 Okay. Is academic ethics on the basis of book five, the end of Cicero's on moral end? So as of now you've read this complete, this entire long, difficult, but important work of philosophy, so congratulations on that. But we have to figure out how it ends. We know how it begins and we know what happened in the middle, so how does it end and where do we end up? And I want to get out what is the overall interpretation of that. Now first of all, what is the, who is the addressee of the book? Brutus. Okay. Cicero is writing to his friend Brutus. What is the setting and who are the characters in book five? Noah. So it's set in Athens, that's true, and they're in the ruins of the academy. Actually they do a sort of tourist thing and they go around and see the sites and say, oh here's Euripides house and here's where the paratetics were and here's the garden of Epicurus. All of this now lies in ruins because of a Roman siege of Greece, but they're sort of strolling around like we do, looking at a bunch of ruins and saying how great it was. Okay. And Noah, who were the characters or anyone? There's Cicero, Cicero and Cicero. Three different Cicero's. So there's the author, there's his cousin, his brother, and then there are some other people. Who else? Titus Pomponius. Uh-huh. The most important one. Marcus Pizzo. Pizzo, yes. Okay, now can you or anybody else tell us something about the setup? Why these characters, what role they basically play in the ensuing dialogue? Just generally. Well generally at the beginning they're reminiscing about the sites that they've just previously seen of historical philosophical achievement where they took place and they're marveling about how, you know, being able to see the locations of where people were doing philosophy has really given them a better perspective and has given them new enthusiasm for philosophy once they've actually seen where these things have taken place. Okay, good, yes. That's the background in the setup, but then how does the book proceed? Who does most of the talking and who answers and for what reason? Yeah, isn't it like Cicero's cousin is gonna start like an education like philosophy but he doesn't really know like what school of thought he wants to like subscribe to and so there's gonna be sort of like a, or like Pizzo starts up and like Adam and he tries to convince Cicero's cousin to join his school of thought and then it just ends up being like this like dialogue between like Pizzo and like Cicero himself like Marcus Delia Cicero. Right. Like what school he should join? Right. Okay, and what school does Pizzo represent? Well the academics, okay, and it's a bit complicated because the academic school goes through several phases and he claims to be a representative of the so-called old academy, but the old academy comes after the new academy and I'll explain how that is in due course, but just a couple of other details. What is the date that this one is set? 79, which is much earlier than the preceding two dialogue. Okay, good point. 79 BC is like 30 years almost before the settings of book one and two, which what were the settings of book one and two? Like where were they in general if you don't remember the exact names of the places that's fine. They were at a couple of his vacation houses in different places 30 years later when they're much older and we're going over this stuff still debating about these schools still, but now at the very end of this book we go back in time to their sort of grad student days. We're actually just student days. This is like these are these are undergrads deciding what they're gonna major in sort of and having a debate about it. Okay, so all of those details are incredibly important for interpreting what's going on. The fact that this is a bunch of rich Roman people now standing in the ruins of a Greek city that was destroyed eight years earlier by Sola carrying out campaigns on behalf of the Roman Empire and in a way there's a point here that the Romans have arrived. Philosophy has passed from the Greeks to the Romans now and in fact the entire thing ends almost the very last thing that said is oh good job translating those Greek ideas into Latin now we can now we can go on and do philosophy and sort of we've we've replaced the Greeks they're gone their buildings don't even stand anymore we're in charge okay just like we do now and we say we translated this stuff into English now so we don't need nobody needs to learn Greek or Latin anymore we'll just we have the superior civilization and language so we'll just conduct philosophy according to that. Now the point about the old Academy versus the new Academy so Plato's Academy founded by Plato and headed originally by Spusifis and Zanothertis after Plato's death if you look at Plato's dialogues first of all Plato was a pupil of Socrates. Socrates wrote nothing he did his idea of doing philosophy was you get together with people in person and you sit down and debate about definitions of virtues that's what philosophy is. Plato wrote these dialogues that depict characters debating about the definitions of virtues but also other things in logic and physics and so forth but doesn't present any dogmatic view of his own they mostly end in perplexity in all Korea but the earliest members of the Academy did set up systems theories of forms and theories of the mathematical nature of reality and things like that that's what Spusifis and Zanothertis did and there was kind of a backlash against that with Arkesla's carnades and these people that said we're founding the sort of new Academy which is meant to go back to the original way of doing things which was skeptical investigation of ideas like Socrates and like Plato where you don't offer dogmatic conclusions you just you just question things and later in this history you have a revolt against the so-called new Academy and its skeptical orientations and in orientation towards a more dogmatic conception says no actually there were some views that came through in academic writings and here's the basis at least of an ethical system and so this figure Antiochus presents a theory of kind of academic ethics that groups together academic ideas of Socrates Plato and Aristotle and it's Antiochus who all of the characters in the dialogue of both five have just been listening to a lecture that he gave and