Basics of Epicurean Ethics

1. Ethics: There Are No Supernatural Gods Influencing Human Affairs; The Individual Does Not Exist Before Birth Or After Death; The Guide Of Life Is Pleasure Rather Than Virtue; There Are No Absolute Standards of Good, Evil, or Justice

Men need not be concerned about "gods" - supernatural beings do not exist, and any higher beings which are "perfect" are not concerned with men.

Therefore it is false to believe that gods favor and reward their friends and disfavor and punish their enemies.
Therefore it is foolish to ask the gods to do things for us that we can do for ourselves.
PD 1. The blessed and immortal nature knows no trouble itself nor causes trouble to any other, so that it is never constrained by anger or favour. For all such things exist only in the weak.

Men cease to exist at death and thereafter experience no sensations whatsoever.

Therefore there is no reward or punishment after death
Therefore all the pleasure that we want to experience must be experienced in life.
PD 2. Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

Pleasurable living is the ultimate goal of life set by nature. The highest degree of pleasurable living possible to us (the "limit of pleasure") is attained by filling our experience with pleasures and expelling all pains. But men who lack knowledge of the nature of the universe are troubled by fear of supernatural forces, and men who are not independent of other men fear their enemies. Men by nature are troubled by these concerns, so they must study of nature and pursue independence. It is not possible to live to the limit of pleasure unless we study nature and attain the power to live safely and apart from our enemies.

Therefore knowledge is indispensable for happy living, but knowledge is not an end in itself.
PD 11. If we were not troubled by our suspicions of the phenomena of the sky and about death, fearing that it concerns us, and also by our failure to grasp the limits of pains and desires, we should have no need of natural science.
PD 12. A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe but suspects the truth of some mythical story. So that without natural science it is not possible to attain our pleasures unalloyed.
PD13. There is no profit in securing protection in relation to men, if things above and things beneath the earth and indeed all in the boundless universe remain matters of suspicion.
PD 14. The most unalloyed source of protection from men, which is secured to some extent by a certain force of expulsion, is in fact the immunity which results from a quiet life and the retirement from the world.

It is essential to state precisely what "pleasurable living" means here, because this single point is where the historical reading of Epicurus has gone wrong more often, and more damagingly, than anywhere else in the philosophy.

Therefore we must be clear that pleasure itself – not a state of tranquility or freedom from disturbance, often labeled by its Greek name, ataraxia, and treated as a separate and higher goal that pleasure merely serves – is what nature identifies as the end of life. Once tranquility is promoted above pleasure as the true target, and pleasure is demoted to a mere means toward it, Epicurus's philosophy has been quietly converted into something that looks like Stoic equanimity or Buddhist detachment: a philosophy of withdrawal and minimal engagement that the actual historical Epicureans – who built and ran an active school, campaigned publicly to spread the philosophy, and in some cases led vigorous public and even military lives – would not have recognized as their own.
A useful test for catching this substitution: if a description of the Epicurean goal would also make sense as a description of the Stoic or the Buddhist goal, that description is almost certainly wrong as an account of what Epicurus taught.
Letter to Menoeceus: "For this reason we call pleasure the beginning and end of the blessed life. For we recognize pleasure as the first good innate in us, and from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance, and to pleasure we return again, using the feeling as the standard by which we judge every good."
Diogenes Laertius records a vivid, almost comic proof that Epicurus meant pleasure literally and without embarrassment:
“'Send me,' he says, 'some preserved cheese, that when I like I may have a feast.' Such was the man who taught that the end is pleasure.”
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers X.11
This is not a sympathetic witness inventing flattering testimony – it is simply a report of what Epicurus himself wrote, and it leaves no room for the theory that he secretly meant something more austere.
Diogenes of Oinoanda, writing this philosophy into a stone wall for his entire city to read, states the goal with a force that admits no misreading:
“I affirm now and always, with a great shout to all Greeks and foreigners, pleasure is the end of the best lifestyle, while the virtues, which are inappropriately fussed over by these people, are in no way the end, but the means to the end.”
Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 32
Therefore we must also reject the closely related claim that Epicurus divided pleasure into two competing kinds – an ordinary, active pleasure of the senses, ranked lower, and a separate, quieter pleasure consisting merely of freedom from pain and disturbance, ranked higher as the true good. Epicurus recognized only one pleasure, described from different angles: as a process, when we are moving toward the satisfaction of a want, and as an achieved condition, once the want is satisfied and no pain remains. These are not two competing goods arranged in a hierarchy. They are the same good considered at two different moments, and neither is superior to the other.
Therefore we must also take care in how the phrase "absence of pain" is used. Nature gives every living creature exactly two internal feelings – pleasure and pain – with no third state between them, so the absence of pain simply is the presence of pleasure: two descriptions of a single condition, not two different things. But because most people who hear "the goal is absence of pain" understand it as recommending an empty, passive, featureless existence, this phrase should never be used by itself as a summary of the Epicurean goal. Pleasure must always be stated first, as the positive goal it actually is, with "freedom from pain" introduced afterward only as a clarification of what full pleasure includes – never as the headline.
Diogenes Laertius confirms that this two-feeling structure is not a modern gloss but the school's own stated doctrine:
“The internal sensations they say are two, pleasure and pain, which occur to every living creature, and the one is akin to nature and the other alien: by means of these two choice and avoidance are determined.”
Diogenes Laertius X.34

