may
be further subdivided, including, for instance, actions done on
impulse and those done after considerable deliberation. In the
latter case there seems to be some kind Cif deliberate choosing,
and Aristotle tries to say something about this. The Greek term
he uses is proairesis. It has often been said that the Greeks had no
idea corresponding to our 'will', but we have here, in proairesis,
something very similar. It is usually translated by a word like
'choice', but it is a special kind of choice that has much in
common with our 'will'. The latteris itself a confused and difficult
notion, and philosophers and psychologists have long since
abandoned the view that there is in us any element or aspect that
can strictly be called the will, but the term does at least point
to something in human nature that deserves to be isolated and
studied if we are to have a full understanding of moral
behaviour.
It is clear from what Aristotle says that the question of the
nature of proairesis was an old one which had already been much
discussed, possibly even in the Academy. Aristotle considers and
dismisses four views, that it is desire, passion, wish, or opinion
of some kind. His method is'to show that there is some character-
istic of each of these things which makes it impossible that it
should be what we a~e seeking. We can, for instance, wish for
what we believe to be impossible, but we cannot choose it.
Aristotle's own suggestion is that cl,oice is a voluntary act pre-
ceded by deliberation. Voluntary acts we have already discussed,
so the next step is to look at deliberation.
We deliberate about things that are in our power to do or to
refrain from doing, and about the means by which we may attain
ends that are already given. A number of possible courses are open
53
to us, and it is not at once obvious which of these is most likely to
achieve the desired end. We have therefore to work out in
imagination the best way of proceeding. This is deliberation.
After that we make our choice.
Choice, then, is concerned with means, and with actions that it
is in our power to take. Wishes, on the other hand, are concerned
with ends, and we must now look at wishes. What kind of ends
are they concerned with? Good ends, or only those that appear to
be good? There are difficulties in both views. It is clearly not true
that all the things we normally call wishes are aimed at ends that
are truly good: on the other hand, Aristotle is still sufficiently
under the influence of Socrates and Plato to feel uncomfortable
about saying that a man can really wish for something bad. His
solution is to draw a distinction between the good man and the
bad man, which he takes to be similar to the distinction~between a
healthy man and a sick one. The healthy man has a taste for food
that is truly wholesome, while the sick man may fancy other
things. In the same way, the good man wishes for what is trnly
good, but the bad man has a variety of wishes, and in particular
is led astray by pleasure.
What Aristotle says at this point is superficial and needs much
more analysis than he is here able to give it. At present it is but a
step in a deceptively simple argument to prove that virtue and
vice are in our power. Virtues are exercised in choosing the right
means, and choice of means is within our power: therefore virtue
is within our power. What this amounts to is that virtues are
exercised in choosing means, because when we act virtuously we
are doing something, and what we do is always in some sense a
means to an end, and as we are choosing to do it, we might equally
well have chosen not to do it, and so in this sense virtue is ln our
power.
Let us leave this for the moment and consider Aristotle's
final remarks on this topic. While he holds that in general people
are responsible for their actions, Aristotle does realise that there
are some conditions in which this ceases to be true. The man far
gone in vice no longer has the power, even if he had the wish, to
reform; his ways are set and cannot be changed. But this was not
54
always so; he has become depraved by a series of actions of which
the earlier ones at least were fully voluntary, and we may still
blame him now for what he did then, and for what he has become
as a result.
At this point, as at some earlier ones, the twentieth-century
reader is bound to feel dissatisfied. By taking one further step, it
seems, Aristotle would have been brought face to face with the
question of free will and determinism as it ls familiar to us, but he
blandly refuses to take that step. What makes it even odder is that
all the materlals appear to have been there. Gorgias and others
had suggested that some at least of the actions we normally call
voluntary are really involuntary; the iniluence 'of heredity on a
man's character was well known to Plato, who even in the
Republic wanted to breed children suitable to be trained as rulers;
and the effect of environment was also appreciated sufficiently
for both Plato and Aristotle to work out detailed schemes for
training children in virtue. To suppose that all actions are in-
voluntary because they are entirely controlled by a man's heredi-
tary make-up and past experience seems a very simple advance
on all this. But, whatever the reason, Aristotle did not argue along
this line. The line he did take resembles very closely that of some
modern philosophers who regard the whole freewill controversy
as misconceived. There are, for instance, great similarities between
his discussion of voluntary and involuntary actions and Moore's
study of the meanings of 'could have' in his Ethics. Both take
their stand on common usage, and their readers will feel satisfied
or maddened according to their own temperaments.
I-- In Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics we have a study that
shows the gap between Aristotle on the one hand, and Socrates
and Plato, on the other, at its widest. It is a study of acrasia-
another term which is difficult to translate but which is generally
rendered by 'incontinence', using that term in a broad sense 37 , It
refers to a very general condition, not connected with any
particular vice, and might perhaps better be translated' weakness
of will'. It is the state that Socrates declared to be impossible,"
where a man knows what is right and yet does what is wrong. In
spite of Socrates, popular Greek opinion recognised it, and
55
 Aristotle's first step, as so often, was to make a survey of common
views about it. As he gives them, they are not completely con-
sistent: he notes for instance that some assert and some deny that
the continent man is always temperate, and that some say that it is
impossible for the prudent man to be incontinent, while others say
that some prudent men are in fact incontinent. In spite of these
discrepancies, he takes common opinions as his starting-point,
examining them closely and trying to extract such truth as they
contain. The most important belief is that the incontinent man
does what is wrong, knowing it to be wrong, because he cannot
control his passions. Aristotle wants to reconcile this with
Socrates' position, for which he still has some sympathy, and
suggests that this can be done if we distinguish different senses of
knowing. Unfortunately what he says is not entirely clear. He
appears to make two separate suggestions, or perhaps even more,
but it is not easy to tell how his suggestions are related and
whether they are all to be taken as independently valid or
whether they are alternative ways of putting his case.
