Introduction

Socrates lived 460 – 399 BC in Athens . He seems to have lived all that time in Athens , apart from a few times when he was in the army. He is famous for a couple of things: first, he is the first of a trio of philosophers who are taken to be the founding fathers of Western philosophy; and second, he was condemned to death by the Athenians for being a general nuisance. The charges were related to accusations of trying to replace the Athenian Gods with Gods of his own, and of corrupting the youth. The charges are most unlikely – even the judges who condemned him probably didn’t believe them – but it was a disturbed time in Athens , as we’ll see in the next lecture.

Socrates didn’t do any writing himself. His philosophical activity consisted of accosting people in the agora, or marketplace, of Athens , and engaging them in a rather confrontational form of conversation. (In fact, his conversational technique turns out to be rather an important part of what makes him an important figure, and we’ll be looking at that more closely later.) He seems to have spent a lot of time in the marketplace chatting to his friends, and became, as you’d expect, a rather well-known figure in the city, although, as you’d probably also expect, not one who was well-respected by all. What the typical respectable Athenian gentleman thought of Socrates may be guessed from the portrait of Socrates that is painted by the comic playwright Aristophanes. In his play, The Clouds (first presented in 423,) Socrates appears as an unscrupulous buffoon with a hatfull of loony theories, and as a sophist. We’ll see what a ‘Sophist’ is in just a moment too. As for the loony theories, Socrates first appears hanging from the ceiling of his school – called the ‘Thinkery’ – because being up high like this will help him have lofty thoughts. It is doubtful that this represents the historical Socrates accurately.

On the other hand, amongst those who did appreciate what he was doing were people like Plato and the famous general Xenophon. These two are our primary sources of information about his views because they wrote serious works in which they claim to record those views. But even these sources aren’t of equal value. The Socrates that Xenophon describes in his Memorabila and some other works, is a rather conventional and dull moralist, advising his charges that the highest virtue is obedience to the law. If this was all there was to Socrates it’s unlikely he would have had the impact that did. Probably Xenophon has left out much of Socrates’ character and his views.

It is in Plato’s early dialogues that we find the most persuasive portrait of the historical Socrates, but there is a problem with this source too. For various reasons, we can’t just read these dialogues as transcripts of actual conversations, so we have to try to interpret what the real-life Socrates thought from what the character called Socrates in the dialogues says. It turns out that there is considerable difficulty distinguishing Plato’s views from Socrates’. This is generally called the ‘Socratic Problem.’ Plato’s early dialogues, the most important of which are Euthyphro, Apology, Protagoras, and Crito, are generally supposed to be the best available guides to Socrates’ thought. In them we find the characteristic doctrines ascribed to Socrates in the Western tradition: the unexamined life is not worth living (you’ll recall I mentioned this one earlier;) a wrongdoer is likely to find unhappiness and misery; nothing can harm the good and just person; nobody does evil willingly; evil acts are the result of ignorance; etc. In the Republic – one of the last of Plato’s books, and one that we will examine next week – Plato is clearly pursuing an original philosophy. In other of Plato’s dialogues – Meno, Phaedo, and Symposium – what we surmise to be Plato’s mature thought tends to be mixed together with the earlier, probably Socratic, doctrines.

In the lecture this week we are going to be exploring the main themes of Socratic Ethics as it emerges in the Crito, Euthyphro, Apology, Protagoras and Meno. And it turns out that in order to make Socrates’ philosophy accessible to you, we’ll also need to take a close look at his philosophical technique.

Socrates' Method

The Sophists

First off, let’s ask why Socrates even thought that he needed a special philosophical technique. This has to do with the bad consequences of the interaction of two quite separate aspects of the Greek culture of the time. The first of these was itself the consequence of the fact that at this time the Greeks were coming into more frequent and deeper contact with non-Greek peoples, and were beginning to make the obvious observations. They could see that there were many different modes of life, which all appeared to be natural and even ordained by the gods to those who followed them. It began to seem to some Greeks that there were no certain truths about how people ought to live and behave towards one another, but that everything depended on where you came from. There’s a very famous story that Herodotus tells to illustrate this point, concerning the funerary customs of strange peoples far away.

When [Darius] was king of Persia , he summoned the Greeks who happened to be present at his court, and asked them what they would take to eat the dead bodies of their fathers. They replied that they would not do it for any money in the world. Later, in the presence of the Greeks, and through an interpreter, so they could understand what was said, he asked some Indians, of the tribe called Callatiae, who do in fact eat their parents’ dead bodies, what they would take to burn them. They uttered a cry of horror and forbade him to mention such a dreadful thing. One can see by this what custom can do, and Pindar, in my opinion, was right when he called it ‘king of all’. [1]

There was thus an openmindedness towards cultural relativism. It was an idea in the air of the time: part of the Zeitgeist.

