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MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY
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Unit Code

PHI110

Unit Name Morality and Society

Assignment No. 2

COE USE ONLY

Date Received

Assignment Title Epicurus

Due Date

19/12/12

Contact Info

Phone:0403424484

Email:joseph.zizys@gmail.com

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Student Name:

Family Name Zizys

Given Name Joseph

Student Number: 42351979

Date:

26/12/12

Epicurus' Argument:
Epicurus argues that the only thing we should rationally be afraid of is pain and mental
disquiet. Since pain depends on a sensing body we should not fear death because once
dead there is no body to experience the pain. He goes on to say that this reasoning makes
life more pleasurable because it removes a perceived need, immortality, and to remove a
need is equivalent to satisfying one in as much as one is not disturbed by something that is
not felt to be needed.

It's Ethical Purpose:

The ethical purpose of this argument is to reduce the fear of death. Since Epicurus felt that
needless fear is a kind of unpleasure and the purpose of life was to maximize pleasure, a
person should remove any fear that does not serve to maximize pleasure, and fear of
death was such a fear for Epicurus. Some fears do act to maximize pleasure, such as fear
of being hit by a truck when crossing the road, Epicurus does not advocate absolute
fearlessness, just the avoidance of unnecessary fearfulness.

Objections:

Before critiquing Epicurus argument we should recognize several facts about our
understanding of it.
First we cannot be sure what Epicurus thought about death and pleasure. His letter to
Menoeceus contains a summary of arguments laid out in an enormous corpus of writings,
larger even than Aristotles,(Hicks 1925) that have been almost entirely lost to us. His
position was almost certainly complex, nuanced and not easily summed up in pithy, clever
sayings without losing some of the sense of the argument. We can not be sure in reading
him that inferences we draw from his statements would have been agreed to by him, or
even that they where not specifically addressed in writings now lost to us.

Secondly, even more than Epicurus own obscurity is the obscurity of those positions he
was arguing against. Epicurus argues against superstitious traditionalists when decrying
the irrational fear of death, not other philosophers but folk. These opponents are of
necessity straw men who never had any writing to leave to posterity and about whos
beleifs we can only surmise. This makes Epicurus doubly hard to pin down, it is not only
uncertain precisely what Epicurus argument was but it is even more uncertain what he
was arguing against.

Thirdly it is clear from statements like;

In the first place, remember that, like everything else, knowledge ... whether taken along
with other things or in isolation, has no other end in view than peace of mind and firm
convictions. We do not seek to wrest by force what is impossible, nor to understand all
matters equally well... (Hicks 1925 letter to Pythocles)

That Epicurus is not claiming epistemological certainty. Epicurus is making an argument

motivated by what he sees as needless distress to human beings, that is he has a
pragmatic or therapeutic purpose in his philosophy, so he has good reason to seek out and
make arguments that reduce the fear of death in those unreasonably fearful. It therefore
may not matter to Epicurus if in the final analysis there is some "flaw" in the logic of his
argument, if it leads to peace of mind, this is entirely consistent with his doctrine of
pleasure and his philosophy of mind, he thus perhaps foreshadows Pragmatism, and
makes his own position harder to criticize on logical or metaphysical grounds.

One objection appears to be an argument that, because the magnitude of pleasure

reaches its limit in the removal of all pain (Hicks 1910 Principal Doctrines 3) and death is
nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling,
(ibid, Principal Doctrines 2) if we can painlessly kill ourselves, then we maximize our
pleasure. Epicurus is clearly opposed to suicide, at least in general, he lambasts worldly
people for "at one time .. shun(ning) death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time

choose(ing) it as a respite from the evils in life." (Hicks 1925 letter to Menoecus)This then
appears to entail a contradiction in his thought.

The reason I think this is not a fair objection to Epicurus position is because by the same
argument he uses to claim that fear is an inappropriate attitude toward death, anticipation
or desire is also inappropriate. Because there is no sensation in which to root our thinking
about death, it is wrong to think of death as desirable for exactly the same reasons that it is
wrong to think of it as fearful. death is no more a painless state than it is a painful one, as
there is no subject to possess the state, it is therefore as irrational to desire suicide as it is
to be terrified of death, both confuse death for something that a sensing body is subject to,
freedom from pain in the former case, deprivation of worldly pleasure in the later.

So in summary, suicide is not the removal of all pain but rather the removal of the subject
out which pain can be sensibly talked about.

Epicurus' argument about death does depend on his naturalism about the body and mind;
if consequences are ultimately confined to the physical body and its mind then his
argument seems sound, however, the background tradition that he critiqued, and the
position taken by many religious persons today, is that the actions taken by the mortal
physical body during it's lifetime can have consequences of pleasure or unpleasure for the
person after their death. If naturalism is false and beliefs in an "afterlife" true, then

Epicurus argument is weakened. This is because, on the religious view, death may be
fearful because it prevents the person from acting to "balance the ledger", that is if they die
without rectifying any moral failings, they will suffer in the afterlife as a consequence, so
death is fearful not just because it is painful but because it will deprive one of the means
(the physical body) of righting the wrongs one has done.

Secondly, even if we accept Epicurus naturalism, there may still be arguments for fearing
death on similar pragmatic grounds to those made by Epicurus in favor of indifference
towards it. Even if there are no consequences for the individual person after their physical
death it may be useful to society and even to them individually to act as if there where. in
contracts and promises, in slander and gossip, in many areas of human life, it is potentially
useful to assume that even if one where to die, one aught still to meet ones obligations.

Bibliography:

Hicks, Robert Drew (1910) Principal Docctrines by Epicurus accessed at

http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/princdoc.html

Hicks, Robert Drew (1925) Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Lartius,
accessed at
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Eminent_Philosophers/Book_X