The general lines of the argument are, however, clear: Aristotle
agrees with Socrates to the extent that he does not think that men
who have full knowledge and who are aware of the relevance of
that knowledge to the given situation could still do wrong. It
follows that when they do wrong they must either have something
less than full knowledge, or the relevance of their knowledge to
the situation cannot be fully appreciated. There are a number of
situations in which we may be said to have knowledge, and yet
not be in a position to use it; in the extreme case, when we are
asleep, but also when we are drunk or insane. This first distinction
concerns what we would nowadays call dispositional knowledge.
But Aristotle seems to be trying to make another point as well
when he says that drunkards, for instance, may be able to reel off
geometrical proofs without understanding them, in the same way
as a beginner might do. The distinction here is the different one
between knowing something parrot-fashion and really under-
standing its meaning.
Now both these distinctions are relevant to the incontinent man
because Aristotle wants to cover even the case of the man who
says in so many words that' Sweet things are bad for one', and yet
goes on to eat them.
So far, the examples he gives enable us to understand what he is
getting at. But we now come to something much more puzzling,
the doctrine that goes by the name of the Practical Syllogism. 39
This he discusses in s-ome separate and not entirely consistent
passages ill the Nicomachean Ethics, and also in the De Motu
Animalium, one of the minor biological works which may not be
by Aristotle himself but certainly comes from his school.
When we are presented with the major and minor premiss of a
syllogism on some theoretical matter, we have by the logic of the
case to draw a certain conclusion. If, for instance} we are told that
all birds are winged and that thIs is a bird, we have to conclude
that this has wings. In practical matters, however, we have to do
whatever it is that the syllogism leads to. If we know that all
sweet things should be tasted, and that this is sweet, we have to
taste the thing. The minor premiss refers directly t9 a particular
object, and so forms a bridge between the major premiss and the
things we actually see and touch. Aristotle's point seems to be that
our moral knowledge, and any other kind of knowledge as well,
is expressed in generalisations and is thus one degree removed
from action. Only when it is linked to the world around us by a
suitable minor premiss does it lead to action. Now the problem is:
suppose we know both the major and the minor premiss of a
practical syllogism and yet do not perform the conclusion, what
has gone wrong? Suppose that one minor premiss is connected
with two different majors, like 'It is wrong to taste sweet things'
and 'Sweet things are pleasant'. The minor premiss, 'This is
sweet', can be connected with both of these, but there is a conflict
because two different actions would result. In the incontinent
man, desire, roused by the first major premiss, will lead to action.
As the text stands, Aristotle's concluding remarks are obscure
and seem perilously near to being nonsense. What he surely needs
to say is that in this condition, when desire ousts morality, the
moral major premiss is put out of action, and if we know it at all
we know it only in the way that a drunkard knows a piece of
poetry. He can say the words, but he does not understand their
57
 meaning. Unfortunately this is not what Aristotle says, and it
does not seem possible to make him say it by any manipulation of
the text, but it may be what he was getting at in a roundabout
way.
He concludes by agreeing with Socrates, having turned a chal-
lenging paradox into a complicated piece of psychology. As a
way of saving the paradox it is brilliant, but it may be doubted if it
advances our understanding much further. Perhaps the most
suggestive point is one he throws out in passing, that there may
be some physiological reason, when people are transported by rage
of lust, for their being unable to use the knowledge they have,
just as there is in drunkenness. But he does not follow this
up.
Incontinence, properly so called, Aristotle says, is found when
a man is overcome by the desire for pleasure. (There are other
things called incontinence by analogy, but we are not concerned
with them now.) He is therefore led to take a closer look at plea-
sure. We are in some difficulty here because there are, in fact, two
sections on pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics, and they are not
entirely consistent. It is usual, however, and seems best, to treat
the section in Book X as giving Aristotle's final views.
As with the Phi/ebus, the background of the discussion is the
debate among the leading members of tl,e Academy over whether
pleasure was the good for man. In Book VlI Aristotle recounts a
number of different theories, and replies to them in a ratl,er
haphazard way. His own contribution is short and not fully
worked out. It receives a much fuller treatment in Book X.
We learned in the Phi/ebus that one of the arguments employed
by those who did not believe that pleasure was the good was that
pleasure is a process. All processes have some end, and the end is
better than the process. Therefore there must be something better
than pleasure. This argument could clearly be met in two ways,
eIther by denying that pleasure was a process, or by denying that a
process could not be the final good, because it was in the rele-
vant sense, an end in itself. Aristotle chooses to demonstrate that
pleasure is not a process. He does this by distinguishing between
activities and processes, and claims that pleasure is an activity,
)8
and that this can be an end. The difference between the two is not
immediately obvious, but can perhaps be thought of on these
Ilnes, that a process is passive, but an activity something initiated
by a living being. Some of men's activities, such as the pursuit of
knowledge, are ends in themselves, and pleasure may be one too.