The other relevant characteristic of Greek society was its extreme competitiveness and its tendency to become more and more litigious. The Athenians in particular were notorious for their habit of going to court at the drop of a hat. What made this particularly ‘interesting’ was the nature of the Greek legal system: their courts were large bodies chosen by lot from the ordinary citizenry – always hundreds of men, and sometimes thousands; the parties to the dispute had to argue the case before this court themselves; and the verdict and sentence were determined by a majority vote. There were some rules of evidence and procedure, but it was nothing like the orderly proceeding of today’s courts. It must have been a terrifying experience, and a man could easily be ruined by a malicious lawsuit.

In these circumstances a market niche opened up for those who could provide training in how to win arguments in the law courts. The sophists were a class of itinerant teachers who claimed to be able to show anyone who could afford their fees how a crowd could be swayed by a speech; they were proud to claim that they could make the worse case appear to be the better case. Sophists like Protagoras would give displays of rhetoric in which they induced their audience to approve absurdities. The only thing that was valued by the Sophists and their customers and admirers was the ability to win an argument – truth as such was entirely irrelevant – and their techniques of argument included all the tricks of rhetoric and demagoguery. The degree to which these techniques of argument were effectively approved can be measured by the fact that a full course from Protagoras might cost as much as 100 minae; that’s about ¼ million Australian dollars. (Considerably more than I ever earn for a course in Logic or Critical Reasoning.)

When these two things are put together we have the Sophists applying their techniques of argument to real issues of ethics and defending an absurd immoralism or relativism. Protagoras, for example is most well known for his dictum that ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ and what he was understood to mean by this, as Aristotle explains, is that

[w]hat seems to any man to be the case really is the case. But if this is so, it follows that the same thing both is and is not, or is bad and good, and so with what I said in all other opposite statements; for things often appear to be beautiful to some and the contrary to others, and what appears to each man is the measure.[2]

Socrates thought that this was both contemptible and dangerous, for the sophist could thereby claim to justify things that no-one should believe to be true or good. Plato quite often presents Sophists as the foil for Socrates in his dialogues. For example, in the Republic, the discussion of Justice begins with some foolish statements by the Sophist Thrasymachus, who claims that ‘Justice or Right is simply what is in the interest of the stronger party.’ In the discussion that follows Socrates shows the worthlessness of this claim. An important point to note here, however, is that this isn’t merely an intellectual exercise. When beliefs such as this become widespread they have real consequences. For example, when Athens sent ambassadors to the Melians, who were mere bystanders in the war that Athens was waging against Sparta , and demanded their surrender, the Melians asked:

Is that your subjects’ idea of fair play – that no distinction should be made between people who are quite unconnected with you and people who are mostly your own colonists or else rebels whom you have conquered?

To which the Athenians replied, in part:

So far as right and wrong are concerned they think that there is no difference between the two, that those who still preserve their independence do so because they are strong, and that if we fail to attack them it is because we are afraid.[3]

Moreover, in a democracy like Athens , where the policy of the state was set by the people in public meetings, these sorts of arguments could do real damage. We shall see when we discuss Plato’s critique of democracy, what sort of damage it could do.

Elenchus

In reaction to this dangerous tendency Socrates developed a method of argument that he thought would lead to the discovery of truth and could prevent one from being imposed upon by such charlatans. The first step, of course, was to recognize that the discovery of the truth of things should be the point of any argument.

In respect of this it is notable that Socrates never claimed to be in possession of the truth. In the Apology, Socrates recounts the story of how he was once declared – by an oracle at Delphi – to be the wisest of people. He tells us that this surprised him, since he thought of himself as possessing next to no real knowledge. And this led Socrates to interview and examine the views of those with the greatest reputations for possessing knowledge. He claims that he invariably found people who claimed to know things they did not really know, but only guessed at or presumed. He was wiser than these people, because at least Socrates knew that he knew nothing. The starting point for many Socratic inquiries, therefore, is a profession of ignorance. An interlocutor would make a claim to know what some important thing is, for example, courage, piety, justice, and so on. Socrates’ task was to demonstrate to them that their knowledge is fake.

