Plotinus provided an explanation of evil which was original and philosophically challenging. While deriving everything from one source, the absolute transcendent Good, Plotinus does not trivialize the phenomenon of evil or reduce it to human moral deviation, as do other philosophical and religious approaches, but traces evil back to a metaphysical principle, matter, the source of evil in the world and in human souls. In Chapter 11 I present Plotinus’ account of evil and discuss to what extent it can be defended against a series of criticisms formulated by Plotinus’ successors, in particular by Proclus.

This chapter addresses three questions that arise from Hume’s observations about character in the Treatise: whether Hume can talk about enduring traits that constitute character, given his depiction of the mind as in flux; whether character is “objective” or a creation of spectators; and whether Hume’s treatment of virtue and vice is only descriptive of how we derive our moral categories. I argue, first, that since Hume distinguishes between the feeling of a motive and its causal efficacy, he can observe that, while feelings may be fluid, character is determined by which has the force to produce action consistently. Second, the contingency of moral categories on human nature is not the same as creation of the features that fall under those categories. Third, Hume both describes our process of moral discrimination and offers guidance about making judgments of virtue and vice. However, he is not defending his view of moral character but employing the norms that arise from human practices.

In this chapter, I argue, drawing primarily on passages from the Philebus, the Republic and the Laws, that Plato understands comedy to be, in essence, an imitation of laughable people, where the notion of the laughable, or to geloion, is a normative one that picks out what genuinely merits laughter, and not necessarily what people actually laugh at. According to Plato, the only thing that merits laughter is moral vice, in particular the vice of self-ignorance. I formulate four constraints on ideal comedy on Plato’s behalf: the veridical constraint, which holds that only what is genuinely laughable, that is, moral vice, should be imitated as laughable; the educative constraint, which holds that comedic imitation must aim at educating the audience by encouraging them to reject vice in their own lives; the emotional constraint, which holds that the comedic imitation should cause appropriate and appropriately moderate emotional reactions; and the political constraint, which holds that only moral and political enemies should be portrayed as laughable.

Before gays and lesbians could claim their full rights as Americans, they needed to overcome a host of laws and legal practices that created an imposing barrier to reform. This chapter provides a brief overview of the antiqueer world of mid-century America, detailing the myriad laws and policies that kept gays and lesbians out of public life. It then examines how and why lawmakers began decriminalizing homosexuality, detailing the demise of sexual psychopath, consensual sodomy, and vagrancy laws. It argues that the key to these changes was not lawyers, legislators, or judges, but rather sociologists – more specifically, Alfred Kinsey. His research revealed that same-sex intimacy was far from aberrant, which undermined the assumption on which the laws were based. His work influenced the thinking of leading legal scholars and advocates, who pressed for law reform.

This chapter notes that current scholarship on Augustine’s idea of pagan virtue and current scholarship on his political thought contain different, and conflicting, interpretations of his notions of virtue and vice, or sin. This chapter proposes that to determine which interpretation is correct we need to situate Augustine’s moral thought in relation to the ancient moral tradition of eudaimonism. Oliver O’Donovan and Nicholas Wolterstorff have proposed that Augustine broke with classical eudaimonism, but this chapter argues that their interpretation of the Stoic and Platonic tradition in eudaimonism is incorrect, and that a correct understanding of this tradition leads to the conclusion that Augustine in fact remained faithful to the eudaimonist approach to ethics.

This chapter asks whether Augustine criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that there was something fundamentally flawed about the eudaimonist approach to ethics, or whether he criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that these philosophies had insufficiently understood eudaimonism itself. It finds that the latter explanation is correct: in reaching this conclusion, this chapter establishes that Augustine defined virtue and vice, or sin, from within the eudaimonist tradition, making use of the ideas of love as eros and philia, and of the highest good, or summum bonum.

This chapter argues that, unlike Dio in his Euboean Oration, in which the countryside is always presented positively and the city almost wholly negatively, Longus does not make his rustics entirely virtuous or his city-dwellers wholly bad. I differentiated between virtues of ἦθος, ‘character’, and virtues of πρᾶξις, ‘action’, illustrating the differences between those of the country and of the city by an analytical table. I noted especially Longus’ presentation of piety and impiety, of deception and of artifice, and of fear and boldness, concluding that the country’s vices prompt readers to reflection as much as do its virtues.

This chapter focuses on Neoplatonist engagements with the issue of life worth living as represented in the philosophy of Plotinus. The Platonic metaphysics and ethics regards the highest form of life as the life of pure intellection, and the materiality of the body in strongly negative terms as the limiting and potentially corrupting influence on the soul. Therefore, the question about the conditions of a life worth living emerges specifically as a question about the worth of embodied life. Is it worthwhile for the immortal soul to descend into bodies, and to remain there until the bond between body and soul dissolves naturally? Plotinus’s attempts to answer this questions are best viewed in terms of a negotiation between the anti-corporealist stance, according to which disembodied existence is always better for the soul, and an acknowledgment that the embodied condition is good for the soul, insofar as it enables the realisation of some of its capacities.

