It may then surprise you to hear that in Epicurus’ opinion the only good is pleasure. Surely how much pleasure we can get depends heavily on our material conditions of life? But there’s a second surprise: he thinks that the highest possible pleasure is freedom from physical pain and mental anxiety. Simple, easily attainable pleasures are no less pleasant than extravagant and exotic ones; and reliance on the latter induces anxiety: the means to obtain them may be taken away from you. (The idea that Epicureanism is a constant dinner party with musicians and dancing-girls is completely misleading—it must have come down to us from Epicurus’ opponents, who were numerous.)
17. Epicureanism in practice? Not according to Epicurus.
A cause of much mental turmoil is superstitious fear. Banish it. Realize that in their perfect bliss the gods have neither need nor wish to interfere in human affairs. Learn enough about physics, astronomy, and meteorology to feel confident that all phenomena have natural explanations—they are not portents, omens, or signs of divine wrath. And do not fear death, for death is simply non-existence, in which there can be nothing to fear. That, on a thumbnail, is Epicurus’ advice to each one of us. You could do a lot worse than follow it. Of course there wouldn’t be any politicians if we all did; but perhaps we could put up with that.
Epicurus taught the individual to be inwardly armed against whatever may befall. Over two thousand years later John Stuart Mill wrote a stirring defence of every individual’s right to shape their own life. In his famous essay On Liberty (1859) he argued for what has become known as the Harm Principle: ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community . . . is to prevent harm to others’. As democratic systems of government became better entrenched in Europe and America they also became better understood, and Mill had spotted a latent danger: the tyranny of the majority over the individual and over minority groups.
As befits the author of Utilitarianism (see p. 47) he makes no appeal to human rights, but rather to the damage done, the value lost, if his principle is not observed. To be master of one’s own life is a good for human beings, a part of our happiness, so the individual loses even if what the law forbids them to do is something they wouldn’t have done anyway. But the whole society loses too. For the people whom the Harm Principle protects are an extremely valuable resource, precisely because they have unconventional opinions and unusual lifestyles. If their opinions are in fact true the value to the community is obvious. If they are false it is less obvious but equally real: if truth is wholly unopposed it becomes a dead formula on the tongue—opposition ensures that it remains live in the mind. As for unconventional lifestyles, they provide living experimental data from which everyone can learn. Constraining the individual damages everybody.The State
Earlier (Chapter 2, and again in Chapter 5) we looked at the so-called contract theory of political obligation. We saw it in action in Plato’s Crito, and noticed that it can in principle take many forms, arising from the variety of possible answers to the question: who contracts with whom to do what on what conditions?
Of all contract theories that of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is perhaps the most famous—and if so then because of his marvellously unflattering description of the ‘state of nature’, life before any social arrangements had been made, in which nobody can own anything, cultivate anything, or do anything constructive at all without continual fear of being attacked and robbed, with a fair chance of being murdered thrown in. As long as this ‘war . . . of every man against every man’ lasts, life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. So how to improve matters? Form an association; agree to accept the authority of a ‘sovereign’ (person or body) with full powers to do anything they deem needful to protect each of you from the others and from any external threat. This sovereign body can do no injustice, since as their accepted representative everything it does is done with the presumed consent of all who are party to the contract that set it up. Only if the sovereign directly threatens their lives may the citizens resist—for it was to protect their lives that they entered into the contract in the first place. The ‘Laws and Constitution of Athens’, you recall (Crito 50e–51c, p. 19 above), wouldn’t allow Socrates even that much, but gave little reason to support such extreme claims.
Mightn’t Hobbes’s citizens reply that it wasn’t just to protect their lives that they entered into the contract? It was to enjoy various liberties, all of which were lacking in the state of nature. That would suggest that the citizens’ right of resistance kicks in rather earlier than the point at which their very lives are threatened. (Besides, having handed over all the power, how are they to protect their lives?) Like Plato, Hobbes seems to have gone further than his arguments warrant. But really that isn’t surprising. Plato’s youth coincided with Athens’s disastrous war against Sparta. Hobbes was born as the Spanish Armada approached; his maturity witnessed thirty years of devastating conflict in Europe and England’s descent into civil war. No wonder that both men believed that the prime need of political life was government strong enough to maintain peace and order, the values without which no others could even begin. Their way of supporting the individual was to hand over total sovereignty to the state. No surprise that some have thought that they went too far. John Locke (1632–1704), writing less than fifty years after