However, in his later treatment he abandons the view that plea-
sure is an activity, and claims rather that it is somethino- o that
accompanies certain activities. The change may be connected with
an ambiguity found equally in the Greek word hedone and the
English word 'pleasure'. Both may refer either to things which
give pleasure, for example, gambling, or to the pleasurable feeling
th~t ensues. In the first sense pleasures may be activities, in the
second sense not. He adds further arguments against its being a
process, the upshot of which is that processes must have begin-
uings, middles, and ends, and are not complete or perfect in a
moment, whereas a momentary pleasure may be just as complete
and perfect as one that lasts much longer.
Aristotle's conclusion is essentially that of the Phi/ebus, that
pleasure is a good, but not the good, and that not all pleasures are
to be desired. What he adds is his characterisation of pleasure as
something extra, like the bloom of youth, which accompauies
activIties and makes them perfect. Any activity may have its
accompanying pleasure, both in men and in animals , and the
pleasure accompanying a particular activity makes us want to
continue in it, and hinders us from doing anything else, while the
corresponding pain makes us want to abandon it. Hence we must
give each kind of pleasure the moral value of the activity it
accompanies, and the pleasures of vicious activities will themselves
be bad. Different men will find pleasure in different activities, some
bad and some good, but the truly good pleasures will be those
that seem to the good man to be so.
This conclusion may well seem unsatisfactory. Why should the
judgment of the good man be preferred to that of others, and
how, anyway, are we to decide who is the truly good man? But
Anstotle would not have seen the force of objections of this kind.
Believing as he did that each man, as a man, has a function
allotted to him by nature - we need not here ask how meta-
)9
phorically that view is to be understood - and believing that he
knew how to discover what that function was, he would feel no
difficulty about discovering the good man, and no difficulty about
accepting his judgments. And it can hardly be claimed that later
philosophers have had anything very satisfactory to add. MIll
reached much the same conclusions by even less satisfactory
methods, while those who have maintained that all pleasures are
good or that no pleasure is good have seldom produced arguments
at all.
So far we have said nothing about the intellectual virtues, but
they play an important part in Aristotle'~ the~ry. We .have seen
that Plato regarded wisdom as the crowmng Vlrtue whIch should
guide men to the good life, and Aristotle.accept~d. this view, .with
significant modifications. His first step IS to divIde the ratlO.nal
part of the soul into two sections, which we may call theoretlcal
and practical reason. It is practical reason or phronesis 40 that
Aristotle regarded as important in moral action. This is clearly a
profound change,4' involving a great split in the field of know-
ledge. For Plato the road to knowledge of goodness lay tllrough
deep theoretical studies, but Aristotle, while recognising. the
importance of these in their own field, thinks that the subJect-
matter of ethics is so different that another faculty must be con-
nected with it. It is unfortunate that we carulot find in Aristotle's
ethical writings as we have them a detailed account of how
phronesis is supposed to work. We may link it with t.he doctrine
of the Mean, and say that its job is to find that POlnt betwe~n
excess and defect which is right. Virtue is a practical matter, In
which a variety of external circumstances, which cannot be dealt
with with mathematical exactness, have to be taken into account,
and so phroncs;s will include at least sound judgment on practical
matters. But it must also include more than this: it must not only
enable us to choose the right means to achieve our ends but it
must also guide us in the right choice of ends. It must make us
want what is good, as well as be able to attain what we want. And
this it does presumably because it involves some knowledge of the
nature of man and of his place in the world.
In the light of his discussion of phrones;s, Aristotle is able to
60
return to the Socratic paradox that virtue is knowledge and that
all virtues are one. He thinks that Socrates was wrong in making
the relationship between virtue and knowledge one of identity,
but agrees that it is impossible to have any virtue fully without
phro"es;!. A distinction must be made between natural virtue and
true virtue. Natural virtue is a disposition towards certain kinds of
good behaviour, and it is clear that men differ in their inborn
dispositions. One will be naturally more inclined to generosity,
and another stouter hearted, than his fellows. But such disposi-
tions need to be guided by phrones;s if they are to develop into true
virtues. Otherwise the brave man will become rash, and the
generous one a spendthrift. So, in the sense that they all share
phro"es;s, all true virtues have a common element.
At the end of the whole work Aristotle returns to the question
of happiness. Plato had shown, neatly enough on his own premis-
ses, that the good man is the happy man and that no bad man can
be happy. But Aristotle, with his division of reason into theoreti-
cal and practical, and his view that virtue depended in practical
reason, phro"es;s, was in a difficulty. It was no longer possible
to link wisdom, virtue, and happiness in the simple way that
Plato had. For Aristotle could not deny that theoretical reason,
or sophia, was the highest activity of man, and he also held that
man's happiness lay in the exercise of sophia. It followed that a life
of pure contemplation, remote from politics and mundane
affairs, was the best of all. And Aristotle pours forth a eulogy on
this godlike existence. But where, then, didarete come in? He could
not say shortly that this was arele, because too many of the tradi-
tional virtues, such as courage and generosity, would find little
place in it. He therefore had to add that the life of moral virtue is
also a happy one, though only in a secondary degree; he finds
many reasons for saying that it is a less satisfactory life, few for
saying that it is happy at all. But he does seem to regard this life
as one in which the human aspects of man, as distinct from his
godlike reason, are given full play: in exercising them, therefore, a
man may be happy.
