The most thorough analysis of moral obligations is unquestionably that of Panaetius, and on the whole, with certain modifications, I have followed him. The questions relating to this topic which arouse most discussion and inquiry are classified by Panaetius under three headings:
1. Is a thing morally right or wrong?
2. Is it advantageous or disadvantageous?
3. If apparent right and apparent advantage clash, what is to be the basis for our choice between them?
Panaetius wrote a three-part treatise about the first two of these questions; the third question he said he would deal with in its proper turn. But he never fulfilled his promise. This seems to me all the more surprising because he was still alive thirty years after the publication of the first three parts of his work – his pupil Posidonius records this. Posidonius himself briefly refers to the subject in certain notes,1 but it seems to me strange that he, too, did not deal with it at greater length. For he expressed the opinion that there is no more vital theme in the whole range of philosophy.
Now one theory is that Panaetius did not overlook this problem but that his omission was deliberate – indeed that no discussion on the subject was required, since the possibility of a clash between right and advantage does not exist. Personally I cannot agree with such a view. Or rather, this last point could raise legitimate doubts: had Panaetius been right to include this third heading in his classification – should he not instead have omitted it altogether? But the other fact is incontrovertible; the subject was included in his classification, and yet he never dealt with it. If someone draws up a triple classification and completes two parts of his threefold task, he obviously still has the third ahead of him. Besides, at the end of his third part Panaetius actually promises that he will deal with this third topic at the proper time.
On this point Posidonius is a reliable witness. In one of his letters he quotes a favourite remark of Publius Rutilius Rufus,2 himself a pupil of Panaetius, about the painting of the Venus of Cos. No painter, said Rutilius, had ever been able to complete that part of the picture which Apelles had left unfinished, since the beauty of Venus’s face made the adequate representation of the rest of her a hopeless task. Similarly, the quality of what Panaetius had written was so outstanding that nobody was able to supply his omissions.
What Panaetius intended, then, is not in doubt. But whether he had been justified when, at the outset, he included this third heading in his programme for the study of moral obligations may well be, as I have said, a matter for discussion. The Stoics behave that right is the only good. Your Peripatetics, on the other hand, hold that right is the highest good – to the degree that all other things collected together scarcely begin to weigh down the balance on the other side. Now, according to either doctrine, there can be no doubt whatever about one point: advantage can never conflict with right. That is why Socrates, as the tradition goes, used to curse the men who had first begun to differentiate between these things which nature had made inseparable. The Stoics agreed with him; for their view is that everything which is morally right is advantageous, and there can be no advantage in anything which is not right.
Those, on the other hand, whose yardstick of desirability is pleasure1 or absence of pain say that right is only worth cultivating as a source of advantage. If Panaetius were the kind of man to hold the same opinion he might argue that clashes between right and advantage are conceivable. However, he is not that sort of thinker at all. On the contrary, he interprets right as the only good, and judges that things which conflict with this, however advantageous they may look, can in fact make life neither better by their presence nor worse by their absence. So we reach the conclusion, after all, that there was no need for Panaetius to deal with the comparison between what is right and what appears (falsely) to be advantageous.
Besides, the Stoics’ ideal is to live consistently with nature.2 I suppose what they mean is this: throughout our lives we ought invariably to aim at morally right courses of action, and, in so far as we have other aims also, we must select only those which do not clash with such courses. That is another reason why, according to the school of thought that I have mentioned, there ought never to have been any question of weighing advantage against right, and the whole topic ought to have been excluded from any philosophical discussion.
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However, there is more to the matter than that. For moral goodness, in the truest and fullest sense of the word – goodness and right being wholly synonymous – could only be found among those hypothetical people who are endowed with ideal wisdom. Nobody who falls short of this perfect wisdom can possibly claim perfect goodness: its semblance is the most he can acquire. And these are the men, the ordinary men falling short of the ideal, whose moral obligations form the subject of my present work. The Stoics call these ’second-class’ obligations.1 They are incumbent upon everybody in the world – so their application could not be wider! And what is more, natural decency and progress in understanding enable many people to live up to these obligations.
