Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Welcome back to the On Duties Podcast. This is episode nine. This is a the podcast is a production of the Ciceronian Society. We are reading through Cicero's work On Duties chapter by chapter with a half hour episode every Wednesday throughout 2026. So we hope you'll read with us. A link to the version we' using the Griffin Atkins translation from Cambridge is in the show notes below. The description of this episode. There's also a link to a free online translation, slightly different, but you can still follow with us. So we hope you'll join us through the remainder of this podcast. Go back and start listening at the beginning. If you wish, we'd be happy to have you join us and share your comments and ideas with us as we go through this important text by Cicero.
I am Chris Anadale.
I teach philosophy at Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland. Joining me today for the first time on the podcast is my friend, Dr. Ethan Alexander Davy of Campbell University. Ethan, why don't you introduce yourself?
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Sure. Thanks, Chris. So I teach political theory and constitutional law at Campbell University.
And well, today, today I was teaching Hobbes. So it's quite a joy to talk about Cicero after the unpleasantness of human nature that one encounters in Hobbes.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Well, there's certainly. I've remarked before that there's this, that Machiavelli certainly sets up sort of targets among moderns, target Cicero for a great deal of his criticism and Hobbes certainly a radically different vision of political theory, of the origin of the state, the nature of political ethics. Right.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Indeed.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Indeed.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Virtue ethics versus not right.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Right.
So we have read through with the help of some of our previous guests, Josh Bowman and Catherine from the previous episodes, the episodes on the chapters in the book on justice. So we're just coming to the end.
We've gotten up through Chapter 40 of Book 1 of On Duties. We're just about at the end of his treatment of justice proper. We're about to get into Cicero's treatment of the other half of social virtue.
Not justice proper, but liberality or generosity. That is the actions that we take because of our justice, according to each person and the station of each person in order to fulfill our duties.
So we'll begin here with chapter 41. This is on page 18 of our translation. Ethan, I think I'll read first and we'll take turns doing commentary, working through the next few chapters.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Sounds good.
Thanks.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Enough has been said about the duties of war.
Let us remember also that justice must be maintained even towards the lowliest, the lowliest Condition and fortune is that of slaves. The instruction we are given to treat them as if they were employees is good advice.
That one should require work from them and grant to them just treatment.
There are two ways in which injustice may be done, either through force or through deceit. And deceit seems to belong to a little fox, force to a lion.
Both of them seem most alien to a human being. But deceit deserves a greater hatred.
And out of all injustice, nothing deserves punishment more than that of men who just at the time when they are most betraying trust, act in such a way that they might appear to be good men.
I have now said enough about justice.
So that's book one, chapter 41 of On Duties. Ethan, what are your comments on that? What do you think?
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you just mentioned how Machiavelli is in dialogue with Cicero here, and that's something we need to mention. But the first thing here is that, and we'll see more about this in the later passages, is that for Cicero, we owe something to everyone. So even slaves deserve some kind of justice.
And that's not something to dismiss there. So he says that we should treat our slaves as though they were hired workers, which means they have some dignity that we ought to respect if we can.
And again, we'll see later on that he sets up a sort of a hierarchy about what we owe to different sorts of people, depending on their status and depending on their relations with us.
And then his denunciation of the fox, the fox like character who relies on deception, who pretends to be good.
And of course, this is the.
The very behavior that Machiavelli recommended in the Prince.
Well, be a fox when necessary and be a lion when necessary. But for Cicero, to be a fox is ignoble, is hateful.
To pretend to be something that you're not, and especially to pretend to be good when you are not. So the manipulative politician for Cicero is think and deserves the greater hatred here. I think that's significant as well.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Right. I think you're exactly right on both scores. I think I noted here my first thought was the treatment of justice towards slaves is handled in a single sentence. And I thought at first, well, it's a bit hard on the slaves. On the other hand, one might say, well, what more is there to say other than you must treat them with a minimum level of justice? They too deserve this sort of place in the community. So the Roman practice of allowing them to be killed with impunity, to be punished arbitrarily, is inappropriate. They should be treated like employees without going into a large scale ethical critique of the institution of slavery. This seems like Cicero just stating what would be a kind of common, I'll say common wisdom, but a, a general attitude of one must maintain justice even towards the lowly. If one treats them below a certain standard, one is offended justice even though there's no power behind the, the institution of the slave to, to strike back at you or to defend them. So that seems like it fits in with the sort of stoic idea of a community of humanity.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Indeed.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: And I think you're quite right also about the, the treatment of deceit. He doesn't really go out of his way to justify this except to say that both of these are bad. But the more hateful one, the more anti human one is the one that puts up the pretense right that lies to you as well as doing violence to you as well as offending justice sort of offends honesty and sort of breaks faith with the human race maybe twice instead of just once.
