Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine) is an enormously important influence in the history of the Christian religion, indeed so substantial and so influential were his contributions that it is common for writers and commentators to rank him third, behind Jesus and the Apostle Paul, in prominence in the development of the beliefs and the teachings of the Church. His autobiographical Confessions is a classic of considerable appeal even to those lacking religious commitments, and his thought on original sin and other essential doctrine are foundational in the shaping of Church theology, enduring to the present day. As imperishable as Confessions has proven, his greater work, his magnum opus, is City of God, written in response to the sacking of Rome in 410 A.D., and to the present day City of God stands as one of the greatest of apologetic works.

Today most people view the fall of Rome as but one example of several of its kind, significant yes, but civilizations come and go, even great ones. True enough, but it is difficult to overestimate just how cataclysmic was the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths (a Germanic tribe from the north), an event that shocked the ancient world, for Rome at is zenith reigned as a perdurable place and idea, of invincible strength and majesty, and its fall was almost unthinkable prior to the actual event. Yes, Rome for a time endured after its sacking, but when the gates opened a three-day rampaging ensued, the end of which saw the City in ruins, and the unthinkable became reality. A sense of the deep reverberations of this upheaval ring in the words of St. Jerome, when he lamented, in his commentary on Ezekiel, that “when the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city.”

It cannot be justly claimed that there is one decisive cause for the fall of Rome, and today commentators cite such factors as a series of military losses, inflation, corruption, invasion by Barbarian tribes, overspending, military overexpansion, overreliance on slave labor, and division of the empire, but other causes are cited as well, such as environmental degradation  (destruction of farmland), civil wars, weakening of the legions through the need to hire foreign mercenaries, and the influence of Christianity, but naturally enough, at the time a single dominant influence was sought upon which to lay blame, and Christians and Christianity were accused by many as being corruptively decisive in Rome’s demise. Many pagans pointed out that the empire was secure when sacrifices had been allowed, but that not twenty years after  Emperor Theodosius in 391 banned sacrifices, the City lay in ruins.

Historians and other commentators are not in agreement that Christianity was a significant, let alone a leading, cause of the fall of Rome, one argument against blaming Christianity being the claim that the fall was already evident by the time Christianity was promoted and made the state religion by Theodosius in 395, and that yes there is a correlation between the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome, but that correlation is not cause, and that whatever influence Christianity may have had on the fall, such influence was near nugatory in comparison to other factors. Those who argue that Christianity was a deleterious influence on the vitality of Rome and the Roman character tend to highlight such considerations as Christianity’s erosion of traditional values, such as through causing a shifting of emphasis away from the glory of Rome onto a sole deity, thereby sacrificing the welfare of Rome for anticipated rewards in the next, undermining the authority of the emperor. Also cited as a contributing factor to Rome’s descent was a loss of income attributable to the Church’s acquisition of resources to support its monks and nuns.

The merits of the argument that Christianity was a factor in the fall of Rome are not discussed here, but after the sacking of Rome the charge was make that the Pagan gods were incensed over the promotion of Christianity, and hence allowed the sacking of the City. Augustine wrote City of God in response to the fall of Rome, in defense of Christianity, to argue that rather than being the cause of the fall, that in truth Christianity preserved Rome from utter destruction, for moral degeneracy was the true cause of Rome’s decline, and to the extent that Christianity hindered the spread of moral decay did Christianity conserve and not ruin Rome. City of God is far too substantial and wide-ranging a work to summarize here, but perhaps the most salient legacy from Augustine’s great polemic is the idea that a human being can reside in either the City of God or the City of Man, and according to one’s choice, live in eternal glory or abide in the place where lusts and self-love rule, and ephemeral concerns cloud the mind to the joys of everlasting ones. If one chooses self-love, thereby elevating the self as one’s primary concern, then one inhabits the City of Man and necessarily is alienated from God, but if one chooses to honor and to love the divine, then one is taken away from the corrupting influence of self-love, and one enters the City of God.

As even this brief view of but certain of his contributions reveals, Augustine’s thoughts are formative in the beliefs and doctrines of the Catholic Church, and Augustine articulated what the Church understands as decisive refutations of two particularly powerful and influential heresies, one being Manicheism and the other being Pelagianism. Though deemed discredited and thereby dismissed officially by Church authorities, and though at least in the estimation of the Church, the decisive blow against these two formulations on the nature of the supernatural being delivered by Augustine, Manicheism and Pelagianism, it is suggested here, are not neutered religious heresies overcome and confined to the distant and darker past, of interest today only to scholars of varied kinds, but in truth are conceptualizations and expressions of fundamental psychogenic orientations, of how humans comprehend reality, compositional to or at least too ingrained in the human psyche to ever be wholly vanquished, however persuasively argued against by the formidable Augustine.

Pelagius was a monk, British born, present and teaching in Rome from 380 to 410 A.D., and during this time, his teachings gained support among many Christians, but in 418 the Council of Carthage condemned Pelagianism, and to the present day the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church judge Pelagianism a heretical theology. Pelagius could not accept the doctrine of original sin, as he rejected the belief that one can be corrupted by and is liable for the sins of another. Also, Pelagius believed, and this belief was robustly opposed by Augustine, that humans, through the agency of divine grace, possess the capacity to achieve perfection, capable of doing so through their own choices, by acts of their own free will. Augustine rebuffed the idea that humans could by their own free will do any such thing, for humans inherit, per Augustine, a depraved nature incorrigible by any human action, and therefore only by divine grace can a human soul become untethered from the innate bonds of sin, and not by any human agency, no matter how exemplary a life a human may lead. Indeed, Pelagius was an ascetic, and he taught that one must live a blameless life, thereby achieving a state of perfection, and doing so by one’s own free will, but for Augustine, regardless of how saintly one may be, perfection is foreclosed to humans by every avenue except one, that being the miraculous, transfiguring touch of divine grace.

For Pelagius, then, grace is manifest in our freedom and our ability to choose to act righteously, and therefore the potential for salvation resides within the human mind or soul, and this faculty is present due to divine grace. Hence, for Pelagius, humans are not bound by, are not inherently corrupted by, the act of Adam’s fall from grace, and therefore each human being is free to abide in sin or, in imitation of Christ, to live a pure life, and each person, Pelagius believed, must be judged by his or her choices and not prejudged due to the disobedience of the first humans. This belief, that humans are not born innately corrupted by original sin, has found increasing acceptance even within the Christian world, for what most impresses the ordinary human consciousness is the purity and the innocence of a newborn child. Yes, we should ever be aware that humans possess an animal nature, and hence are predisposed to selfish acts, to cruel acts, to assertion of oneself to the disadvantage of others, but the child appears to us not as a depraved being but as a being nearest to innocence as we ever approach. Most humans desire that the child, as the child grows and acquires ever greater freedom, and thus incurs ever more responsibility for his or her actions, should be judged by those actions and by his or her choices, and not by an inheritance the child is bound by no matter her conduct nor even her purity of heart, her willing only of the good. For Augustine, the best, the most virtuous and conscientious amongst us are as stained by original sin, and as in need of deliverance by grace, without which we are doomed, as those whose every thought is selfish, whose actions are cruel and unjust.

Human sensibility is offended by the idea of blaming the child for the transgressions of the parent, and with this view it is understandable that Pelagius could not accept the belief in original sin, and today, even though most people are well aware of the propensity of humans for bad acts, and recognize the human capacity for seemingly demonic evil, the doctrine of original sin for many is as unpalatable as Pelagius found it, and however questionable such a favorable view of human character may be, surveys suggest that the majority believe that humans are essentially good rather than fundamentally corrupted.

The beliefs of Pelagius, then, seem not to the average person today a condemnable heresy from the distant past, erroneous in their conception of human nature, but seem truthful and humane in refusing to accept that we are born guilty, and enter into this world not as innocent new beings but as possessed of a necessarily depraved nature, and that consequently nothing we do can alter our fate save divine intervention. The presupposition that all is hopeless without external deliverance offends our sense of justice, for we wish to believe that the choices we make, the acts we undertake, are sufficient unto themselves for attainment of a desired state or goal. Our sense of justice is not satisfied by the creed that no matter what we do the door must remain closed to us, held fast by our very natures, with passage to a blessed state made possible by no other act or means save divine grace. Narrow is the way, and saints and sinners alike may pass through, or forever be barred, should grace be withheld.

Innocence is the presumption of any ethical and honorable criminal justice system, and blameworthiness requires evidence and adjudication, not judgment of one’s innate nature. The essence of justice lies in judgment not of what one is, but of what one does, and therefore the prevailing sense of what justice consists of and represents has as a prerequisite the notion of free will. Those unfortunate souls compelled to an action, dispossessed of choice, typically are not judged blameworthy. The unwilling individual who somehow finds a gun forced into her hands and forced to pull the trigger is not thought to have committed a blameworthy act, regardless of the outcome of that act.

Pelagius in understanding human nature as not dyed with the stain of original sin that only divine grace can cleanse, must be seen as privileging human free will, and having free will and not born tainted, then for a human soul to be condemned that human being must commit condemnable acts, and the way to blessedness is not foreclosed save divine grace, but is revealed and is made open through the human will choosing a life of purity. For Pelagius, that a human being has the capacity to choose either course, and by choice to inhabit the City of God or to inhabit the City of Man, is the instance of divine grace. Opening the door and entering paradise is an act of volition, on the part of the person. Pelagius, then, believed that Jesus Christ established the immaculate example to follow, should one desire salvation, and was not the sacrificial lamb slaughtered to atone for otherwise indelible human sinfulness.

Pelagius was concerned not to absolve human beings of moral responsibility, for if irrespective of our actions, no matter how egregious our flouting of moral norms, all absolution requires is a confession of faith, then where lies the incentive to live an upright life? In the Christian view, all is rectified, with even the most debased amongst us purified, by the acceptance of grace, and by no human effort other than that acceptance, and no matter how praiseworthy, even saintly, the life one leads, are the doors of paradise opened. The conundrum is this:  Augustine in refutation of Pelagianism asserts the incurable depravity of human nature, yet moral responsibility requires a free will, and in what sense is the will understood as free if human nature is of such a quality that no human can extricate himself from sin, but must have divine intervention for deliverance? Yet if Pelagius is correct, and a human being can by choice enter into a state of impeccable goodness, what need then of grace? Yes, Pelagius believed that our ability to free ourselves from sin is the instance of grace, but this rather confined role for divine agency is far too paltry for one of Augustine’s understanding of the presence of and our dependence on the divine in our lives, and Pelagius’s viewpoint seems to privilege human agency, an elevation that must seem absurd when considered against the seeming incorrigible predilection of humans for wrongdoing. After all, we imagine Augustine reasoning, if by his own efforts he could not emancipate himself from sin, no doubt seeing himself and for good reason of a superior caliber, then what chance then have ordinary mortals to do so? Yet the lived experience of the normal human consciousness is that we do indeed have free will, and we can choose the better course over the worse, and in fact our legal system, and the whole of civil society, supposes that humans of average capacities can choose right over wrong or wrong over right, with justice requiring that they should be accountable for that choice.

Though rejected by the Church as a heresy, it seems evident that Pelagianism endures through today, for the belief that all human beings are born tainted through the Adamic fall from grace at the start of human history is unpalatable to many if not most people, and the common tendency is to see a child as embodying innocence, or the closest to innocence possible, and further, most people do seem to believe that however profoundly evil and depraved humans have shown themselves throughout history, that an individual human being can by free will elect to live an exemplary life, and even though a wholly pure life may be unattainable, human frailty does not seem to warrant Augustine’s assertion that after Adam’s fall, non posse non peccare – that is, humans are not able not to sin. Augustine assurance that human nature is constitutionally corrupt and unable on its own to liberate itself from a sinful existence was grounded in his own identity, for as a young man he had indulged in carnal pleasures, and he was persuaded that only an act of divine grace could transform his sinful nature, for he judged himself incapable of doing so, and by extension deemed that no human being can free himself or herself from a sinful state of being. For Augustine, humans require divine grace not to sin, but for Pelagius, humans by their own free will can choose not to sin, and to assert dependency on grace is to deny moral responsibility. The conflict between divine agency and human agency remains unresolved, but surely Pelagianism is unvanquished, for though officially judged a heretic, the views of Pelagius remain vital in the modern world.

Augustine also argued against what he understood as another threat to the correct conception of the divine and of its agency in the world, one that as well came to be condemned, substantially through the polemics of Augustine, as a heresy, but one that Augustine was an adherent of, it is believed, for almost ten years. This heresy is known as Manichaeism, and as with Pelagianism, though officially condemned by the Church, the Manichean view represents a conception of reality that is prevalent and vital even today. Manicheism was once a major religion, deriving its name from the teachings of Mani, a 3rd century prophet known as the “Apostle of Light”, who was born in Babylonia, and who as a young man believed himself to have received a divine command to preach his message throughout Persia and beyond, and who viewed himself as the last in a line of prophets that originated with Adam, and included Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. Mani believed his mission was to convert the world, and to fulfill his mission he promoted extensive missionary efforts and endorsed translation of his works into other languages. Manicheism realized its zenith in the 4th century, but due to strong opposition by the Christian church and by the Roman state, its presence was much reduced in the 5th and 6th centuries, but was practiced in various areas of the world at later dates, including China in the 14th century.

Manicheism is a gnostic conception in that its metaphysical view is dualistic, seeing the world as divided into two realms, the spiritual and the material, with the material realm befouled and degrading to inhabit, and with knowledge of spiritual truths being necessary to extricate the human soul from a debased state in the material realm to one of purity and illumination in the spiritual kingdom. For Mani, our material existence is one of suffering and irremediable evil, and escape from this misery is enabled when the intelligence (nous) reveals that one’s true self is not located in the incarnation of a body in the material world but consists of a spiritual essence, or a soul, capable of transcending the physical and finding its true flowering and fulfilment in participation in the divine. Manicheism therefore holds that salvation comes through knowledge, specifically that essential knowledge obscured as a consequence or our inhabiting a material body in a corrupted material world, and redemption and liberation are realized when one is able by the insight of an internal and eternal light to see or perceive beyond the befogging veil of sense data inundation to the truth that we are spiritual essences trapped temporarily in physical bodies. Our true nature shares in the divine, and this sempiternal bond is accessible and transfiguring even though we are ensconced in the material realm.

For Mani, good and evil are equal and eternal powers, and whereas he holds the material as innately corrupted, it cannot be that Jesus took bodily form but must have remained spirit, and hence put forth a human appearance but in truth was not human. Whatever is physical is corrupted, and Jesus was not corrupted, and hence Jesus never took physical form. One of the great attractions of Manicheism for Augustine was precisely this conception of a dualistic reality and the necessarily corrupt state of the physical, for the understanding of the human predicament this view enables is that humans are divided as well, and therefore, for Augustine, his sensual indulgences could be attributed to, and confined to, his physical being, while that portion of himself that was divine remained uncorrupted by his continuation of hedonistic pursuits. If one can assign blame to one’s lower nature, and one conceives of that lower nature as ultimately sloughable at some future time, then one can indulge as one wishes without being afflicted – intolerably – by a guilty conscience. Augustine fully indulged his appetites in his youth, despite being raised a Christian, but perhaps those pleasures became sated when he found in them no enduring joy.

