The Morality of Happiness by Annas Julia;

Author:Annas, Julia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 1993-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

3. The Stoics: Natural Law and the Depoliticized Outlook

We have seen that the Stoic account of oikeiōsis has the consequence that we extend our other-concern in a steadily more rational way until we come to have the same degree of rational other-concern for all other rational beings. Neither philia nor the bonds of the polis or city-state seem to be ethically defensible boundaries setting limits to the demands of other-concern. With friendship this has the result that particular commitments to others have, as such, a limited and not very important ethical role.913 What of distinctively political attitudes, developed in the context of the city-state; and in particular what of justice as that relates to political institutions? What is the specific role left for these in Stoic thought? Here our evidence is unfortunately scanty, and the interpretation of it much disputed. The Stoics are the originators of one of the most influential concepts in political philosophy, that of natural law;914 but matters are complicated by the fact that they do not seem to have meant by natural law what later became its standard form in the tradition. Still, even with these difficulties we can produce a coherent account which is consistent with the rest of Stoic ethics.

We complete the process of oikeiōsis,in its two versions, when we have extended our intuitive sympathies in a way which is wholly rational; when we act on, and are aware of the nature of, certain kinds of reason. This is reason as employed by the sophos or wise person; it is the normative ideal of reason. The Stoics sometimes characterize this reason as taking the form of law and thus as prescribing and forbidding actions. It is also called natural, for reasons which we have seen at length already.915 The best account that we have from the early Stoa goes back to Chrysippus:

Chrysippus began his book On Law as follows: Law is the king of all things, human and divine; it must preside over what is noble and what is base, and be their ruler and leader; and in accordance with this it must be the standard of what is just and what unjust, and for creatures that are by nature social it must be prescriptive of what one should do and prohibitive of what one should not do.916

All moral people, insofar as they are moral, will agree in their reasoning, so the content of natural law is perfectly objective; it is the reasoning anyone would come up with insofar as they reasoned morally. However, the sophos will be reasoning about particular situations and the rightness or wrongness of particular actions. Insofar as this reasoning is thought of as prescriptive, in a positive or negative way, it is thought of as taking the form of law—but not law of the kind with which we are familiar.917 For the Stoics, natural law is simply correct moral reasoning, thought of as being prescriptive.918

The early Stoics also call natural law divine, and this is not surprising, since they take

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