The pursuit of pleasure as the guide of life is not endless and is not in vain, because there is no goal higher than seeking the limit of mental and physical pleasure possible to you as an individual. You can experience that goal by filling your experience with pleasures and expelling all pains. Even if you are not able to expel every pain, pleasurable living is possible to most men because pain that is strong is generally short, and pain that is long is generally mild.

Therefore pleasurable living is the goal of life.
Therefore the escape from pain is not the goal of life, because the only means of total escape from pain is death, and the experience of pleasure, which is the goal of life, is only possible to the living.
PD 3. The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever pleasure is present, as long as it is there, there is neither pain of body nor of mind, nor of both at once.
PD 4. Pain does not last continuously in the flesh, but the acutest pain is there for a very short time, and even that which just exceeds the pleasure in the flesh does not continue for many days at once. But chronic illnesses permit a predominance of pleasure over pain in the flesh.
PD 3 is often misread as though it described an empty or minimal state to be reached and then simply maintained. It does not. It is Epicurus's answer to an older philosophical challenge – that pleasure, having no natural limit, could never be complete, and therefore could not be the highest good. Epicurus answers that pleasure does have a limit, and that once every pain has been driven out, the limit has been reached: the cup is full, not empty. What fills the cup is the whole range of the pleasures of life – friendship, philosophical understanding, food, conversation, and the delight of the senses. PD 3 tells us when the cup is full. It does not tell us what fills it.
The challenge Epicurus is answering here is not invented for modern convenience – it goes back to Plato, who argued that pleasure could never be the highest good precisely because it seemed to have no limit:
“SOCRATES: Have pleasure and pain a limit, or do they belong to the class which admits of more and less? PHILEBUS: They belong to the class which admits of more, Socrates; for pleasure would not be perfectly good if she were not infinite in quantity and degree.”
Plato, Philebus 28a
PD 3 is Epicurus's direct answer to exactly this objection: pleasure does have a limit, reached the moment all pain is removed, and reaching that limit is what makes a life complete rather than merely long.

It is possible for us to attain the limit of pleasure (the maximum pleasure possible to us) if we pursue pleasure intelligently.