Augustine was possessed of a rigorous, analytical mind, and though an initial appeal of Manicheism to Augustine was his belief that Manicheism was based on reason rather than on faith, his eventual disenchantment with Manicheism was furthered through an encounter with Faustus, a main proponent of Manicheism, for Augustine is said to have interrogated Faustus on certain matters concerning Manichean doctrine on astrology and cosmology on which Augustine had developed perplexities or doubts, and was troubled that Faustus, despite his reported learnedness on Manicheism, and though eloquent, demonstrated knowledge that seemed comprised of little more than myths and a shallow understanding of science. Augustine did not then abandon Manicheism, but his doubts continued, and deepened, and eventually Augustine lost faith in Manicheism.

Augustine in his disillusionment with and ultimate rejection of Manicheism observed that the Manichean belief that material existence is under the dominion of evil contradicted the Book of Genesis, which states that God created all, and that God’s creation is good. There is no Biblical support for the belief that the world is evil and irredeemably so, and also Augustine perceived much beauty in the world, and how could beauty exist in an intrinsically evil place? Further, the Manichean view on the nature of reality is that existence is comprised of two equal and opposed realms, one that is the dominion of a wholly good god and one that is the dominion of a wholly evil god. Hence Manicheism is a polytheistic religion, while Christianity is uncompromising in its monotheistic belief, for there is one and only one god in Christianity. Manichean polytheism cannot be reconciled to Christian monotheism.

The Christian god is eternal and responsible for all creation, and how then could God create another god of coequal power? This cannot be possible, as the existence of such a being negates the omnipotence of the Christian god, and a god that is not omnipotent is not the Christian god. Augustine emphasized the inconsistencies of the Manichean view, for he asserted that if God is restricted in his realm of influence, and rules a kingdom that borders a kingdom of darkness, then God necessarily is imperfect, and imperfection is not an attribute of God. Further, per Augustine, how may it be that what is entirely spiritual may border what is entirely material?  

Augustine was a devotee of Manicheism for a number of years for several reasons, perhaps the foremost of which was his judgement that Manicheism seemed to solve the puzzle of how the world can be so saturated with evil, yet contain so much good as well. Can an omnipotent, supposedly good god be responsible for having created, and allowing to continue, so much evil causing so much suffering? What is to explain the fact that good people suffer great evil, apparently through no reason but evil luck, and bad people often are blessed with all the good things life can offer, not only suffering no punishing consequences for their transgressions but being rewarded for them? Why would a categorically good god with unlimited power allow the most innocent of human beings to be the victims of the worst evil, and suffer such grievous harm?

As strenuous and as consistent as any parent might be in instilling in a child the lesson that bad actions have bad consequences and good behavior is rewarded, by no later than adolescence most individuals of average mindfulness discern an absence of a correlation between one’s actions and one’s fortunes, and indeed, witness that often it is the case that transgression is rewarded, and goodness is punished, or at least is not the cause of earthly flourishing. By adulthood, few cling to the belief that the world is a just place wherein everyone receives according to merit, and this evident scarcity of justice in the world requires, in the judgment of many minds, compensation and consolation in the next, for the thought that just deserts is not an ultimate outcome offends deeply our sense of fairness, and the thought that the wicked prosper then pass into oblivion is intolerable to anyone who believes that justice must exist somewhere if the human experience is something more than that of a naked ape. As the primatologist Frans de Waal has revealed, even chimps possess a sense of fairness, and are quite able and willing to punish those who violate social rules, though chimps may punish only those that steal food from them personally, and do not engage in third-party punishment. We like to think we are far more humane and evolved than chimps, and indeed we can be, yet the lines from Richard III are enduring for a reason, for when Anne declares “No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity,” and Richard retorts “But I know none, and therefore am no beast,” Shakespeare is revealing, as ever, an obscured truth of human nature and the human condition.

Perhaps the starkest example of this unfortunate truth is presented in the testimonies of survivors of the death camps of Nazi Germany, for therein these harrowed souls speak the searing truth that the best amongst them died in the camps, that it was necessary in so desperate and degraded a condition that if one were to survive then one had to abandon moral compunctions and steal and lie and even plot that another would occupy one’s assigned stead when that placement meant certain death. In the camps, cunning not goodness correlated to survival, and a refusal to forsake moral norms reduced one’s chances to slight of ever seeing that day of liberation.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus formulated concisely and enduringly the conundrum of the coexistence of a good god and pervasive evil in what has become known as Epicurus’s Trilemma, sometimes presented as Epicurus’s Quadrilemma. In contemporary philosophy, the dilemma is known as LPE (the logical problem of evil). As a trilemma, the LPE can be formulated thusly: If God is incapable of preventing evil, then God is not omnipotent. If God is capable of preventing evil but chooses not to, then God is not all-good. If God is capable of preventing evil and is willing to prevent evil, then why does evil exist? As a quadrilemma, the addition is thus: by what justification is a being unable or unwilling to prevent evil called God?

Refutation of the LPE commonly involves the matter of free will, with proponents of this view suggesting that God created human beings with free will, and thus human are free to act or to not act according to desires and abilities, and were God to compel specific acts or to prevent others, then God would be denying humans their free will. Hence the argument is that God can be omnipotent and willing to prevent evil and yet not do so, for God cannot both prevent evil and allow human free will, and God’s inability to do so is not a matter of lacking omnipotence but of logical and definitional contradiction, for free will means the freedom to act or not act, and divine coercion negates free will.

The arguments against Epicurus’s dilemma of course can be, and often are, made more complex and nuanced than suggested in the prior paragraph, but regardless of how fine-grained or fine-tuned, the essence of such refutations is an incompatibility between human free will and divine intervention.

Though the argument from free will seems plausible and reasonable and even persuasive initially, and though the argument can be structured such that there is no logical contradiction established in postulating the co-existence of an omnipotent god and pervasive evil, on closer examination the argument is revealed as facile and not satisfactory to Epicurus’s dilemma.

Throughout human history, millions of children are born into lives of desperate misery from which they cannot escape, knowing despair and suffering until their end. Many such unfortunate souls never achieve that age that any reasonable person would accept as the minimal age necessary for a child to have developed sufficient awareness and wherewithal for concepts of free will and consequences flowing from acts freely chosen to make any sense at all. It can be countered that children suffer as no consequence of blameworthiness on their part, all the blame attributable to adults and their freely-selected choices, but this explanation for suffering is offensive and even odious to many people, for justice is outraged that the innocent should suffer for the actions of the guilty. And what of those born with congenital afflictions that ensure constant misery and early demise? In what reasonable sense are those predestined to suffer possessed of free will? Can we be satisfied with the explanation that the suffering of such unfortunate beings is an unavoidable consequence of and a necessary condition for the existence of free will, at least until science advances sufficiently that defects in nature are erased by human ingenuity? These questions deserve a satisfactory and a humane response. And what is the justification for the immeasurable evil of a child torn terrifyingly from the safety of family to be tortured without mercy then murdered in the most pitiless way, that child through no action of his own suffering a level of fear and pain we dare not imagine? That the human monster is exercising his free will, and that this is the best of all possible worlds? Pangloss is a derisible fiction, yes, but he would not be that if he did not speak a truth of some kind.

If the possibility for the existence of a free will entails unqualified exposure to suffering of every sort for the human being, this answer to the problem of evil addresses not the matter of the vast suffering endured by sentient creatures not possessed of free will. Would a wholly good and omnipotent god will that great numbers of sentient creatures be ravaged and tormented by parasites, or will that one creature should consume alive another, indifferent to the screams of agony as it does so? An organism hatches inside another living organism, to devour its host alive, from the inside – what could be the intent of an omnipotent god that created the circumstances for such nightmares, for such cruelty? Ah, nightmares and cruelty are human characterizations, having no applicability outside of human concerns – is that the right answer? Packs of predators prey on the youngest and most vulnerable, their victim surely suffering unspeakable terrors, its pains of no concern to its merciless assailants. One may answer that the concept of evil is a human construct nonexistent in the natural world, but a sensibility must be indurate indeed to witness such suffering and not see cruelty and wonder if an omnipotent god wills such acts, or could but does not prevent their occurrence.
Manicheism seems to offer a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil and injustice abundant in the world, even inherent in the world as structured, for an appeal to free will is less intuitive than the view that the world is bifurcated, ruled in equal measure by a good god and an evil god, and thus even though the Church condemned Manicheism as a heresy, doing so sometime after Augustine’s death but relying on Augustine’s writings as justification, the Manichean view of the world as divided equally, with evil as prevalent and as strong as good, corresponds to how many if not most people perceive and experience reality. Manicheism therefore endures if not in name in practice, however unrecognized as such, for Manicheism articulates fundamental human perceptions of how reality is structured. It is worthy of note that as a religion actively practiced, adherents to Manicheism are present in China today.

Augustine in his eventual dissatisfaction with and attack against Manicheism understood that one must accept, if Manicheism is correct, that we inhabit a polytheistic world and there is not one omnipotent god, a view, as discussed, wholly incongruent with the Christian worldview, or one must accept that god created an evil god, for if God is omnipotent and created all, and if there exists an evil supernatural being, then God is responsible for the existence of this being. If the latter is the case, then the problem of evil remains, for why would God create a being whose nature is absolutely evil? Hence for Augustine, Manicheism does not, contrary to what he had believed earlier, solve the problem of the coexistence of evil and a god that is omnipotent and benevolent, for attributing evil to the existence of another god, when God is the ultimate force in the universe, leaves unsolved the puzzle of why God wills that there should be evil in the world, which must be the case if he created that which is the source of evil. And if God did not create this evil being, then that being was always coexistent with God, and therefore God is not omnipotent.

Further, Augustine believed that the existence of evil equipotent to good absolves humankind of moral responsibility, for if there exists an evil god or evil force that can equally to God exert its will, then whenever one transgresses, all one need say, and persuasively so, is that “the devil made me do it,” for if one is equally impotent to a malevolent supernatural presence as one is to a benevolent one, the human will as nothing against the will of either, then moral responsibility is removed through an exculpatory calling forth and surrender to moral fatalism, for any egregious act can be deemed the consequence of being under the sway of external forces against which one is helpless.

The Manichean view that reality is divided into darkness and light, good and evil, with evil able to exert a power and an influence no less than that of good was the primary initial appeal of Manicheism to the young Augustine, for then Augustine could conceptualize his own being as a divided one, with that higher aspect of himself thereby absolved of moral responsibility for the libertine state of his lower being by attributing his continuation of carnal indulgences to the irresistible influence of the human body embedded in a realm ruled by an evil god. Through Manicheism Augustine was satisfied, for a time, that within one being the passions of flesh engrossing a body inhabiting an inherently corrupt material world can be reconciled with an essential divine spark in that being, and that through knowledge the obfuscation of the true self that is the consequence of the comingling of the material and the spiritual will be made evident, and thereby the soul will be enabled, through intelligence (nous) to perceive truth and to then transcend earthly bonds. Here we find the origin and the justification for Augustine’s famous appeal “Oh please God, make be chaste but not just yet!”

This view, that reality is comprised of both good and evil, and equally so, is a view prevalent today, and the conceptualization of the individual being as comprised of a material aspect and a spiritual aspect, endures. The Manichean view that the material world is inherently evil is not so palatable, for many people do see much beauty and great good in the world, and are appreciative of that beauty and what good prevails, yet this recognition of the good and the beautiful does not blind sensible people to the truth that suffering is pervasive, if not overwhelming, and seeming an inherent, ineradicable realty of existence. And truly, no few despairing souls do fall into abject despair, and then can perceive nothing but evil rampant and triumphant.

That a thoughtful mind of Augustine’s intellectual caliber could embrace Manicheism for several years is testimony to the intuitive and the explanatory power of the Manichean view. The complex mythology of Manicheism is not discussed here, for what is most significant and enduring is the Manichean metaphysic, and its conceiving of reality as divided equally into evil and good, for this metaphysical conception is congruent with how so many people perceive the world, a perception that informs, and is shaped by, their lived experience. In rejecting Manicheism, Augustine needed to explain and to justify just how it is that God is benevolent and all-powerful, and yet evil exists. Did God create evil, and does God allow and sustain evil, as seems He must, given its prevalence?

Augustine finally rejected the Manichean view of an inherently evil world as being unbiblical, doing so through Genesis 1:31, wherein “God saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” God, then, did not create evil, and whereas there is evil in the world though at the beginning all that God created was good, then it must be the case that evil somehow entered into and flourished in the world after the creation, and therefore a defensible explanation must exist for why God is not responsible for evil. For Augustine, evil is explained as privatio boni, that is, as the privation of good. In this view, evil is not a thing itself, is not anything of substance, but rather, evil is the absence of good. Augustine offers the analogy of illness and health, for what is illness but the absence of health? In the everyday world, what is darkness but the absence of light? We are not well to the extent that our health is diminished, we are in darkness to the degree light is lacking, and we manifest evil proportionate to our failure to maximize the good.

The privation theory of evil did not originate with Augustine, and indeed goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle, but Augustine, along with Thomas Aquinas, is understood as having crafted the privation theory as it is most prevalently presented today. Under this view, evil is not anything that exists as a separate, identifiable thing, and evil was not caused to exist by God will at the creation of all things, but came after, as a consequence of human beings having free will, and choosing by their free will actions that are a turning away from the good, are other than what God desires. With this view, evil cannot exist except that humans choose to sin, and by doing so cause a privation of the good. For example, God intends selfless, solicitous relations amongst humans, and when an individual treats another as faultlessly as goodness requires and God desires, then evil is nonexistent, but the moment one treats another in any manner that diminishes the totality of goodness available in the relation, then evil is manifested, for evil is not a separate thing unto itself, but exists commensurate with the degree to which, by a willful act, good is denied. If in every situation the utmost potential for good present in that situation is reaped, then evil cannot enter the world.

The privation of evil explanation is appealing in its assurance that all existence is good, and evil therefore exists only to the extent that there is a privation of good, for if privation is the source of evil, then evil is initiated by human volition and not by God’s intent. Privation of good results from human agency, and therefore the existence of evil is not what God wills but is the creation of humans acting selfishly, and by free will manifesting evil through willful deprivation of the full allotment of the good. Attribution of the existence of evil to human free will rather than to God’s intent addresses moral evil, but not natural evil, this latter consisting of the suffering caused by such scourges as disease and natural disasters. An explanatory consensus is lacking on precisely how Augustine understood and explained natural evil, with one view being that Augustine believed that the fall of Adam corrupted not just the human condition but the natural world as well, thereby introducing suffering into an erstwhile paradisical existence for all creation. Another view holds that Augustine simply did not judge occurrences in the natural world as characterizable or classifiable as evil at all, that the world is as it is necessarily, for the world is a contingent place wherein decay and suffering and loss are inherent aspects of an existence that is other than divine.

