Cicero on Virtue as the Path to Well-​Being

Cicero wrote, “men … are born for the sake of men.”² The moral duties which bind men enjoin them to deal justly and humanely with their fellows—to be kind, considerate, useful, and charitable, and to respect the lives, liberties, and property of others. Ciceronian moral judgment demands prudential evaluations, simultaneously rooted in unchanging principles of right and conscious of the particularities of circumstance. Following Plato, Cicero has use neither for purportedly “wise” or “courageous” men who, lacking the virtue of justice, commit immoral acts.³ As William F. Buckley once observed, it is a very different thing to push an old lady out of, rather than into, the path of an oncoming bus; one must gain the capacity to make such calculations and act rightly. The good man must determine the effects of a given action on others, on his community, or on his soul. “Nature is the source of right,” Cicero wrote,⁴ and “Nature’s law protects and conserves human interests”—both those of the person as an individual of persons assembled in communities and nations.⁵

But what does virtue profit us? A cynic might contend that an honest person who forgoes a safe chance for unjust gain or submits to hardship for the sake of his country has quite obviously disregarded personal interest for the sake of some profitless principle. Cicero would retort that the skeptic had mistaken the character of his own nature and misvalued human interests. De Officiis teaches that moral rectitude (honestum), our personal concerns of expediency (utile), and the good of our communities and our countries are of a piece. According to Cicero, just as man is made for man, so too is he made for virtue. He finds his happiness in the fulfillment of his moral duties in the embrace of his family, friends, and country.

The ultimate end of human life is, Cicero wrote, “living in accordance with nature.”⁶ This argument leads not to an appeal to Mother Gaia, the social conventions of primates, or some imagined state of nature, but to an inquiry into the nature of human beings. The question is: what are we humans like, and what is good for us? In any work of moral philosophy, the premise must be human nature; all principles of morality and judgments of the utility of worldly goods are conclusions derived therefrom.⁷ If a philosopher misunderstands human nature—as Cicero accused the Stoics of having done—his conceptions of moral duties and expediency alike will go astray.⁸ As the excellent flautist plays with exact technique and sensitive phrasing, the excellent human being lives life in accord with the four Ciceronian virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, and propriety.⁹

Cicero knew what Aristotle knew: all animals perceive pleasure and pain, but humans’ rational faculties enable us to reach a more profound inquiry, to differentiate between “the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust” (as Aristotle put in the Politics).¹⁰ Reason enables judgment—the weighing of causes and effects—to rise above the din of sensory stimuli.¹¹ The process of moral deliberation is no mere “hedonistic calculation,”¹² in which the goodness or badness of a deed is determined by its “cash value.”¹³ A person who cannot endure even slight discomforts or forgo any immediate sensual or psychological gratification will fail to gain success or happiness, let alone virtue.

The Ciceronian virtues demand that we learn to value better things than mere money, fame, and pleasure, although these things, if sought in the proper context and manner, are rightly to be desired.¹⁴ A man “is mistaken in thinking that any ills affecting either his person or his property are more serious than those affecting his soul,” Cicero stated.¹⁵ Vice scars the essence of the human being while virtue polishes it. The brave soldier puts less stock in danger than in the wellbeing of his comrades and country, hazarding peril to do his duty and thinking cowardice worse than injury or death. Lucius Mummius, a Roman general and statesman, returned from a victorious campaign not “one penny the richer”; and yet, in Cicero’s account, his virtue and his good reputation adorned his house “more splendidly” than could any plundered gold.¹⁶ A similar principle holds good with respect to the virtue of fortitude. “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice,” wrote psychologist Viktor Frankl.¹⁷ That meaning—intertwined inextricably with moral duty—has far greater import for human happiness than the momentary sacrifice. In all these cases, virtue repays itself, meeting the expense of any expediency apparently lost.

