The Highest Good

The Epicurean position, presented by Torquatus in Book I, holds that pleasure (voluptas) is the natural and evident highest good: all creatures, from birth, pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Epicurus distinguishes between kinetic pleasures (active enjoyment) and katastematic pleasures (a stable, painless state of body and mind), arguing that the latter — ataraxia (tranquillity of mind) and aponia (freedom from bodily pain) — constitute the highest pleasure. Cicero's Torquatus presents this as a naturalistic claim about the architecture of desire, not a hedonistic call to excess. Cicero's critique in Book II focuses on the impoverished conception of virtue this entails: if virtue is merely instrumentally valuable as a means to pleasure, then in circumstances where courage or justice reduce net pleasure, there is no reason to be virtuous.

The Stoic position, presented by Cato the Younger in Book III, holds that virtue (arete/virtus) is the only genuine good and that all other things — health, wealth, pleasure, even life itself — are "indifferent" (adiaphora). A rational being who has virtue is fully happy even on the rack; external circumstances contribute nothing to eudaimonia. Cicero is attracted to this view's moral seriousness but questions its psychological plausibility. The claim that a healthy person in comfortable circumstances is no happier than a virtuous person being tortured seems to confuse the logical claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness with the empirical claim that nothing else matters to how one feels.

Cicero's own method in De Finibus is that of the New Academy: in the absence of certainty, we follow the most persuasive argument. He finds the Stoic account closest to the truth — virtue is the highest good — while allowing that the complete elimination of external goods from the account of happiness is philosophically untenable. The practical upshot is a demanding but not inhuman ethics: cultivate virtue as the primary end, treat health and circumstances as preferred indifferents that reasonable people will pursue without making happiness depend on them.

De Finibus is Cicero's most technically accomplished philosophical work and our primary source for the ethical theories of Panaetius, Carneades, and Antiochus of Ascalon. Its influence on Renaissance humanist ethics — especially Petrarch and Valla — was formative.