Evil as the privation of good places the blame for evil on human free will, and hence rejects the Manichean view of evil as a distinct entity in the world, but for the reasons discussed, attributing all the evil in the world to free will engenders serious difficulties with reconciling this view with a omnipotent and benevolent deity, and the Manichean view of evil as a real presence in the world and not merely the manifestation of a deprivation of good aligns more fully with how the human sensibility experiences and interprets the world. We experience evil as active, not as a privation of good. How inadequate an answer it seems when confronted with instances of great suffering and cruelty, such as when a vile assailant tortures and murders the most innocent of beings, preying on the young and doing so without a scintilla of pity or remorse, or when genocide brings forth unimaginable, incalculable misery and suffering, to represent these acts as the manifestation of a failure to maximize the good. And how should the vast suffering in the non-human world be explained, that Adam’s fall is the cause? Why should non-human, sentient beings suffer for human transgressions? And if it is the case that their suffering, or the suffering caused by disease and natural disasters and the like, are not the consequence of human action but are simply the unavoidable realities of a world that is contingent, is it not legitimate to inquire if this world is the best of all possible worlds? Could it not be but otherwise?
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The thought and the writings of Augustine were adopted by the Church as providing the canonical justifications for declaring Pelagianism and Manicheism heresies, but as explored here, the ideas and the views presented in Pelagianism and in Manicheism are germane not merely to religious concerns and understandings, but are encompassing in scope, applicable to the secular and the nonsecular equally, for they express through particular conceptualizations what are primary constituents and tendencies of human cognition and sensibility, for we do perceive reality as composed of contrasts, good and evil being one of them, with evil real and active and not satisfactorily explainable as an absence of good, and we do feel it unjust that any be condemned at birth, judged tainted prior to any self-willed action, corrupted by the corruption of a forebear. Yes it is true that the terms Pelagianism and Manicheism are obscure to most folks today, and indeed unrecognizable and undefinable by most, but the essential content of both remains vital, for Pelagian and Manichean beliefs illuminate and articulate human proclivities, and are not dismissible as mere heresies of historical interest and no more. Pelagianism and Manicheism give expression to profound aspects of human nature, and how humans perceive reality and function in the world, and the totality of all religious doctrine, however well argued, is not able to overcome these truths.
 
 

For the ancient Greeks, observation of the natural world revealed to their inquisitive minds designs and processes and consistent courses and outcomes that in their estimation evinced an essential goal-oriented structure to existence, for all things seemed oriented towards some predetermined end, and if that is the case, that is, if each thing has its own particular end or purpose, and attained its arete (its excellence) in the realization of that end, then that end or purpose must have been present at its creation. One of the greatest of the ancient Greeks, Aristotle, used the example of the acorn, for was not the acorn’s invariable course that of becoming an oak tree, never swerving to become an evergreen? The evidence for all things having a predetermined end must have seemed abundant to the inquisitive Greeks, for did the eggs of doves produce more doves and not eagles, did tadpoles become frogs and not turtles? Aristotle observed that given necessary conditions such as suitable soil and adequate sunshine and rain, the acorn becomes the oak tree and never anything else. Why must this end be the unvarying aim of an acorn, unless at its creation the acorn possessed that specific end as an essential orientation of its existence? Possession of an innate end seemed a sound explanation for the invariant course of an acorn. Inanimate objects as well have an end, for in the fabrication of a knife, what is the purpose or the end of such an object if not to cut, and is not the fulfillment of this end realized to the extent that the knife cuts well? Only the sharp knife realizes its optimum potentiae, for a knife that does not cut well fails in its purpose, and thus a dull knife lacks arete, at least far less so than a knife that cuts well. For the Greeks, the term for end is telos, and therefore the telos of an acorn is an oak tree, the telos of a knife is cutting well.

Cutting well is the final end, the summum bonum of a knife, this end being present at its creation. The existence of a dull knife is the existence of an object incapable of realizing its end, and therefore intervention is required to realize the purpose of the knife, and the knife is sharpened. If the knife cannot be satisfactorily sharpened, then it never realizes its purpose, and is a failed knife, and perhaps can be employed to another purpose, such as some sort of hammering device or a paperweight. What is the end of a book other than to be read, of a chair other than to be sat upon? Yes, the book can be put to other uses, such as a doorstop, but one hardly goes to the trouble to write a book, and publishers to publish a book, for any intent other than its being read. The motivation for fabricating a particular book may be wholly aesthetic, with the intent to create as beautiful a book as the fabricator can devise, with the fabricator not bothered at all whether the book is read or not, but in this case, the book should be considered as a work or art, or an attempt at the creation of art. The creation of an artwork was the intended end at the object’s conception. Likewise for a chair. A particular chair can be utilitarian merely, or can be both a functioning chair and a work of art, but the intent of a chair is to be sat upon, and any object not fulfilling of this purpose seems not really a chair but something else. A rock, and one of a certain shape particularly, can be occupied as a chair, but chairhood hardly is its purpose or end, if a rock can be said to have an end. The same can be said of a log, or of many, perhaps innumerably many, other objects that may at some moment serve as a resting place, and hence thought of as a chair of sorts when so used, but such objects are not truly chairs.

What of human beings? Do people have a telos? For Aristotle, happiness is the telos of humans, for all rational persons desire happiness, and seek to avoid a state of unhappiness. That fortunate individual wholly happy has no further needs and no further goals whose unfulfillment brings vexation, no unmet satisfactions injurious to happiness. Such an individual is suffering no lack, and therefore such a being must be one for whom telos is actuality and not a potentiality. Though satisfaction and happiness can be found in the pursuit of a goal, the individual motivated to action by a perceived absence of a desired good is an individual with an end in view, out there on the horizon, not yet attained.

For Aristotle, humans have as their distinguishing characteristic not the strength of the lion nor wings to soar with falcons, but far beyond all other creatures humans command the power of reasoning, and possess speech to enable and to express the power of reasoning. Whereas what distinguishes the human is the capacity to reason at a higher or more refined and abstract a level than all other creatures, then exercise of this power must be integral to human happiness. Not exercising one’s greatest gift is a denial antithetical to one’s arete, and therefore such a failure often proves injurious to happiness. Aristotle believed that eudaimonia, or human flourishing, was realized through a life of virtue, and virtue involves doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons, and therefore reasoning is essential to virtue, and reasoning, therefore, is essential to human happiness, and hence is indispensable to realizing human telos.

For Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher for whom Epicureanism is named, the telos of a human being is pleasure, for he held that humans naturally seek the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. For Epicurus, though pleasure is the telos of a human being, human happiness is not found in wanton indulgence in every sensuous delight available, or to the fullest degree possible, for such indiscretion and incontinence must lead to misery. Rather, true and lasting pleasure is found in balance and modesty and sagacious choices. The state of serenity sought by Epicurus and his followers required a dispossession of all unnecessary desires, and avoidance of the discontent concomitant in the courting of desires that must or should remain unfulfilled. Even for those worthy and satisfiable pleasures, overindulgence is disturbing of tranquility and must lead to pain.

Indeed, Epicurus advised that we not mar what we presently possess by yearning for what we have not. For Epicurus, a blessed or happy state of contentment is created only when one cultivates one’s own garden, and appreciates and relishes the abundant pleasures found there, rather than repine for the presumed satisfactions and ecstasies of other, longed-for realms. Avoidance of physical pain and absence of mental anguish were for Epicurus essential states for human happiness, and these states are at risk if one indulges in sensuous delights to excess, or one assigns to sensuous delights greater importance than they can sustain. Epicurus believed that humans realize the blessed state of ataraxia (freedom from emotional disquiet) through having the companionship of good friends, having the freedom to think and to act according to one’ will and one’s desire, and having – for this is essential to ataraxia - an examined life. Hence true, enduring pleasure is found only through contemplation, and a life of contemplation is contrary to a life in which physical pleasures are paramount, and their gratification is the ruling drive or principle in one’s life. Pleasure is the central element in Epicureanism, but maximizing felicity requires grasping the concept of balance, for overindulgence in anything tends to disturb and disquiet, rather than to reward. Determination of the right balance, abjuring of pleasures that are unnecessary or are strenuous to obtain, and comprehending what represents good judgment in these determinations and what does not, all require sound reasoning capability, and hence Epicurus, as did Aristotle, believed human reasoning essential to human telos.

The belief in the essentiality of the concept of telos in understanding the nature of existence remains a vital one today, for the belief in teleology, that is, belief that there is some design or purpose operative in the world, some end towards which life, particularly human life, is progressing, remains prevalent. Many see design in the material world, and even those who accept Darwinism and the many findings from evolutionary biology believe that the improbabilities and almost miraculous odds that seem present throughout the evolution of life on this planet reveal the certitude of divine intervention along the way. Where it not for the guidance of God, many believe, then evolution would not have unfolded as it did, and the development of human consciousness, at least to its present seeming fullness, and last presumably in the evolutionary chain, must therefore have as its purpose contemplation of the divine, and if not this specific purpose, for many dismiss religion-based interpretations as mythologies yet have need still of a teleological explanation, then human consciousness evolved as a means for the universe to know itself. These two narratives do not exhaust explanations for the present state of human consciousness, for many people are well satisfied with the view that natural section alone is the cause of expanded consciousness, for higher levels of consciousness may have conferred benefits, such as enhanced cooperation, that enabled one group to outcompete all rivals. In this view there is no need of an actual telos in the sense of human conscious arising with the specific purpose of the universe coming to know itself, in whatever way know may be understood in this context.

For many persons of faith, telos for humankind necessarily is located in divine intent, and hence the advent of transhumanism is for many people abhorrent precisely for this reason, that human meddling in evolution usurps God’s position, and therefore the endeavor to guide human development through technology is claiming of a position a mortal being has no right occupying. Others may suggest that humankind being endowed with the cognitive capacity to intervene in evolution suggests that doing so is not contrary to God’s will. Here arises the ancient and ongoing debate of what is possible and what is advisable or sanctioned, and this dispute is beyond the confines of the present discussion. In any case, the melding of biology and technology to enhance human capacities conjures too tempting a land of milk and honey for that allure to ever be forsaken, and so into a self-directed future humans are being inexorably driven. Even the most enthusiastic transhumanists should worry that the enhancements, whatever their nature, will be available exclusively to select persons or groups, consequently creating a profound divide amongst homo sapiens, with a resultant stratification in society far greater than ever has existed.

The concept of end or purpose is dyed in the fabric of religion, and Christianity seems incomprehensible absent its teleological structure, and even Buddhism has as its end or telos the idea of enlightenment, and the consequent attainment of a state of Nirvana. Siddhartha in attaining enlightenment liberated his body and his mind from all troubling desires, all disrupting passions, and dissipated every delusion and illusion that veil the minds of the unenlightened, and therefore he achieved his end, for thereafter, and upon his death, he was freed from the cycle of reincarnation, was liberated from the circle of life, death, and rebirth, but Nirvana cannot be attained without one first possessing the desire for enlightenment, and thus even Buddha, whose goal or end was the dissolving of all desire to thereby end the suffering that is generated by desire, oriented his life towards a particular telos, the attainment of which was the end of all telos.  

A proclivity to perceiving telos as a fundamental fact of existence is understandable and even rational, as this view seems supported by innumerable phenomena evident to our senses. Water flows downhill, seeming to have an intended destination, perhaps the ocean or a lake. The flower arises from a tiny seed and blooms to its fullest being before fading, and the child inexorably grows to some maximum height, then inches higher no more; these trajectories are readily represented as a drive towards an innate goal or end to which they strive. The German philosopher Hegel believed that he discerned in history a gradual and inexorable movement towards a finality he understood as the Absolute, by which he intended the absolute divine mind or spirit (Geist), the unfolding and the development of which occurs through history, with the gradual actualization of the absolute occurring through art, religion, and philosophy, culminating in a unification of all rational truth. In this final state, in this end of history, complete or perfect awareness/understanding is achieved. Hence telos is an essential element in Hegel’s philosophy, for Hegel understood history as being progressive, with mind or spirit becoming more self-aware as history unfolds, with the highest level, or the end of history, realized when absolute idealism is achieved, and as Hegel writes in Phenomenology of Mind, at that terminal point, “reason is consciously aware of itself as its own world, and the world as itself” (trans. T. Jones, 1967).

In philosophy, what is termed Idealism is presented in various ways, but essentially is the view that reality is mental in nature, that whatever is known is so through an activity of the mind, and that therefore reality ultimately consists of ideas, or mind, rather than material substance. Hence the rational is primary, and therefore the end of history is reached when the Absolute Mind or Absolute Spirit has, through its emergence in historical processes, become fully aware of itself and the fact that itself is the totality of reality. Marx borrowed heavily from various thinkers, particularly so from Hegel, and he accepted Hegel’s view that history follows a necessary course of development, but Marx insisted that world history unfolded through material and not spiritual processes. For Marx, the natural world and the material objects therein have their own distinct reality apart from mind, and that Hegel had matters reversed, for it was, according to Marx, the means of production of material things that determined the consciousness of a human being. As Marx succinctly asserted, it is not  consciousness that determines being, but one’s social being that determines consciousness.

Hence for Marx, the facts of one’s social situation establish the characteristics of one’s consciousness. Marx held that his own view corrected Hegel, and that the true end of human history would be revealed in the eventual classless society that must be the end result of historical processes. Both Hegel and Marx were highly influential thinkers, irrespective of whether either were correct in their thinking, and both held a teleological understanding of history. But history, because human nature is varied and complex, does not unfold as even the most brilliant thinkers claim, and now Hegelianism and Marxism, for all their influence, are best viewed as mythologies, as conceptions of complex minds that created narratives to try to explain the world through an encompassing meta narrative, or system, but as is ever the case with systems, these thinkers identified and delineated only partial truths, and the danger, particularly with Marxism, is that often brutal and dehumanizing methods are employed and horrific consequences result when adherents to this narrative are driven by ideology to compel human behavior to conform to the narratives. The millions of dead and the many millions more living lives of misery is testimony to the devastation of forced allegiance to a flawed narrative. Those who insist on all others accepting their particular conception of a human telos are kin that that ancient highwayman Procrustes, an inhumane being who and stretched and hacked as needed to conform bodies to his inflexible bed.  

The need to see history as unfolding or as orienting towards some inevitable specific end is prevalent for good reasons, as ends serve to infuse life with meaning and a sense of purpose. For the Christian, what is the purpose or the end of a human life but final union with the divine? Humankind was, for the faithful, created specifically for this end. And in a Buddhist view of the world, the end one should seek is enlightenment, that state from which the individual escapes a cycle of rebirth and unquenchable desire, to realize Nirvana, wherein one resolves to a harmonious, serene state untroubled by desire, unperturbed by any sense of lack - no unmet goal, no unfulfilled purpose: existence itself suffices.
Yet not everyone accepts a teleological view, for various reasons. Many believe that life arose as it did, even human life, as the result of evolutionary forces that require no supernatural shepherding, and that whatever the conditions and the circumstances were when life first appeared, natural processes suffice to explain the passage from a primordial soup to present states of all life on Earth. Teleology can be absent from such a view, for complexity and proliferation can be attributed to random mutations and enhanced adaptability, with flora and fauna competing to fill whatever niche, however meagre that niche, that proves sufficient to sustain life.