The moral calculus of De Officiis is one of opportunity cost: when confronted with two evils, the lesser evil ought to be embraced.¹⁸ If one must choose between incurring damage to his material interests and damage to his soul, his choice must protect his higher interest. No matter what might seemingly be gained through unjust acts or the avoidance of duty, Cicero wrote, those who commit such acts “see the material reward but not the punishment—I do not mean the penalty of the law, which they often escape, but the heaviest penalty of all, their own demoralization.”¹⁹ Human beings, as self-​loving creatures, invariably will pursue what seems expedient.²⁰ Cicero endeavored to show that, rightly understood, honestum and utile (the good or well-​being of the actor) come into harmony, if not into unison.

Human beings are social creatures, in need of the companionship and assistance of others. So powerful is the natural desire for social connection that even a person who attains some (purportedly) ideal philosophical existence of learning and contemplation “would seek to escape from his loneliness and to find someone to share his studies.”²¹ Total solitude, for Cicero, means death.²² As the Scottish thinker Adam Ferguson put it, “If we are asked therefore, where the state of nature is to be found? we may answer, it is here.”²³ Society as we find it is the state of nature.

The duties we owe to others arise primarily from “the social instinct,” and not from abstract, speculative “knowledge,” Cicero wrote.²⁴ It is this social instinct that drives us to do right by others and rewards us for the doing of it; and even a person with scant philosophical understanding can, to a high degree, act kindly and justly.²⁵

Rightly ordered love occupies a central position in De Officiis’s account of morality and the good life—somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, in a pre-​Christian work. Besides our simple need to interact with others, we harbor, deep within our souls, natural affections for other human beings.²⁶ We are called by these affections to protect and to assist, to sacrifice and to provide for, those we love. These noble sentiments impel us toward our moral duties to others; a man’s deeply felt sense of responsibility, born of his care for his loved ones, “stimulates his courage and makes it stronger for the active duties of life.”²⁷ In the pursuit of the good life, meaningful and loving relationships involve acts of service, including those undertaken at some personal cost.

Our loves begin at the hearth in our nuclear families. “We begin our public affections in our families,” as Edmund Burke wrote.²⁸ From there, Cicero held, “affection spreads gradually outwards” to other relatives, friends, neighbors, countrymen, and, finally, “the whole human race.”²⁹ Ciceronian morality dictates that we care for ourselves and our own, widening the scope of our beneficence to other, more distant persons only insofar as it can be done without detracting from our ability to provide for those closest to us.³⁰ “The interests of society will be best conserved, if kindness be shown to each individual in proportion to the closeness of his relationship,” Cicero stated.³¹ Thus, the prosperous community, in which everyone has what he needs, is constructed brick by brick, by the hands of many bricklayers, each attending dutifully to his own task.

Cicero did not believe, as some philosophers have, that the good life is to be found in austerity or reclusion, safe from the winds of politics or public life. In Ciceronian terms, human beings are both body and soul, and a true system of morality must attend to both.³² We are, by nature, self-​loving creatures, concerned especially for our own preservation and wellbeing as well as those of our families, our friends, and our little platoons; therefore, “we are not required to sacrifice our own interests and surrender to others what we need for ourselves, but each one should consider his own interests, as far as he may without injury to his neighbour’s.”³³

The necessities and luxuries of life, provided by means of agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce, along with mediating social and political institutions, require humans to collaborate and assist one another.³⁴ The program requires adherence to moral duty, Cicero contended. Every sort of human association rests upon some shared sense of justice, founded on good faith and the confidence that those with whom we associate will not harm us, rob us, or defraud us.³⁵ In the first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Friedrich Hayek said it thus: “Living as members of society and dependent for the satisfaction of most of our needs on various forms of co-​operation with others, we depend for the effective pursuit of aims clearly on the correspondence of the expectations concerning the actions of others on which our plans are based.”³⁶ Even robber bands and pirate crews operate upon some assumption of fair dealing held commonly among their members.³⁷

As C. S. Lewis notes in The Abolition of Man, certain rules of justice have obtained as the foundations of communal living across time and the whole world over, appearing in ancient China and Egypt, the Greek and Roman civilizations of classical antiquity, the old Norse lands, and beyond.³⁸ Taken together, these rules become social systems, by virtue of which individuals can reasonably expect that their persons and property will remain secure as during the course of their associations with others. If we are to obtain those relationships and material goods we desire, all human beings share an interest in strengthening the bonds of human cooperation by making good on the social duties, the duties of justice.

