Summary and concluding remarks
Like any other political model, the Epicurean one has a compelling normative or regulative character. This function of the Epicurean political model is embodied in the preconception of the just.
We have provided some general considerations regarding what Epicurus calls ‘the just of nature' for the sake of explaining the connections between justice and usefulness. Our purpose was also to clarify what we mean when we state that, within the domain of the Epicurean contractual model, justice can be considered a ‘modality of utility' and that the prolepsis of the just is a canon that validates the just. The expression ‘the just of nature' does not aim, as in Callicles' immoralism or in iusnaturalism, at upholding the normativity of nature. Its framework is Epicurean ‘physiology', and it responds to the attempt to qualify the effective ontological status of human phenomena such as justice, and, implicitly, the methodology that its explanation must follow. So, it is not wrong to make it equivalent to the expression ‘the nature of the just', employed by Epicurus in PD 37, as opposed to representations of the just grounded in empty words. For Epicurus, the just should be conceived only along with the notion of usefulness, such usefulness being the one that guarantees that in the political community people neither harm one another nor are harmed. The preconception of the just is the ‘regulative' instrument that political communities possess to assess whether laws serve the purpose of the pact on which they are founded. It functions as a criterion to evaluate empirically through its results the ‘truth' of certain convictions about justice embodied in the laws, out of their adequacy for achieving the end of not harming one another nor being harmed. Due to variation in circumstances, the validation itself is temporary. What has been confirmed or counter-witnessed as just in the present may not have been confirmed or counter-witnessed in the same terms in the past, or may not be confirmed or counter-witnessed in the future. We reject the interpretations that locate the prolepsis of the just in the constitution that rules over the life of a community or which distinguish a hierarchical and historical plurality of preconceptions of the just. The Epicureans embed the collective ownership of the preconception of the just in language. We underline the relevance of an ingredient of experience that is not usually considered when dealing with Epicurean preconception's empirical genesis: the transmission and learning of language.
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