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Virtue cannot be the ultimate good
Virtue ethics is, arguably, the most effective general framework for moral decision making. This is because it isn’t in the business of providing universal rules of behavior, since the real world is too complicated for that. And, perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t focus on judging actions (is X moral?) But rather on the ethical self-improvement of the moral agent (am I acting virtuously?).
So far so good. In the western tradition, virtue ethics comes in a large number of flavors, including Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Skepticism, Epicureanism, and a number of others. A major divide among these schools that is rarely commented on is whether virtue, i.e., excellence of character, is the ultimate (or chief, or even only) good, or whether it is instrumental in obtaining some other, higher good.
The divide is particularly obvious if we compare the Stoics on the one hand and the Epicureans on the other hand, though similar considerations apply to the other sects. Here, for example, is Seneca:
“The matter can be imparted quickly and in very few words: “Virtue is the only good; at any rate there is no good without virtue.” (Letter LXXI.32)
Of course that qualification, “at any rate,” is important, and deviates from Stoic orthodoxy. Perhaps it is not by chance that Seneca often favorably quoted Epicurus to his friend Lucilius. Diogenes Laertius is far less equivocal:
“Zeno was the first (in his treatise On the Nature of Man) to designate as the end ‘life in agreement with nature’ (or living agreeably with nature), which is the same as a virtuous life, virtue being the goal towards which nature guides us.” (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII.87)
What about the Epicureans? Cicero, in De Officiis, directly contrasts the Stoic and Epicurean takes:
“If [the Stoic] Panaetius were the sort of man to say that virtue is worth cultivating only because it is productive of advantage, as do certain philosophers who measure the desirableness of things by the standard of pleasure or of absence of pain [i.e., the Epicureans], he might argue that expediency sometimes clashes with moral rectitude. But he is a man who judges that the morally right is the only good, and that those things which come in conflict with it have only the…