Cicero believed duties to country took precedence among all others, save those owed to the gods. Particularly as the storm winds of egoism, vice, and civil war tore down the republic he cherished, it is worth investigating just what he believed engagement in politics and governance had to offer men. Just as Cicero taught that moral duty demanded public service, he also taught that virtuous public service furthers the individual’s interests because a stable and just government secures, inter alia, the individual’s life, property, and liberties. Indeed, Cicero believed, “the chief purpose in the establishment of constitutional state and municipal governments was that individual property rights might be secured.”³⁹ And besides protection, “what the people have always sought is equality of rights before the law. For rights that were not open to all alike would be no rights.”⁴⁰ Such equality under the law is a sine qua non of a free people.⁴¹ It is only within such a sphere of liberty that the individual can exercise his capacity to think, plan, and act according to his judgment—to carry out his duties, provide for himself and for his family, and capitalize on his natural capacities. This vision of government, if somewhat idealized, provides an end toward which to strive.

As the saying goes, the past was a foreign country, where things were done very differently; and, indeed, the ancient world is to us an unfamiliarly dangerous and menacing place, where domestic tyrants, foreign invaders, and marauding brigands practiced murder, rape, and pillage as everyday business practices. In such a world, the law stood as a watchman against the wolves in the night. There was perpetual threat that some Great Man or seditious faction might march legions into the heart of Rome, destroy the law altogether, and rule by mere will.

Cicero was no Pollyanna. His Rome had contended with decades of strife, often instigated by unworthy characters from Gaius Marius to Lucius Cornelius Sulla to Marcus Licinius Crassus to Gaius Julius Caesar. And although he could not know it as he wrote De Officiis, the Republic would fall with Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, never again to rise. Nonetheless, Cicero certainly knew that, in this world, good cannot always prevail. The decades of Roman civil war had proved as much. Even should an all-​too-​ambitious general or would-​be tyrant secure influence or rule outright for a time, he is likely to be dogged by fears of conspiracies and betrayals, often succumbing to a traitor’s blade or an insurgent’s armies. Caesar was stabbed to death in the Senate, at the feet of the statue of his rival Pompey. The politics of rage and force, of fear, revenge, and humiliation sometimes play their parts in keeping a regime in check.

Good governments, however, do not function of their own accord; good men—statesmen and citizens alike—must take part in their operations to ensure that justice prevails and liberty remains secure.

One day in 1931, Winston Churchill read a book describing the future of the human race, in which the author imagined tremendous technological progress launching expeditions to faraway planets, allowing the citizens of this advanced society to enjoy heretofore unknown pleasures, and granting them the power to foresee the future. “But what was the good of all that to them?” Churchill inquired.⁴² “What did they know more than we know about the answers to the simple questions which man has asked since the earliest dawn of reason—‘Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Whither are we going?’”

The sentiment is unmistakably Ciceronian. Neither individuals nor societies, no matter how seemingly fortunate, can flourish without the answers to those simple questions. A conception of utile without concern for honestum can provide no more than a mirage of happiness—as many lottery winners discover.

People are what we are—and what we were, for that matter, in the dusk hours of the Roman Republic. Our nature remains obstinately unchanged. We are reasoning creatures, to be sure; but we are also social and loving creatures who seek our purpose and happiness in community with others and the labors we undertake for their sake. We labor for our families and our countries to improve our lot and those of our fellows. Churchill’s hope was Cicero’s: that human beings, however lost, can chart a course toward a better life by consulting the loves, the sentiments, and the duties inscribed upon their hearts and minds by their nature.