ABSTRACT
We know that the Sceptic’s ‘observance of life’ (PH 1 9, 10; PH 1 22-3) has four components: (a) ‘the guidance of nature’; (b) ‘the compulsion of the affections’; (c) ‘the tradition of laws and customs’; and (d) the ‘instruction of the arts’ (10; cf. Chapter XV, 251-4). Sextus defines (a) as ‘that by which we are naturally capable of sensation and thought’, and (b) as that ‘whereby hunger drives us to food and thirst to drink’ (ibid. 24); we have already seen what account a Sceptic can give of these things. But what of (c) and (d)? If I obey a law, or practise a trade, do I not thereby evince a set of beliefs? Not according to Sextus. I can obey a law without thinking that it enshrines anything of real value. I just do it because it seems the way to behave. My attitude to the law then precisely parallels my attitude to sensations and affections. Indeed, Sextus sometimes suggests that it is the very automatism of the behaviour that sets it apart from any such evaluation. He assumes that I can only be held responsible for what I actually do, for some fairly strongly agentive sense of ‘do’—but he represents the Sceptic’s mental life as being exclusively one of reaction, and hence one susceptible of no moral evaluation at all.1