Does that make sense to you?
[00:07:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's fair. The other thing that occurred to me is that again this is the old honor ethic that to be open about what one is doing is more honorable than to deceive. So I think this maybe owes something to that old warrior code. Perhaps that is part of, or maybe the more primitive version of the kind of honor that, that Cicero is promoting.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Right. No, that makes perfect sense. That reminds me of something Nietzsche says about the.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Yes, I was thinking about Nietzsche too.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Nobility would address each other as we truthful ones. We ones who don't have to deceive, who don't lower ourselves to lie about the violence that we do. So interesting. It's certainly not a Nietzschean, but someone who's looking at a sort of similar honor based understanding of the solidarity between human beings.
Ethan, why don't you pick up chapter 42 and we'll talk about that next.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Yes, next I must do as I proposed and speak about beneficence and liberality.
Nothing is more suited to human nature than this. But there are many caveats for first, one must see that kindness harms neither the very people one, neither the very people whom one seems to be treating kindly, nor others.
Next. That one's kindness does not exceed one's capabilities and then that kindness is bestowed upon each person according to his standing. Indeed that is fundamental to justice to which all these things ought to be referred. For those who do someone a favor in such a way that they harm him whom they appear to want to Assist should be judged neither beneficent nor liberal, but dangerous flatterers, those who, in order to be liberal towards some harm others, fall into the same injustice as if they had converted someone else's possessions to their own account.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Okay, thank you.
If I could take first comment on this.
We're moving now from justice into liberality or generosity, the kind of actions that follow upon justice, that sort of act out one's duties, one's officia towards other people. It'll obviously be dependent upon who those other people are and who I am.
But we get, in a sense, three different varieties, three different warnings about beneficence in this opening chapter.
First, do no harm.
Second, don't exceed your own capacities. Don't give more than you ought, given who you are and the resources that you have.
And then lastly, perhaps most importantly, which he'll take the most time to talk about in the coming chapters, give to each person according to their standing. So we don't give equally. We don't feel equally beneficent to everyone because we don't owe an equal obligation of justice to everyone. We owe duties, the duties. And paying what is needful to each person depends upon our relationship to each of those people.
Do you have any thoughts to follow on that?
[00:11:00] Speaker A: Well, I do, but I wanted to start by introducing some broader characteristics here that occurred to me when reading these passages, and then I'll come back to this specific passage.
So in this section and in this book generally, Cicero and I have a copy of the the Latin as well in the Law of Classical edition. So I've been looking at that as well.
My Latin is far from perfect, but I can at least recognize key terms.
And so there's this distinction that goes on through these sections of the book, where Cicero describes homo liber, the free man, and sometimes homo liberalis, the liberal or generous man.
And that is contrasted with what he elsewhere calls homo sordidus.
We can recognize our word sordid in there. So the sordid man, the vulgar or the base man.
And so when I saw that distinction, it made me think of someone else who's been featured in these podcasts, especially with respect to Homo sordidus, the vulgar man, Philip Rieff. So Philip Riff describes the modern psychological man. And I think Cicero's Homo sordidus is a lot like that. So this is the man who lives according to his uncultivated passions.
And so in one of Philip Rief's versions of this, this is the kind of person who lets it all hang out. So that sort of uncultivated person who follows his passions where they lead him.
Whereas for Cicero, the free man, Homo liber, is not free in the modern sense. He is very disciplined.
He has to acquire all of these virtues and live according to all of these rules.
In the older translation I have, Homo liber is often translated as the gentleman, or being a gentleman, which I think is an appropriate translation, especially in 1915 when that translation came out. So the free man, the gentleman, is the one who has to cultivate these virtues which he's going to discuss here in himself and also try to foster those virtues in others.
So I think that's maybe one way of looking at the project that Cicero is engaged in when he's discussing these different virtues, liberality being the first one that comes up here.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: Well, that's excellent. I appreciate, always appreciate a reference to Philip Rieff and a way to bring him in and popularize him. We've talked about him recently in some episodes of our other podcast, the Sower. And of course, you and I both contributed essays to the Philosophy of Philip Reif, an edited volume that came out last year. I'll put a link to that, that book and some of those episodes. In the description of this episode, I was thinking this. This is maybe from the sublime to the ridiculous. But one thing that pops into my head listening to what you've had to say as well, is an example from a very different source, which was Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.
