De Officiis by Cicero II

Although philosophy offers many problems, both important and useful, that have been fully and carefully discussed by philosophers, those teachings which have been handed down on the subject of moral duties seem to have the widest practical application.

That is why I chose to study ethics! Because I thought that it would be the most practical philosophical subject that I could take. Imagine my surprise to discover that it was totally impractical because of moral hypocrisy. But the basic problem in this regard seems to be, now as it was then, the conflict between duty and expediency. The dictionary of philosophy stated that this work of Cicero was a classic attempt to solve the problem, but did not elaborate on what his basic argument was. I am therefore reading the work to ascertain whether it is worth including in my book or not.

For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.

In other words, Cicero associates morality with duty, just as Williams does. Yet Williams rejects this notion as incapable of meeting the demands of modern life, yet recommends something that goes back to the Ancient Greeks. Whereas, Cicero, who was not living much past this era, is writing quite freely about duty in connection to morality. Hating utilitarianism the way I do, I also find the notion of morality as duty quite attractive. I also recognise, as does Cicero, a conflict between duty and expediency, so I will be reading with interest to see how he proposes to resolve this conflict.

If, therefore these schools should claim to be consistent, they could not say anything about duty; and no fixed, invariable, natural rules of duty can be posited except by those who say that moral goodness is worth seeking solely or chiefly for its own sake.

Duty is contrasted with self-interest, and indeed from any consequences of the actions. Cicero also notes that if duty were not practised for its own sake, then it would not exist at all. One would simply perform any and every action that might produce the most expedient consequences at the time. Of course, it is easy to see the utilitarian objection to this position, namely that an abstract duty could still exist to perform those actions that were most expedient. Cicero could be understood as talking of duties in terms of concrete actions that do not vary, but this would make his argument circular.

For there is a limit to retribution and to punishment; or rather, I am inclined to think, it is sufficient that the aggressor should be brought to repent of his wrong- doing, in order that he may not repeat the offence and that others may be deterred from doing wrong.

And if I were to write such things, I would be accused of banality, and yet here they are, preserved in the mouth of a famous Roman statesman. This passage reminds me of something that I wrote in my Honours thesis, about the limits of retribution. I was using ridiculous neologisms, such as retrovenience and pristinience. But the essence of the argument was that it was entirely possible to transgress the boundaries of the pristinity in a malefactor via one's retribution and commit maleficence oneself. My supervisor regarded this as an insight, perhaps in the way in which I was formulating it, but it seems clear that the intuitions have been adequately captured elsewhere in plain language from thousands of years ago.

And this was where I drew my main insight. Cicero writes moral reasoning that the external reviewer would probably simply call banal, and yet the reasoning is not meant to be controversial; it is simply sound. Furthermore, the soundness of this reasoning is founded no more and no less than on the fundamental principles as he states them, rather than on the rationalistic formalisms that one sees in so many other philosophers. Cicero is giving advice to his son that we would glady give to our own children as well. He is not teaching him the doctrine of the mean, or the categorical imperative, or some absurd moral calculus; he is teaching him real morals, as real as morals can ever get. Real morals stand without any reference to such formalisms, and are far more plausible than those formalisms could ever be. I suspect that real morals do not get discussed very often in philosophy precisely because they are banal, and because philosophers are clouded by a love of system. They seek to formalise ethics beyond the terms of common sense, and inevitably produce something that is not ethical at all. At most it is merely coextensive with some ethical rules, but usually not all of them. It is even worse when their defence of these systems becomes circular, as though these formalisms were the real moral truth rather than the moral reasoning of common life. Their systems can lead to much immorality if taken as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means to an end of shedding light on certain moral issues that do arise in common life.