Let us consider possible objections.
I. Suppose a man of great wisdom were starving to death: would he not be justified in taking food belonging to someone who was completely useless? 2. Suppose an honest man had the chance to steal the clothes of a cruel and inhuman tyrant like Phalaris,1 and needed them to avoid freezing to death, should he not do so?
These questions are very easy to answer. For to rob even a completely useless man for your own advantage is an unnatural, inhuman action. If, however, your qualities were such that, provided you stayed alive, you could render great services to your country and to mankind, then there would be nothing blameworthy in taking something from another person for that reason. But, apart from such cases, every man must bear his own misfortunes rather than remedy them by damaging someone else. The possible exception I have quoted does not mean that stealing and covetousness in general are any less unnatural than illness, want, and the rest. The point is rather that neglect of the common interest is unnatural, because it is unjust; that nature’s law promotes and coincides with the common interest; and therefore that this law must surely ordain that the means of subsistence may, if necessary, be transferred from the feeble, useless person to the wise, honest, brave man, whose death would be a grave loss to society. But in that case the wise man must guard against any excessive self-regard and conceit, since that could only lead to a wrongful course of action. If he avoids these pitfalls, he will be doing his duty – working for the interests of his fellow-men, and, I repeat yet again, of the human community.
An answer to the query about Phalaris can very easily be given. With autocrats we have nothing in common; in fact we and they are totally at variance. There is nothing unnatural about robbing – if you can – a man whom it is morally right even to kill. Indeed, the whole sinful and pestilential gang of dictatorial rulers ought to be cast out from human society. For when limbs have lost their life-blood and vital energy, their amputation may well follow. That is precisely how these ferocious, bestial monsters in human form ought to be severed from the body of mankind.
Such are the problems which beset our efforts to define obligations which may arise in particular circumstances. And this is the sort of theme which I believe Panaetius would have dealt with if some accident or distraction had not altered his plan. Indeed, plenty of rules bearing on precisely this sort of question had emerged from the earlier parts of his work. Those rules already suggest which courses of action have to be shunned as wrong, and which can be tolerated as right.
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Well, the structure of my book is still not complete, but completion is not far off: now for the topmost stone. Mathematicians often simplify their arguments by leaving out the proofs of certain propositions and requiring that a number of conclusions should be taken for granted; and I shall adopt the same procedure. I shall invite you, my son, to concede to me (if you feel you can) that we must aim at nothing other that what is right. And even if Cratippus forbids such a concession,1 at least you will grant me this: that right is more worth aiming at, for its own sake, than anything else. Either of these assumptions is enough for my purpose. Sometimes the one alternative may seem more convincing, sometimes the other; and no solution apart from these two has any probability at all.
Before going on, I must refute a charge against Panaetius. He never made the improper assertion that advantage could in certain circumstances conflict with right. What he said was that apparent advantage could do so. But he frequently asserted that nothing can be advantageous unless it is right and nothing right unless it is advantageous; and he comments that no greater plague has ever visited mankind than the attitude of mind which has regarded the two things as separable. So the conflicts that he postulated were not real but only apparent ones. Far from permitting us ever to allow advantage priority over right, he was thinking of occasions when we should have to distinguish whether advantage or right were truly present, or whether their apparent presence was illusory; and his intention was to help us to reach such decisions correctly. However, as I have pointed out, Panaetius did not after all discuss this subject of apparent clashes. Accordingly in my treatment of the matter – which is now to follow – I shall be unsupported and fighting my own battle. True, I have seen studies on this theme by writers subsequent to Panaetius, but personally I have not found them satisfactory.
When we encounter advantage in some plausible form, we cannot help being impressed. But close examination may reveal something morally wrong with this apparently advantageous action. In such a case the question of abandoning advantage does not arise, since it is axiomatic that where there is wrong there can be no true advantage. For nature demands that all things should be right and harmonious and consistent with itself and therefore with each other. But nothing is less harmonious with nature than wrong-doing: and equally, nothing is more in harmony with nature than what is truly advantageous. So advantage cannot possibly coexist with wrong. Take it for granted, then, that we are born – that our nature impels us – to seek what is morally right. In that case, whether we adopt Zeno’s view that this is the only thing worth trying for, or Aristotle’s opinion that it is at any rate infinitely more worth trying for than anything else, then one must conclude that right is either the only good or at least the highest of all goods. Being identified, therefore, with good – which is certainly advantageous – right is advantageous too.
A man who has in mind an apparent advantage and promptly proceeds to dissociate this from the question of what is right shows himself to be mistaken and immoral. Such a standpoint is the parent of assassinations, poisonings, forged wills, thefts, malversations of public money, and the ruinous exploitation of provincials and Roman citizens alike. Another result is passionate desire – desire for excessive wealth, for unendurable tyranny, and ultimately for the despotic seizure of free states. These desires are the most horrible and repulsive things imaginable. The perverted intelligences of men who are animated by such feelings are competent to understand the material rewards, but not the penalties. I do not mean penalties established by law, for these they often escape. I mean the most terrible of all punishments: their own degradation.
Away, then, with the whole wicked, godless crowd of people who hesitate which course to follow – the course they know to be right, or deliberate immersion and self-pollution in sin and crime! For the mere fact of their indecision is an offence: some courses of action are wrong even to consider – merely to pause over them is evil. Nor will it help the vacillator to expect or hope for his offence to be covered by secrecy or privacy. For if we have learnt any philosophy at all, this at least we ought to appreciate: all the secrets we may be able to keep from any and every god and human being do not in the least absolve us from the obligation to refrain from whatever actions are greedy, unjust, sensual, or otherwise immoderate.