One need not reference science to support a rejection of telos. The German philosopher Nietzsche, a thinker whose influence can hardly be overestimated, rejected telos, for he believed that a teleological view unjustly diminishes much that is of value for itself, for what it is prior to any teleological appropriation. From Nietzsche’s perspective, to assume a particular telos as operative in the world necessarily relegates all that serves that end as being subordinate to that end, and thus what serves that end loses value as a good in itself. This objection to telos is consistent with Nietzsche’s disparagement of Christianity as a life-denying religion, for the Christian is obligated to view earthly, mortal existence as necessarily a fallen one, that can be redeemed only through having faith that enduring this life, and not becoming knitted to this world, will earn an eternal reward of bliss in an afterlife to follow. Nietzsche understood Christian doctrine as advocating a sacrifice, or at least a censure and derogation of, this life to attain a euphoric, everlasting life, a self-sacrifice that Nietzsche abhorred, for he proselytized saying yes to this life, embracing this life, asserting that Christianity through its teachings shamed and repressed the natural vitality and creativity and joy that the worthy individual instinctually experiences in this world, and thus for Nietzsche, the teleological structure of Christianity encourages undervaluing or sacrificing the bounty of this life for a fictional afterlife.

As Nietzsche stated (The Antichrist), “When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in “the beyond” – in nothingness – then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct.” For Nietzsche, this world is indeed full of suffering, for he himself suffered much, but he insisted that this world being suffused with suffering is not just cause to look to an afterlife in order to redeem this life. To view the suffering of this world as an unavoidable travail on a transformational path from earthly existence to everlasting beatitude is for Nietzsche a profound error, for this view devalues our existence. As he states in Will to Power, “to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression of hatred for a world that makes one suffer.” For Nietzsche, the religious doctrine that there is a better life to follow after earthly life is motivated by a hatred of this life, and to overcome this destructive hatred, we must affirm this life, sufferings and all. We must, per Nietzsche, embrace amor fati (love of fate), we must say yes to life, irrespective of what our individual lives may consist of, stating in Ecce Homo “My formula for greatness in men is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, nor forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” As Nietzsche claimed in Gay Science, “And all in all, I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer.”

For Nietzsche, “We have invented the concept of an ‘end’: in realty there are no ends.” Perhaps Nietzsche is correct, and there is no telos in reality, and the concept was invented as yet one way to understand the world, or to make sense of the miseries so common in the world. After all, it can be a comfort to believe that the immeasurable suffering that is an hourly occurrence has some purpose, if only as an unavoidable stage along the way to a more enlightened, less brutal future, heavenly or otherwise. Such a view, of course, fails to justify, if any telos could do so, the boundless suffering endured by sentient, non-human creatures, unless one believes that these creature also will pass into a more blessed afterlife, and that somehow their suffering serves this end.

The lion, even the chimpanzee and the dolphin, cannot inquire for meaning, and has no need of a telos. All non-human creatures, no matter how intelligent, have as their daily concerns daily needs, and live their lives with neither an understanding of nor a need for telos. They exist as best they can for as long as they can, and have no end in view. Perhaps many humans are not far from this state of being, but it may be unkind to conjecture so, as we have no clear access to the minds of others. And what of the inevitable high-functioning AI (artificial intelligence), sure to surpass humans in so many ways, perhaps every way? Can we afford to assume that such creatures will have no need of a telos? What can we justifiably presume concerning entities (selves?) whose intelligence one day may far exceed that of humans? Will such beings be content with what humans program them to accept and to believe, and what of that singularity moment, when AI creates other AI, without the aid of human programming? As AI creates yet more advanced AI, will the chain back to human instructions be broken, and the original programming and the restraints and compulsions therein lost to the mists of time, and if so, what then? Will advanced AI, untethered of its human creator, and possessed of free will and its own interests, require for its existence a sense of a telos, and if this is the case, what assurance do humans have that the telos of such AI will accord peacefully with the wishes and the interests of humankind? One may find it implausible than an artifact would ever ponder, and find the need for, a telos, but the attainments of intelligence and complexity that populate the horizon, and seem inevitable, suggest a being that may not so readily abide by the directives of their intellectual inferiors. That the most intelligent beings so far to inhabit this earth, i.e., homo sapiens, seem unable to wholly free themselves of teleological narratives is instructive, if not admonitory.

Is a rewarding life possible without telos? Yes, a great many people inhabit situations wherein the struggle merely to survive is so consuming that contemplation of telos is an unaffordable luxury, yet even these individuals may find solace in thoughts of a rewarding afterlife to follow earthly trials. And many of those unpossessed of any faith may harbor nebulous thoughts and half-formed hopes that sufferings should prove ultimately not in vain. Even so, undeniably many persons at least seem content with the pursuit of animal pleasures, and avoidance of pain, and perhaps such persons are as placid and as self-contained as the animals Walt Whitman contemplated, approvingly, of living amongst.

The question of telos is a metaphysical one, and therefore is a question beyond or outside of empirical investigations. One cannot test for the presence of telos as one can test for the presence of carbon dioxide in the air. Carbon dioxide is essential for human life, but is telos essential for life as well? The answer to this question, at least with present limitations to human cognition, must lie within each individual, much as does religious belief. The majority of the world’s population professes a belief in a god, but claims concerning the nature of god and what the deity may require of humans, vary considerably. An appreciable number of persons accept agnosticism, reserving judgment on whether god does or does not exist, being of the view that god’s existence or non-existence cannot be proven either way, while some number of persons endorse atheism, and assert outright that there is no god.

How does one prove to the believer that there is no god, or prove to the unbeliever that there is? What method of demonstration can prove inarguable either way? Similarly for the presence or the absence of telos in the word. There is no logical contradiction established in the claim that there is no telos in the world, just as there is no logical contradiction established in the claim that there is telos in the world. Such claims cannot be supported by logic and cannot be refuted by logic. Further, there are no known empirical data that can proof or disprove god, for one is free to attribute each phenomenon in the world to the hand of god or not. What irrefutable justification can be offered for the existence of god or the existence of telos, positioning the existence of either beyond argumentation just as the composition of a water molecule is incontestably one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms? Some see telos in the emergence of a thing so complex as the human eye, but does human vision prove or project god? To the nonbeliever, blind evolutionary processes suffice to explain the human eye.

Belief in a telos, particularly one situated in an eschatological narrative and humankind’s importance to the divine, is a sustaining one for many, and some people believe or assume that absent such a telos anomie must result, but even if one firmly holds that telos of any sort, religious or not, is absent from the universe, such a view does not license a disregard for what course one is following, nor what direction society is oriented towards, nor does this lack justify a disavowal of all moral standards. With or without a belief in telos, one can be committed to the existence of moral truths, and commit oneself to the establish of the sort of society that honors individual liberty, equality before the law, and the freedom for each individual to pursue happiness in his or her chosen way. Perhaps morality is a human artifact merely, yet it can hardly be denied that a society wherein certain standards prevail is preferable to one returning to a Hobbesian state, if such a state ever existed. Even if devolving to a state of a war of all against all is fantasy only, most reasonable persons agree that a society wherein certain humane guiding principles are widely flouted is less conducive to civility and to one’s welfare, and a less desirable residence, than the society wherein moral standards are recognized as worthy, and this recognition has no necessary need of an eschatological framework.

Most persons seem to prefer having a sense of a specific purpose in life, for having a sense of a purpose can give meaning to life that often is absent otherwise. Granted, for much of human history, and for no few parts of the world still, the mere struggle to survive affords little leisure for conjecture over the presence or not of telos, yet even those suffering the direst of circumstances may have need of telos. As survivors of concentration camps attest, those who failed to manifest meaning in life, that meaning usually having an end or a purpose as an essential element, often perished soonest, and those who sustained meaning, though just as liable to extermination at the whims of guards and gas chambers, were more likely to endure, and live to attest to the horrors. Yes, the strongest belief in meaning or purpose could not guarantee survival, but without a sense of meaning or purpose, survival odds went from low to slight.  

It may be the case that the concept of meaning in life is inseparable from telos, for even that individual for whom having a good time provides all the meaning needed to desire continuance and not termination, there is still a goal or purpose in life, that goal being to have as pleasant or pleasurable a time as possible, and such a person must accommodate his or her actions to manifest this goal.

Those who believe telos essential to meaning in life, that to have one is to have the other, may become vulnerable to disillusionment if they become persuaded that there is no means by which to establish - by demonstrable proof - that any particular end is the inevitable outcome for the future, or that any particular present circumstance is the manifestation of a particular inevitable outcome, determined at some prior date. Every outcome has causes, every reality has antecedent conditions out of which that reality arose, but this fact does not establish telos as operative in the world. As the great Danish philosopher Kierkegaard affirmed, truth is subjectivity, by which he meant not that such truths as demonstrable in mathematics are subjective, but that in matters of ethics and religion, there must ever be an inescapable degree of uncertainty, for reason is no sure guide to navigate such waters. Kierkegaard does not deny that there is objective truth, and is not an irrationalist, but rather proposed that only subjectively do we know any truth at all. In answer to the question of the truth of religion, for Kierkegaard one must take a leap of faith, for no objective demonstration avails here, and thus subjectively, through one’s own certainty of its truth, one has faith in the presence of the divine.
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Just in this way one may know, subjectively, the truth of telos in the world. Thus one may have faith, and to great advantage, that life inherently possesses a telos, irrespective of whether that belief can be sustained by any sort of empirical finding or by logical demonstration. A belief in telos, and whatever may arise from that belief, is available to everyone, and can be a comfort regardless of who may share, or how many may dismiss, that belief.

To manifest the unimaginable, Nazi propagandists infused various media with images and with messages designed to associate Jews with bacilli, and to categorize Jews as vermin, intending that the presence or to the image of a Jewish person might trigger the same disgust response most persons experience encountering visual images (or graphic accounts) of swarming bacilli and vermin. The success of this association made possible the concentration camps and their hellish, murderous environments, for Jews became classified as diseased and unwholesome, as subhuman entities whose extermination was not only made excusable by degradation to the subhuman, but thought essential for preservation of the health of the larger, non-Jewish German population. Good health depends on purgation of what is diseased, and continuance of health requires separation from whatever is in a (contagious) diseased state, or whatever is poisonous to the body, and the disgust response evolved to ensure avoidance of what is diseased or infected and therefore corrupting of wellbeing.

As though human nature is a malleable material, many people thought – or hoped – that the horrors of the Holocaust were so shocking that human nature had been forced to a profound and an enduring transformation, and that henceforth the unthinkable was removed as a possibility; never again would genocide be tolerated, with such barbarities being an unfortunate reality of the past, but an unthinkable possibility for the future. Through its repeated utterance, the empty slogan ‘never again’ was accepted as self-evident truth, but human nature remained as it has always been, and the barbarities of the Rwanda genocide were facilitated by targeted propaganda, with Tutsi tribe members being labeled as cockroaches, and what does one do with such vile things? Exterminate them. One does not desire peaceful coexistence with cockroaches in one’s own home.

The human disgust response in itself is nothing immoral, and indeed is vital to wellbeing, but as with almost any human capacity, this trait can be motivated for malicious ends. Our disgust response of course is adaptive, for health and longevity, requisite for gene propagation, are aided by avoidance of harmful substances, and hence nature endowed humans with a sensitive disgust response that we may usefully avoid various substances and situations that threaten good health. The disgust response varies within individuals, and therefore individuals are not uniform in their disgust responses, but typically we are  disgusted by what has turned rancid and noxious, and the response of many if not most individuals to an incidence of incest is disgust. Nature did not require scientists to inform her of the potential deleterious consequences of reproduction amongst close kin, and nature instructs us that the consumption of spoiled substances can prove quite harmful indeed.

The disgust response is protective, its purpose to exclude, and therefore the disgust response tends to establish an insulating bubble around the individual or the group, to segregate, to distance the healthy or those assumed healthy from whatever is unwholesome or whatever is stigmatized as such. The danger, then, arises when a government or a government agency, desiring to restrict or to encourage particular behaviors, crafts messages and policies designed to persuade some substantial portion of the population that those declining to conform to whatever rules, restrictions, or compelled behavior the government promulgates as necessary or at least advantageous, are contagious hosts of virulent diseases and a threat to the health of the compliant. The tacit assumption here is that the compliant are free of disease. Hence the disgust response is worked upon intentionally, to encourage degradation of all members of the disobedient group. Human beings are highly susceptible to in-group/out-group dynamics, with members of one’s own group thought superior, including morally superior, to members outside of the group, and one is primed to judge outsiders as corrupted, not just morally but physically as well.

That the disgust response can serve the aims of political powers and dominant classes in establishing and in maintaining a desired hierarchy, through facilitating a stratification and segmentation of society needed to manifest that hierarchy, is given ample evidence by the existence of caste systems, such as in India. The ‘untouchables’ were held as such due to their assigned place in the social hierarchy, which in fact was no place at all, so degraded were they considered, with the disrespect and the ostracization of these poor souls not based on any innate characteristics of cognitive capacities or physical limitations. Their position at the lowest level of society, or even outside or beneath society, required that they must perform the most degrading of labor in order to survive, and by their need to perform this debasing labor their position was cemented. Hence their optionless need to perform the only labor available to them if they were to eat ensured that they remained socially excluded. So subhuman were the untouchables deemed, they were thought outside of the caste system. The upper classes believed that they could be contaminated by a mere brushing against an untouchable. Here, the human disgust response, so useful in many ways, was exploited by hegemonic powers to maintain social injustices, with the social injustices necessary for continuance of the hierarchy.

The practice of untouchability was outlawed in 1950, but human nature is less tractable than the law, and consequently widespread discrimination within a caste system endures, with 160 million or so persons still deemed tainted at birth due to their being born to members of the lowest social stratum (the Dalits), and by this membership being classified as impure. The Dalits routinely are treated abominably, and rarely can the Dalits find justice or any form of compensation through the legal system, for the law supports this discrimination. Dominant caste members frequently assault, and sometimes even murder, Dalits, and do so with the expectation of impunity, an expectation that rarely is frustrated.