then they walk off and do their tourist thing and then they end up debating about these views now it would be a tricky question if I was to say well how does it end which school ends up winning in the end I think that's not exactly clear that's a matter for debate and interpretation which is perhaps where Cicero wants us to end up after all he is an academic skeptic of some kind the question is how far does he lean towards the so-called old Academy and how far does he lean towards the new Academy that is how much does he end up with a skeptical view or how much does he accept on a basis of probabilism or whatever the quasi-dogmatic views of the new Academy old Academy okay so again I here's here's a map I showed you on day one that shows the locations of the different philosophical schools in Athens and this is what these are areas they are walking through and they walk out to this suburban location of the Academy very far out of town but it's nice shady spot where they can sit and have a philosophical conversation now this conversation is structured by a consideration of a classification of philosophical schools offered by the academic skeptic carnades member of the new Academy and so just to go through that for you this diagram is in your book on page Roman numeral 24 this is this is a plausible reconstruction of the diagram that they're considering we take what the end is like pleasure freedom from pain or the goods that are in accordance with nature and then we look at whether the philosopher argues that one needs to succeed in achieving those things or merely attempt to achieve them and then we look at some mixed views that combine those ends with morality okay and so for example Aristipus is supposed to be someone who helped the view that the goal of life is to succeed at achieving pleasures the view that the goal of life is pleasure but you can just attempt to get it and it doesn't matter if you actually achieve it nobody holds that seems to be an incoherent view similarly nobody holds the view that the goal of life is freedom from pain but if you don't manage to achieve that that's okay so long as you tried that to you doesn't make any sense okay but there might be a view that achieving freedom from pain is the goal of life and that looks a lot like the view that Epicurus holds although it's attributed to Heronimus somebody about whom we know almost nothing in this text and finally about the somewhat vague term natural goods it said that carnades supposedly holds that the attainment of the natural goods is the end while the Stoics since they have this non consequentialist and stochastic approach to ethics holds that the attempt to attain them is the goal of life that is choosing the appropriate intermediate actions and so forth but whether you actually achieve the end or not is not is to be chosen they say but isn't the goal and so that is the Stoic held to be the Stoic view now this gives us a way of classifying and thinking about a bunch of the schools that are mentioned in the work and it also shows us the ensuing dialectical strategy that Cicero employs for disregarding several of these schools and then ending up pitting two of them against each other the view of the Stoics and the so-called view of the old Academy and the crucial point that that happens is in sections 21 to 22 here's what the text says I'll just read it and comment on it now I cannot lay out everything at once so note for the present that pleasure must be excluded since we're born for greater things as I shall shortly explain and one can pretty much say the same about freedom of pain okay therefore the views about pleasure and freedom from pain if that's all they're focused on we can just eliminate them from the consideration now nor need we look any further for any further arguments against carnades view any exposition of the supreme good that leaves out morality has no place in its theory for duty virtue or friendship and so we can eliminate another one of the views more over the conjunction of morality with pleasure or lack of pain debases morality and attempting to embrace it our actions are being referred to two standards one of which declares that the greatest good consists in being without evil while the other concerns itself with the most frivolous part of our nature that is pleasure that is to dole all the brilliance of morality if not to defile it says Cicero so then there remain the Stoics who so says Pisa borrowed everything from the parapetetics parapetetics meaning Aristotelians and the academics and reach the same conclusions using a different terminology so I'll give you a simplified version of carnades classification emphasizing the views that we've discussed in this class so again no one holds the view that pleasure is the end and all you have to do is attempt to get it and even if you end up in a painful horrible condition you still succeeded somehow and nobody holds that view for freedom of pain but the Stoics do seem to hold the view that the attempt to gain natural goods which they essentially define as moral things virtues that that is a viable account of the end now Aristotelians holds that actually attaining pleasure is the end and Epicurus holds that actually attaining freedom from pain is the end and it's the so-called old academics whose views were going to discuss at greatest length in this book that hold that it's the actual attainment of natural goods not the mere attempt to obtain them that is the end and the procedure we just went through with Cicero said eliminate everything in the first column because pleasure is not a suitable thing we're talking about high-minded stuff like morality here and that would debase that talk even bring pleasure into it same thing from with freedom of from pain and so that leaves us essentially with a showdown between the two by this process of elimination these two schools the Stoics versus the old Academy view so which one of those theories is the better theory is what Cicero's aiming at okay so let's see try to figure out where he ends up well first of all Piso gives a very long speech and I'll try as briefly as possible to summarize I think the essence of the argument that he makes about natural goods in that speech although there's a many many important things he touches on so he presents this parapetetic view about the relationship