The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

by Kenan Malik

Values become a matter of personal preference or political need.

Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most influential moral philosophers of the late twentieth century, and perhaps the most important Catholic philosopher of our time, observed that morality finds its meaning in the distinction between what he called ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’ and ‘man-as-he-could-be’.

This, for Homer, is the tragedy of being human: to desire freedom, and be tortured by a sense of autonomy, and yet be imprisoned by forces beyond our control. Fate, to Homer, is a social reality, and neither will nor cunning can evade it. Indeed, a man who does what he ought to moves steadily towards his fate and his death. Achilles and Hector go into battle knowing they are fated to die, but knowing, too, that without surrendering to their fate they would also surrender their honour.

In part, the history of moral thought is the history of attempts to address the problem of reconciling fate and free will.

In the modern world, morality is inseparable from choice. Homer’s warriors cannot choose to be moral or not. Each is simply good or bad at performing the duties of his role. Human choice adds texture to the cloth already woven on the loom of fate, but cannot unpick the threads.

Oresteian trilogy

The Choephoroi, the second of the Oresteian plays,

In the final part of the trilogy, The Eumenides,

‘Polis’ meant to the ancient Greeks much more than ‘city state’ means to us. It carried a spiritual sense and embodied a sense of ‘home’ and belonging. It embodied also the sense that only through membership of the polis was humanity raised above the level of barbarism.

Athena’s judgement is righteous because she recognizes both the fallibilities of humans and the dilemmas that they face.

Naturalists they may have been, but the only language the early Presocratics possessed through which to understand the workings of the cosmos was the language of human action and agency. By seeing human history as the product not simply of individual agency but also of the environment, social, physical, cultural and historical, that the agents inhabited, Herodotus turned on its head this relationship between humans and nature.

In an age in which the alternatives seemed to be the scepticism unleashed by Democritus or the relativism of Protagoras’ rebuttal of such scepticism, there was plenty of space for the idea that the ability to argue and persuade was more important than the content of one’s argument.

Plato could trace his descent from Codrus, the last of the legendary kings of Athens, killed during the Dorian invasion in the eleventh century, and Melanthus, king of Messenia. His mother was a descendant of Solon, the sixth-century poet and statesman whose political and economic reforms laid the foundations for Athenian democracy. It was a family saturated with power, prestige and influence.

In picking up Thrasymachus’ challenge, Plato responds at two levels. First, he sets out plans for a social Utopia to show how naked self-interest is harmful to both the individual and the collective soul. Second, he gives a metaphysical account of what it is to be good, challenging the claim that justice is relative to particular cities.

This is Plato’s response to Thrasymachus. Pure self-interest cannot be in the interest of the self, because it makes one unhappy and enslaved. To live well is to have an ordered soul, one that is in harmony with itself. ‘How can it profit anyone to acquire gold unjustly’, he asks, ‘if, by doing so, he enslaves the best part of himself to the worst?’

Plato dismisses naked self-interest not as ethically unsound but as mentally unhealthy. To be unjust is to suffer from an unbalanced mind.

Thrasymachus possessed a different concept of self-interest. Self-interest to him was unrelated to the interests of the community; individuals should not take into account needs other than their own. Philosophers, ancient and modern, have shown why such an egoistical view makes little sense. Humans are not solitary creatures but exist only within a community. It is only through a community of others that an individual can assert his or her own interests.

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stagira in northern Greece. His father was court physician to the king of Macedonia. At seventeen Aristotle went to Athens to attend Plato’s Academy, which became his home for the next twenty years. He was the Academy’s star pupil, but also fiercely independent. That may be why, when Plato died in 347 BCE, Plato’s nephew Speusippus was chosen to head the Academy. Aristotle went back to Macedonia, becoming court tutor to the young Alexander, later to be Great.

Aristotle was a different kind of philosopher to those that had gone before. One of Raphael’s most famous paintings, Scuola di Atene or The School of Athens, is a fresco on the walls of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, depicting most of the great Greek philosophers. At the centre stand Plato and Aristotle, holding copies of their books in one hand, and pointing with the other, Plato upwards to the heavens, Aristotle down to the Earth.

This supreme good is εὺδαιμονία – eudaimonia. It is a concept that in Greek moral thought goes back at least as far as Socrates, but which is most associated with Aristotle. The word is usually translated as ‘happiness’. To the Greeks eudaimonia meant much more. It was not a matter of the satisfaction of immediate desires, nor even of a sense of wellbeing, but described more broadly a state of human flourishing, or a state of being that is worth seeking, that which Aristotle calls ‘living well and doing well’.

Moral virtues are character traits, of which Aristotle mentions twelve: courage, temperance, generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, pride, patience, honesty, wittiness, friendliness, modesty and righteous indignation.

Intellectual virtues consist of abilities such as intelligence or foresight that help formulate plans and calculate consequences.

Theoria is the ability to think about the nature of the world; it is akin to science and is used to contemplate universal laws.

Phronesis, or practical wisdom, helps us ‘contemplate things that are variable’.