Therefore we must not think that we can increase our limit of pleasure past the limit which we experience when we are living most pleasurably and also experiencing as little pain as possible
PD 18. The pleasure in the flesh is not increased, when once the pain due to want is removed, but is only varied: and the limit as regards pleasure in the mind is begotten by the reasoned understanding of these very pleasures and of the emotions akin to them, which used to cause the greatest fear to the mind.
Therefore we must not regret that we cannot live forever, because the limit of pleasure is not measured by the time available to us, but by our capacity to live as pleasurably as possible while also experiencing as little pain as possible, and the mind is capable of understanding this and eliminating the fear of death and regret that we are not immortal.
PD 19. Infinite time contains no greater pleasure than limited time, if one measures by reason the limits of pleasure.
PD 20. The flesh perceives the limits of pleasure as unlimited, and unlimited time is required to supply it. But the mind, having attained a reasoned understanding of the ultimate good of the flesh and its limits and having dissipated the fears concerning the time to come, supplies us with the complete life, and we have no further need of infinite time: but neither does the mind shun pleasure, nor, when circumstances begin to bring about the departure from life, does it approach its end as though it fell short in any way of the best life.
Therefore we must learn also that it is not necessary to compete with others in seeking pleasure, as it is easy to live a complete life without comparing ourselves with other men.
PD 21. He who has learned the limits of life knows that that which removes the pain due to want and makes the whole of life complete is easy to obtain, so that there is no need of actions which involve competition.
Therefore we must also learn to analyze our desires so as to pursue those which bring the most pleasure with the least accompanying pain.
PD 29. Among desires some are natural (and necessary, some natural) but not necessary, and others neither natural nor necessary, but due to idle imagination.
PD 30. Wherever in the case of desires which are physical, but do not lead to a sense of pain, if they are not fulfilled, the effort is intense, such pleasures are due to idle imagination, and it is not owing to their own nature that they fail to be dispelled, but owing to the empty imaginings of the man.
Only the natural and necessary desires cause real pain when they go unmet – hunger, thirst, and the like. The vain desires, when unfulfilled, do not themselves inflict this kind of pain; what causes suffering is the anxious, restless pursuit of them, not the mere fact that they remain unsatisfied. This is why analyzing our desires correctly matters: mistaking a vain desire for a necessary one leads us to treat ordinary non-satisfaction as though it were real deprivation.
PD 26. Those desires which do not bring pain when unfulfilled are not necessary, and the longing for them is easily dispersed, when to achieve them seems difficult or when they seem likely to produce harm.
Therefore we must learn that it is as great an error to live too simply as it is to live too extravagantly, as the goal of life is pleasant living, and different circumstances will require and allow different levels of simplicity and luxury.
VS. 63. Frugality too has a limit, and the man who disregards it is like him who errs through excess.

In pursuing pleasure we must remember that no pleasure is bad in itself, but some pleasures frequently bring more pain than the pleasure justifies.

Therefore in ALL actions we choose to pursue we must ask: "What will be the result if I pursue this and what will be the result if I do not?"
PD 8. No pleasure is a bad thing in itself: but the means which produce some pleasures bring with them disturbances many times greater than the pleasures.
Therefore we must remember that it is not the faculty of pleasure that is to blame when some men pursue actions we consider to be evil, it is the unintelligent or malicious mind of the individual that employs the faculty of pleasure in a way likely to bring more pain to him than pleasure.
PD 10. If the things that produce the pleasures of profligates could dispel the fears of the mind about the phenomena of the sky and death and its pains, and also teach the limits of desires (and of pains), we should never have cause to blame them: for they would be filling themselves full with pleasures from every source and never have pain of body or mind, which is the evil of life.

In pursuing pleasure we must remember that no single pleasure can be pursued to the point where it consumes our lives, because if it did so there would never be any room for any other pleasures.

Therefore do not seek to pursue one pleasure to the exclusion of all others.
PD 9. If every pleasure could be intensified so that it lasted and influenced the whole organism or the most essential parts of our nature, pleasures would never differ from one another.
PD 15. The wealth demanded by nature is both limited and easily procured; that demanded by idle imaginings stretches on to infinity.

Protecting yourself from other men is something that is naturally to be desired, and any action necessary to achieve this is justifiable. But fame and power frequently do not achieve this result for us, and those who pursue fame and power frequently do so in vain.

Therefore pursuit of fame and power can be justified in particular circumstances, but frequently the results do not justify the effort.
PD 6. To secure protection from men anything is a natural good by which you may be able to attain this end.
PD 7. Some men wished to become famous and conspicuous, thinking that they would thus win for themselves safety from other men. Wherefore if the life of such men is safe, they have obtained the good which nature craves; but if it is not safe, they do not possess that for which they strove at first by the instinct of nature.

"Virtue" is not the goal of life, but simply the name we give to the necessary tools by which pleasurable living can be attained. It is not possible to live pleasurably without these tools, nor is it possible to employ these tools properly without living pleasurably.

Therefore it is essential to see that "virtue" is an empty word when divorced from the goal of pleasurable living, as other philosophers attempt to do.
PD 5. It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently and honorably and justly, [nor again to live a life of prudence, honor, and Justice] without living pleasantly. And the man who does not possess the pleasant life, is not living prudently and honorably and justly, [and the man who does not possess the virtuous life], cannot possibly live pleasantly.

The only way to dismiss superstition and other fears from life is to live intelligently, and therefore confidently, and this requires that we study nature and employ the faculties of observation given us by Nature (the Epicurean Canon of Truth).

