Order can arise from chaos without anyone or anything directing the process when unstable combinations of atoms perish and others persist. In the 17th century, Descartes applied this insight to cosmology, and long before Darwin presented his more rigorous ideas about variation and selection, people began to speculate more openly about the origins of life and the species in Epicurean terms.

Epicurus recommends bread and cheese as the staple, and his emphasis is more on avoiding pain than on seeking pleasure, insofar as pleasure-seeking tends to be followed by painful after-effects.

Epicurus was not at all interested in what we would call the problems of mass society, and he thought civic politics was just trouble and to be avoided by the wise.

Maybe we will get to this point and reach a decision one way or the other with 'Human cloning is acceptable,' but I doubt that it is ever going to happen for 'It is morally permissible to eat shrimp' or with the general formula 'Adultery is wrong,' whose intended extension is again very unclear.

We use and need to use both systems in complex political societies, and we oscillate in our commitments, because both oligarchy and rule by the will of masses have their bad points, as the ancient philosophers all knew.

Epicurus thought of justice as an agreement to prevent people harming and being harmed.

Epicureanism did inspire libertine culture in isolated sects, but Epicurus himself rejected an ethics of sensory indulgence, and he would have disowned latter-day 'Epicureanism' as a fussy, expensive, unphilosophical approach to eating and drinking.