between natural kinds the capabilities that these natural kinds have and the natural goods that apply to them so plants have natural goods that is we can distinguish between a plant is withering and dying on the vine and one that's flourishing fructifying throwing out shoots and flowers and so forth on the basis of its vegetation growth reproduction and so on plants of course aren't capable of sensation or self-motion or reason so we don't apply any of those standards to figure out if a plant is doing well animals on the other hand we involve we look at both how their vegetative growth and reproductive capabilities are working those are certainly necessary for them to say that they're doing well and flourishing but it's not sufficient an animal that had all of the goods associated with these kind of capabilities but didn't have goods associated with sensation self movement the ability to experience pleasure avoid pain we would not say is doing well and has not attained its end so we require that to say that an animal is flourishing that are have goods of both of those categories and then when we talk about humans of course humans also have vegetative and reproductive capabilities that are important for their flourishing and their sensation self movement pleasure and pain and so forth all of that there are goods related to those things but in addition goods related to the use of language reason judgment intellectual virtue and so forth goods that we do not think apply to animals or plants and the parapetetic view is that there are goods relative to each of these categories that human nature involves all of these things and thus goods from each of those categories are necessary for flourishing and having goods from all of the categories are sufficient for flourishing and the criticism seems to be that the Stoics somehow ignore these basic aspects of human nature and obsessed obsessively focus only on goods in this category and in fact refused to call the other things goods they say that goods apply here and evils correspond to the lack of things here but these things in the other category are indifference at best preferred or dispreferred and so Peezo's argument is that which one of these views makes more sense the one that embraces all of human nature the one that for some reason fixates simply on the rational capability and his speech ends like this section 74 even the very proponents of hedonism themselves resort to contortions and have virtue constantly on their lips they declare that pleasure is only desired initially subsequently habit creates a kind of second nature which drives people to do many things that do not include seeking pleasure so again this is the basis for us eliminating hedonistic views including that that focuses on pleasure and the one that focuses on freedom from pain so what remains is the Stoics but the Stoics have transferred not one or other small part of our philosophy over to themselves but the whole of it thieves generally change the labels of the items they've taken so the Stoics have changed the names that stand for the actual things in order to treat our views as their own it is therefore our system alone which is worthy of the student of the liberal arts worthy of the learned and distinguished worthy of princes and kings this is all of you you know which of you is is worthy of you princes okay so again looking at this diagram the idea is that the Stoics recognize that all of these things are good they just start changing the names they say only use the term good in this category and use the term preferred preferred and different for this and so they change the labels on the things but the philosophy ends up amounting to the same thing so they may as well just admit just go back to the old-fashioned way of talking about this let's not try to revise our language and instead of saying oh that's a good that's a good thing saying oh you've achieved a preferred and different or something like that we can just we can just avoid all of that by going back to this old-fashioned ethical system okay let me pause for questions there before we see where the argument goes from that point any comments questions yeah no it's it's not that it's preferred for achieving happiness because the only thing that matters for happiness is goods and the only goods are virtues in the Stoic view now if you ask me would I prefer to be poor or wealthy ugly or beautiful diseased or healthy then I'll tell you of course I prefer health but I want to make sure that you don't get confused and think that by saying I prefer health that I think health is a good thing such that I couldn't be happy if I didn't have it so if I had other goods and was happy but then I suddenly didn't have health because I felt ill from an accident or or from getting some kind of disease then if health really was a good thing and suddenly I didn't have that good then I wouldn't be happy anymore so I as a stoic don't apply the term good to those things that actually aren't relevant to whether I'm happy in the philosophical sense successful prosperous in the philosophical sense in part because otherwise I make myself and all otherwise people vulnerable to things that are outside of my control it's not up to me whether I get hit by a falling crane when I walk out of this building or I contract a painful disease because that I from interacting with some other people or something that's not up to me and so I don't want to I don't want to have a theory that says I can I can end up being a bad person or not the most successful possible person if I don't have those things so I've isolated my entire value system from anything that I can't control okay it's still hard to control the things that I have isolated it down to but I'm no longer vulnerable to those other things whereas this paraphatetic system is completely vulnerable to all of these so if you didn't have a good birth you have a lot of congenital defects your impotent you have a growth disorder you're blind you're paralyzed so you can't move yourself around in space you experience a lot of pain and you don't have any pleasure then they're not gonna say you're no matter how wise and virtuous you are they are gonna say that's a successful life right they're gonna have to say that that that person is actually miserable right or well they were a virtuous