The second necessary step was to recognize that the pursuit of truth had to be a collaborative exercise. No-one was clever enough to be able to establish the truth of things all by themselves. This is one of the recurring themes of Socrates’ discussions in the dialogues – he is forever saying to those he’s talking with that he would welcome their assistance in discovering new reasons for or against some point, or showing him how his reasoning may have gone astray. This is all very different from the attitude of the Sophists, for whom argument was a competitive event between two people – one of whom would emerge as the winner and the other would be the loser.

The Euthyphro gives a good illustration of Socrates basic method, as recounted by Plato. Socrates comes upon Euthyphro as they both make their way to the Athenian Law Courts: Socrates to face his charge of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens ; Euthyphro to lay a charge of murder against his father. Euthyphro’s father had mistreated a servant to the point that he died and Euthyphro was charging his father with murder. He declares that it is the right and pious thing to prosecute his father, even if the killing was unintentional (it was) and of someone unrelated to him (it was) and even if the servant was himself a murderer (he was). Socrates tackles the case like this: in order to be justly prosecuting his father, Euthyphro must understand what is at stake. Euthyphro says the prosecution is an act of piety, so he must understand what piety is. So what is it? Socrates then proceeds to demonstrate that Euthyphro has no real understanding of what piety is. All his attempts to define piety fail. Socrates does not tell us what he thinks it is. He professes ignorance; but has the wisdom, at least, to know that he doesn’t fully understand the concept of piety. A philosopher may be wise because she finds mysterious things which other people wrongly take for granted.

The method Socrates uses is called elenchus. It is a question and answer session with the following rules and goals:

1.                    Socrates asks all the questions.

2.                    The interlocutor must answer every question.

3.                    A definition or principle in moral philosophy is sought from the interlocutor.

4.                    Socrates seeks clarification, gaining assent for various propositions.

5.                    These propositions are used to show that the proposed definition or principle is unsatisfactory.

Therefore, when you begin to read the dialogues that are the primary sources for Socrates’s views (and for Plato’s views too) you should be prepared for them to seem, at least initially, a bit unfocussed. It may seem that the discussion is going around in circles and that they aren’t really getting anywhere, but that’s not really the case. What’s happening is that one solution after another to a definitional problem that Socrates has proposed is being refined, criticized, and discarded, with an ever-increasing clarity of understanding of the original problem. That’s philosophy. Don’t be discouraged either if it seems that we never get to the part where Socrates tells us what the answer is. Sometimes we really don’t get to a fully satisfactory answer. That’s philosophy too.

Socrates' Conclusions

Having said that, however, there are certain doctrines that have become associated with Socrates. Although he always claimed not to know the truth, the arguments that are recorded seem to support a few interesting claims. We’ll look at them now.

Vengeance is always unjust

You’ll recall that in the last lecture I mentioned that the traditional morality of Greece at the time included a good many elements that had survived from the warrior culture of the Greek Dark Ages. A conventional moral claim of the tradition Socrates inherited – often called the Homeric Tradition – was that wrongdoing ought to be repaid in kind: something like the classic ‘eye for an eye’ of Hebrew justice except that vengeance is not just the Lord’s but belongs to any self-respecting man. You’ll also recall that I mentioned that this sort of view of morality was increasingly being seen as inappropriate to urban society, and that the philosophers and writers were in the forefront of efforts to overcome that traditional view. In particular, one conventional definition of traditional Justice was as “helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies”; and in the Crito, Socrates tries to rebut this claim.

Early in the dialogue, Socrates gets Crito to agree to the disastrous nature of having an “evil and corrupted body.” The health of the body is important, but so is the health of the soul. He puts the question to Crito:

And will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be depraved, which is improved by justice and deteriorated by injustice? Do we suppose that principle, whatever it be in man, which to do with justice and injustice, to be inferior to the body?[1]

Socrates gets Crito’s agreement that:

                Not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued.

                A good life is a just and honourable one.

                Doing wrong is always evil and dishonourable.

From this Socrates infers that:

                We must do no wrong.

And then we encounter the following argument.

S: And what of doing in return for evil, which is the morality of the many – is that just or not?

C: Not just.

S: For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him?

C: Very true.

S: Then we ought not retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.[2]

This argument illustrates a central theme of Socratic Ethics: that doing wrong always harms the wrong-doer (by corrupting the higher part of themselves; by diminishing them in the one aspect that counts for their well-being above all others). Socrates takes it that it is literally in our own interests to act rightly and avoid injury and harm to others. His ethics is primarily concerned with care of the self.

Virtue is knowledge

One of the most arresting claims defended by Socrates is that virtue consists in knowledge of the good. This and the view we discuss next are often called ‘Socratic Paradoxes.’ They are called paradoxes because they are strongly counterintuitive theses, theses which seem to deny facts of ordinary experience.