The Greek word for virtue is ἀρετή, or arete. An arête is also, for mountaineers, a sharp ridge, with steep cliffs falling away on either side. It is a good metaphor for Aristotle’s vision of arete as moral virtue. An Aristotelian virtue is like a narrow path with a chasm of vice to right and left. Courage is the virtuous path between rashness and cowardice, righteous indignation the path between envy and spitefulness. To act virtuously in accordance with reason is for Aristotle to observe a balance between excess and deficiency in all things, to thread a path along the arête between the vices on either side.

It is phronesis, the wisdom acquired through thinking about one’s experiences, that enables the virtuous man to find the mean and keep on the mountain ridge.

For Aristotle, as for Plato, ethics was subordinate to politics. The primary good was the good of the community rather than the good of the individual. Moral rules grew out of the structure of the community, and ensured the maintenance of that structure.

It is in Athens that we see the spirit of ancient Greece, and in whose magnificence we recognize how much we owe the Ancients. But it is in Sparta that we find its ethical heart, and in whose virtues we understand how different is the modern world.

The new rulers possessed no legitimacy but upon the battlefield, and so it was upon the battlefield that they continually had to assert their authority.

It was best to avoid both fame and power, Epicurus thought, for these created enemies.

Live in fear ?

For Stoics, neither pleasure nor the elimination of pain but the acceptance of one’s fate was the road to tranquillity.

Socrates’ indifference to bodily comforts, his plainness in matters of food and clothing, his refusal to flee Athens when charged with a capital crime and his calmness in the face of death all shaped Stoic thinking. Zeno took also from the Cynics their insistence that nothing mattered aside from virtue.

God was not separate from the universe; God was the cosmos, its ‘soul’, materially expressed in the pneuma, or cosmic breath, that is dispersed throughout all the individual bodies and organisms, maintaining each in its proper state and in its proper relation to its environment.

From the Stoic point of view, that which will be will be, and no amount of rage or desire will suffer to change it. The rational response to fate is to accept it and, in Epictetus’ words, to ‘wish the things which happen to be as they are’. You may be suffering from a debilitating illness, but it would be irrational to whine about it, as it would make no difference to your health. You may be falsely imprisoned, but no amount of anger and resentment will break down the door, so you might as well accept your fate, however undeserved, with equanimity.

Rage against fate, try to change the unchangeable, and your life will be neither happy nor virtuous.

Seneca suggested that those who seem to suffer unjustly should say to themselves: ‘God has deemed us worthy instruments of his purpose to discover how much human nature can endure.’26 Such justifications of suffering and evil came to be known as ‘theodicy’ and was influential in shaping Christian moral thought.

These questions return us to the debate about free will and fate that runs back to Homer and beyond and forward to our own age. The Stoic answer was that our actions might be fated, but we still have to assent to our fate.

To be virtuous, Hierocles suggested, is to draw these circles together, constantly to transfer people from the outer circles to the inner circles, to treat strangers as cousins and cousins as brothers and sisters, making all human beings part of our concern. The Stoics called this process of drawing the circles together oikeiosis, a word that is almost untranslatable but means something like the process by which everything is made into your home.

‘I AM THAT I AM,’

Sum ergo sum

For the Greeks, order and harmony were experienced in the very nature of the universe (kosmos meant to the Greeks both the physical universe and a sense of order and harmony).

Even Plato, the most rule-bound of the Ancients, viewed morality more as a means of educating the mind than of observing a law.

Prophecy, the Polish American philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel has written, ‘is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profane riches of the world’. In a prophet lies the ‘crossing point of God and man’.

The earliest parts of the Torah were committed to writing at around the same time as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Like Homer’s epics, the Torah came to define the origins, history and identity of a people.

All moral codes possess two elements: a set of values to pursue and a reason for pursuing those values; or, to put it another way, they both elucidate the means of being good and demonstrate the end to which the means take us. In ancient Greece, the virtuous life was the means. The end – the reason for submitting to such a life – changed over time. For Homer the prize was honour, for Plato justice, for Aristotle happiness. These shifts, as we have seen, reflected social changes. But however the end was conceived, what made the moral rules acceptable was that most people perceived a relationship between means and end, and embraced the end as a prize worth striving for.

The trouble is that Jesus, like Socrates, wrote nothing. Most of his followers were illiterate and there exists no eyewitness account of his life or ministry.

The Golden Rule has a long history, an idea hinted at in Babylonian and Egyptian religious codes, before fully flowering in Greek and Judaic writing, and independently in Buddhism and Confucianism too.

The insistence on virtue as a good in itself, the resolve to turn the other cheek, the call to look inwards, the claim that correct belief is at least as important as virtuous action – all were important Stoic themes.

It was the irrational, unpredictable nature of the gods that led Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to look to secular reasons for piety and righteousness.

Each moment of consciousness gives birth to the next and then ceases to be, so no person is constant from one moment to the next. For Buddhists, the belief that humans possess a self, that there is an essential ‘me’, is part of the illusion of permanence that must be discarded if an individual is to achieve enlightenment.

There is something Stoic about the Buddha’s conception of the good life. There is also something Aristotelian about it (or there would be were it not anachronistic to describe as Aristotelian the ideas of a man who lived two centuries before Aristotle).