There is a passage right at the end of the Ememiall Ethics that
differs considerably from anything he says in the Nicomacheall
6,
 Ethics. He roundly declares that the end of man'is the contempl,,- husbands and wives, and associates' of many different kinds, and
tion of God. To this statement he adds no amplification, but leaves he touches on kindred notions like goodwill and unanimity. There
it as the culminating point of his work. This has been taken ,as an is much good sense in his treatment of the incidental problems of
indication that the Eud.mian Ethics is by far the earlier work, but friendship, like how to return favours and whether one should
it is perhaps best to treat the difference on this point as just another limit the number of one's friends, but it is all very straightforward
illustration of an uncertainty at the heart of Aristotle's thought. and contains little of philosophical importance.
He accepted from Plato that the life of thought was the highest,
but the question still remained what one was to think about. He
had abandoned Plato's Idea of the good, and the alternatives left
were the contemplation of God or scientific and philosophical
enquiry. Aristotle was enough of a theologian, as we know from
Book Lambda of the Metaplqysics, to appreciate the importance of
the former, but his heart was rather in the scientific and logical
studies which form so great a part of his work. There is a magnifi-
cent defence of the study of biology in the, first Book of the D.
Partibus Animalitlm, and it is no surprise that he should have put
in the first place the activity he so much loved.

NOTE ON ARISTOTLE'S TREATMENT OF FRIENDSHIP

Eros or love is mentioned only in passing by Aristotle, but two

books are devoted to friendship in its broadest sense, treated in a
down-to-earth fashion very different from Plato's. There are three
kinds of friendship, aimed respectively at utility, pleasure, and
goodness; A good man loves his friend because he is good and
also wishes him to fare well. All men may have friendships in
which the goal is some profit or pleasure, but only good men can
have the best kind, based on the pursuit of goodness. Aristotle
makes a final break with the tradition that the good man is self-
sufficient by showing that even a good man needs friends to be
happy, because man is a social animal and there is therefore a
natural basis for friendship. Even so, he resorts to some rather
forced arguments to confirm his point, such as that a friend is a
second self, and something that belongs to one, and therefore one
benefits from contemplaring the existence, goodness, and welfare
of one's friend, as one does one's own.
In addition, Aristotle surveys the love of parents and children,

6. E

VI. AFTER ARISTOTLE
(i) BACKGROUND
As we have seen, Aristotle's ethical teaching, though it claimed
to be practical, is strikingly 'academic' compared with that of
Socrates. The tradition of such teaching continued in the Academy
and the Lyceum, and these must not be entirely ignored because
we know so little of them. It is quite likely that some of the ideas
later adopted by the Stoics, for instance, were first worked out
in them. 42 However, the main interest of this period lies in the
growth of philosophies of a different kind, specially adapted to
equip men for life in a rapidly changing world; for it was at this
time that the Greek political system collapsed, and the conquests
of Alexander destroyed the sovereignty of the city-states and made
them insignificant parts of much vaster units. The question as to
how a man ought to live assumed a new significance, and recipes
of many kinds were produced to give the answer." Athens,
however, remained the centre even for these new philosophies,
and most of them claimed to be inspired by the spirit of Socrates
- a fact which indicates not only the breadth of his views but
also how variously they were understood.
There were two extreme sects which were too odd to have any
very great following, and about which we know comparatively
little. They are the Cyrenaics and the Cynics. The Cyrenaics
derived their name from the fact that their founder, Aristippus,
came from Cyrene, though he was one of the company of Socrates'
admirers in Athens. 44 He taught that the goal of life was pleasure,
and he and his followers seem to have developed theories about
the nature of pleasure along lines similar to some of those dis-
cussed by Plato and Aristotle. Accepting that there was a neutral
state between active pleasure and active pain, they taught that only
active pleasure was good and to be pursued. 45 At the same time
they did not preach what would normally be regarded as an
immoral way of life, Aristippus going as far as to say that if all the
restraints of law were abolished he would still go on living in the
same way. It is not impossible to imagine how he might have
reached this conclusion: we could invent a Socratic dialogue to
show that only virtue gives real pleasure and that therefore virtue
is desirable, but our actual information is scanty.
At the opposite pole were the Cynics, followers of Diogenes of
Sinope,46 who acquired this name probably because their way of
life was thought to resemble that of a dog - onos in Greek.
Exiled from Sinope, he, too, spent much of his life in Athens, and
was an outstanding character of his time. Plato is said to have
described him as 'Socrates gone mad', for his uncompromising
way of life which was indeed a caricature of that of Socrates.
Taking up the sophists' distinction between nature and conven-
tion, he led a 'back to nature' campaign that involved a minimum
level of subsistence and scorn for all the decencies of life. His ideal
was self-sufficiency, which was to be achieved by such mastery of
one's feelings and desires that one could face unflinchingly any-
thing fortune might bring, and this mastery was to be obtained by
a course of severe training in self-discipline. A more positive side
of Cynicism is found in the life of Diogenes' follower Crates,
whose more cheerful nature enabled him to undertake pastoral
duties among the Athenians with such success that he was wel-
comed everywhere. He particularly specialised in settling family
quarrels, and probably gave homely advice like the Socrates of
Xenophon. Exactly how this philanthropic work was connected
in theory with Cynic self-sufficiency we do not lmow, but we do
know that even Crates did not satisfy Zeno of Citium founder of
the Stoics for long, and he was driven to think out a new philo-
sophy for himself.