It is said, I think, in the Jungle Book of the Bandar Log, the monkey people said of them rather contemptuously, they have no law. They merely do what they want.
There are people without law. So the idea of having law. This is, of course, Kipling writing in his own place and time, you know, not too far removed from the 1915 of the gentleman translation about fictional animal people. But the distinction between the law governed the lieber, the one who is disciplined enough to be free, versus the one who is not. And so it's just sort of spread out and wasted across the sort of low or base kind of freedom.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Yes, right. That's exactly the point I was trying to make.
And about this particular passage, maybe the one thing that might be surprising to people. Well, I suppose it might be surprising that Cicero says that what we owe to another depends on his standing. I think in the original Latin, it's a dignitatis, like dignity. So it depends on the worthiness of the person.
Are we as well. Okay, you could pose this question a few different ways. Are we as Christians, to think of the worthiness of the recipient? Or are we, as modern humanitarians, to think about the worthiness of the recipient? For Cicero, you do.
And also we have to make a judgment.
If we have a duty to help, we have a duty to understand or to make a judgment about whether our help is actually going to be good for that person. And if it's not, then we will not give him that assistance if we think it would harm him. So again, that's the. Well, maybe that's the gentleman there using his superior judgment to judge what other people need. And that also, I don't know, might be surprising or challenging to modern ethicists.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: I would think, certainly the more sort of egalitarian our instincts and our intuitions are, the more we might sort of stumble over the idea both of the judgment used in rendering generosity and also the idea that some people are of greater dignity. So one would be generous towards a king or a prince or a superior in a different way from being generous towards a slave or a child or someone else. But we'll let Cicero, I think, speak to the specific question of stations. Why don't I take up sections 43 and 44 together, and I'll offer you first comment on those.
There are, though many, especially those greedy for renown and glory, who steal from one group the very money that they lavish upon another.
They think that they will appear beneficent towards their friends if they enrich them by any method whatsoever.
But that is so far from being a duty that in fact nothing could be more opposed to duty.
We should therefore see that the liberality we exercise in assisting our friends does not harm anyone.
Consequently, the transference of money by Lucius Sulla and Gaius Caesar from its lawful owners to others ought not to be seen as liberal. Nothing is liberal if it is not also just.
The second need for caution is lest one's kindness exceeds one's capabilities.
For those who want to, kinder than their possessions allow, first go wrong by being unjust to those nearest to them, they transfer to strangers resources which would more fairly be provided for or left to them.
Usually there lurks within such liberality a greediness, greediness to plunder and deprive unjustly, so that resources may be available for lavish gifts.
One can see that most men are not so much liberal by nature as drawn by a kind of glory. And in order to be seen to be beneficent, they do many things that appear to stem not from goodwill, but from ostentation.
Such pretense is closer to Sham than either to liberality or honorableness.
So a couple of important points in those two chapters covering the first two points that were given us back in section 42. Ethan, what are your thoughts?
[00:19:09] Speaker A: Well, we have a very elegant denunciation of Sulla and Caesar here. Right. So the two dictators.
But he says it very.
With a great deal of elegance and care. But essentially he's saying about them, it is not liberal, it is not generous to give property to people that you have stolen from others. Right. And Sulla and Caesar both, as I think Sulla was, had, had been declared dictator at that point.
They both had the ability to confiscate the property of some and give it to their cronies, to their friends, in order to gain the support of people to make themselves look like they were generous, they were liberal because they have this bounty to give, but they were able to do that by stealing from other citizens. So it is not generous to give stolen goods in order to make yourself look good.
That's the simple way of putting what he says there.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: Right. Certainly a lesson with some political resonance in the present day.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: Right.
To tax someone for the purpose of charity from that point of view would not be generous.
It's a different sort of thing. Using compulsion to lavish goods on someone by compelling others to give, in effect.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: Well, you're saying, in fact, it's so far, it's the polar opposite of generosity, we might say.
