Summary and concluding remarks
In the introduction, we recalled that Epicureans understand philosophy as a ‘physiology' aimed at dissolving empty opinions and the vain desires and fears grounded in them, with the ultimate goal of attaining peace of mind.
Among such empty opinions are those that can concern justice. Epicurus (PD 37), Hermarchus (Porphyry, Abst. 1.12, 3), and Polystratus do not have in mind - or, at least, not primarily - the Platonic idea of justice. Instead, they write in debate with those who derive the conventionality or non-existence of justice from the geographical diversity and temporal variability of what is just. The Epicureans are not opposed to a view of justice that minimizes its variability; on the contrary, they recognize that this is inherent in its peculiar ontological status. On the one hand, the Epicureans analyse the just as a modality of the useful and employ the Hellenistic category of the relative [ τo πρoς τι]; on the other hand, they maintain that the just represents conformity with a collective purpose established by human beings as a result of their evolution, as is language, family or technology.At first sight, the combination of these explanatory schemas seems to play out in favour of the conventionality of what is fair. For the Epicureans, the opposite is true. The just is not conventional because it is constrained by conformity to the purpose established in the first pacts of human communities (‘neither harming one another nor being harmed'), which, as Hermarchus and Lucretius emphasize, enabled the survival of the human species. However, as such conformity is always operative in determined circumstances, these circumstances constitute an inexorable and thus natural prerequisite for conformity. As a result, the geographical diversity and temporal variability of the just coheres, in the Epicureans' view, with the unconventional nature of what is just.
Another result of the genealogical approach to the just and to the laws is the capacity to distinguish between these concepts.
For the Epicureans, the just precedes the laws, both logically and chronologically. What is just is established as that which is in accordance with the purpose of the pacts in the first human groupings. It possesses a foundational and paradigmatic character. The Epicureans believe that the introduction of laws and sanctions only became necessary due to the complexity of societies, the weakening of the awareness of the usefulness of the original pacts, and the dissolution of the bonds that made pacts possible. The Epicureans do not describe the pre-social human beings or the first human groupings subject to pact as warlike or savage. Only the stage of culture in which the introduction of laws and sanctions becomes necessary has Hobbesian features. According to Lucretius, violence is sporadic in the solitary wandering of primitive pre-social beings. The gradual ‘softening' or humanization of said beings makes possible the birth of a pact between finitimi, people immersed in affective relations [ amicities ], and not in a state of ‘war of all against all' due to vain and irrational desires. The role of friendship in this benevolent image of the first groups submitted to pact is, for some interpreters, inconsistent with the Epicurean conception of friendship. In section 3, we have attempted to dismiss these arguments by showing that they do not adhere to the purpose of Lucretius' theory of the origin of culture. They approach friendship from the selfishness-altruism disjunction. But this way of treating friendship neither corresponds to the Epicurean approach to friendship nor to the way of understanding interpersonal relations in the ancient world which inspires the Epicureans.