Cynicism had a long history after Crates,47 lasting well into
Christian times, but we must leave it now and turn to the two
major philosophies of this period, Epicureanism and Stoicism.
(ii) EPICUREANISM
Epicurus,48 though born on the island of Samos, was an
Athenian citizen, and in 306 set up a school of his own in Athens.
He had early come under the influence of the teachings of Demo-
critus, and took over almost the whole of them into his system.
The greatest difference was one of emphasis. Democritus was
primarily interested in theory, but Epicurus used theory entirely
as a guide to practice. According to the atomic theory, the soul
was mortal and the gods lived remote from the world and took no
interest in the affairs of men. There was no need, therefore, to
fear punishment or hope for reward after death, nor to expect any
intervention by the gods during our lifetime. An ethical system
must be concerned solely with how one should live this present
life.
But before we look at Epicurus's moral teaching, a word must
be said about one alteration that he made to the system of
Democritus. The latter's system was a strictly determinist one, in
which, given the initial position and direction of movement of all
the atoms, everything else necessarily followed according to the
laws of physics. Epicurus introduced the possibility of an atom's
making an unpredictable swerve at any time, which would bring
about new and unforeseeable relationships.49 This, he claimed,
would introduce the possibility of freedom of action, and personal
responsibility, so that it would be fair to puuish men for wrong-
doing. If their actions were entirely determined, punishment
would not be justified. Now the swerve clearly will not do the
job it is intended to do. We cannot be held more responsible for
our actions because they are due to unpredictable swerves in the
atoms that compose our minds, than if they were entirely deterc
mined by the motions of unswerving atoms. The interesting
thing, however, is that Epicurus saw that there was a problem
here, and made the first attempt to face up to a strictly determinist
system with the difficulties for theories of responsibility and
punishment that it raises. so
Epicurus noted that from birth all living creatures seek pleasure
and avoid pain. He concluded that pleasure was the good for
man, as well as for other creatures, but his views on pleasure
were not those of the Cyrenaics. Instead of active pleasure, he
recommended the calm middle state, which he called ataraxia -
which we may perhaps translate 'tranquillity'. This must involve
66
recogrusmg two different kinds of pleasures, active or kinetic
pleasures and other stable ones which he called katastematie." He
held, in fact, that there was a positive feellng attached to those
states in which the body is healthy and unstirred by desire and the
mind is tranquil and not affected by emotion. As an animal, man
cannot stay permanently in these states, though the gods can,
but he must use desires and active pleasures in such a way as to
achieve the maximum possible tranquillity. This can best be done
by aiming at self-sufficiency, and here Epicurus resembles the
Cyuics. Desires can be divided into natural and vain desires, and
the natural ones can be subdivided into necessary and unnecessary.
The necessary ones are those that conduce to self-preservation, to
peace of body and to happiness. Although all pleasures are good,
not all are to be chosen, because some have painful consequences:
on the other hand, we should accept some pains, because they
bring great pleasures in their train. In this section, as in parts of
Aristotle, we can see the effect of the ambiguity of the word
'pleasure'. It is pleasurable feellng that is good, but it is pleasure-
bringing activities that may lead to pain. The upshot is that we
should try to live a frugal life in which necessary desires are
satisfied, and natural but not necessary desires given some place,
while vain desires are outlawed. Such a life would naturally be
virtuous. Wisdom will be found in a knowledge of Epicurean
theory, temperance in the restraiuing of desires, and courage in
attaining freedom from fear, but justice is on a different footing.
Justice is defended in a sophistic way as being based on the mutual
agreement of sensible people not to harm each other or to suffer
harm in return.
In practice, Epicureans led quiet lives in 'friendly societies'
of their own, for a high value was placed on friendship, partly
for its own sake and partly for the mutual help and support it
could bring.52
(iii) STOICISM
The Stoics were founded by Zeno of Citium, a city of Cyprus,
who came to Athens in 310 at the age of twenty-two, and studied
there for some years before setting up his own school in 300. He
came under the influence of the genial Cynic Crates, but seems to
have wanted a philosophy with a more complicated theoretical
basis, and took over many terms and ideas from the other
Athenian schools. His followers are known as Stoics because he
taught in a hall called the Stoa Poikile or Painted Porch. It is
difficult to disentangle Zeno's teachings from those oflater Stoics,
particularly the formidable Chrysippus, because none of their
works have come down to us except in fragments. Further,
Stoic ethics are set against a background of Stoic physics which is
a complicated and not entirely coherent structure. 53
Like the Epicureans, the Stoics abandoned the view that the
soul was incorporeal; the whole Universe was a single substance,
endowed with a soul that was God or reason, which, being
material, was spread through the universe and made man a being
endowed with reason, too. The life according to nature for man
was, therefore the life of reason, and it was man's business to
adapt himself to the universe around him.
