One of the central philosophical issues for the respective philosophical schools of
Epicureans, Stoics and Skeptics is the question of ethics, or, as Melchert phrases it, the question of happiness. All three schools offer radically different conceptions of what ethics and the good life entails.
For the Epicureans, and in particular, the founder of this school, Epicurus, the concept of the good life and the ethical imperative of the human being is based on the central importance of pleasure. The argument for pleasure is arguably a product of Epicurus’ greater metaphysics, which is materialist in nature. This means that Epicurus emphasizes the material world and our world as the only level of existence. Accordingly, our relationship to the physical world around us is the only way in which we can judge happiness. As physical and material beings, therefore, our greatest concerns are informed by our physical life. For this reason, Epicurus defines pleasure as largely the absence of pain. This makes entirely logical sense, in so far as we accept the concept that we are only material beings: what defines our life, in other terms, is the health of our material bodies. The question of happiness therefore is one in which we avoid physical pain. For this same reason, Epicurus is also a hedonist, precisely because he defines ethics in terms of pleasure.
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"Epicureans".
The Stoics attempt to define happiness by using an argument which basically takes different possible conceptions of happiness and then tests them for their universality. In other words, consider that I am a wealthy man. For the Stoics, this is not an adequate definition of happiness, precisely because it is not universal. Consider, for example, that I am a wealthy man in the middle of a revolutionary class war, where the rich are being murdered. In this case, my wealth is not a cause of happiness, but, clearly, of distress and problems. Happiness is defined by virtues that transcend context-dependent situations. For example, for the Stoics there is never a situation where being just is incorrect: we treat others fairly. There is never a situation where wisdom is not valuable. This universality defines the Stoic conception of happiness. Ethics, for the Stoics, is defined in terms of contexts and looking for virtues that transcend contexts, or, in other words, virtues always exist outside of particular contexts and remain unchanged by different situations.
Arguably, it would seem that the school of Skepticism has the most difficult task to overcome in advancing a vision of happiness and ethics. This is because of the epistemology of the Skeptics. Skeptics always practice a strong form of doubt with regards to knowledge claims. Hence, when someone claims that they know something, the Skeptic then seeks to challenge this claim. The Skeptic does not take any claim without a challenge. This, however, leads to radical forms of skepticism, which ultimately conclude that we can know nothing, because every claim is subject to skeptical scrutiny. Paradoxically, however, this does not prevent the Skeptics from making a claim about what the good life and happiness is. Namely, for the Skeptic, the freedom to challenge claims is at the basis of their enterprise. Accordingly, the Skeptic practices his or her way of thinking by being free to challenge claims. This means that the Skeptics do possess an argument for happiness or the good life: namely, this is living out the Skeptical practice, which means that the Skeptic must be free to dispute that which others claim to be true. Even though the Skeptics argue against the concept of truth, surprisingly, they can still have an account of happiness that is consistent with their world-view.