Therefore we must always keep our minds clearly focused on the goal of pleasurable living.
PD 22. We must consider both the real purpose and all the evidence of direct perception, to which we always refer the conclusions of opinion; otherwise, all will be full of doubt and confusion.
Therefore we must never allow ourselves to repress our faculties of observation, including our faculties of anticipations and our faculty of pain and pleasure, because if we abandon these we have no ability to judge what is true and what is false.
PD 23. If you fight against all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false.
PD 24. If you reject any single sensation and fail to distinguish between the conclusion of opinion as to the appearance awaiting confirmation and that which is actually given by the sensation or feeling, or each intuitive apprehension of the mind, you will confound all other sensations as well with the same groundless opinion, so that you will reject every standard of judgment. And if among the mental images created by your opinion you affirm both that which awaits confirmation and that which does not, you will not escape error, since you will have preserved the whole cause of doubt in every judgment between what is right and what is wrong.
PD 25. If on each occasion, instead of referring your actions to the end of nature, you turn to some other nearer standard when you are making a choice or an avoidance, your actions will not be consistent with your principles.

It is possible for men to live wisely and pursue pleasure intelligently, for men are free agents and their actions are not wholly determined by outside forces.

Therefore we should reject both those who teach determinist views that men are nothing more than pawns of outside forces, and those who teach that men are playthings of chance.
Letter to Menoceus: Fate, which some introduce as sovereign over all things, he scorns, affirming rather that some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency. For he sees that necessity destroys responsibility and that chance is inconstant; whereas our own actions are autonomous, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach. It were better, indeed, to accept the legends of the gods than to bow beneath that yoke of destiny which the natural philosophers have imposed. The one holds out some faint hope that we may escape if we honor the gods, while the necessity of the naturalists is deaf to all entreaties. Nor does he hold chance to be a god, as the world in general does, for in the acts of a god there is no disorder; nor to be a cause, though an uncertain one, for he believes that no good or evil is dispensed by chance to men so as to make life blessed, though it supplies the starting-point of great good and great evil. He believes that the misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool. It is better, in short, that what is well judged in action should not owe its successful issue to the aid of chance.
Therefore the pursuit of pleasure that this philosophy recommends is a conclusion to be reasoned toward and chosen deliberately, using the standard nature provides – not an involuntary compulsion that a man is helpless to resist. The wise man pursues pleasure because reflection on his own nature and experience shows it to be the good, not because he is incapable of choosing otherwise.

If we live wisely we will see that our most important tool of happiness and security is friendship.

Therefore we will cultivate and protect our friends.
PD 27. Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship.
PD 28. The same conviction which has given us confidence that there is nothing terrible that lasts forever or even for long, has also seen the protection of friendship most fully completed in the limited evils of this life.

Friendship also demonstrates why the guide of life cannot simply be stated as "avoid pain," because forming a deep friendship guarantees future pain: friends fall ill, grow old, move away, or die, and the deeper the friendship the sharper the eventual grief.

Therefore, if minimizing pain were the actual rule governing Epicurean choice, the wise man would avoid deep attachments altogether, guarding himself against every commitment that might later cause him grief.
But Epicurus taught the opposite: that of all the things wisdom acquires, friendship is by far the greatest contributor to the blessed life (PD 27, above), and something to be actively and gladly pursued, not cautiously rationed out of fear of loss.
Therefore the true Epicurean standard is not the minimizing of pain considered in isolation, but the greatest balance of pleasure over pain across a whole life – and a life rich in friendship, grief included, yields far more pleasure on net than a guarded life spent avoiding the risk of loss. The pain of eventual grief is accepted willingly, with open eyes, as the price of a good whose pleasures far exceed it.
Vatican Saying 66. Let us feel for our friends not by mourning but by thinking of them.

As with any other virtue, "Justice" is not the goal of life, but justice is essential to happy living because the just man is the most free from trouble, and the unjust is the most full of trouble.

Therefore we should seek arrangement with other men that are just.
PD 17. The just man is most free from trouble, the unjust most full of trouble.

The ONLY true foundation of Justice is mutually advantageous agreement among intelligent beings to neither do or receive harm from each other.

Therefore we should pursue agreements with other men that are mutually advantageous.
PD 31. The justice which arises from nature is a pledge of mutual advantage to restrain men from harming one another and save them from being harmed.