It is possible to trace many of the elements of Stoic ethics back
to earlier philosophers. They argued, like Plato and Aristotle, that
reason set man apart from the animals, and that in the exercise of
reason lay man's peculiar function and his virtue. Because it
depended on reason, all virtue was one, and at the same time a man
was either perfectly virtuous or not virtuous at all. This led on
to the notion of the Stoic Sage, a self-sufficient being resembling
in some ways Aristotle's godlike man of contemplation, and in
some ways the self-sufficient Cynic like Diogenes. The trouble
was that few men could aspire to be sages, and so Stoic morality
tends to operate on two levels. On the one hand is the un-
compromising statement that only virtue is good and only vice is
bad, and all other things, including life and death, are indifferent:
on the other is the admission that among the things that are in-
different some may be 'preferred'. Indifferent things are all those
that may be put to good or bad uses, according to the intention
of the user. But there is still a sense in which beauty is better than
ugliness, and health than disease, though this may not be a moral
sense. This is perhaps the point at which we first meet a distinc-
68
tion which is a commonplace nowadays. One of our difficulties
in interpreting earlier Greek writers is that they tend not to make
this distinction between moral and non-moral value. And when
we meet it after studying them, the Stoic distinction itself seems
odd. But if, as the Stoics did, we put moral virtue squarely in the
centre of the picture, it is a perfectly natural development.
Another momentous development is the Stoic conception of the
natural equality of men, and of man's subjection to a universal
law. On the one hand, this led to complete determinism: as part of
the natural order man was subject to the laws of nature - in our
modern sense - and his life was completely determined: his only
choice was between submitting willingly or being compelled. On
the other, Universal Law was something behind and better than
the laws of individual states: the Stoic could imagine and aim at an
ideal community in which all distinctions of rank or race were
abolished. These ideas go beyond anything envisaged by the great
Greek philosophers, and had much influence on Roman law and
Christian thought. 54
It is appropriate that our survey should end, as it began, with
questions about nature and law. Both are themes that run right
through Greek ethics. The other great topics are virtue and the
good for man, together with careful thinking about the nature
and place of pleasure .. All these derive from Socrates, and it is
impossible to imagine what Greek ethical thinking would have
been like if Socrates had never existed.

NOTES
I. Nicomachean Bthics, excerpts from Book IV, chap. ,.
z. See L. Pearson, Popular Ethics in Ancient Greece, pp. 199-202.
3. For a description of Greek city life, see A. Zimmern, The Greek
Commonwealth (Oxford, 1931).
4. Greek religion is a very complicated subject. See, for instance,
W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods (London, 1950); M. P.
Nilsson, Greek Piety (Oxford, 1948), and H. J. Rose, Ancient Greek
Religion (London, 1948).
5. For a long list of similar differences, see the Dissoi Logoi.
6. See Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity,
chap. III.
7. It is on this point that many who try to reconstruct the arguments
of the sophists go wrong.
8. There is a considerable literature on the Thrasymachus problem:
for a summary, see Cross and WoozIey, Plato's Republic, chap. ii. It is
important to remember that there are two different questions: (i) What
was Thrasymachus' own line of argument, if any? and (ii) What is
the point of Thrasymachus' argument as presented by Plato in the
Repnblic?
9. Some scholars deny that he was a real person, but if so he is
unique in Plato's earlier dialogues.
10. See G. Calogero, 'Gorgias and the Socratic Principle, NelJlo Sua
Sponte Pecrat', j.H.S., Ixxvii (1957), and A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and
Responsibility (Oxford, 1960), pp. 125-7.
I I. See G. Vlastos, 'Ethics and Physics in Democritus' , Phil. Rev.,
Iiv (1945), and Iv (1946). W. K. C. Guthrie, in A History of Greek
Philosoplij, vol. ii, pp. 489-97, expresses doubt about the genuineness of
the ethical fragments of Democritus.
12. Produced in 423. The version we have, however, is a revised
version of about 418 which seems to show greater hostility to Socrates.
13. There is a vast literature on the Socratic problem. Views include:
(i) Plato's conscious aim was to give a faithful portrait of Socrates, and
he largely succeeded in doing so (A. E. Taylor, J. Burnet). (ii) Aristo-
phanes, interpreted correctly, is also a good witness (A. E. Taylor).
(iii) Plato tried to give a faithful picture of Socrates, but was too
powerful a thinker himself to do so. Xenophon, being nnhampered by
genius, is to be trusted (von Arnim, Gomperz). (iv) The convention
of the Socratic dialogue was such that it was used as a vehicle for their
own views by thinkers of all kinds, and bore no relation to the actual
thoughts of the real Socrates (Gigon). (v) Aristotle's evidence is valu-
able (Ross).
For a detailed survey, see V. de Magalhaes-Vilhena, Le Probleme de
Socrate (paris, 1952).
'4. For a discussion of the historical background of the Delphic
response, see H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle
(Oxford, '956), vol. i, pp. 401-5.
'5. This would be an example of Greek sophrosyne, though not of
English temperance.
16. For details see A. E. Taylor, Socrates, pp. 97-102.
17. There has been much discussion as to how seriously Socrates'
hedonism should be taken. His attitude in the Gorgias is quite different,
and many have argued that in the Protagoras he is only assuming for the
moment that popular views are true. But I am inclined to think it went
a little deeper than that. For a close study, see J. P. Sullivan, 'The
Hedonism in Plato's Protagoras', Phronesis, vi (1961).
18. The classic paper on Socrates and the soul is J. Burnet, 'The
Socratic Doctrine of the Soul', Proc. Brit. Academy (1915-16).
19. For Plato's own account of this, and other episodes, see his
Seventh Letter. See also G. C. Field, Plato and his Contemporaries,
chap. ii.
20. The genuineness of these has been doubted, but it is probable
that at least the most important ones are authentic.