In the Aristotelian ethics after Aristotle, there are two major discussions of the conditions for a worthwhile life found in a Peripatetic doxography preserved by Stobaeus and in an Academic theory of Antiochus Ascalon, heavily inspired by Peripatetic views, reported in Book 5 of Cicero’s On Ends. We see in these texts a tendency, under the influence of anti-Stoic polemic, towards a greater explicitness but also a radicalisation of some views about the life worth living that go back to Aristotle’s own ethical works. The tendency to explicitness can be exemplified by the introduction of the notion of an ‘intermediate life’, that is, a life that is not happy but still worth living. The most striking example of radicalisation is the claim that irreparably vicious humans not only do not have a life not worth living, but that they should hasten to die. The chapter also contains a discussion of an account of the value of life by Alexander Aphrodisias, which in interesting ways develops and qualifies Aristole’s view that mere living in itself is non-instrumentally valuable.

In the mirror literature, power and sovereignty are identified with the king’s person. The king’s conduct established a model, which his subjects would follow; consequently, the ruler’s actions and behaviour determined the nature of the polity. The king’s cultivation of virtue is, in consequence, a pragmatic as well as a moral imperative. The mirror-writers insist on the importance of the king’s self-discipline as a prerequisite for his governing other people; if he is unable to govern himself, he will be incapable of governing anyone else. The three extracts in this section describe the virtuous and effective king. From different perspectives, they treat some of the ethical and philosophical problems of human nature; in particular, they discuss how to strengthen, acquire and practise virtues and how to overcome and eradicate vices. The texts in this section are drawn from Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib, Kutadgu bilig; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; and Kaykāʾūs, Qābūsnāmeh.

Is hope a virtue? Not necessarily. We hope for many things, some of them good, some bad. What we do or don’t do about our hopes may also reflect on us, for better or for worse. Is hope pleasurable or comforting? Again, not necessarily. Hope may involve anxiety and pain. What about hopes in as well as for others? As good and generous as such hopes may sound, even they are not necessarily virtuous. If hope appears an unqualified good to you, independent of any specific context, it is likely for one of two reasons: first, you belong to or have been influenced by one of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), in which faith-based hope counts as a virtue; second, you are a political liberal. Starting with supporters of the French Revolution, hope has served as shorthand for progressive politics. I start my literary history with the classical counterpoint, in which hope is at best problematic, something in need of regulation and restraint if not extirpation. I then turn to Judeo-Christianity, and European and American Romanticism, and offer a preliminary sketch of the reasons why hope features as a good thing in these over-lapping but distinct contexts.

What should we make of the glaring absence of the emperor Nero from Seneca’s Epistulae morales – not mentioned once in 124, often lengthy, letters, written by a man who had been for many years one of his closest associates? Although Seneca does sometimes allude to the question of how frank advice may be offered to the powerful, the letters barely touch on imperial politics, beyond advising their addressee that he would be better off withdrawing from the public sphere. Yet if Nero is not present explicitly, there are a number of respects in which Nero’s domination of others as well as his failure to exercise control over himself are constructed as implicit and potent anti-models in the letters. When Seneca reflects on the dynamics of vice in its more florid and imaginative forms (the examples analyzed here are letters 90 and 114), his terms frequently resonate quite specifically with ancient accounts of Neronian Rome (notably those of Tacitus and Suetonius) and other works of Neronian literature (particularly Petronius and Persius). As it turns out, highly refined vices even play a notable role in Seneca’s model of the development of philosophy.

This chapter illustrates that envy’s ethical dimensions are varied and complex. A paradigmatic case of vicious (spiteful) envy that is both morally and prudentially bad is slowly altered. The details relevant for the normative assessment are changed, while the core psychological features are left untouched, so that in succession there is a case of envy that is morally bad but not prudentially bad (aggressive), a case of envy that is prudentially bad but not morally bad (inert), and finally a case of envy that is neither prudentially nor morally bad (emulative). Through the different variations, the emotional episode keeps satisfying all the conditions set out in the definition of envy, and thus should be recognized as such. The chapter ends by arguing that emulative envy can be a virtuous emotion, and highlighting the taxonomy’s implications for moral education.

Morality is about right and wrong. There is the question of what we should do, substantive ethics, and the question of why we should do what we do, metaethics. There is little if any real difference between Ruse and Davies at the substantive level. At the metaethical level, Ruse takes a subjective view and Davies an objective view, but in important respects there is shared belief. Both ground morality in human nature. Right and wrong at the substantive level is a matter of who and what we are. Kindness to children is a good thing, because that is natural for humans. Hate of the disabled is wrong, because that is unnatural. But whereas Ruse grounds human nature in Darwinian evolutionary theory, and believes that there is no extra appeal to authority, and so is subjective, Davies grounds human nature in God’s loving creation, and hence in this sense is objective. An action is good is because God made us that way, and to do the right thing is to do the (God-created) natural thing.

The final chapter reads Othello as a study in the failure of Venetian republicanism to manage global and racial heterogeneity. And also as a play shot through with Seneca. Othello originally presents himself as an embodiment of Ciceronian decorum, reconciling in himself the various personae discussed in Cicero’s De Officiis. But in Cyprus, under the influence of Iago, he opts for a different, Senecan mode of constant self-performance, one that is more individualistic and less social in its orientation. Iago, who imagines himself to be in a revenge play, likewise has a Senecan psychological profile, derived from the virtuosity and weird projective psychology of Seneca’s Atreus. By persuading Othello to abandon belief in a republican public arena, he is able to steer Othello into becoming a Senecan monster like himself – one who then is seen by others as embodying the racial stereotypes discussed in the previous chapter. Othello imagines his suicide as being purgative, like the death of Hercules in the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus.