but only the questions, What is justice-at-Athens?

but only the questions, What is justice-at-Athens? and, What is justice-at-Corinth? From this there seems to follow an important consequence, which both reinforces and is reinforced by a new twist that was lent to the distinction between nature and convention. For an individual is offered no criteria by which to guide his own actions if he is merely asked to note that the prevailing criteria vary from state to state. From this he can draw nothing to answer the questions, What am I do to?

How am I to live? For he has to choose for himself between the differing criteria of different states (Where and how shall I choose to live?) and also whether to regard with any serious respect the standards which prevail where he does happen to live.

But since the whole moral vocabulary is defined by the sophists in terms of the prevailing usage in different states, and since this usage ex hypothesi cannot provide an answer to these crucial questions, both the questions and the possible answers to the questions, What am I to do? How shall I live? have to be treated as nonmoral and premoral. It is at this point that a new use is found for the distinction between nature (ϕύσις) and convention (νόμος).

A man who lives in a given state and conforms to its required standards is a creature of convention; a man who is equally at home in any state or none, depending upon his own personal and private purposes, is a creature of nature. Within every conventional man there hides a natural man. This doctrine rests squarely on a separation of the standpoint of the individual agent from that of the socially established conventions which it is up to him to accept or reject.

When to that is added an identification of the moral with the conventional, the identification of the premoral and nonmoral agent with the natural man is complete. The natural man has no moral standards of his own. He is therefore free from all constraints upon him by others. All men are by nature either wolves or sheep; they prey or are preyed upon. The natural man, conceived thus by the sophist, has a long history in European ethics in front of him.

The details of his psychology will vary from writer to writer, but he is almost always-though not always-going to be aggressive and lustful. Morality is then explicable as a necessary compromise between the desire of natural men to aggress upon others and the fear of natural men that others will aggress upon them with fatal consequences.