Ancient Ethics and Modern Morality

Abstract

It is no news to moral philosophers that it is extremely hard to define morality, at least convincingly. Those of us who do ancient philosophy face a further problem. When we study Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, the Stoics and Epicureans, it's not at all obvious that these famous figures in moral philosophy are talking about morality at all. They all take it for granted, for a start, that the main focus of their enquiry is the agent's happiness; and this doesn't sound much like morality. We explain at this point, of course, that they are not talking about happiness as we understand that, but about eudaimonia, and that eudaimonia is the satisfactory, well-lived life. But a little reflection shows that this doesn't help, or at least that it doesn't help as much as one might have hoped, it still doesn't sound much like morality. And this initial feeling of unease is only reinforced when we find other differences, such as that in ancient ethics the good of others enters in as part of one's own good, justice is a virtue of character rather than being introduced via the rights of others, and so on. We study the ancient theories, then, but sometimes with some doubt as to what they are theories of. We tend in fact to talk of ancient ethics, not ancient morality, and we do the same for modern theories containing elements that are prominent in the ancient ones: thus we talk of virtue ethics, not virtue morality. There is a fairly widespread attitude that ancient theories of virtue and the good life are concerned not with what we take to be morality, but with something different, an alternative which can be labelled ethics.1 Recently the issue has been sharpened by Bernard Williams.2 The ancients did indeed, Williams claims, lack our notion of morality-and were better off without it, since it is confused and in many ways objectionable. However, one need not be hostile to morality to think that ancient ethics is an alternative to modern morality, rather than part of the same endeavor. We might have taken a wrong turning, but there again we might have made