However, before we can look at Socrates’s argument we have to make a few comments about the words and concepts that he is using. Bear in mind always that you are reading translations of the primary sources and there may not always be a good match between the concepts behind the foreign words and the concepts behind their closest English matches. The word that he uses in the argument and that we translate as ‘virtue,’ is the word aretê. In other circumstances that word might also be translated as ‘excellence,’ or something like that. It’s a word that doesn’t apply exclusively to humans or to moral qualities – in much the same way that ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in English don’t. The aretê of a thing is the way that the thing should be if it is to do what it should do and do it well. For example, the aretê of a knife would be it’s sharpness, the aretê of a soldier would be his courage, that of an apple would be its tastiness, and so on. The Greeks were always aware of this functionalist overtone to the concept, and since they tended to use it in places that we think of as referring to moral facts, it came to have a noticeable effect on their formal theories of morality. We’ll see more of this when we talk about Aristotle.

Now let’s get back to Socrates’s doctrines. The thesis that virtue is knowledge is developed in Plato’s dialogue Meno.

S:             The next point to consider seems to be whether virtue is knowledge or something else.

M:           That does seem to be the next point to consider.

S:             Well now, do we say that virtue is itself something good, and will this hypothesis stand firm for us, that it is something good?

M:           Of course.

S:             If then there is anything else good that is different and separate from knowledge, virtue might well not be a kind of knowledge, but if there is nothing good that knowledge does not encompass we would be right to suspect that it is a kind of knowledge.

M:           That is so.

S:             Surely virtue makes us good.

M:           Yes.

S:             And if we are good, we are benefited, for all that is good benefits. Is that not so?

M:           Yes.

S:             So virtue is something beneficial?

M:           That necessarily follows from what has been agreed.

S:             Let us then examine what kinds of thing benefit us, taking them up one by one: health, we say, and strength, and beauty, and also wealth. We say that these things, and others of the same kind, benefit us, do we not?

M:           We do.

S:             Yet we say that these same things also sometimes harm one. Do you agree or not?

M:           I do.

S:             Look then, what directing factor determines in each case whether these things benefit or harm us? Is it not the right use of them that benefits us, and the wrong use of them that harms us?

M:           Certainly.

S:             Let us now look at the qualities of the soul. There is something you call moderation, and justice, courage, intelligence, memory, munificence, and all such things.

M:           There is.

S:             Consider whichever of these you believe not to be knowledge but different from it; do they not at times harm us, at other times benefit us? Courage, for example, when it is not wisdom but like a kind of recklessness: when a man is reckless without understanding he is harmed, when with understanding he is benefited.

M:           Yes.

S:             The same is true of moderation and mental quickness; when they are learned and disciplined with understanding they are beneficial, but without understanding they are harmful.

M:           Very much so.

S:             Therefore, in a word, all that the soul undertakes and endures, if directed by wisdom, ends in happiness, but if directed by ignorance, it ends in the opposite.

M:           That is likely.

S:             If then virtue is something in the soul and it must be beneficial, it must be knowledge, since all the qualities of the soul are in themselves neither beneficial nor harmful, but accompanied by wisdom or folly they become beneficial or harmful. This argument shows that virtue, being beneficial, must be a kind of wisdom.

M:           I agree.[3]

This perhaps shows that knowledge is a necessary for virtue, but it doesn’t show that knowledge is all we need in order to be virtuous. What else might Socrates be assuming that led him to hold that virtue just is a special kind of knowledge. First, we should note that the type of knowledge Socrates has in mind is practical knowledge. In Plato’s early dialogues, Socrates often compares the art of living with other arts (or skills): medical skill, or navigation, or horse-breeding, and so on. To know the good is to know how to live well, how to bring it about that one’s soul is properly cared for. The knowledge Socrates has in mind isn’t theoretical knowledge of what is right. It is not mere recognition that a certain act is the right thing to do, say return a borrowed item that one has grown very fond of. It is knowledge not just that this is the just thing to do, but also knowledge of how it is to our own benefit, and not just to the benefit of the lender, that we return the borrowed item.

The second point to note is that Socrates might well be assuming what is called an egoistic theory of motivation. According to this theory, all our actions are directed towards what we think is our own good. We never aim to be harmed, but only benefited by our actions. Add to this knowledge of how the just action will benefit and the unjust action harm us, and it starts to make sense that virtue is knowledge. Virtue is knowledge because knowledge is the only missing ingredient. We already posses the motivation needed to act well, to complete the picture we need to add adequate knowledge of what it is to act well and why this is to our benefit. Socrates appears to be developing this egoistic view of human motivation in the following passage from the Meno:

M:           I think, Socrates, that virtue is, as the poet says, “to find joy in beautiful things and have power.” So I say that virtue is to desire beautiful things and have the power to acquire them.