This grounding of justice in actual mutual advantage, rather than in an eternal or abstract standard, answers one of the oldest and most searching challenges ever raised against any theory of justice: the story of the Ring of Gyges. Plato's Republic poses the question through a shepherd who finds a ring that makes him invisible: if a man could act however he wished with complete certainty of never being detected, would he have any remaining reason to act justly?

PD 34 and PD 35 give the Epicurean answer, and it is stronger than a simple argument from deterrence. Injustice is not evil "in itself," but it is inseparable from the fear of eventual discovery – and no one who acts unjustly in secret can ever be completely certain that he has escaped detection for good, since certainty on that point is impossible before death itself. The invisible man does not gain freedom from anxiety. He gains a permanent, unresolvable source of it.
Therefore no ring of invisibility, however complete, actually delivers what it promises, because it cannot deliver certainty – and it is the ongoing possibility of discovery, not the immediate act of being seen, that makes injustice a source of disturbance to the person who practices it.
Therefore this same standard – that justice consists only in actual, mutually advantageous agreement among people capable of making and keeping agreements – refutes every attempt to ground justice in something else: the claim that justice is an eternal standard existing independently of any actual arrangement between people; the claim that justice is a law woven into the fabric of the universe and binding regardless of advantage; and equally the modern claim that justice binds people through an appeal to abstract duty or inherent dignity alone, without reference to any actual mutual benefit between the parties involved. All of these commit the same error: each asserts an obligation that supposedly exists prior to, and independent of, any actual agreement between the people it claims to bind.

There is no such thing as absolute or universal justice or injustice.

Therefore what some men label "injustice" is never evil in and of itself, no matter how intensely we may dislike the activity. The penalty of injustice is only the pain that it brings to the men who are unjust.
PD 32. For all living things which have not been able to make compacts not to harm one another or be harmed, nothing ever is either just or unjust; and likewise too for all tribes of men which have been unable or unwilling to make compacts not to harm or be harmed.
PD 33. Justice never is anything in itself, but in the dealings of men with one another in any place whatever and at any time it is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.
PD 34. Injustice is not an evil in itself, but only in consequence of the fear which attaches to the apprehension of being unable to escape those appointed to punish such actions.
PD 35. It is not possible for one who acts in secret contravention of the terms of the compact not to harm or be harmed, to be confident that he will escape detection, even if at present he escapes a thousand times. For up to the time of death it cannot be certain that he will indeed escape.

Because justice is founded on mutually advantageous agreements, relationships which change over time so as to no longer be mutually advantageous are no longer to be considered just.

Therefore human relationships must constantly be reexamined and reconstituted to fit circumstances in order for them to be labeled "just" or "unjust."
PD 36. In its general aspect justice is the same for all, for it is a kind of mutual advantage in the dealings of men with one another: but with reference to the individual peculiarities of a country or any other circumstances the same thing does not turn out to be just for all.
PD 37. Among actions which are sanctioned as just by law, that which is proved on examination to be of advantage in the requirements of men's dealings with one another, has the guarantee of justice, whether it is the same for all or not. But if a man makes a law and it does not turn out to lead to advantage in men's dealings with each other, then it no longer has the essential nature of justice. And even if the advantage in the matter of justice shifts from one side to the other, but for a while accords with the general concept, it is nonetheless just for that period in the eyes of those who do not confound themselves with empty sounds but look to the actual facts.
PD 38. Where, provided the circumstances have not been altered, actions which were considered just, have been shown not to accord with the general concept in actual practice, then they are not just. But where, when circumstances have changed, the same actions which were sanctioned as just no longer lead to advantage, there they were just at the time when they were of advantage for the dealings of fellow-citizens with one another, but subsequently they are no longer just, when no longer of advantage.

The man who pursues happy living most intelligently will live among friends, and he will refrain from mixing with, and expel from his life, all those who are not his friends, or who are his enemies.

Therefore happy living requires us to constantly examine our circumstances and take action to pursue friendly relationships and separate ourselves from unfriendly relationships.
PD 39. The man who has best ordered the element of disquiet arising from external circumstances has made those things that he could akin to himself and the rest at least not alien; but with all to which he could not do even this, he has refrained from mixing, and has expelled from his life all which it was of advantage to treat thus.
PD 40. As many as possess the power to procure complete immunity from their neighbours, these also live most pleasantly with one another, since they have the most certain pledge of security, and after they have enjoyed the fullest intimacy, they do not lament the previous departure of a dead friend, as though he were to be pitied.