21. There is a useful account in W. D. Ross, Plato's Theory of Ideas
(Oxford, 1951), chap. i. Since that was written the position of the
Timaeus has been questioned by G. E. L. Owen, 'The Place of the
Tin/aeus in Plato's Dialogues', Class. Quart., N.S. iii (I9J3), but the
general picture is unaltered.
22. Scholars are much divided over whether Plato argued from soul
to state or state to soul. I favour the latter view.
23. There has been much argument about whether Plato regards
them as parts o,r as aspects of the soul, but clearly his usage is meta-
phorical, so the question does not arise.
24. See D. A. Rees, 'Bipartition of the Soul in the Early Academy')
].I-I.S., !xxvii (1957).
25. See D. Sachs, 'A Fallacy in Plato's Republic', Phil. Rev., Ixxii
(1963), and R. Demos, 'A Fallacy in Plato's Republic?', Phil. Rev., !xxiii
(19 64). . . .
26. Hackforth, Plato's Examination of Pleasure, p. 4, thinks It pOSSIble
that this view had not yet been formulated and that it is not referred to
in the Phi/ebus.
27. Hackforth (ibid.) suggests that it was written between 360 and
354, when Plato was thoroughly disillusioned with politics after the
Sicilian episode.
7'
 2.8. Interpretations differ. See Hackforth, pp. 77-78, for another view.
29. See a series of articles by J. Gosling and A. Kenny in Phronesis,
iv-vi (1959-6I), and D. Gallop, 'True and False Pleasures', Phil.
Quart., x (I960). A defence of Plato's usage in modern terminology is
in I. Thalberg, 'False Pleasures', J. Philos., lix (1962).
30. For interesting comments on eros and philia, see A. H. Armstrong
and R. A. Markus, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy (London, 1960),
pp.81-93·
3I. See D. J. Allan, 'Magna MoraNa and Nicomachean Ethics', j.H.S.,
!xxvii (1957).
32. Some views are: (i) Eudemian much earlier (Jaeger), (ii) Eudemian
slightly earlier (Gauthier and Jolif), (iii) Eudemian later than Nico-
machean (D. J. Allan).
33. Much of interest on this point can be extracted from G. E. L.
Owen, 'Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle' in
Aristotle and Plato in the Mid-Fotlrth Century (Goteborg, 1960), ed.
During and Owen.
34. P. Glassen, 'A Fallacy in Aristotle's Argument about the Good',
Phil. Quart., vii (I957), suggests that Aristotle is confused between the
good of a man and the goodness of a man, but A. Mace. Armstrong,
'Aristotle's Conception of Human Good', Phil. Quart., viii (1958),
replies convincingly. For Aristotle's method see R. Bambrough,
'Aristotle on Justice: a Paradigm of Philosophy' in New Essays on
Plato and Aristotle, ed. R. Bambrough (London, 1965).
35. Nic. Ethics, IIOIa, '5-,8 (Book I, chap. 10).
36. The great-souled man is taken very seriously by Dorothea Krook,
Three Traditions of Moral Thought (Cambridge, '959), chap. iii.
37. There is a full study in J. J. Walsh, Aristotle's Conception of
Moral Weakness.
38. See R. Bambrough, 'Socratic Paradox', Phil. Quart., x (1960),
for a discussion of the issues between Socrates and Aristotle.
39. For a clear account of the difficulties of the passage, see Mary
Warnock's review of Gauthier and Jolif's Commentary in Phil. Quart.,
xi (1961), pp. 370-2. For a wider survey of the Practical Syllogism see
D. J. Allan, 'The Practical Syllogism' in Autour d'Aristote, Receuil
rEtudes . .. offert d Monseigneur A. Mansion (Louvain, 1955). See also R.
Robinson, 'L'Acrasie, Selon Aristote', Rev. Philosophique, cxlv (1955),
and G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford, 1957), pp. 57 if.
40. For the development of the notion of phronesis from Plato to
Aristotle, see W. Jaeger, Aristotle, trans. Robinson 2 , pp. 81-84.
41. An earlier stage in Aristotle's ethical thought is to be found in his
fragmentary earlier works, particularly the Protrepticus. Unfortunately
space prevents us from studying it here.
42. For an example, see C. O. Brink, 'Theophrastus and Zeno on
Nature in Moral Theory', Phron,sis, i (1956).
43. For a lively description of the background, see A. J. Festugiere,
Epicurus and his Gods, chap. i.
44. For a recent defence of the view that Aristippus the elder was
indeed the founder of the Cyrenaics, and not his grandson of the
same name, see P. Merlan, Studies in Epicurus and Aristotle (Weisbaden,
19 60), pp. 33-35·
45. The evidence for the Cyrenaics has been studied by Erich
Mannebach (Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum Fragmenta, pp. 106 if.), who
concludes that the elder Aristippus founded the school, the younger
Aristippus, also known as Metrodldactus, built it up, and Anniceris
restored it after a lapse. The elder Aristippus believed that as long as
they were conscious, men were feeling either pleasure or pain, but the
younger accepted that there was a neutral state. When Epicurus claimed
that in this state lay man's greatest felicity, Anniceris replied that it was
a state like sleep or death. Pleasure depended on activity. The younger
Aristippus had taught that one should seek a life of happiness composed
of many pleasures and few pains, but the Cynics criticised this on the
ground that all lives contained more pain than pleasure, and so the goal
was an impossible one. Hegesias therefore took the line that the goal
should be to avoid pain and trouble, and Anniceris that one should
pursue only the pleasure of the moment.
