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This book brings together twenty-three distinctive and influential essays on ancient moral philosophy--including several published here for the first time--by the distinguished philosopher and classical scholar John Cooper. The volume gives a systematic account of many of the most important issues and texts in ancient moral psychology and ethical theory, providing a unified and illuminating way of reflecting on the fields as they developed from Socrates and Plato through Aristotle to Epicurus and the Stoic philosophers Chrysippus and Posidonius, and beyond. For the ancient philosophers, Cooper shows here, morality was "good character" and what that entailed: good judgment, sensitivity, openness, reflectiveness, and a secure and correct sense of who one was and how one stood in relation to others and the surrounding world. Ethical theory was about the best way to be rather than any principles for what to do in particular circumstances or in relation to recurrent temptations. Moral psychology was the study of the psychological conditions required for good character--the sorts of desires, the attitudes to self and others, the states of mind and feeling, the kinds of knowledge and insight. Together these papers illustrate brilliantly how, by studying the arguments of the Greek philosophers in their diverse theories about the best human life and its psychological underpinnings, we can expand our own moral understanding and imagination and enrich our own moral thought. The collection will be crucial reading for anyone interested in classical philosophy and what it can contribute to reflection on contemporary questions about ethics and human life

As it is currently understood, the notion of autonomy, both as
something that belongs to human beings and human nature, as such,
and also as the source or basis of morality (that is, duty), is
bound up inextricably with the philosophy of Kant. The term
"autonomy" itself derives from classical Greek, where
(at least in surviving texts) it was applied primarily or even
exclusively in a political context, to civic communities possessing
independent legislative and self-governing authority. The term was
taken up again in Renaissance and early modern times with similar
political applications, but was applied also in ecclesiastical disputes
about the independence of reformed churches from the former authority in
religious matters of the church of the Roman popes. Kant's innovation
consisted in conceiving of (finite) individual rational persons, as such,
as lawgivers or legislators to themselves, and to all rational beings (or
rather to all that are not perfect and holy wills), for their individual
modes of behavior. For Kant, rational beings possess a power of
legislating for themselves individually, according to which they each
set their own personal ends and subject that selection, and their pursuit
of the ends in question, to a universal principle, which is expressed in
Kant's categorical imperative. The categorical imperative
requires that one set one's own ends only within a framework that
would warrant acceptance by all other such beings.

Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all of them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of "virtue" (and only he) is entitled also to the further descriptions "honest" and "well-controlled" and "just" and "friendly" and "courageous" and "fostering" and "supportive," and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary "virtue"?