On the one hand, then, there is that ideal, unlimited obligation – the perfect obligation, as the Stoics put it, ‘satisfying all the numbers’2 -which none but the ideally wise man can fulfil. And then there are also these other actions in which we see the working of a ’second-class’ obligation. “When the latter situation arises, there is often a very general impression that here, too, an ideal action has been performed; most people fail to understand that, in fact, the deed falls short of the ideal – their intelligence is insufficient to appreciate what is lacking”. Judgements of poems, paintings, and much else reveal the same fault: uninformed readers and viewers admire and praise things that do not deserve to be praised. For evidently ignorant people can grasp such merits as these poems and pictures and so on may possess without being capable of detecting their deficiencies. What they need is expert instruction, and then they quickly revise their opinions.
The obligations, then, which I am discussing in this book are those related by the Stoics to this ’second-class’ kind of goodness, which is not the exclusive possession of the hypothetical man of ideal wisdom, but is relevant to the whole of mankind. That is to say, everyone who is not devoid of good is prompted by obligations of this sort. Take for example the two Deciuses,3 or the two Scipios.4 We call them ‘brave men’; and we describe Gaius Fabricius Luscinus5 as ‘just’. But this does not mean that they are perfect models of bravery or justice as the truly wise man would be. For none of them were ‘wise’ in the ideal sense we are here attributing to that word. Nor was Cato the Censor, nor was Gaius Laelius,1 although they received names indicating that they were so regarded. Even the Seven Wise Men2 were not wise in this sense – they merely bore a certain resemblance to wise men, because of their consistent performance of’ second-class’ obligations.
Now it is mistaken, we know, to weigh what is ideally right against apparent advantage when the two things are in conflict. And apparent advantage should equally not be weighed against this ’second-class’ sort of right which is cultivated by everyone who aspires to a reputation for goodness. For we are morally bound to cherish and observe the degree of right which comes within our comprehension just as carefully as the ideally wise man is obliged to cherish what is right in the full and ideal sense of the word. Because that is the only way in which we can maintain whatever progress we have made towards achieving goodness.
So much then for people who fulfil their moral obligations sufficiently well to be regarded as good. But those who habitually weigh the right course against what they regard as advantageous are in quite a different category. Unlike good men, they judge everything by profits and gains, which seem to them just as valuable as what is right. Panaetius observed that people often doubtingly weigh those two things against one another. I am sure he meant just what he said: that they often do this, not that they ought to. For preferring advantage to right is not the only crime. It is also sinful even to attempt a comparison between the two things – even to hesitate between them.
But can there be any sort of contingency warranting doubts and special consideration? I believe that there can; certain situations are perplexingly difficult to assess. On occasion, a course of action generally regarded as wrong turns out not to be wrong after all. Let me quote a particular instance, which admits of a wider application. There could be no more terrible crime than to kill someone who is not merely a fellow human being but a close friend. Yet surely someone who kills a tyrant, however close friends the two men have been, has not committed a crime. At any rate the people of Rome do not think so, since they regard that deed3 which was done as the most splendid of all noble actions. Has advantage then, in this case, prevailed over right? No; advantage has come from right.
All the same, there are occasions on which advantage, as we understand the term, will give the impression of clashing with what we interpret as right. In order to avoid mistaken conclusions when this happens, we must establish some rule to guide us in comparing the two things, and to keep us true to our obligations. That rule will be in accordance with the teaching and system of the Stoics. They are my models in this work; and I will tell you why. It is true that the earlier members of the Academy and your Peripatetics (who were once indistinguishable1 from them) regard right as preferable to apparent advantage. But the Stoics go further, and actually identify advantage with right, insisting that a thing must be right before it can be advantageous. This treatment of the subject is more impressive than the Peripatetic and earlier Academic belief that some particular good actions may not be advantageous and some advantageous actions may not be good. I, however, belong to the New Academy, which allows wide latitude to adopt any theory supported by probability.