Chapter 6 gives a survey of ethical themes in Plotinus. It begins with happiness (eudaimonia) as life at its highest degree, the life of intellect of which human soul is capable. The affairs of bodily existence have no part in this life of intellect, which is a perfect, joyful, peaceful state. To reach this state, virtue is required. Two sorts of virtue are distinguished: the ‘political’ virtues and the ‘higher’ (or ‘greater’) virtues, as stages in assimilation to the divine life of transcendent Intellect. The affairs of our bodily life concern us as souls which have a need, a natural ‘appropriation’, to take care of bodily lives, ours and that of others. Action in this bodily existence should be guided by practical wisdom, a wisdom guided by ‘premises’, i.e., norms derived from theoretical wisdom. Finally, I indicate the variety of texts composed by Plotinus’ Platonist successors where ethical themes may be found.

This book on the language of love’s joy starts with the acknowledgement that such a language has repeatedly been expressed as impossible. The poetic and vernacular tradition of joie d’amour originates in the lyrics of the troubadours, which famously sing the absence of fulfilment in the endless prolongation of desire: it is thus born in a lyrical language that presupposes its impossibility. This study on the language of love’s joy is thus grounded in the paradox that love’s joy is beyond language. The elusive nature of the emotion has resulted in a lack of studies on love’s joy. If there is an important scholarly tradition on the semantics of Old Occitan joi, this critical interest has been confined to the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and has not been picked up by the field of emotion history nor by more recent studies on medieval love literature.

Bentham gave utilitarianism its name and put it on the map, both as a philosophical theory and as a reforming social and political doctrine. In all of his philosophizing, Bentham was most fundamentally concerned with its relevance for law and, ultimately, for a distinctive kind of legal, social, and political reform. Bentham was unalterably opposed to legal and political doctrines whose only grounding was in tradition and any common sense tradition informs. This extended also to his views about morality. His defense of the principle of is not grounded, as Sidgwick will argue any moral principle must be, in intuition. But neither does Bentham ground his utilitarianism in an empiricist-naturalist metaethics, as do Cumberland and Mill, though his metaphysics certainly has that character. Bentham holds that the ultimate grounding of utilitarianism must be political. According to Bentham, the utility principle is the only one that can play the role that a moral principle must be able to play in informed noncoercive public debate. In this way, Bentham anticipates Rawls’s “political liberalism.” This chapter argues that Bentham could accept Rawls’s an emended version of Rawls’s slogan: “the principle of utility: political, not metaphysical.”

Although Mill learned Bentham’s utilitarianism literally at his father James Mill’s knee, Mill’s own version of utilitarianism departed from Bentham’s at key points. When Mill tried to live Bentham’s utilitarian doctrine as a youth, he was sent into a deep depression from which he was saved by reading the Romantic poetry and a romantic relationship with Harriet Taylor. This led him to reject Bentham’s “quantitative hedonism” in favor of a “qualitative hedonism” that emphasized intrinsic differences between different kinds of pleasures and held that some pleasures are “higher,” and therefore more valuable, than others. Here Mill’s view recalls Aristotle’s that pleasures resulting from exercising higher, distinctively human faculties and sensibilities are intrinsically better. Unlike Aristotle, however, Mill persisted in holding that his view is a version of hedonism, defended on nonteleological, empirical naturalist grounds. A second important departure from Bentham, was Mill’s holding that the deontic ideas of moral right and wrong are conceptually connected to accountability. This made him a “modern moral philosopher” by Anscombe’s definition and led him to defend, on these grounds, a utilitarian theory of rights and justice as well as a version of utilitarianism that was more like rule utilitarianism than act utilitarianism.

This chapter examines how the theological ideas discussed in Chapter 5 were successfully disseminated throughout English society. To do this it examines the religious split between the established Church of England and non-conformity. The development of the theology self-love, happiness, and interest is examined in the writings of the enormously influential philosopher and theologian Richard Cumberland. It then discusses how this evolved into Latitudinarianism, and examines printed sermons as they commented on these ethical concepts, as well as on consumption and worldly goods. The writings of the Anglican ministers Joseph Butler and Josiah Tucker are examined to show how these ideas became directly linked to economic thought. The concurrent development of non-conformist theology relating to the same concepts is traced through the writings of John Locke on the mind, and the dairy of the student lawyer Dudley Ryder. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and his theory of polite sociability is also investigated to show how it provided a less austere means to disseminate Locke’s psychology of the mind. Central to this investigation will be the process by which individual selves were able to become comfortable with trusting new institutions by using the concept of interest as a form of commitment.

When Nietzsche disparaged the “English utilitarians” in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, he was referring to followers of Jeremy Bentham, most prominently to John Stuart Mill, whose Utilitarianism was published in 1861 and 1863. Mill took the term “utilitarianism” from Bentham. There was, however, a lot of utilitarian theorizing before Bentham, much of it quite sophisticated. That is the subject of the present chapter. The leading figures with whom we are concerned are Richard Cumberland, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, George Berkeley, John Gay, and William Paley. Hutcheson and Hume are especially important figures, although both are known as virtue theorists. Hutcheson was the first to formulate the “greatest happiness principle” in English, and Bentham wrote that he read the proto-utilitarian passages in Hume’s Treatise, he felt as if the “scales had fallen from his eyes.” Another important influence on Bentham was Paley. The inspiration for Mill’s utilitarianism in his turn, however, was decidedly Bentham. This chapter surveys the roots of nineteenth-century utilitarianism in the natural law theory of Cumberland, the theological voluntarism of Berkeley, and the virtue theories of Hutcheson and Hume. Hutcheson put forward a sophisticated utilitarian theory of rights, and Berkeley, a version of rule utilitarianism.

This chapter moves from examining institutional changes to the cultural history of morals and emotions, by examining how the evolution of the idea of the self came to supplant the institutional mediation of local law courts. It traces how three concepts – self-love, happiness, and interest – were developed and disseminated as religious and interpersonal ethics, all related to the development of the self within the singular mind. This was a crucial move that allowed the idea and practice of savings to move from taking the form of a debt owed, to the interest-bearing capital described above. It also validated the crucial concept of interest within religion, and this was related to the increasing moral acceptance of the interest rate. Although a legal interest rate had existed from the Elizabethan Act of 1571, interest rates are difficult to find mentioned explicitly in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth, however, they had become commonplace.

The final book of the Tusculans is intended to bring together the results of the preceding books in two ways. It concludes the argument that virtue is sufficient for happiness, where that is understood as invulnerable tranquillity and peace of mind. The book also fills out its opening praise of philosophy, understood as Academic sceptical method. However, the forceful final coda raises problems of philosophical consistency which, when examined carefully, cannot be reconciled with the book’s initial aims.

This chapter focuses on Cicero’s treatment of the emotions in Books 3 and 4, and more specifically on his account of the dispute between the Stoics and the Peripatetics. At first sight, the dispute seems uncomplicated: the Stoics advocate the complete absence of emotions whereas the Peripatetics hold that emotions should rather be moderated or controlled. But Cicero’s stress on the idea that emotions are beliefs seems to come at the expense of other central parts of the theory of emotions, most prominently the theory of action.  I argue that these features of his presentation serve him in securing a thesis that he is keen to defend in Book 5: that virtue guarantees happiness and that this happiness is invulnerable to the accidents of fortune.