Reply to Cooper

Abstract

'The matter will hinge on this point: what will be established is the ideal wise and virtuous person either of the Stoics or of the Old Academy [Platonists and Aristotelians]. You can't have both; the dispute between them is not about boundaries but about complete ownership, since all rationale for living is involved in one's definition of the final good, and dispute about that is dispute about all rationale for living. So it can't be both, since they disagree so deeply; it must be one or the other....1 am dragged in different directions-at one time one view seems more convincing to me, at other times the other.. Still, unless one or other of them is the case, I firmly believe that virtue is defeated. But-just on this issue they disagree.'I Cicero is presenting for us the problem faced by a thoughtful and enquiring person who is troubled by the central question of a eudaimonist ethics and also stands at the end of a long debate which faces him with well-worked out positions and batteries of arguments on either side. It is notable that he sees it as a specifically ethical debate. What troubles him is the disagreements between Stoics and Aristotelians on ethics, beginning from dispute as to our final end. To solve these problems he needs to show that the Stoics get the better of the Aristotelians when arguing about the relation of virtue and happiness; he doesn't need Stoic metaphysics. Moreover, Stoic metaphysics, were he to bring it in at this point, would be plainly quite irrelevant. He is talking about the central issues in ethical debate and surveying the different disagreements over them.2 Obviously one does not succeed in showing Aristotle (or Epicurus or Plato) to be mistaken about the relation of virtue to happiness by bringing in Stoic metaphysics, which ex hypothesi none of these opponents accept, and which do not engage with the specific debate that is here seen as so pressing.