Principal Doctrine 37

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Translation

Among actions legally recognized as just, that which is confirmed by experience as mutually beneficial has the virtue of justice, whether it is the same for all peoples or not. But if a law is made which results in no such advantage, then it no longer carries the hallmark of justice. And if something that used to be mutually beneficial changes, though for some time it conformed to our concept of justice, it is still true that it really was just during that time – at least for those who do not fret about technicalities and instead prefer to examine and judge each case for themselves.

Analysis

In this, relatively lengthy Doctrine, Epicurus unfolds his complex, multipartite understanding of the "Nature of Justice": what it is, what it is based on, how it changes, how it is conceived. To follow Epicurus' logical exposition one item at a time:

A. Epicurus begins with what he considers "natural" justice, or the "justice of nature":

• Certain (kinds of) actions have been held to be just. Instead of embarking on argumentation (which he would have considered superfluous), Epicurus defers to a broad, moral/historical sense of precedent, a notion of Common Law, of a commonly held understanding among many people. This may be the Epicurean (approximate) equivalent of "self-evident truths", albeit not conferred by deity, but self-evident because they are commonly shared among humans.

• These just actions have been confirmed. Here, Epicurus tellingly uses the term epimartyria, i.e. the same term he uses routinely to signify the mental process by which sensory perceptions in general are confirmed. As above, it was not some god who decreed these moral truths, but they stand as solid as facts, because human experience has confirmed them since time immemorial.

• These actions have been confirmed as just expressly because they are beneficial. Thus the cornerstone of the Epicurean understanding of justice is instrumental, "utilitarian" (yet not, of course, in the sense of modern, economic, "upper-case" Utilitarianism), as it views justice not as something inherently good in the abstract (Cf. Principal Doctrine 23), but as something useful for the benefits it confers.

• These confirmed actions are beneficial because they serve the needs of human association; there is no doubt that here Epicurus refers to his usual principle of "neither to harm, nor to be harmed", brought up in several of the Principal Doctrines.

• Such actions belong inherently "in the domain of what is just", regardless of circumstances, whether "the same thing, or not the same thing happens to all (people)". Again, Epicurus is probably referring to the foundational imporance of neither harming, nor being harmed by fellow-members of one's social group.

B. From this point on, Epicurus narrows the scope of his argumentation, from the "Basic Law" of justice in general, to individual, particular, specific laws (in the plural, i.e. legislative acts, decrees, ordinances, etc.):

• On occasion, people have established particular, ad hoc laws-- this, in contradistinction to the fundamental "justice of nature". Tellingly, Epicurus uses nomos (i.e. law) and thetai, the verb from which thesis is derived; in everyday parlance, then as now, nomothesia simply means legislation, the process of writing something into law.

• Sometimes, such ad hoc laws do not turn out well: they do not serve the (requisite) benefit of human association, they do not help people get along with each other.

• Such flawed laws "do not partake of the Nature of Justice", i.e. these "lower order", ad hoc legislative acts sometimes do not have the required modicum of the "higher order", self-evident Law that the earlier part of this Doctrine extolled.

• Nor are these ad hoc legislative acts valid in perpetuity; even when a law started out as a good idea at first, it may sometimes "degenerate", i.e. it may cease to serve the purpose of social harmony, for which it was written to begin with.

C. At this point, Epicurus reconciles two seemingly incompatible items of his argumentation, i.e. what he claims is of perpetual, and what is of temporary value:

• Even when a law occasionally "goes bad", and no longer holds any of that other, "higher order", "natural" justice,

• it still did fit within our preconception of what is just for some time. Most tellingly, Epicurus brings in his crucially significant notion of preconception or prolepsis. His argument is that even those laws that eventually become obsolete did, at some earlier moment in time, seem like good ideas; otherwise (he might have argued) we would have never written such laws at all.

• Nevertheless, such laws were in fact just, at least for some time.

D. Finally, Epicurus closes this Doctrine with a defensive statement; it is quite probable that his philosophical adversaries might have accused him of duplicity in his views on justice, especially in light of the complexity of the above argumentation. Thinking perhaps of the Stoics, who held rather rigid views on laws as immutable, Epicurus argues that what he claims is true; his conclusions ought to be shared, he argues, by all those who look at things the way they really are, and "do not agitate themselves by empty shouts".

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• The colloquial expression echei to einai, literally (but awkwardly) "has the being", is rendered best in English as "has the attribute/quality of being".

• The coupling of ouden hetton, literally "nothing less" is the same as the English composite preposition "nonetheless".