Thrasymachus, Morality and Interest

Thrasymachus states: the right thing is to act unjustly / immorally (the two terms are interchangeable in Greek philosophy), because one should always act in one's own self-interest.

Objection: is a particular kind of life worth living for its own sake, and not for its rewards?

Plato's objection: once we understand the nature of justice, we know that it is worth pursuing for its own sake, because it is in our self-interest.

To understand this, we must understand ourselves, and namely the makeup of our soul:

Reason - the rational part concerned with knowledge
Spirit - irrational consciousness concerned with emotions and unconscious experiences that engage the mind
Appetite - instinctive, unconscious biological motivations concerned with food, drink, reproduction, reflex, etc.

These three aspects of the soul are related to four virtues:
Wisdom (reason)
Courage (spirit)
Temperance (subordination of spirit to reason)
Justice (the balance of the soul)

The just individual therefore has balanced their reason, spirit and appetite under the dominance of reason. Such a person will then naturally act in a way that is traditionally considered just, since causing harm to others will harm one's own spirit and will thus unbalance one's soul.

The reward for acting justly is therefore internal health; no conflict, one simply acts according to one's best nature.

Pritchard's objection: Plato shares Thrasymachus' assumption that one ought only act in a way that benefits oneself (ethical egoism). But can one not show, without reference to some socio-political theory, that one ought to act justly independent of self-interest? i.e. is there a normative ethical reason to be just?

If there are normative ethical reasons to be just, are these sufficient to motivate us to be just, independent of self-interest, or do we still rely on self-interest to motivate us? E.g. I might save someone from a house fire, but would I do this even if I weren't branded a hero for it?

Guilt provides a further objection to the assumption of ethical egoism. If we only act in self-interest, and yet cannot feel guilty about failing to act in self-interest, why do we feel guilt? E.g. if I enter the lottery every week with the same numbers, but opt out one week when my numbers win, I may feel stupid, but I won't feel guilty. However, if I fail to save the person from a house fire, I will feel guilty; that I act out of self-interest to avoid that guilt is beside the point, because the guilt still exists irrespective of self-interest.

A further assumption that Plato makes is that justice and morality must be tied to an understanding of human nature, and in particular the nature of the human soul. But can a normative morality not be established irrespective of the nature of the soul? Moral theories like Kant's suggest so; are they then flawed, or is Plato's approach flawed? Further, can one construct a normative ethical theory that isn't egoistic based upon human nature? Surely the answer is "yes", since such an ethical theory could aspire to force us to act in the interests of all, according to their nature, as opposed to self-interest according to one's own nature. Then again, how can we know the nature of others?

Surely creating a system that seeks to benefit others according to one's own nature is just indirect egoism?

Plato also addresses justice from the point of view of social justice, attempting to prove that the state must also be just to serve the people's own interests. He does this in part by showing that just as we have the three aspects of our soul, so individuals achieve different balances, emphasising either of the three aspects. Someone who is dominated by reason is a wise leader; someone who is dominated by spirit is a courageous soldier; someone who is dominated by appetite is a worthy grunt. So each person finds their place in society, and the wise, who have no need to display courage or accumulate appetitive rewards govern in a wise and just manner.

So perhaps a "humanist" ethical theory, to avoid direct or indirect egoism, must be both based upon a certain conception of the human soul, and be relativistic about the possibilities for difference, so as to allow all kinds of soul to "prosper".

References

Plato's Ethics: An Overview (SEoP)
Plato's Republic, Book 1.

The soul and immortality

Following from his attempt to show that justice is worth pursuing for its own sake, as well as its consequences, Plato tried to show that the greatest consequence was the rewards in the afterlife. To support this, and as a separate project, Plato tried to show that the soul is immortal. He advances three main arguments for this in The Republic, Phaedo and Meno.

The argument from the Republic (book 10)

1) Everything has a specific evil
2) Only something's specific evil can destroy it, e.g. iron's evil is rust, wood's evil is rot, etc.
3) Vice is the specific evil of the soul
4) Vice cannot kill your soul
The soul is immortal

Objection: Is Plato not making a fallacy of equivocation, in that he appears in premiss (2) to be talking about a different evil to that in premiss (3) (scientific and then moralistic)?