person but it ended up being a really happy unfortunate life okay so do you see do you see what's why one would want to use this to switch the language from talking about goods to talking about preferred and dispreferred and again they aren't they aren't preferred in the sense that they're preferred because they contribute to happiness like if you know if you have virtue then you can be even happier if you have wealth and health as well it's just that we it's a description of the fact that we have a natural impulse towards one and away from the other but it's not crucial to our concept of overall success and happiness because that is exclusively focused on the nature that we become at age 7 or 14 when we're rational and reasonable and that that's what we care about preserving is that good okay any other questions before we see where the the dielectric goes from there yeah I'm just wondering that wisdom is considered as a part of virtue yes not well that's an odd way to put the question for the stoics it's considered the whole of virtue yeah because one of them could decide that I read on the text it was very interesting to mention that it says that poverty is evident and then if you see a beggar and then he is wise you think that you know it is right right so poverty can't be evil because there you can you could find somebody that's poor but very wise yeah so how could poverty be an evil if this good person who's better than a lot of these rich people who are scoundrels and horrible people with wasted lives they're not better just because they're richer and if we start recognizing letting wealth and beauty and so forth be considered goods and that one could be happy on those bases then we're gonna start weighing these against each other and say well you know he's kind of stupid and you know unjust and mean towards his friends and so forth but he's really rich and he's really good looking and he has a has a really nice house and a great status and he's got a lot of fame and people think he's really great and then we'll say that that person is happier than somebody that's actually a virtuous wise person who doesn't happen to have those other goods and the first guy may have gotten all of those things by you know as people usually do inheriting them right has nothing to do with what they themselves do it's what you know their parents gave them those genes those that that wealth that status and so on okay so here's then the dialogue that happens after that speech is given okay so Lucius who they're trying to win over he's the sort of guy you've got to convince says I'm completely won over and I think my cousin is too we're ready to sign up for the old academic system which seems to us a lot more reasonable than the stoic system well then does the young man have your consent Piso ask me i.e. Marcus Tullius Cicero or do you prefer that he learn a system which will leave him knowing nothing when he's mastered it and Cicero says I gave him I give him his head but are you forgetting that it is quite legitimate for me to bestow my approval on what you said after all who can fail to approve what seems probable now that statement makes it look like the conclusion of the dialogue is that Cicero ends up signing up to the old academic system not because it's been proven deductively true beyond all shadow of the doubt nothing you can't prove anything that way according to an academic skeptic but all things considered when we go through all of these arguments it seems like the most probably true and as you learned from Dr. Blythe Green that is the goal of an academic skeptic in the way that they get through life is nothing is certain and nothing can be known for sure but therefore I have to act on the basis of what I think is most probable and so I think that this picture is the most probable view of what we should call goods and what is necessary for our happiness and the one that says none of this is relevant and only this category is relevant and that's the only place that goodness and happiness flows from I reject that is not probably being true doesn't seem very convincing so that's that's one way to interpret where Cicero ends up however the work goes on for quite a long ways after that okay that's that's sort of what you would expect the conclusion to end up being and notice that it ends on an odd number book not an even numbered book so the structure of the other books as we've had a presentation of the view and then a refutation of it at presentation of Epicureanism refutation of Epicureanism presentation of stoicism refutation of stoicism now we have a presentation of this view and there is no subsequent refutation of it it looks like there's an acceptance of it as the probably correct view but Cicero goes on to make an objection to where we've ended up this is in section 77 your claim piso on behalf of your school the old academy or whatever that all the wiser happy appears to me to be too quick somehow or other it's slithered by in the course of your speech but unless the claim is made good I'm afraid that theophrastus will be vindicated in his view that no life can be happy if it involves ill fortune sorrow or bodily anguish for it is a violent contradiction for a life to be happy and yet weighed down with many evils I quite fail to understand how this position is coherent and piso says what then what is it then that you take issue with that virtue has such a power that it's sufficient in itself for a happy life or if you accept this do you deny that those who possess virtue can be happy even when suffering certain evils and sister replies I wish to attribute the greatest possible power to virtue let us leave the question of just how much for another equation for another occasion for now the question is whether virtues power could be so great if anything outside of virtue is counted as a good so what piso is done is said all of these things are goods and we have to continue using the term good and good for all of them but virtue and these things that have to do with reason is really way more important than them really outweighs them yes they're kind of important but this really outweighs them and if somebody has these they're basically yeah they're good they're gonna be happy that's that's it's basically sufficient for them to be happy but I'll admit that these other things are