46. Antisthenes was widely claimed to be the founder of the Cynics,
but this seems unlikely. See G. C. Field, Plato and His Contemporaries,
pp. 160-3·
47. See D. R. Dudley, A History of Cynicism.
48. For Epicurus's life, see A. J. Festugiere, Epicurus and his Gods,
chap. ii, and N. W. De Witt, Epicurus and his Philosophy.
49. The swerve probably had two functions, to allow free will, and
to arrange for an original collision of the atoms. For if all were falling
in the same direction at the same speed, they could never collide, as
the system required them to do.
50. See P. M. Huby, 'The First Discovery of the Freewill Problem',
forthcoming in Philosophy, '967.
51. See P. Merlan, Studies in Epicurus and Aristotle, pp. 1-19'
52. For Epicurean friendship, see A. J. Festugiere, Epicurlls and his
Gods, chap. iii.
53. For a brave attempt to grasp Stoicism, see J. Christensen, An
Essay on the Unity of Stoic Philosophy (Copenhagen, 1962).
54. For the ethical views of the heretical Stoic, Posidonius, see L.
Edelstein, 'The Philosophical System of Posidonius', Amer. J. Philol.,
lvii (1936), pp. 305-16.
73

BIBLIOGRAPHY
(i) TEXTS
GENERAL
Vogel, C. J. de. Greek Philosophy, A Collection oj Texts, 3 vols.
(Leiden, '950-9).
THE SOPHISTS
Translations of the fragments are to be found in K. Freeman,
Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Oxford, 1948), a
translation of the texts in Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, II. i, ed,
Diels-Kranz (Berlin, 1961).
PLATO
There are many English translations, from the five-volume set of
Jowett to the modern paperbacks. We may mention the
Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee, the Protagoras and Meno, trans.
W. K. C. Guthrie, and the Gorgias, trans. W. Hamilton,
Cornford's translation of the Republic (Oxford, 1941), and
R. Hackforth's Plato's Examination of Pleasure (Cambridge,
1945), a translation of the Philebus. The Philebus (London,
1956) and the Lall's (London, '934) have been translated by
A. E. Taylor. Socratic Discourses (London, '954), ed. A. D.
Lindsay, includes several dialogues of Plato and the Socratic
works of Xenophon. The Loeb Classical Library contains
the texts of Plato's dialogues in several volumes, with
English translations facing.
ARISTOTLE
The Nicomachean Ethics has been translated many times. There is
a paperback by J. A. K. Thompson, and others by J. Warring-
ton and W. D. Ross. The Loeb Classical Library contains the
74
text and translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian
Ethics, and the Magna MoraNa.
OTHERS
The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, ed. W. J. Oates (New York,
1957), contains translations of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucre-
tius, and Marcus Aurelius. Epicurus, the Extant Remains, by
C. Bailey (Oxford, 1926), has the text and translation of all
the remains of Epicurus. See also Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum
Fragmenta, ed. E. Mannebach (LeidenJKoln, 1961), and
Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. H. von Arrum (Leipzig,
190 3- 2 4).
(ll) OTHER WORKS
GENERAL AND BACKGROUND
Adkins, A. W. II. Merit and Responsibility, A Stu4J in Greek Values
(Oxford, 1960).
Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, '95 I).
Ferguson, J. Moral Values in the Ancient World (London, 1958).
Greene, W. C. Moira (Harvard, 1948).
Pearson, L. Popular Ethics in Ancient Greece (Stanford, 1962).
SOPHISTS
Lovejoy, A. 0., and Boas, G. Primitivism and Related Ideas in
Antiquity (Baltimore, '935).
SOCRATES
Taylor, A. E. Socrates (London, 1932).
PLATO
Crombie, 1. M. An Examination oj Plato's Doctrines, vol. i, Plato
on Man and Society (London, 1962).
Cross, R. c., and Woozley, A. D. Plato's Republic: A Philosophical
Commentary (London, '964).
Gould, J. The Development oj Plato's Ethics (Cambridge, 1955).
Grube, G. M. A. Plato's Thought (London, '9350 1958).
75
Hall, R. W. Plato and the Individual (The Hague, '96,).
Murphy, N. R. The Interpretation of Plato's Republic (Oxford, 1951).
Shorey, P. What Plato Said (Chicago, "9, ,).
Taylor, A. E. Plato, The Man and His Work (London, 1952).
See also G. C. Field below.

ARISTOTLE

Allan, D. J. The Philosop", of Aristotle (Oxford, 1952).

Aubenque, P. La Prudence chez Adstote (Paris, 196,).
Gauthier, R. A. La Morale d' Aristote (paris, 1958).
Jaeger, W. Aristotle, trans. R. Robinson (Oxford, 1948).
Ross, W. D. Aristotle (London, "92,).
Taylor, A. E. Aristotle (London, '9II-15).
Walsh, J. J. Aristotle's Conception of Moral Weakness (New York,
"9 6,).

OTHERS

Bevan, E. Stoics and Sceptics (Oxford, 191,).

De Witt, N. W. Epicurus and His Philosop", (Minneapolis, 1954).
Dudley, D. R. A History of Cynicism (London, 1937).
Festugiere, A. J. Epicurus and his Gods (Oxford, 1955).
Field, G. C. Plato and his Contemporaries (London, 1948).
Hicks, R. D. Stoic and Epicurean (London, 1910).