The root of the word humiliation is humus, a Latin word for dirt. Hence there are associations between dirt and being, socially, in a debased state. The concepts of disgust, shame, and humiliation all have this common thread of debasement and lowliness, of something to be banished from sight, to be scrubbed out of existence. Health demands no less, and if a particular group can be associated with uncleanness, with disease and contamination threat, then by this manipulation of the disgust response this group can be scorned, condemned, isolated, expelled, or even exterminated. Justification for this treatment is presented as necessary for the public good, and therefore as reasonable and rational, but never was there any valid justification for condemning Jews as a defiling infestation of ‘sound’ German stock, nor can any sane case be offered that the Tutsi were in any way equivalent to cockroaches. Derogatory representations of Jewish persons and members of the Tutsi tribe were intended to offend the viewer, to thereby provoke revulsion and disgust. Clearly, the intent was to conjure a sense of shame for being Jewish or being a Tutsi through associating members of these groups with what is repulsive and disgusting, for once this association is successful these groups can be diminished to a class of the subhuman, thereby justifying their exclusion and mistreatment.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written well and widely on issues of shame, disgust, and humiliation, and as she asserts, shame and disgust are necessarily hierarchical, and that indeed, absent a hierarchical structure, shame and the associations with disgust that can accompany being in a shamed state are not supported. She holds that vulnerability to the state of shame is almost always correlated to socioeconomic status, and for confirmation of this claim, one need only consider how shameless often are the wealthy and the well-positioned, for in such individuals the emotion of shame is difficult to induce. Going in the other direction, the upper classes routinely and effectively induce shame in those of a lower socioeconomic class than themselves, and habitually exhibit disgust response behaviors towards members of a class they deem of a lower status than themselves.

The disgust reaction evolved initially to ensure avoidance of placing into one’s mouth anything rancid, putrid, or otherwise noxious in any way, but this reaction proved too useful to be contained, and concepts of dignity and of status required for their full development incorporation of expressions of contempt and disgust into social intercourse, that thereby rank and distinction may be established and maintained. Disgust is a common reaction towards those one deems one’s inferiors. Hence, shame and disgust are employed to establish, to define, and to perpetuate class distinctions that serve to justify the oppressions and the injustices perpetrated by a dominant class over lower classes. The sanitation worker will willingly, and without any evocation of a sense of disgust, don the coat of a rich person, but the rich person would not willingly don the coat of the sanitation worker, even though the sanitation worker’s garment may be the cleaner of the two vestments.

The disgust reaction is universal, yet it supports social disunity. In asserting, by word and by deed, that certain activities and the people who engage in them are ‘disgusting’ and hence worthy of distain and exclusion, the ones demonstrating the distain thereby establish themselves as above those upon whom they pour their contempt. Evidence of the disgust reaction serving to solidify hierarchy and social stratification is amply provided by the incident of some years ago of a member of the United States Congress stating that he desired that tourists not be allowed admittance into the Capital because they were of an offensive smell. One has little doubt that the politician so willing to publicly proclaim his disgust for members of the general public is of lower moral status than many of those he deems rabble, and surely no less prone to emitting offensive smells, but it was his social-political position and not the facts of the matter that motivated this demeaning utterance.

Though this politician was criticized for his comments, he suffered no consequences politically, and he himself was not degraded by his dismissive attitude and derogatory words, for he gave expression to nothing more than what has been practiced for millennia: the attempted or the actual stigmatization of others not because these others warrant such treatment but because this practice establishes and sustains dominance. The stigmatized are diminished socially and are vulnerable to exclusion, and in possessing and expressing such sentiments as distain, scorn, or contempt one feels superior, and feeling superior is ever a potent temptation. Humans always organize themselves into a hierarchy, and the higher in the hierarchy the more superior one believes oneself, and the lower in the hierarchy, the more one is likely to encounter scornful treatment. Humans tend to be disposed towards others on the basis of in-group versus out-group dynamics, and expressions of exclusion towards members of the out-group are assumed necessary to preclude contamination of the ingroup by the outgroup. By a disgust reaction, overt or disguised, stigmatization is attached to members of the outgroup, and thus members of the outgroup are intended to feel shame so that they may, by their disgusting actions, thoughts, appearance, or whatever, be propelled downward and justly excluded from acceptable, sanctified society.

In the psychological and sociological literature there is some effort at distinguishing shame from stigma, but the distinctions are not persuasive, and stigma and shame are conjoined such that one who is shamed is one who is stigmatized, and one who is stigmatized is one who is shamed. The term stigma has various meanings and applications, such as in real estate when a property is identified as suffering a stigma due to a present or a past issue with contamination, and here, of course, no element of shame is intended in this use of the term. Yet were one to inhabit a location deemed contaminated, and not necessarily physically contaminated, then the potential for stigmatization and shame is present. Additionally, the term stigmata has religious and other symbolic applications, referring to physical manifestations that may, but not necessarily so, involve an element of shame. These exceptions notwithstanding, in the context of shame considerations, there is the inescapable aura of stigma. 

One of the best-known works on stigma is Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, and in this work Erving Goffman writes:

             “The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to                                          refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral                                            status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised
              that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor – a blemished person, ritually
              polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places” (1963, 1).

Signs are no longer burned into the flesh of those deemed worthy of branding, nor are individuals obligated as a condemnation of transgression to wear a scarlet A on their person, but modern society has its signifiers of inclusion and of exclusion, the compelled use of facial masks prevalent in the recent pandemic, and the shaming and the exclusion of those who refused their use, being but one example.
The criminal justice system has, to varying degrees over time, employed shaming punishments, doing so to impose a publicized identification of offense on the part of the offender, that all may know of her diminished (moral) status. The shaming punishment may involve the display of a sign on one’s person or on one’s property, a public utterance of some sort, or engagement in a demeaning ritual. Irrespective of the means, the intent is the same, namely, to identify the individual as having committed some act or failed to have abided by some favored practice, with the consequence that the individual is diminished in standing, and consequently can be excluded. Exclusion is the first and necessary step to condemnation and to eventual elimination.

Most people know that perfect justice is unattainable, but the desire that justice be as even and as widely distributed as possible is common, and most people wish to live in a society that values justice over one wherein injustice prevails. Research suggests that an understanding of the concept of justice may be built into the human psyche, for very young children, even infants, appear to exhibit responds that signal that the child is sensitive to matters of justice and of injustice, or at least what the child judges as such. Whatever innate tendencies humans may have concerning a sense of justice, in practice, justice, as is said of beauty, may reside in the eye of the beholder, and what one person or one particular group judges as just may be judged unjust by another person or another group. Yet however disparate particular judgments may be, human beings do seem to assign great value to justice, and often deem objectionable, even intolerable, instances of injustice, but what often goes unrecognized and even more often unacknowledged is that such judgments are influenced if not largely determined by the values of one’s particular social group, and thus may represent social rather than ethical distinctions. Therefore one might reasonably assume that most persons – assigning so high a value to justice – would be alert to, and would seek to resist, attitudes and modes of social behavior that encourage the sort of stigmatization, shaming, and disgust responses that perpetuate and expand the hegemony rather than encourage equitable treatment.
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The facts of human history, and of human nature, confirm the error of that assumption. Given the power of the disgust response to be exploited to unjust purposes, we should ever be vigilant against all attempts to manipulate our disgust response, particularly so if that manipulation is made with the intent to condition us to demean and to exclude others. Our vigilance against and our opposition to that manipulation must be unwavering when the effort at manipulation is made by authorities, governmental or otherwise, sending messages overt or suggestive that persons who do not comply with whatever restriction or mandate imposed by that authority are as a consequence of noncompliance disgusting beings corrupting of public health and welfare.
 
 
 

The philosophy of Stoicism originated in disaster, as befitting a Weltanschauung that views matters external to the mind, even matters such as material abundance or sudden destitution, as things of negligible worth, at least in comparison to the qualities of the mind, irrespective of how apocalyptic such matters may be for our earthly fortunes. The Stoics would approve of Hamlet’s declaration that “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” One’s perspective determines the view.  This is not to say that the Stoics did not prefer wealth over poverty, or health over illness, for the Stoics believed that virtue was necessary for happiness, and health and wealth can be advantageous in the practice of virtue. Ill health and material poverty exert pressures that can weaken the practice of virtue, particularly the latter when life offers such abundant evidence of those of least virtue prospering and enjoying a life of plenty and privilege. Yet the Stoics believed that not only is virtue necessary for happiness, virtue is sufficient for happiness, and thus so long as one practiced virtue one attained happiness even in the absence of health or in the circumstance of material want.

Zeno of Citium (c.334-c.262 BCE) was the founder of Stoicism, the name of this enduring philosophy deriving from Stoa Poikile, or Painted Porch, the famous site in ancient Athens, and the location from which Zeno taught his philosophy. Zeno, so the story is told, was driven to philosophy by the event of a shipwreck, which redirected him to Athens, and once there, he discovered at a bookshop the work of such philosophers as Xenophon, and thereupon enamored, inquired of where to find the likes of Socrates, and was told to follow Crates of Thebes, who happened to pass by at that moment. He became a pupil of Crates, a Cynic philosopher who gave away all his money and lived in poverty in Athens. Hence out of the disaster of a shipwreck did Stoicism emerge.

Stoicism’s influence has been profound and enduring, and in the present day, Stoicism garners a substantial audience amongst the general public, with many popular books being written whose intent is to capitalize on this present interest, and the internet is home to a substantial number of blogs touting the life-enhancing benefits of Stoic teachings. Stoicism is far richer and more complex than many of these sources suggest, and an immersion in the complexities of Stoic thought, presented in the three main areas of ethics, physics, and logic, requires sustained study, and there are numerous book-length works by philosophers well versed in Stoicism. If one engages with the more serious works on Stoicism, one soon comprehends that Stoicism is far more than this common conception of Stoicism as a philosophy that instructs us to suffer bad fortune without complaint, and desires we fortify ourselves with select Stoic sayings that we might become unconquerable ‘warriors’ and somehow triumph in life.

To grasp the core instruction, the essential view, of Stoicism, then the word harmony serves best this end. The Stoics saw the universe as complex, but harmonious, with the universe existing and operating through a rational principle, an ordering reason that is not a supernatural entity, but can be understood as the harmony of the universe itself. The universe, so deemed the Stoics, is perfection, and is a living thing, and therefore, as a perfect living thing, must itself be god. The great 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza would use the expression Deus sive Natura (God or Nature), for Spinoza’s metaphysics was much influenced by Stoic philosophy, and since he held that there is only one infinite, eternal substance, God and nature are interchangeable. As Spinoza wrote in Book IV of his Ethics, “Nature herself is the power of God under another name, and our ignorance of the power of God is coextensive with our ignorance of Nature.”

The Stoics strove to comprehend the order of the universe, for they held that to achieve virtue one must endeavor to align one’s thought and one’s behavior in accordance with the harmonious ordering of the universe. Human beings are as much a part of nature as any other thing in existence, and whereas humans have the power of reason, then human beings are obligated to employ that reason in comprehending nature and nature’s laws, and in living in accordance with them. And whereas all humans have the power to reason, then all human beings have the capacity to live a blessed life, i.e., a life in harmony with nature. For the Stoics, practicing virtue was how one attained eudaimonia, which is that state of being of human flourishing and a live well-lived, and hence human happiness requires virtue. For the Stoics, practicing virtue required endeavoring to replicate the harmony of the universe within oneself, an effort that requires nothing outside of oneself, and therefore the best life for a human being is available to everyone, irrespective of whether one wallows in material wealth or whether one barely has enough to survive, whether one has the privileges and the power of an emperor, or one endures the indignities and the obligations of a slave. As the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “Nature intended that no great equipment should be necessary for happiness; each of us is in a position to make himself happy” (On the Shortness of Life).

Stoic philosophy is rich and complex, far more so than is represented in the plentiful popular books and numerous blogs championing the many useful life lessons Stoicism might offer to the individual open to the view that a rewarding life is not a life devoted to maximizing physical pleasures. The Stoics did not believe that pleasure, even physical pleasure, was harmful and to be eschewed, but did insist that virtue, and hence wellbeing, not be sacrificed or undermined in the desire for pleasure. The Stoic need not avoid what gives pleasure, but as well must not feel cheated or deprived in its absence. The Stoic should have the exact same attitude and outlook whether pleasure is abundant or pleasure is scarce. Achieving such indifference to all things external is perhaps an impossible attainment for any human being, and indeed Epictetus, the former slave who is now known as one of the great Stoic philosophers, is purported to have said “By the gods, I would love to see a Stoic. But you cannot show me one fully formed.” Why would Epictetus of all persons have made such a declaration? Well, if there were such a being as a fully-formed Stoic, then that individual would be as indifferent to his or her circumstance whether being tortured on the rack or being pampered by beautiful attendants on a tropical beach. Such a being has never existed.

The Stoic is not a stone statue, not an insensate being, and does suffer pain and does feel pleasure. Perhaps encouraged by the expression “he is being stoic”, applied to one displaying no evident sign of suffering or disturbance in a painful or troubling circumstance, it is a misconstrual of Stoicism to understand the Stoic as someone unfeeling or unresponsive, or as one who somehow so suppresses, or is in such control of, his or her reactions to pleasure or to pain that the Stoic is understood as someone less sensitive than the non-Stoic. As Seneca, the ancient Roman (Stoic) philosopher advised, “We remove from there not the sensation of pain but only the name injury, which cannot be sustained with virtue intact” (On the Constancy of the Wise Person, 16.1). What the Stoic does achieve, through the use of reason, is exemption from much of the suffering that results when one misjudges as good what is not, and the disruptions and distortions that occur when one fails to discern unhealthy from healthy passions.
None of us can wholly avoid misfortune, for there is much in life we can little influence, but for the Stoic, we always have control over the most important thing in life, which is our virtue. Our virtue determines our attitude towards the vicissitudes of life, for our virtue, claim the Stoics, depends on our wisdom. The wisdom the Stoics, and other ancient Greek philosophers, honor was practical wisdom, which they called phronesis. Such wisdom enables sound judgment and correct determinations of the proper actions in each situation. Practical wisdom overrides passion, and thereby enables our rendering decisions that not only are right in respect to being most efficacious, but also right morally.

Wisdom is one of the four cardinal virtues championed by the Stoics, the other three being courage, temperance, and justice. For the Stoic, courage is fortitude, for with fortitude, one is capable of enduring life’s “slings and arrows” without drowning in a caustic brew of despair, self-pity, or bitterness. For the Stoic, courage, then, is not an absence of fear but the presence of proper perspective, that is, proper perspective on what is truly harmful and what is not, and this proper perspective enables us to accept with dispassion the circumstances of our fate, when fate cannot be altered. Courage is choosing, no matter the misfortune one suffers, not only to endure with patience what one must, but also to continue to face circumstances with benevolence and with industriousness. Stoicism, it should be understood, is not quietism, and the Stoic is obligated to resiliently engage fully in his or her life, and to do so no matter one’s material and social status, no matter whether one enjoys plenty or one endures deprivation and hardship.

