Ethics: Socrates

• Socrates, who claimed to know nothing and

probably wrote nothing, is nonetheless the first
to see the connections between the
philosopher's search for truth and the world of
politics.
• Socrates was the first philosopher to turn away
from the study of nature to exclusive concern
with human affairs, and began a long tradition
of reflection on the encounter between the
philosopher's love of wisdom and the
established conventions of political society.
• The political outcome of this first encounter
between philosophy and political society in the
history of political thought is the trial and
death of Socrates. The Vlastos school holds
that the philosophical outcome of this is a
rational theory of morality embodying the
Socratic technique of elenchus, the method of
question and answer, and which unites
knowledge with virtue.
• Socrates’ conception of virtue, the so-called
Socratic paradoxes, the method of question
and answer (the elenchus), and the use of the
craft analogies are among the ideas to define
the unique role of the philosopher in relation
to 'the many' in society.
• Socrates’ trial and death, is examined through
Plato's dialogues the Apology and Crito.
Socrates shows here how the quest for
wisdom challenges the acknowledged
experts and leaders in society, but at the
same time looks for points of reconciliation so
that politics will not be wholly devoid of
contact with truth and justice.
 Socrates Life & key texts:
• Socrates was born in 470 or 469 BC and was
executed, following his trial, in 399 at the age
of 70. His father was a stonemason or possibly
a sculptor, and his mother was a midwife.
• He was married to Xanthippe, whose name
became a byword for bad temper and
shrewishness.
• Socrates lived in very difficult times, and was
unfairly associated with the rule of the Thirty
Tyrants because of his earlier association with
Critias and Alcibiades. He was brought to trial
by the restored democracy, accused of impiety
(a capital crime) and corrupting the young.
The vote against Socrates was fairly close at
approximately 280 votes for conviction and
220 for acquittal.
• Key texts
• Aristophanes, The Clouds
• Plato, Apology. Crito, Gorgias, Protagoras
• Xenophon, Apology of Socrates, Memorabilia
• Socrates is known through the contemporaries of
Socrates. More than the difficulty of interpreting texts
in terms of various contexts, there are additional
difficulties when one comes to determine what
Socrates thought.
• Socrates like Sophists is studied mainly through the
surviving writings of others, particularly Plato.
• He is unique in the history of political thought in
having written nothing and in claiming to know
nothing.
• The writings of Leo Strauss and Gregory
Vlastos by no means exhaust the range of
interpretations that has developed over the last
200 years on Socrates.
• There are several main contemporary sources
for our knowledge of Socrates. In
Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds he features
him as a Sophist, a student of nature, and is
ridiculed as a dubious teacher and an atheist.
• From the perspective of traditional Athenian
values, Socrates is portrayed as a poor, needy
person lacking in prudence. At the time of his
trial Socrates was well aware of the
importance of Aristophanes' work. In Plato's
Apology of Socrates, he refers to Aristophanes
as the old accuser, who had poisoned the
atmosphere and turned Athenian opinion
against him over several decades.
• Xenophon refers to Socrates as not lacking in
prudence and taught injustice by portraying him in a
number of works, such as the Oeconomiecus,
Apology of Socrates, Symposium, and
Memorabilia, as the ideal citizen and statesman, and
a political educator of the highest rank. Although he
is also portrayed by Xenophon as a critic of
Athenian democracy, he is represented as a good
and just person in his dealings with Athens
generally.
• the philosophical and political doctrines which
are nowadays ascribed to Socrates are the
speeches Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates
in certain dialogues constitute authentic
Socratic doctrine.
• Socrates is well known for setting forth in his various
conversations a series of related paradoxes:
1. (a) virtue is knowledge,
2. (b) no one does wrong voluntarily, (wrong acts must spring
from ignorance rather than from a will which intends evil;
3. (e) the unity of virtue,
• that is, if the various virtues are, in effect, knowledge, then any
virtue, say courage, is equivalent to any other, e.g. moderation.
The wise person is necessarily courageous and it follows that
he or she is also necessarily moderate and just.
 Criticism:

• The three paradoxes are related in that they

follow from the doctrine that virtue is
knowledge. Because it is one thing to know
what is courageous, for example, but
another to act courageously.
• That virtue is knowledge seems too
intellectualist for many, and hence a first
reason for the ascription of paradox to these
doctrines. In addition, Socrates' assertion that
knowledge of virtue is sufficient to make one
virtuous has been questioned in its extension
to morals and politics.
• One difficulty with the analogy is moral
neutrality which does not make much sense in
the spheres of morality and politics. It is
difficult to conceive of a political art which is
morally neutral.
• One approach to these problems is to consider
them in relation to the elenchus, which, for
Vlastos at least, is less a contribution to an
epistemological method and more a
substantive moral theory. The elenchus is a
way of searching for the truth in which the
genuine moral beliefs of one's interlocutors
are tested and, if necessary, refuted.
• Unlike the Sophist method of setting the
argument to achieve victory, whether or not
the arguments are true or false, the elenchus is
to obtain knowledge about morality and
politics.
• Furthermore, the object of the elenchus is to
combine philosophical understanding with a
therapeutic reformation of moral and political
setup and improvement of one's life!
• Not only is one searching for the truth about
the good life through the elenchus but one is
also being directed to living it (based on the
doctrine that virtue is knowledge).
 Methodology: how the elenchus works.
• Socrates characteristically asks his interlocutor to provide a
definition of a key moral term, like justice, or to assert a
related thesis, as when Polus in the Gorgias states that it is
better to commit injustice than to receive it (Gorgias 474BC).
Socrates insists that the thesis should be one in which Polus
believes and not one that he is not setting forth simply for the
sake of argument. It is more shameful to commit injustice than
to suffer it (474C).
• Socrates then argues that since shamefulness entails badness).
Socrates assert that Polus is willing to regard his admission as
his belief owing to social conventions regarding shamefulness
which Polus holds in an unthinking manner.
• The elenchus is often considered a negative doctrine,
leading only to the refutation of the interlocutor, and one
feature that is used to distinguish a Socratic dialogue from
later Platonic dialogues, in which Socrates also
participates, is that they end without an apparently positive
outcome.
• But Socrates never intends his conversations to be wholly
negative, and he often asserts principles and reaches
conclusions that not only are positive in character but are
regarded by him to be truths achieved through the
elenchus.
• Reflection on Socrates' unique mission to
submit all moral and political ideas to a
rigorous questioning, nevertheless, leads to the
conclusion that there must be a kind of
knowledge, held however tentatively, that has
survived the elenchus and has not yet been
refuted.