And he's still this idea that nothing is liberal if it is not also just. So justice is our sort of outer limit of everything liberal and generous. There's not going to be any kind of sort of purely relational generosity that we might want. If we're thinking in Machiavelli's way. If you violated justice, you can't claim to, you know, have this generosity or liberality about you.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: That's right, yeah.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: Then chapter 44 is a warning against giving beyond your ability.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: Which he suggests, first off, if you give beyond your ability, you are stealing, as it were, from the people who had a clearer or higher title to the goods that you're giving. If I give away the mortgage money to the homeless man on the street, my wife and my children to whom I had a duty to pay that mortgage for their benefit, would justly complain, would complain that I had violated my. My duties of justice towards them.
What more do you think we can get out of this chapter?
[00:22:04] Speaker A: Well, I mean, this also might have some resonance for, say, the modern conception of humanitarianism, that perhaps we should give money to people who are on the other side of the planet and help them, perhaps at the expense of providing the best living or education for our own family.
To deprive those to whom one has the most demanding duties for the sake of helping someone farther afield, that's not something that Cicero would support.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Right. Right. We're getting here to issues of telescopic philanthropy which has been observed since the time of Dickens, and the question of what we owe to our fellow human beings. Is it just a sort of general obligation that follows to them because they are human, or is it somehow proportioned to their nearness to us, as though proximity were the only factor? Or, as Cicero is clearly assuming here, are we embedded in a network of social relations, each of which carries a certain kind of needfulness and duty must pay. So I must pay this duty to my parents and this duty to my children and this duty to my close friends and this duty to my acquaintances, such that there's almost a kind of content of that ethical duty that is given to me by the very character of the relationship. And as you pointed out before, the dignitas of the other party that may be also relative to mine.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: Right. And also, again, as he suggests here, one who tries to escape from those particular duties is doing so probably out of ostentation, wants to show off.
And that would be the only.
That's the motive that one would expect to find for someone who is willing to take money from his family and give it to someone much farther afield.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: I think we're getting close to something like Ordo Amoris, which came up in the American political context somewhat recently. Last year was discussed by political figures and commentators.
What's the nature of my duties to my fellow citizens, to resident aliens, to people abroad, et cetera? So I don't want to get into any of those political issues directly right here.
Why don't we try to read chapter 45, and we'll wrap up this episode and return next week to continue talking about liberality. Ethan, would you care to read that one?
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Yes.
The third point I had laid down was that one should, when exercising beneficence, make choices according to standing. Here we should look both at the conduct of the man on whom we are conferring a kindness and at the spirit in which he views us at the association and fellowship of our lives together and at the dutiful services that he has previously carried out for our benefit. It is desirable that all such considerations should come together.
If they do not, then the more numerous and more important grounds will carry more weight.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: All right. Thank you. So book one, chapter 45, an introduction to what's really going to occupy us through the whole rest of this treatment of liberality. A walkthrough of the different kinds of relationships that I would have, the different kinds of standings or dignity which people would have which would dictate the level of generosity in terms of my material goods and also my time and attention that I would be willing to give in order to pay off what is needful in each case. And as he said before, the goal of justice and liberality is to pay what is due and not more than what's due and not more than one's capacity to give. And I would just note here, he starts broad and then he becomes more specific. And then he says the proper judgment will take all of these factors into account and select the right level of generosity of liberality towards that particular person at this place in time. So we go from the conduct of the person, his attitude towards us, the association of our lives, the services he's provided to us in the past, all of those things, we're getting into a kind of prudential judgment that's required for each particular act of generosity.
So this is setting us up for the next 10 or 15 chapters or so of this book. Any further comment, Ethan?
[00:26:36] Speaker A: Well, this is obvious, but the liberality. We have liberality to maintain relationships. That's the function that it's performing is to maintain our relationships with other people.
And we have to make judgments about those relationships in order to maintain them.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: Very good. Absolutely. And that's important to remember here, that generosity here is considered under the virtue of justice. That is, this is. It's precisely in order to serve the common good of the body politic, to maintain the relationships by giving what is appropriate and needful, to maintain each relationship that the whole republic, the whole city and all the families and all the relationships involved are maintained and kept healthy so that the. The polity functions well and we are related to each other as human beings ought to be.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Indeed.
[00:27:28] Speaker B: Well, we're at about the half hour mark now. I think this is a good time to wrap up this episode for this week of the On Duties podcast. I hope you'll join us again next Wednesday. I'm Chris Anadale, this is Ethan, Alexander, Davey, and we will be coming back to talk with you next week next Wednesday about book one, chapter 46 and beyond, more about liberality. Thanks so much for watching.
Goodbye.
