The Reign of Virtue and Justified Legal Coercion

This study traces the astonishing – from today’s point of view – promptness or carelessness with which violent legal institutions, in particular slavery and cruel punishment, were accepted or even approved in Ancient philosophy. The basic concept of Ancient practical philosophy was virtue. Plato conceived virtue in the context of his tripartite psychology as reason-controlled activity. Aristotle and the Stoics took up Plato’s notion of virtue in different ways. The influential Platonic concept was used to justify in a straightforward and unifying manner harsh coercive legal institutions of Ancient Greece and Rome. On the one hand it was precisely this aspect of Platonic virtue ethics that helps to historically explain the success and flourishing of the Stoic school until the Roman Empire. On the other hand, however, the Platonic paradigm was an effective conceptual obstacle to the further development of a humane and critical political philosophy in Greco-Roman Antiquity.