S:             Do you mean that the man who desires beautiful things desires good things?

M:           Most certainly.

S:             Do you assume that there are people who desire bad things, and others who desire good things? Do you not think, my good man, that all men desire good things?

M:           I do not.

S:             But some desire bad things?

M:           Yes.

S:             Do you mean that they believe the bad things to be good, or that they know they are bad and nevertheless desire them?

M:           I think there are both kinds.

S:             Do you think, Meno, that anyone, knowing that bad things are bad, nevertheless desire them?

M:           I certainly do.

S:             What do you mean by desiring? Is it to secure for oneself?

M:           What else?

S:             Does he think that the bad things benefit him who possesses them, or does he know they harm him?

M:           There are some who believe that the bad things benefit them, others who know that they harm them.

S:             And do you think that those who believe that bad things benefit them know that they are bad?

M:           No, that I cannot altogether believe.

S:             It is clear then that those who do not know things to be bad do not desire what is bad, but they desire those things that they believe to be good but are in fact bad. It follows that those who have no knowledge of these things and believe them to be good clearly desire good things. Is that not so?

M:           It is likely.

S:             Well then, those who you say desire bad things, believing that bad things harm their possessor, know that they will be harmed by them?

M:           Necessarily.

S:             And do they not think that those who are harmed are miserable to the extent that they are harmed?

M:           That too is inevitable.

S:             And that those who are miserable are unhappy?

M:           I think so.

S:             Does anyone wish to be miserable and unhappy?

M:           I do not think so, Socrates.

S:             No one then wants what is bad, Meno, unless he wants to be such. For what else is being miserable but to desire bad things and secure them?

M:           You are probably right, Socrates, and no one wants what is bad.[4]

The following claims help to make sense of Socrates claim that knowledge is virtue (which, of course, doesn’t yet show Socrates to be right about any of this):

1.        Knowledge (wisdom) is practical understanding of what is good and how it benefits us, and what is evil and how it harms us.

2.        Humans always aim towards what they think will benefit them and not harm them.

No person voluntarily does wrong

To know the good is to pursue it. This is a closely related view. If virtue is knowledge, and evil is the result of ignorance, then wrongdoers are ignorant. They act wrongly without understanding the full implications of what they are doing. They do not intentionally do wrong, they do what they think it would be good to do, but misunderstand what is at stake. Here is a statement of the view, drawn from the Protagoras:

“Well gentlemen,” I said, “what about this? Aren’t all actions praiseworthy which lead to a painless and pleasant life? And isn’t praiseworthy activity good and beneficial?”

They agreed.

“So if what is pleasant is good,” I said, “no one who either knows or believes that something else is better than what he is doing, and is in his power to do, subsequently does the other, when he can do what is better. Nor is giving in to oneself anything other than error, nor controlling oneself anything other than wisdom.”

They all agreed.

“Well now. Is this what you mean by error, having false opinions and being mistaken about matters of importance?”

They all agreed to that as well.

“Now surely,” I said, “no one freely goes for bad things or things he believes to be bad; it’s not, it seems to me, in human nature to be prepared to go for what you think to be bad in preference to what is good. And when you are forced to choose one of two evils, nobody will choose the greater when he can have the lesser. Isn’t that so?”

All of us agreed to all of that.[5]

This idea involves a denial of weakness of will and of a self-destructive will. Recall that, for Socrates, the good is what benefits an agent, evil is what harms the agent. In the Protagoras, Plato has Socrates advance the idea that the good is to live a pleasant and pain-free life; and it is doubtful that Socrates held a view like this.

A just person can suffer no harm

And, contrariwise,  an unjust person is necessarily miserable. This is another of the so-called Socratic Paradoxes. A just person is a virtuous person; and virtue, according to Socrates (and the Ancient Greeks generally,) is a kind of excellence. An excellent life is a life of virtue. Socrates must have thought that all harm (genuine harm; as opposed to apparent harm) is a kind of degradation of the self; a falling away of the excellence of one’s life. A harmed life is a diminished life. In this case, one might see why it is that a just person cannot be harmed. Only injustice degrades the self and thus only injustice can bring genuine harm to a person. An unjust person can never be anything but degraded and miserable. A just person can never be harmed.