good and sister says if you admit these other things are good then you admit that their contraris are evil if their contraris are evil then even if you have goods in these categories they will have to be balanced to count against evils in the other categories and so therefore your wise and virtuous person can end up being miserable and unhappy if he or she lacks a sufficient number of goods in these categories and similarly your scoundrel who's actually morally vicious and stupid as long as he or she has a lot of these other kinds of goods in a sufficient quantity since they are goods yes they're lacking some good from this category but they they're so rich they're so famous they're so powerful they're so beautiful that even though they're kind of not fully virtuous they might still be considered happy and so Cicero does not think that that remains a coherent position okay and he restates the dilemma in a very direct way here Pisa says oh so you're in agreement with the Ephrases view that one needs some modicum of good luck and and good health and integrity of your limbs and everything in order to be happy are you are you signing up for that point and he says we're wandering from the point to cut along story short Pisa I'm in agreement so long as what you classify as evils really are that well do you not think they're evils Pisa ask whichever reply I give to this question I replied is bound to leave you on the hook and Pisa says how so and he says because if they are evils then no one afflicted with them will be happy if they are not evils then the paraphatetic system collapses it just becomes this the stoic system again I can point it out on this diagram so either you leave these as being yes these are good again in which case their opposites are evils and then you cannot assure that the wise person is happy or you deny that they're actually good so that their opposites aren't actually evils and cannot conflict with the happiness and success of the virtuous wise person but in that case you've conceded to stoicism and signed up with that with that view okay so here is then Pisa's final restatement of his view this then is our system which you think inconsistent virtue has a kind of heavenly excellence a divine quality of such power that where it arises in conjunction with the great and utterly glorious deeds that it generates there can be no misery or sorrow but there can still be pain and annoyance and so I would have no hesitation in claiming that all who are wise are happy but that one person can nevertheless be happier than another and to that Cicero says this position of yours Pisa is an urgent need of strengthening but if you can if you can defend it I'll let you steal not just my cousin here but my own self okay so there we have a kind of rhetorical in you know exhortation to virtue descend into saying no no we really think virtue is such a great thing but it still doesn't get at the issue of whether non-virtue things are truly considered bad and so he concedes that no these non-virtuous things like having to do with pleasure and pain having to do with wealth and poverty are relevant and so somebody that's wise who has good health and has wealth and so forth we're gonna say is happier than somebody who is wise but lacks those goods and the reason why Cicero says that position is in need of strengthening is again because that opens you makes you now vulnerable to the position that somebody who has a huge amount of these other non-moral goods may be considered happier because now we're comparing happy happier happiest and we have a sort of continuum where somebody with a lot of one kinds of goods could be happier than somebody even who possesses goods of the other category the stoics of course avoid that all together there is no such thing as one person being happier than other you're either happier you're not meaning you're either wise and virtuous or you're vicious and foolish and if you're the latter there's no way you're happy and if you're the former there's no way that you're not happy and there's a categorical difference not a continuum on the basis of which we compare people being happy or unhappy now so that again I it's not perfectly clear how the dialogue ends and what message is supposed to be taken away but here's here's a way to think of it two standards for evaluating a moral theory okay I'll define these standards descriptive adequacy and normative adequacy descriptive adequacy requires that a moral theory say of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not and normative adequacy requires the theory says of what should be that it should be and of what should not be that it should not be now the view of the old academy okay the one the piezo defense is descriptively adequate in that it says of what appears to be good health health well freedom from pain things that we all know and think are good it says that they really are good whereas the view of the Stoics it says health and wealth aren't good at all doesn't seem to be a descriptively adequate view it doesn't really capture how people use this terminology further the Stoic view that the wise man can be happy even while being tortured on the rack doesn't seem descriptively adequate that seems like a ridiculous claim on the other hand the view of the old academy that says that something that should not be considered a good like well should be considered to be a good doesn't seem to be normatively adequate we should have a moral fear theory that does not include things that are not within your control or are not always productive of goods should not call them to be good and the view that it's not in the power of an agent to be successful but rather that depends as the aphorastus holds on whether they're lucky and whether they're fortunate in life doesn't seem to be normatively adequate it shouldn't be the case that I my happiness depends on things that happen to me instead of what I do so therefore the view of the old academy seems more descriptively adequate while the view of the stoics seems more normatively adequate how then do we decide which is better we would we would apparently have to decide what's more important descriptive adequacy or normative adequacy and I was hoping that I had another slide that went through and solve this problem and explained it but I don't so what do you think