Happy even under torture?

Cicero 106 BC · 43 BCTrue law is right reason in agreement with nature.

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What it claims

Virtue suffices for happiness: the wise man is always happy, even in torment.

Why

Happiness needs a good that cannot be lost, and only virtue qualifies, since it depends on nothing but ourselves.

In short

"Happy even under torture?" is an argument by Cicero (Tusculan Disputations, V, 29-44; V, 80-87) on the question "What is happiness?" (answer: virtue and wisdom). Its claim: Virtue suffices for happiness: the wise man is always happy, even in torment. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Tusculan Disputations, V, 29-44; V, 80-87

Valid with an implicit premise

Is virtue enough to be happy? Can one be happy in prison, sick, exiled, even under torture? Cicero wrote this book shortly after his daughter's death, sidelined from power by Caesar. He defends the hardest answer, the Stoics': yes, the wise man is always happy. But he admits himself that everything depends on one thesis: that pain and misfortune are not real evils.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a virtuous wise man, whose virtue is stable, for whom only the honourable is good, and who nevertheless suffers a real evil on the wheel: he is not happy.

Valid with P4. P1 and P2 show that virtue is the right candidate: a good that fortune cannot take back. But to conclude that the wise man is happy under torture, torture must also not be a real evil (P4). Cicero says so himself: "if these are evils, who can guarantee that the wise man will always be happy?". P4 is the premise the Peripatetics reject. Cicero, as an Academic, then shows that even they, if consistent, should grant the wise man a happy life, if not a perfectly happy one.

Analogy. A musician loses his violin in a fire. Has he lost his music? The violin was his, but the music is what he became by playing. For Cicero, virtue is like the musician's music: a fire can take everything except that.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

The listener (in the dialogue) attacks premise 4

One can remain just, brave and dignified in the midst of torments: one then lives well, but not happily. Your virtues marching together to the rack make a fine picture. But prudence itself sees that not all good people are happy: we remember Regulus, tortured to death by the Carthaginians.

Cicéron replies

Cicéron

That happiness should stay alone at the prison door while all the virtues march to the torture would be shameful. But it is impossible: the virtues cannot hold together without happiness, nor happiness without them. They will drag it along with them, to whatever torture they are led.

The debate goes on (our summary) Cicero answers the image with an image: he asserts that the virtues and happiness are inseparable, without showing here how one can be happy on the rack. Everything still rests on P4: pain and torture would not be real evils.

Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) 330 BC · attacks premise 3

Happiness also needs external goods: it is hard to act well without resources, friends or health. Those who say that a man on the rack, or struck by great misfortunes, is happy if he is good are talking nonsense, whether they mean to or not.

Cicéron replies

Cicéron

Even granting the Peripatetics three kinds of goods, a trade is called profitable if it gains much more than it loses. Likewise, a life in which the goods of the soul far outweigh the rest can be called happy. By their own principles, Aristotle, Xenocrates, Speusippus and Polemon can therefore say, without leaving their principles, that happiness follows virtue even into Phalaris's bull.

The debate goes on (our summary) Aristotle, for his part, wrote the opposite (passage quoted), and so did his pupil Theophrastus: he praised the line "fortune, not wisdom, rules life". Cicero grants the line is feeble, but judges that nothing could be "more consistent" with Theophrastus's principles (V, 24-25). Cicero himself, a few pages earlier, found it inconsistent to speak of a life "happy but not entirely" (V, 23): his reply to the Peripatetics grants them only happiness in a broad sense.

Martha Nussbaum (The Fragility of Goodness) 1986 · attacks premise 2

Virtue itself is not safe from fortune. Extreme misfortune can break the character of a good person, like Hecuba in Euripides' tragedy, turned cruel after the death of her children. Pretending that virtue depends on us alone means refusing to see our vulnerability, which is also what gives our attachments their value.

no reply

summary: their text is not yet in our corpus

No reply possible: objection raised in 1986, after the author's death (-43).

The debate goes on (our summary) A Stoic would answer that someone whom misfortune turns cruel did not have the wise man's perfect virtue. But in On Friendship (18), Cicero has Laelius say that no mortal has yet attained that wisdom. The thesis then becomes almost impossible to test: if someone is broken, one will say they were not truly wise.