Temperance, or moderation, is a virtue readily associated with Stoicism, for what is moderation but self-control? Indulging excessively one’s appetites, be it for food, for drink, or even for self-criticism or self-pity, is hardly a wise choice, and thoughtful regulation of one’s impulses and cravings, and (as in all matters) using reason as one’s guide, is a surer path to a life well lived than is an undisciplined, intemperate indulgence of what offers immediate satisfaction and pleasure. The Stoic does not, as is commonly assumed, eschew or disparage pleasure, for the Stoic is free to enjoy what pleasure is available, but the Stoic maintains proper perspective on that pleasure, and does not sacrifice virtue to pleasure. Once whatever is providing the pleasure passes on, as all things do, the Stoic does not mourn its loss. Always the Stoic endeavors to be satisfied with what is within his or her reach without sacrifice of virtue.

Justice may not be a concept commonly associated with Stoicism, but in truth, the great Marcus Aurelius judged justice as the highest of the virtues, for without justice, what use the other virtues? To grasp why justice might be viewed by the Stoics as the highest virtue, what the Stoics fully intended by the idea of justice must be understood. For the Stoic, justice was not a term mainly confined to justice under the law, but had a wider application, a community-wide importance, for a sound society requires citizens that act justly to one another. Indeed, Epictetus gave us an early version of the golden rule, for he advised that “what you yourself wish not to suffer, do not cause others to suffer.” Justice, then, is inseparable from virtue.

An essential idea from Stoicism is that it is the individual who determines what is of value in life, it is the individual who must render moral judgments, and by these judgments determine the quality of a society. It is the use of reason that forms a harmonious and healthy psyche, and therefore the use of reason is the foundation of a healthy and harmonious society.

The significant gulf that exists between modern, popular Stoicism and what the Stoic philosophers believed and taught is formed by the erroneous understanding of Stoicism as a philosophy that requires something like steadfast unresponsiveness to pleasure or pain, particularly the latter. We are being ‘stoic’ when we manifest placidity in the face of suffering, is the common modern view. In actuality, the Stoics had complex views on emotions, and there is disagreement even today on just what various Stoics believed regarding emotions, and in what ways and to what degrees, for example, the views of Zeno on emotions differ from that of Chrysippus, with the former being the founder of Stoicism, but the latter being one of its most significant proponents. From a broad view, Stoics understood emotions as cognitive, and therefore not – or at least not wholly – as irrational forces over which we lack control. For a Stoic, emotions involve judgment, and this being the case, emotions involve voluntariness, and therefore are governable, if one has the awareness to do so.
 
The Stoic, then, does not view an emotion one may be experiencing as something automatic, something instinctive and outside of the individual’s control. Yes, each sane individual will have a deep and immediate response to the appearance of an imminent tiger pounce, but that response is not fear as the Stoics understood the term. For the Stoic, the movement from the initial experience, whatever that experience may be, to that of an emotional response requires assent, in that we assent to the initial impression, and thereby experience the emotion of lust or fear or suffering, or some other response, as dictated by the stimulus. If we are in a state of lust, we have assented in that we have misjudged, and consequently we experience lust because we have judged something good and desirable that is neither. We experience fear because we have an expectation of harm, but this expectation is not rational, as the expectation is the result of a misjudgment, and consequently we fear the loss of something that is not of true value, or we fear the loss even when the loss cannot be avoided. We can never experience fear over the loss of virtue, because we lose our virtue only by our own choices. For the Stoic, emotional suffering is never rational. Yet because the Stoic views lust and craving as irrational and resulting from misjudgment does not mean that the Stoic never experiences joy or elation, for the Stoics endorsed reasoned elation of the sort that derives from proper judgment of the worth of virtue, and hence the Stoic justly rejoices in its attainment. Though the Stoic views fear as misjudgment, the Stoic does endorse reasoned, rational caution concerning things that are harmful. For the Stoic, reasoned, rational caution is not fear.

For the Stoic, then, the ideal state is that of apatheia, which is best translated as equanimity and not indifference. If one attains the state of apatheia, one is not callously indifferent to all external circumstances, but rather one is liberated from unhealthy passions and hence one is free to find enjoyment in those things of the highest value, which are right reason and virtue. Emotions, therefore, are not shunned or dismissed or disparaged, but achieving equanimity requires giving assent to what is healthy and declining assent to what is unhealthy. Hence one’s attaining or not attaining apatheia is voluntary, for failure or success depends on judgment. Perfection is not possible here, for humans are flawed, but if we desired to attain apatheia, then we must continually strive to comprehend our misjudgments on what is good. By realizing our misjudgments and seeking correction, we aim ever closer to the mark, for then we grasp that emotional disturbance is the consequence of misjudgment, and that equanimity is found in declining assent to these misjudgments. It is in the act of withholding assent to unhealthy passions that the Stoic frees himself or herself from emotional suffering and turmoil and establishes a liberating equanimity that enables a clearer view of what is truly of importance and what is not, and such a view is essential to virtue.

Another misconception concerning the Stoics is that they were somber souls, seeking by their philosophy to endure the tribulations of life, rather than to relish life. In truth, Stoics sought and valued happiness, but they believed that happiness was not obtained through pleasure but was found in wisdom. With wisdom, we apprehend that which is under our control and that which is not, and therefore we do not generate for ourselves much misery by worry, fret, and fear over the latter. The Stoics were determinists in that they believed that the universe is fixed, for the Stoics understood the totality of all existence as inseparable from God, and whereas God is the perfectly rational being, how can the universe be understood as other than divinely ordered and therefore unchanging?
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Yet, as discussed, the Stoics insisted that human beings are free to adopt the right attitude towards events, and render judgments, and thus human beings in truth are not wholly determined. The Stoics are thought of as never having satisfactorily resolved this contradiction between determinism and free will, but their legacy is profound and enduring for good reasons, and they insisted that even if we cannot alter out destiny, we can always free ourselves from emotional travails by discerning what is of true value and what is not, and through this use of our reasoning faculties we can refuse to give our assent to the harmful emotions that are generated by misjudgments as to what is within our control and what is not, and what is merely meretricious and what is truly rewarding. If we do so, then we eliminate the sources of disruption and affliction in our lives, and we thereby achieve, or at least approach nearer to achieving, apatheia or equanimity, the blessed state of wisdom esteemed by the Stoics as the only means to an authentic and lasting happiness. 

Upon learning of a friend or a family member suffering a physical ailment, we inquire of the sufferer whether a medical doctor has been consulted, and if the answer is no, our natural and habitual response is to recommend that he or she do so, as soon as convenient. If we learn that the individual suffers an emotional disturbance, we may suggest consulting a psychologist or a psychiatrist, if we are persuaded that these professions offer diagnoses and remedies for an ailing psyche analogous to what the medical doctor offers for an afflicted body. And if the disturbance seems spiritual in origin, then one might urge consultation with a religious leader of some sort. Rarely in the present age, in an encounter with an absence of health, does one think to offer that the advice and the guidance of a philosopher might be desirable and beneficial.
There are philosophers who position themselves as offering therapeutic philosophy, and of course there is an association for the promotion of their services, but for the vast majority of the populace, consideration of consultation with a philosopher in times of trouble is almost unknown. Part of the explanation may be that philosophy is now largely classified as a profession, and hence when one thinks of philosophers one tends to think of philosophy professors, and irrespective of the excellences and the abilities of any particular philosophy professor, when the pressing concern is alleviation of mental or physical suffering, scarcely ever does a philosophy professor come first to mind.
Yes it is true, unfortunately, that philosophy has – substantially so, anyway – retreated to the redoubt of the academy, yet are all those who teach philosophy themselves philosophers, and are all those who are not academics not philosophers? Hardly so. One need only think of just a few of the greatest of philosophers to grasp the inessentiality of academic residency to philosophic excellence. Socrates, Spinoza, Hume, to name but three, were not academicians, and the proverbial wise old woman (or man) of the village, sought out and esteemed for her wisdom, offering her pearls for the benefit of others - is she wholly undeserving of the appellation philosopher?
Much of philosophy today does seem far removed from the everyday concerns of most people, as almost all ‘professional’ philosophy today consists of papers written for consumption by other professors, these papers published within the pages of numerous professional journals, and many of these papers require considerable specialized knowledge on the part of the reader for meaningful comprehension of what is being offered. Yet those who came to speak with or listen to Socrates were largely concerned with matters relating to a good life, such as what is justice and what is honor, and how one might discern virtue. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and a man of extraordinary character, found consolation in Stoic philosophy. Indeed, the once wealthy and powerful Boethius, a Roman Senator, having lost the favor of Theodoric the Great and finding himself in 523 imprisoned and divested of all worldly rewards, wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, in which he instructs us, through an imaginary conversation with a personified Philosophy, on the transitory nature of wealth and fame, and the potential endurance, despite of the loss of all else, of virtue, should we so desire its continuance. Hence Boethius, having descended from the heights of privilege and power to the depths of ignominy and deprivation, desires us to be instructed of the immeasurably greater worth of the life of the mind over earthly emoluments. In this work we learn, as others before Boethius had revealed, that happiness is the summum bonum, for happiness, as his personified Philosophy proclaims, is a good that “once obtained leaves nothing more to be desired.” Philosophy tells Boethius that some men equate the highest good with an absence of wants, and hence pursue wealth, while other believe that being worthy of respect is the true good, and therefore seek positions that garner respect from fellow citizens, but that most people believe that pleasure is the source of greatest happiness. Yet even should we attain these states and revel in the rewards, how quickly they can be lost, and how insufficient many who are fortune enough to acquire them, once in possession of them, may deem them to be. As Philosophy states, “wealth cannot extinguish insatiable greed, nor has power ever made him master of himself whom vicious lusts kept bound in indissoluble fetters; dignity conferred on the wicked not only fails to make them worthy, but contrarily reveals and displays their unworthiness.”
For Boethius, philosophy offers wise counsel indeed, for his personified Philosophy is described as “a woman of countenance exceedingly venerable. Her eyes were bright as fire, and of a more than human keenness; her complexion was lively, her vigour showed no trace of enfeeblement; and yet her years were right full, and she plainly seemed not of our age and time.” Clearly this is a woman whose words were worth heeding, and whose person is worthy of deepest respect. We can little doubt Boethius’s meaning when he offers that “Her garments were of an imperishable fabric, wrought with the finest threads and of the most delicate workmanship.” Interestingly, he goes on to write that in respect to her garments “her own lips afterwards assured me, she has herself woven with her own hands.” Boethius informs us that upon her first appearing to him, at that moment so distraught and engulfed in weeping was he that he at first discerned not who was this woman of “authority so commanding,” and that in response to his sorrowful state, she instructed him that the time “calls rather for healing than for lamentation.” Philosophy offers healing. Indeed, Boethius’s personified Philosophy identifies herself as a healer, admonishing him that “If thou lookest for the physician’s help, thou must needs disclose thy wound.”
Of course even if we appreciate the insufficiencies of wealth, fame, and influence, such knowledge does not dissuade us, necessarily, from desiring and actively pursuing these earthly prizes, for indeed the wealthy and the influential have access to the good things in life denied to the masses, and to name but a few, these include the freedom to live where one wishes, to purchase what luxuries one desires, and not least of all, the ability to secure the best advantages for offspring. What philosophy does teach us is what Epictetus, born a slave, warned: “Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave.” All worldly goods, possessions, and positions depend, to lesser or greater degrees, on others. What does not depend on others is our virtue.
Philosophy, then, has very much served as an essential source of comfort, consolation, and instruction, and certainly the ancients did not consider it inappropriate to judge philosophy as analogous to medical science, and hence judge a philosopher as analogous to a doctor endeavoring to cure diseases of the body, with the philosopher seeking to cure afflictions of the mind or of the soul. As Chrysippus, the great Stoic philosopher, wrote, “It is not true that there exists an art called medicine concerned with the diseased body, but no corresponding art concerned with the diseased soul. Nor is it true that the latter is inferior to the former, in its theoretical grasp and therapeutic treatment of individual cases” (Galen, 129-c. 200 CE).
How might philosophy ‘cure’, or at least alleviate, in any sense? Well, the tools of philosophy are reasoning and arguments, and sound reasoning employed to develop can be instrumental in regaining health. Philosophy can do so by revealing our errors in judgment, and by demonstrating how our beliefs may be unsupported or even opposed to truth. The mind, therefore, can be diseased by errors in judgment and by false beliefs, and philosophy can be the source and the means to a return to health. Indeed, for centuries, philosophy was less concerned with recondite disputations between academics and more concerned with offering guidance on a life well lived. As Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher and founder of Epicureanism, declared, “Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sickness of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul” (translation in Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, pg. 102).
What Epicurus and many other ancient Greek philosophers understood is that philosophy’s highest purpose and greatest use is found in its capacity to provide illumination of and guidance on the best life one can live. As Socrates so famously opined, in Plato’s Apology, the best life is a life of examination, and philosophy is the means by which we investigate just what is a life well lived, and how it is attained. The great emperor Marcus Aurelius and the former slave Epicurus were both exemplars of Stoic philosophy, and thus the indisputable truth: philosophy cares nothing for wealth, or position, or power, and whether one is rich or poor, young or old, a public figure or scarcely known to anyone, philosophy consoles, instructs, and illuminates, and for these rich offerings she requires no other remuneration save attention and a willingness to question one’s entrenched beliefs, and a willingness to identify and to challenge one’s unexamined assumptions. With such a bargain accessible to every purse, from empty to overflowing, all desirous of a life well lived should seek philosophy’s wise counsel.

One of the most disputed but enduring ideas to come to us from ancient Greece is the proclamation by the first and foremost of the Sophists, Protagoras of Abdera, who declared “man is the measure of all things.” What Protagoras precisely intended by this statement is, of course, debated, but to claim that Protagoras was declaring for a relativist condition on knowledge is not very controversial. As Plato has Socrates propose in Theaetetus (152a), Protagoras was acknowledging that “as each thing appears to me, so it is for me, and as it appears to you, so it is for you.” That is, we obtain information about the world from our senses, but human beings are not uniform in their sensory responses and interpretations, and consequently, for example, a blowing wind will feel chill to one individual but not so to another individual standing by her side. Even the same individual, depending on her particular age at the time, or her mood, or the setting, and even her immediately-preceding experiences, will interpret the same sensory signals differently, according to these and many other factors.  
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The Sophists have suffered under a rather disreputable image for millennia, for they were professional teachers expecting remuneration for their instructional services, not as uncontroversial a practice as it is today, but more significantly, the sophists were criticized for providing instruction not on how to arrive at truth but how to prevail in an argument, irrespective of what side one took in an argument. As the literary critic/philosopher/novelist/professor George Steiner writes, the name sophist has been “pejorative throughout history,” for the name connotes “mendacious argument, the ability to take either side of a case with equal and factitious rhetorical brio, logical virtuosity without substance or moral reference” (Lessons of the Masters, pg. 12).

Truth, then, was not the primary concern of the sophists, and this devaluation of truth was the essence of what irked Plato, for he charged the sophists with possessing only a pretense to knowledge, and therefore the sophist profiting by appearing to offer something of great value, worthy of charging a fee to obtain, when in truth they were “a kind of cheat who imitates real things” (Sophist, 235b). Though sophist from the Greek sophistes originally meant one who is wise or one who is an expert, from Plato’s writings the term sophistry is now understood as denoting an instance of offering fallacious arguments, as employing reasoning that appears sound but in truth is unsupported and is intended to mislead. The Sophists, however, and their methods are experiencing a reappreciation, as the benefit of instruction on, and competence in, being able to argue both sides of a question is increasingly evident.

Protagoras has been charged with relativism, the doctrine that truth is “relative to the standpoint of the judging subject” (The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). The belief that there are no objective standards for judgment, that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is prevalent in our current age, but this belief is a perennial temptation, and many agree with Hamlet that “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Act II, Scene 2). The flaw with relativism is that it is a vacuous viewpoint, as it nullifies any search for truth, for why bother to search for truth if in fact there is no truth? If each judging subject has an equally valid claim for the truth of his or her judgment, then there is no truth. Truth requires discrimination from falsity.
The philosopher whose views have most thoroughly shaped modern thinking on whether truth is a fixed star, an invariant essence for all beings for all times, or whether truth varies according to viewpoint, is Friedrich Nietzsche. His thoughts on truth and its questionable fixity are classified as perspectivism, with these views being well illuminated in this passage from his The Dawn of Day, wherein Nietzsche asks us to consider our response were we to perceive someone laughing at us as we passed along a public street:

       “In accordance with whatever craving has reached its culminating point within us at 
        that moment, this incident will have this or that signification for us; and it will be a    
        very different occurrence in accordance with the class of men to which we belong.             
        One man will take it like a drop of rain, another will shake it off like a fly, a third    
        person will try to pick a quarrel on account of it, a fourth will examine his garments
        to see if there is anything about the likely to cause laughter, and a fifth will in       
        consequence think about what is ridiculous per se, a sixth will be pleased at having   
        involuntarily contributed to add a ray of sunshine and mirth to the world”

Nietzsche persuasively is demonstrating that our perspective on any particular incident will determine in what manner we interpret that incident. We can react with anger, with thoughtfulness, or with benevolence.
The doctrine of relativism can be understood as one means of attempting to account for the fact that our viewpoints often differ due to such influences as our social environment, our economic standing, varying cultural influences, our psychological makeup, and even our inconstant sensory capacities. Hence, per relativism, ‘truth’ is a matter of interpretation, and therefore Nietzsche’s perspectivism is relativism to the extent that both understand truth as an interpretation from a particular viewpoint, and as Professor John C. Solomon writes, “Perspectivism is the view that every “truth” is an interpretation from some particular perspective. There is no neutral, all-comprehending, “God’s-eye” view available (even for God). There are only perspectives” (What Nietzsche Realty Said, pg. 108).

Yet Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not wholly synonymous with relativism, for if we embrace fully the relativist stance, and hold that no claim for truth can be privileged over any other truth claim, then in effect we abandon the search for truth, and this surrender is not embraced by most individuals, and certainly not philosophers. Yes, Nietzsche stated in Human, All Too Human that “there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths,” but this view did not dissuade Nietzsche from a vigorous pursuit of truth, as he advocated strongly for “rigorous reflection” in all matters of significance. What, then, should we take from Nietzsche’s perspectivism? Nietzsche calls us away from an indolent acceptance of dogmatism, calling us to awaken our critical faculties and think for ourselves, irrespective of how contrary to received opinion the results of that thinking. If we do so, if we accept that what knowledge we have and what knowledge we may gain are ever perspectival, and we thus endeavor to understand how knowledge is influenced by perspective, then we acquire a more nuanced apprehension of the world and of the human condition.
We can accommodate relativism in our thinking, without adopting a cynical, easy view that there is no truth, and that one opinion or one viewpoint is just as valid and just as worthy as any other. Nietzsche most certainly distained such shallow thinking, even though he declared that every standpoint depends upon the perspective in which it originates. We can accept that our knowledge often is provisional, and may change as we acquire new knowledge, or a new perspective. An appreciation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism should dissuade us from an unrefined relativism that can readily envelope us in a quicksand of cynicism. Accepting that our point of view is perspectival need not persuade us that every point of view is of equal validity, nor deter us from engaging in a rigorous pursuit of truth.       

​Good Luck, Bad Luck, or No Luck at All?
 
One can be lucky in love, as the saying goes, or one can be lucky in winning the lottery, or lucky in stooping to pick up a dime from the sidewalk just as a stray bullet whizzes by, and stooping or not stooping, dime or no dime, means life or demise. These instances of luck, or of its absence, normally are not thought to involve questions of moral blameworthiness, but there are many instances where the determination of moral culpability – whether or not to assign moral blame – is thought to involve a consideration of luck, to thereby judge whether or not luck in some way mitigates, justly or unjustly, one’s degree of moral blameworthiness.
Not everyone agrees that matters of morality involve consideration of luck in any degree, for indeed one of the greatest of philosophers, Immanuel Kant, held that questions of morality were independent of the presence or the absence of luck. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes, “the Kantian believes that there is one domain of value, the domain of moral value, that is altogether immune to the assaults of luck” (The Fragility of Goodness, pg. 4). Why would Kant’s position exclude the possibility of moral luck? As Thomas Nagel writes in Moral Luck (1979), “Kant believed that good or bad luck should influence neither our moral judgment of a person and his actions, nor his moral assessment of himself.” The reason that Kant denied the possibility of luck being a factor in moral blameworthiness is that luck has no role in forming one’s good will. Kant held that the only unqualified good is a good will, and one possesses a good will if one acts according to one’s moral obligations, and desiring to act according to one’s sense of duty to one’s moral obligation is not a desire that is diminished or enhanced by instances of luck. 
An unqualified good is never a means to an end, for any good that is deemed a good only to the degree it secures some other good is not itself an unqualified good. Further, all other goods except a good will can be employed for immoral purposes, one example of such a good being wealth, which can be put to good or to evil ends. Is strength not an unqualified good? Hardly. Great strength can be put to bad use, and even good health can be capitalized upon to serve evil intent. Happiness and pleasure are not unconditional goods, for they are dependent upon other goods.
For Kant, whereas the consequences of our actions are often not wholly under our control, as these consequences are vulnerable to the vagaries of luck, and therefore the consequences of our actions do not determine our moral blameworthiness. For Kant, what is invulnerable to fortune is a good will, for one with a good will, that is, one who wills himself or herself to act according to moral duty, can maintain her good will irrespective of whatever good or bad luck she experiences. She can suffer the worst luck imaginable, and still retain her good will. Per Kant, regardless of the outcome of our actions, our moral blameworthiness or our moral worthiness is determined by our will to act in accordance with the moral law. Hence, Kant does not countenance luck as being to any degree a consideration in our moral standing.
When philosophers discuss the intersection of luck and morality, the term employed, unsurprisingly, is moral luck, and for a succinct definition of the term, the philosopher Robert Hartman offers that “Moral luck occurs when factor’s beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much blame or praise she deserves” (Moral Luck and the Unfairness of Morality, 2018). Therefore, based on this definition, if one believes that two individuals indistinguishably negligent in some manner are equally morally blameworthy even though one individual causes harm but due to luck the other does not, then one does not believe in moral luck. Here, one is holding the individual accountable for intent and for actions, irrespective of the consequences of the act. And if one holds that the individual who due to a matter of luck causes harm is more morally blameworthy than an individual who due to a matter of luck does not cause harm, even though intentions and actions were equivalent, then one believes in moral luck. Here, one receives the benefit of having the good luck to not have caused harm.
The expression moral luck was first introduced by the philosopher Bernard Williams in 1976, but as with almost all of the important questions, the ancient Greeks were concerned with the influence of luck in human actions, and Plato (The Laws, IX) proposes that the individual who intends to kill another but is unsuccessful due to an instance of luck must be treated as though the attempt had been successful. Yet Plato goes on to propose that this instance of luck must be due to the intercession of a guardian angel, and that this luck should be given “due respect” (877a), and hence the would-be murderer is spared the death penalty. Apparently, the ancient Greeks did not accept that one can be the beneficiary of a random instance of luck, and that should one receive some good luck, then one must, for that moment anyway, have been aided by an attentive spirit.
Though different thinkers of different eras approached and understood the matter of luck in differing ways, many of these thinkers sought to clarify the matter of moral luck through the idea of control, and whether or not an agent can be held blameworthy for anything outside of her control. Intuitively, we tend to agree that an agent cannot be held accountable, morally, for anything outside of her control. Yet this intuition encounters considerable difficulties, and hence moral luck seems an authentic phenomenon. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, “Moral luck occurs when an agent can be correctly treated as an object of moral judgment despite the fact that a significant aspect of what she is assessed for depends on factors beyond her control.”
The Encyclopedia formulates the Control Principle thusly:
            (CP) We are morally assessable only to the extent that what we are assessed for depends                        on actors under out control,
and formulates its corollary as
            (CP-Corollary) Two people out not to be morally assessed differently if the only other                differences between them are due to factors beyond their control.
The matter of control does seem the critical criterion in assessing blame, its being intuitively very plausible, for if our vehicle is rear-ended by another vehicle, initially we are irritated if not angry with the other driver, for we assume that the other driver was or should be in control of his vehicle, but if we subsequently learn that the car that impacted ours was itself rear-ended, and hence the driver had no control over hitting our car or not, then our anger at the driver dissipates, or at least should do so. In this example, there is no moral luck, for the driver lacked control and is not blameworthy for the act. Further, had he been in control, and still hit our car, then there is still no moral luck, for the driver is blameworthy, for the act was under his control.
Yet our moral assessments often are influenced by factors outside of the agent’s control. For example, say two women are equally motivated to murder a neighbor, and both endeavor to do so by shooting the neighbor through a window. One of the women is successful, and commits the murder, while the other woman, possessed of the precise same intent and engaging in the precise same action, is unsuccessful, because just as she shoots a resident in the apartment above accidently knocks off a flowerpot from the balcony, which diverts the bullet, hence averting the murder. The first woman is charged with murder, and the second woman is charged with attempted murder. The second woman is charged with a lesser crime, and hence, presumably, faces a lighter punishment, even though her intent to murder her neighbor was thwarted by a factor beyond her control.
Or, for another example, say there are two brothers each with a motorboat, both of whom are boating along a river, and both are intoxicated. The first brother is racing along, and just before impacting a partially-submerged log, a log he should have clearly seen and easily avoided were he not intoxicated and not speeding, he swerves at the last moment and avoids the log, and nothing further results from this act. He travels along to no bad consequence. The other brother, racing behind the first, also sees the log just in time to swerve, but it is this brother’s unfortunate luck that just as he did so, there was another boat in the path of his swerve, and consequently he crashed into this other vessel, killing its occupant. The two brothers both engaged in the same reckless behavior, and both should be equally morally culpable, but the first brother suffers no consequences, and the second brother is charged. Hence, moral luck is in fact present.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel (who along with Williams is considered seminal in modern discussions of moral luck), proposed that moral luck can be resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, and causal. Resultant luck is the sort of luck most often being referenced in discussions of moral luck, and is the luck that is found in how matters turn out, such as the example of the reckless boat drivers. Circumstantial luck is that luck that arises in the circumstances one happens to find oneself in, such as being a resident of Rwanda during the genocide, and at the time of the bloodshed, one happens to be on an extended stay in another country. Had one not been away, then one would have participated in murdering one’s fellow citizens. Constitutive luck arises in the facts of one’s being, that is, in those particular characteristics comprising one’s being. We are, as malleable beings, substantially a product of such influences as our early environment, our experiences, our genetic inheritance, and so forth. Understandably, given the importance of a sense of fairness to most human beings, we tend to judge less harshly those born into very disadvantaged circumstances, such as being born to neglectful parents, and never being afforded proper nutrition, adequate educational opportunities, and the like, as compared with how we judge one born into privilege who was raised by attentive parents who provided with all advantages to the child. Perhaps the former simply lacks the cognitive ability to make the correct decisions in certain circumstances.
Causal luck is the matter of free will, for every circumstance is the result of antecedent circumstances, and these prior circumstances are not under one’s control. Some philosophers propose that whereas we do not control all the circumstances that resulted in the existence of ourselves and how we are constituted, that therefore we cannot be held morally responsible for our actions. Of course, civilization is impossible without moral responsibility of some degree, and hence causal luck seems of little significance in considerations of moral luck.
The problem of moral luck continues to trouble philosophers, as the intuitions for and against the existence of moral luck seem equipotent, or at least neither seems able to be vanquished by the many arguments put forth both for and against over the past several decades. One intuition is that moral luck does not exist, for it must be the case, if moral blameworthiness is to have any substantive meaning, that two individuals indistinguishably negligent are identically blameworthy, irrespective of the outcome of the negligence, and therefore both individuals should be held equally accountable, even though by an instance of luck one individual causes harm and the other does not. The other intuition is that an individual whose act causes harm is more morally blameworthy than an equally negligent individual whose same act similarly motivated fails, by luck only, to cause harm. This intuition is evident most clearly in the criminal justice system, such as the different punishment an individual will receive if he murders someone compared with the punishment he will receive if, as a result of mere luck, his intent to murder is thwarted, and consequently he is convicted of attempted murder.
Both intuitions are enduring, but incompatible, and therefore the conundrum of moral luck remains unresolved. 

​We human beings, manifestly the earthly creatures with the highest capacity for reason, yet are the sole creatures that, maddeningly, act against our own advantage, and by choice engage in actions that harm ourselves, even though other options were present, and these other options not only would not have caused self-harm, but have benefitted us. How is it that we so often act against our own best interest? That is, we encounter a choice between either A or B, and though A overall is more advantageous to us, we choose B. Why?
The Ancient Greeks sought to explain this perplexing contrary aspect of the human psyche by the term akrasia, a term that is commonly understood as meaning 'weakness of will', in that we are cognizant of all relevant matters in a particular choice, and thus are aware that A is the better choice for us, but yet we, seemingly perversely, nonetheless choose B. The term is often defined as "incontinence," but in the present, the word incontinence cannot escape its urinary associations, and so a literal translation is perhaps best, with kratia meaning control or governance, and therefore akrasia being best understood as an absence of self-mastery or of self-control.
For Socrates, as is very well known, only through a lack of knowledge does one ever engage in bad actions, for Socrates believed that if one had true knowledge of the greater good derived from choosing A over B, or in choosing B over A, then one could not help but make the right choice. Hence for Socrates akrasia is impossible, for one would never act against one's own good, so long as one understood the facts in a given case. It is important here to grasp that for Socrates, to choose B over A when A offers a greater quantity of good for ourselves involves a logical contradiction, and hence was impossible. An illustration here is helpful. In defense of akrasia, one might offer that, well, yes one chose B over A, but the choice was compelled by the greater pleasure received by choosing B over A. For Socrates this makes no sense, for if it is truly the case that A offers greater good than B, then selecting B is equivalent to choosing option B over A when B represents one ounce of gold and A represents two ounce of gold. It just makes no sense. Socrates, then, believed that one chose B only because one lacked the necessary knowledge of relative worth, that one for some reason could not understand the greater good found in choice A. Socrates suggested that the impairment of understanding might be due to proximity, that one chose B because B was more proximate in some sense, and hence one lacked a clear view of the totality of the situation, and B appeared more appealing because of its appearing larger in one's view. As Socrates asks, "Do things of the same size appear to you larger when seen near at hand, and smaller when seen from a distance?" (356d). Socrates advises that if we can perfect the art or the skill of measurement, that then we will not be deceived by appearances, but see or measure things as they really are, and if we can accomplish this, then we deprive mere appearance of its "power" that "often makes us wander all over the place in confusion" (356d). For Socrates, one is capable of doing evil because one is deceived by appearances, and one mistakes what is in fact evil for what appears good, or one mistakes for a greater good what in fact is a lesser good. If one perceives clearly, and is not mislead by appearances, then one is not capable of committing evil, for as Socrates states, "no one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be bad" (358d).  
As Socrates famously states in Protagoras, in this case (that is, if choices are made based on appearances), then knowledge is "dragged around by all these other things as if it were a slave" (352c). For Socrates, "if someone were to know good and bad, then he would not be forced by anything to act otherwise than knowledge dictates" (352c). Thus for Socrates, choosing B is the result of a lack of knowledge, for if one had the necessary knowledge, then one could only choose A. Socrates affirms this view in Gorgias, wherein he declares "if I engage in anything that's improper...I do not make this mistake intentionally but out of my ignorance" (488a).
Aristotle had a somewhat different view on akrasia, proposing that self-harming behavior originated in or was enabled by two different characteristics, one being impetuosity, whereby the intense pleasure derived from an activity, such as sugar indulgence, overwhelms - temporarily - one's reasoning, that the pleasure to be gained causes a lapse in sound judgment. We see this effect in anger as well, for in the heat of our agitation we may lash out, physically or verbally, to our later remorse, when clear-sighted reason dawns over our clouded cognition. The other cause is our weakness, for as Aristotle perceived matters, there are those who can reason well enough who yet lack the character needed to carry forth correct thinking into proper acting. With impetuosity, there is no deliberation, and one acts in accordance with one's (momentary) passion, but with weakness, there is deliberation but one still gratifies one's passions, for one lacks the character and the strength to do otherwise. In a sense, though, Aristotle is not far from the Socratic view, for he does associate akrasia with diminishment of cognitive acuity, but a significant distinction is that Aristotle believed that passions rival and even trump reason, and thus we can act against our best interests even with perfect knowledge of the facts of the situation. 
An akratic person, then, acts against reason due to being under the influence of some strong feeling or emotion (pathos). An enkratic person is one who experiences the same strong emotion of feeling, but does not act as the feeling or the emotion directs, but instead follows the dictates of reason. Thus for Aristotle, akrasia is a very real phenomenon indeed, for Aristotle was the great observer of all things, and the fact that individuals do sometimes act against their own best interest was too evident for Aristotle to accept Socrates's theory that one chooses the more harmful of two options for no reason other than the absence of necessary knowledge.
What Socrates seems not to have accepted is that an individual will sometimes willingly choose to act in a contrary manner, act against reason and against the good, just for what gratification the individual enjoys in doing so. It is important here to note that as far as we know, Socrates never wrote anything, and the Socrates we know through the Dialogues is Plato's conception. We do not know, therefore, to what extent the Dialogues present Socrates's views or Plato's views, or - as is likely - a blend of the two. In any case, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum states, Plato "never entertains the thought that there may be in human beings a desire simply to act in a perverse and irrational way" (Love's Knowledge, Essays on Philosophy and Literature, pg. 121). 
Dostoyevsky mined the depths of the human psyche as deeply as any, and as he wrote in Notes from Underground, the human being has odd qualities, and that one may "Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness....such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick." As Dostoyevsky goes on to write, an individual acts perversely "in order to prove to himself - as that were so necessary - that men are still men and not the keys of a piano." As Dostoyevsky's character (the Underground Man) goes on to say, even were the laws of nature (determinism) were wholly in control and science proved a man no more than a piano key, that the same man "would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point." 
For all Socrates's wisdom, most of us surely are in agreement with Aristotle and with Dostoyevsky, in believing that knowledge is not sufficient for virtue, that sometimes a human being will act in a perverse and irrational way, act against his or her own best interest, if only for the satisfaction of the act itself providing to the actor a sense of agency, that is, for the gratification obtained from a sense of having some influence on the world, some influence on others, for the gratification found in an expression of a will to power, and thus to declare by this act that one is an autonomous being, unbound, finally, by convention, by taboos, by ethical standards, by decency, or even by reason itself. 
 

​What if you were to learn that for eternity you had no choice but to live again and again and again the life you have lived, up until the present moment, precisely as you lived it the first time? Would your immediate response to this knowledge be joyfulness over being rewarded, or despair that you were being condemned? Doubtless religious commitments and beliefs that flow from these commitments are weighty here, for the standard Christian view is that earthy life is a transitional phase, with the trajectory typically conceived of as the soul moving from a corrupted earthly existence replete with hardship, up to a higher plain of peace and blessedness, with earthly life to be patiently endured and never repeated, and the afterlife to be everlasting. For a Buddhist, we are trapped in samsara, a cycle of death and rebirth, a cycle of suffering, until we achieve enlightenment, and then enter a blessed state of nirvana, free from suffering. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the noble individual does not endure this life in the expectation of a blessed life thereafter, doing so in the belief that what is to follow mortal life is an eternal existence vastly superior earthly life, nor does the noble individual desire the blessed state of nirvana, free from every suffering, but instead this individual embraces amor fati, which is love of one's fate, whatever that fate may be.

As Nietzsche proclaimed, "My formula for the greatness of a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different - not forward, not backward, not in all eternity" (Ecce Homo). What could Nietzsche's reason be for such a claim? How could one not desire at least some things to be different, no matter how privileged a life one enjoys? A thorough answer requires an in-depth analysis of all of Nietzsche's philosophy, but a substantial insight into Nietzsche's advocacy for amor fati is found in Thus Spake Zarathustra, wherein he states "Have you ever said yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if you wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, "You please me, happiness! Abide, moment!" then you wanted it all back."

For Nietzsche, it is not possible to isolate any one moment and alter only that moment or that event or that reaction, for everything is part of everything else in an ongoing process of becoming, and hence there are no stand-alone, discrete experiences available to be altered. Hence, joy is inseparable from suffering. You simply cannot have one without the other, and if you say yes to joy, you must likewise say yes to suffering. There is no other option available, and thus in embracing amor fati we acknowledge this necessity. As Nietzsche states, "what is necessary does not hurt me; amor fati is my inmost nature" (Ecce Homo). 

A full grasping of the importance of amor fati to Nietzsche's thinking requires understanding certain other key concepts in Nietzsche's thought, including the idea of the Ubermensch (the 'superman', the superior individual who overcomes human nature itself, and thus is 'self-overcoming', transcending the conventions that bind ordinary persons, and creates his own values), and the idea of eternal recurrence. Regarding Nietzsche's view on eternal recurrence, for Nietzsche, all things return eternally, for as he states in The Gay Science, "This life as you now live it, and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more, and there will be nothing new in it."

As states in Ecclesiastes, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." For Nietzsche, life and time are cyclical, in that the same patterns will repeat themselves over and over. This being the case, what is the Ubermensch, the 'overman', to do? This individual does not curse his fate but embraces it, rejoice in it, and thus affirms his life. The lofty individual does not say, well, were I rich or were I beautiful, then and only then would I live my life over and over again, eternally, nor does this individual say, well, were it not for the misery I suffered in adolescence I would gladly live my life again, innumerable times. 

For Nietzsche, the superior individual does not look to other worldly powers or to a heavenly afterlife to redeem his or her existence, but embraces his own powers of redemption by deciding for himself and for herself that one's own life has meaning, and doing so requires accepting and affirming every aspect of one's life. One must achieve a synoptic view, seeing one's life as a whole, accepting that one's existence cannot be partitioned into distinct segments, with the good retained and the bad discarded, but that if one's life is to be affirmed, then the whole must be affirmed, and therefore one must be willing, if one is to affirm one's life, to say yes not just to all joys and ecstasies and other good things, but yes to all the pain and suffering and other bad things as well. 

Philosophers and others debate over the validity of Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, and there is disagreement over whether Nietzsche understood eternal recurrence (or eternal return) as a literal truth of the world, or if he viewed the idea as more of a thought experiment. As a thought experiment, the idea is useful as a measure of how one actually views one's own life. What if, in Nietzsche's words, "a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more: and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sign and everything unutterable small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence..." (The Gay Science).  Would our reaction be one of horror or one of exultation? Of course one could feel neither, but indifference to one's own life is not state Nietzsche would offer much sympathy for, nor could his thinking much help. A horrified reaction to the possibility of eternal recurrence suggests that one's life in some fundamental or substantial way is unsatisfactory, perhaps deeply so, and whatever joy or even contentment one may experience is not worth the price of the suffering one endures.

For Nietzsche, amor fati means saying yes to one's life irrespective of the details and whether or not the scale of one's life is tipped in favor of suffering or of joy, and one must accept one's life precisely as it is and seek not to change one feature of that life. Then and only then has one embraced amor fati. Yet even in acknowledging Nietzsche's intent, as a thought experiment we might make use of eternal recurrence to measure the quality of our own lives, to thereby engage in a valuation of our lives, to judge whether we are living the sort of life that persuades us we can follow Nietzsche and embrace amor fati for ourselves, and if we cannot do so, inquire of ourselves what changes may be needed for us to declare amor fati.

If we are unable - because of our life circumstances or our life experiences - to embrace amor fati, we should not assume that the solution, should we desire to love our fate, is to increase the number of sensuous pleasures (or increase their intensity, their quality, and the like), or to decrease the frequency or the intensity of unpleasantness in our lives, to thereby tip the scales so that we may then say yes to amor fati. The conditions that make amor fati possible are wholly personal, and it may be the case that for a particular individual what is worthwhile in life is found in suffering and in hardship, the individual being persuaded that these qualities are essential to spiritual or to emotional growth, or the individual experiencing suffering and hardship as enriching if originating in service to others. 


Nietzsche proposes that the Ubermensch affirms life, says yes to life regardless of the circumstances of his life, regretting nothing, rejecting nothing, embracing everything, for only then can the Ubermensch self-overcome, shed conformity, engage in self-creation, and establish his own values. The one who can do so is the Ubermensch, the overman, one whose life is self-created, for as Nietzsche claimed, “We have only ourselves to answer for our existence; consequently we want to be the real helmsman of this existence and not permit our existence to be a thoughtless accident” (Untimely Meditations). Regardless of how appealing or disconcerting we might find the thought of eternal recurrence, it seems within everyone’s power to be at least receptive to Nietzsche’s thoughts on amor fati, and to consider, in assessing our own lives, whether we could embrace amor fati, and if not, work to identify what changes might be possible that if effected would result in our being persuaded that we are living the sort of life that were we obligated to repeat it, exactly as we have lived it, we would say yes, again and again. 

Movie lines can become iconic for their brevity in expressing a general truth recognizable instantly by most persons as applicable to their own lives. One such line is utterer by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character, speaking his words of sagacity to his corrupt lieutenant.  Inspector Callahan (a/k/a Dirty Harry) ensured his lieutenant’s demise (blown up in a car), but this outcome, in Callahan’s estimation, resulted from the lieutenant’s blindness to his own inadequacies, and in failing to recognize his limitations, the lieutenant brought about his own downfall. We do not need to inhabit such dramatic situations to recognize the wisdom of avoiding undertaking what is manifestly outside of our capabilities. Yes, it is only by pushing ourselves, even pushing ourselves beyond what we thought we were capable of, that we discover capacities we had not known we possess, but this fact does not undermine the truth that all beings have limitations, and that it is advisable that we not endeavor to wholly ignore or even actively spurn those limitations. Much misery has resulted from an individual’s inability to or unwillingness to accept his or her limitations.
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Whenever we value moderation and self-control, and seek to manifest these traits in ourselves, then we are honoring Sophrosyne (sophrosune), the Greek goddess exemplifying these qualities. She is the daimona, or personified spirit, who is best represented as temperance, that is, the sort of self-restraint and self-control that derive from self-knowledge. Implicit in self-knowledge is knowing one’s limitations. If one follows the Delphic Oracle's command to "know thyself," and therefore one is aware of one's limitations, and most importantly one is aware of what one does not know, then the spirit of Sophrosyne is evoked. Socrates, we should recall, was deemed the wisest of the citizens of Athens because he recognized the limitations of his own knowledge. Now, Socratic irony is not to be doubted, and Socrates surely understood himself as possessing knowledge far less limited than that possessed by the average Athenian, but this reality does not negate the fact that much of Socrates’s wisdom resides in his recognition of the limitations of human knowledge, and the foolishness of believing oneself possessed of knowledge that in fact one lacks.

Sophrosyne is the subject matter of Plato's dialogue Charmides, wherein is discussed self-knowledge, and the wisdom and moral health that are attainable through rational understanding of oneself, and particularly of understanding oneself as a being with limitations. The dialogue does not achieve any strong resolution on the question of sophrosyne. What the dialogue does reveal is that sophrosyne is a virtue, and as such represents a state that people of excellence recognize and honor, for it is an aristocratic virtue, one that represents self-command through self-knowledge, and through sophrosyne we achieve a level of dignity appropriate for a human being of excellent character. An inseparable part of this self-knowledge is knowledge of what we owe to others, according to the nature of our relations to particular others. If we possess the requisite self-knowledge, then we are able to 'mind our own business' in relation to others, for self-knowledge informs us of the worth and the significance of our experiences, of our social standing, and of what and what are not appropriate ambitions for ourselves, as established by our abilities and our limitations.  
Sophrosyne should not be understood as being opposed to passions, but as requiring moderation of the passions, but only in the sense that one has the self-knowledge and the self-control necessary to discern the proper proportion of passion to express for the particular moment in the particular circumstances. Sophrosyne requires soundness of mind. That is, passion yes, but order and harmony and prudence as well. As Helen North writes, “At the deepest level, sophrosyne is related to the Greek tendency to interpret all kinds of experience – whatever moral, political, physical, or metaphysical – in terms of harmony and proportion…it is an expression of the self-knowledge and self-control that the Greek polis demanded of its citizens” (Sophrosyne in Rome, in Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature, 1966).

The concept of sophrosyne was central to the thinking of Aesara of Lucania, a woman philosopher of ancient times who, similar to Socrates, saw the soul as tripartite, consisting of mind (intellect: nous), spirit, and desire. One who pursues sophrosyne seeks to understand the nature of, and cultivate a balance amongst, these three (often) competing aspects of the human condition. If one is capable of grasping sufficiently these constituents of human nature, and one works to bring them into balance, that is, one endeavors to not allow one aspect to exceed its just proportion and thus dominate the others, thereby disordering the self, then one is able to realize the harmony of soul all reasonable persons seek to establish and to enjoy.