hi, this is Dr. Gregory Sadler. I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called Reason IO, where we put philosophy into practice. I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years, and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts. Sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured, but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated, and that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners. I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to YouTube. Many viewers say they find them useful. What you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos, each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text. I hope you find it useful as well. In On the Ends, Cicero has Torquatus represent the Epicurean position in ethics. And Epicureans are hedonists. They hold that pleasure is not just a good, but the good. It is the highest good, the Summum Bonum, and it is the final end.

thing that should be motivating us, and indeed does motivate us according to them, whether we realize it or not, and everything else is to be understood in light of pleasure or in light of pain, its opposite, which is the final evil, the worst evil, the end of bad things. Everything else is bad in relation to pain or the loss or lack of pleasures. Now, Torquatus is in an interesting position here, and his interlocutor points this out. As opposed to, say, Epicurus himself, who was, you know, a philosopher living in a garden that he selected for himself with some friends who he had to enjoy a common life and enjoy philosophy with over the course of his life. Torquatus is coming from a noble family. He's coming from a family that has done important deeds in the history of Rome prior to this dialogue. So, this raises the problem, his interlocutor says, you know, think about your great ancestors. They didn't just evaluate things in terms of their pleasure and pain, or else they wouldn't

have done the great things that they did. They wouldn't have engaged in noble deeds. And so, the question here is, since he has ancestors who have displayed not just a little bit of virtue, but great moral virtue, is why did they engage in this virtuous action? Now, why are we talking about virtue here? Virtue, for the other philosophies that were out there, provided an example of something that you could say, this does reduce to pleasure and vice. It's offi ce that doesn't just reduce to pain. To engage in virtuous activity is not always pleasant for oneself. As a matter of fact, it may be quite unpleasant sacrificing your life for your country. Isn't that something that would be painful fighting against the enemy itself? I mean, you might didn't really enjoy fighting for a little while, but I think a lot of fighting back then was not quite so fun. Maybe virtue is about something different. And Turk wata says no, no, no. I can explain all of this. So the question is, why did these ancestors do the things

they did. Why did they engage in these virtuous, noble, you know, deeds that would, would attain them and a moral reputation? Then we can even talk about today. So he tells us that here we go, I'm not gonna be bribed by your flattery of my family. What's the explanation you put on their actions? Why did they charge an armed enemy? Why did they treat their children cruelly without a thought for their own interest in advantage, what even while the animals don't act that way? So what was the motive? He says if they had a motive for these glorious exploits, it was not a love of virtue in and for itself. Virtue is not something desirable in and for itself from an Epicurean position or standpoint. What was it that they were doing then? Why were they engaging in these deeds that would earn them glory and earn some sort of advantage to Rome? He says, Consider my ancestor who rested the neck, let this is why Torquatus right from his his foe the tork he saved himself from death but he.

braved great danger yes before the eyes of an army so he wouldn't have just done this in a bar fight or done this you know willy-nilly some other place. He did it in specific circumstances why in front of the army what was he trying to win. He says honor and esteem and why does he want those here's where we get to a distinctively epicurean position. Torquatus says well honor and esteem are the strongest security that you can have in life so he was really doing something dangerous to produce a state of greater security for himself. What about others one of them sentenced his own son to death and he says well he better have had some good reason for doing that because if he didn't that I'm sorry to be the descendant of somebody who's so savage. But if his purpose was by inflicting some pain upon himself to establish his authority as a commander and to tighten the reins of discipline then his action aimed at ensuring the safety of his own fellow citizens upon.

which he knew his own dependents so again a matter of security, a matter of some sort of greater good being brought about, a matter of ruling out certain pains, and guaranteeing certain pleasures by engaging in those actions. Now, the way that Torquatus is going to talk about this in general could apply to the rest of us when we engage in virtuous actions. What we're doing is one of two things, perhaps both at the same time. We are foregoing pleasures in the present for greater pleasures in the future, or we are enduring pains in the presence so that we can avoid greater pains in the future. So, if for example, we're being generous to somebody who we see in poverty, perhaps we that will get some sort of greater reward for that, or perhaps what it is that we really want is to be looked at as somebody who gets to be generous, and that we that we value more than the money or resources that we provide them with. And we can go on and on and on with other sorts of examples of this.

so Torquatus says the famous examples of my relatives don't really prove that virtue is something good in and of itself. Something that has intrinsic moral value. The moral value that virtue really does have, and he thinks that it does have moral value, derives from how it helps us to produce or to safeguard pleasures and to prevent or to avoid pains. We take a little bit of pain or even a great amount of pain to avoid much greater pain later on or indeed to attain pleasures for ourselves. We forego certain pleasures to avoid greater pains or to attain greater pleasures for ourselves in the future or perhaps even in the present. So he goes on and he tells us that all of the pleasures tend to produce Verte. All the virtues tend to produce pleasures in one way. He also goes on, he says, I understand there's a lot of people out there who are mistaken about the moral status of virtue. They think that virtue is the good. The Stoics would be a prime example of this but Aristotelian also in a certain way.

plaintiffs would be making that the good as well so if that's really the case then pleasure and pain would be rather incidental but for the Epicureans it's the opposite of that he says those who put the chief good in pleasure the Summum bonum the best good are being fooled they're captive they are they're being seduced by a name by a verbal expression this virtue business anything else that we want to call it being upright being a good person more importantly he says they fail to understand what it is that nature requires of them and so there is an intimation here this is that to pursue virtue solely for its own sake might be to misunderstand human nature and to get the virtues wrong to not really engage in the virtues but only something that would be let's call it a facsimile of it virtues ought to be productive of pleasure and to ward off pains and he will discuss the four cardinal virtues each of them in particular and those are wisdom justice

temperance and courage, and try to provide some arguments on an Epicurean basis for why each of them is going to produce greater pleasure than pain for the person who develops and who deploys that virtue. So for the Epicureans, according to Torquatus, virtue can be seen as a good, but it's merely a means to the greater good of pleasure.

Cicero, on the Ends bk 1 | Pleasure, Pain, and Moral Virtue | Philosophy Core Concepts

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