Objection: Why is there only one specific evil for each entity? Can wood not be destroyed by rot as well as fire, insects, and so on? Does the soul, therefore, have more than one specific evil, and can they be said to destroy it? It seems odd that Plato would assign four virtues of the soul, and only one vice. Does not every virtue have its associated vice?

Plato states that injustice, cowardice, licentiousness and other "bad things" connected with the soul make that soul bad, but he claims that only vice can be its specific evil. Why? Plato might answer that, whilst fire and insects can destroy wood, rot is something intrinsic to wood, and so has a special relation to wood, making it wood's specific evil. But this doesn't help Plato, since it allows that things can be destroyed by other than their specific evil; i.e. just because vice can't destroy the soul, it doesn't follow that nothing can.

One might make an extremely sympathetic interpretation of his argument, modifying it such that premiss (1) reads "Every mortal thing has a specific evil", and to modify (2) to read "If the soul has a specific evil, it is vice". That way, Plato can show that the soul is exceptional, without a specific evil and therefore indestructible. But this still fails to deal with the previous objection.

Objection: How can Plato imply that the soul is so independent and seperate of the body that a bodily evil might not also destroy the soul? It seems Plato's only reason for believing that the soul could survive the death of the body is that the soul is immortal! In other words, he simply begs the question.

The argument from Phaedo

1) All things come to be from their opposite (the bigger from the smaller, the colder from the hotter, etc.)
2) The opposite of life is death
Life must come to be from death, as death comes from life
The souls of the dead must exist prior to their reincarnation; i.e. the soul must be immortal

Objection: Life can be contrasted with death, non-life (e.g. a stone is not alive, nor is it dead) and not existing. Is death, therefore, the opposite of life, or merely one of several contraries? By definition in philosophy, it must be a contrary, since to be an opposite the choice must be binary. Assumption 2 is therefore false, making the argument false.

Objection: The opposite of existence is non-existence. Does this therefore not mean that at some point the soul must not have existed? Either, then, the Universe had a beginning, or souls aren't immortal. This objection suggests that Plato's argument only supports prior existence, and not necessarily immortality.

Objection: The fact that the soul has existed previously doesn't mean it will continue to exist forever. It may be that my soul has existed for eternity, but that when I die it will die with me.

Argument in Phaedo and Meno

1) All knowledge is recollection (you don't learn, you remember things from previous lives which you forgot when you last died; ties in with Plato's epistemic belief that all knowledge is uncovering universal truths, forms)
2) One can only recollect in this life what we knew before this life
The soul pre-exists its present embodied form

It is important to note that Plato didn't make assumption one purely on his theory of forms; he thought he had shown it empirically. He took a slave boy and asked him a series of questions about geometry. He claimed that since the slave boy had no formal education, and so could not have been taught the principles of geometry in this current incarnation, he must remember them from a previous incarnation.

Objection: What, then, is the origin of knowledge? Plato seems to imply that everything that can be known has already occurred, or its predestined to happen, and that the human mind, in any one embodied life, knows all that will happen in its life, only it is forgotten until recollected. But what mechanism triggers this knowledge? Is it not conceivable that I might recollect my future?

Plato perhaps based this argument on his epistemic model based around mathematics and forms, a priori knowledge that he explained by recollection and discovery. But there seems to be a difference between suggesting we can discover a priori truths about the universe, and that we can recollect truths innate in our minds. Locke, in particular, began to disentangle these two concepts, and might have claimed that the slave boy was simply discovering a priori truths through the application of reason.

References:

Exploring... The Phaedo

Desiring the good

Plato asserts that everyone always desires the good; that may mean either:

1) whatever we desire is good
2) whatever we desire we consider to be good

1 allows for an extremely subjective understanding of "good", since one person may desire a fattening meal whilst another might desire a healthy meal. In fact, it allows just about anything to be considered "good". For this reason, Plato rejects 1, pointing out that people judge poorly.

Instead, Plato says that "good" can be understood as what which we can desire, a kind of form that we wish to achieve or attain. In other words, Plato is saying that we evaluate our desires, i.e. we're not purely appetitive; he thus makes a distinction between desires and urges, the latter being purely appetitive.

Thus what we desire the most is that which is best according to our judgement.

To desire is generally (i.e. where possible) to be motivated to do something. This is distinct from being moved to do something, where one feels one has no choice in the matter, and that one must follow a particular course of action.

If I judge something to be [good / best] I am [motivated / moved] to do it

This suggests a strong form of internalism, especially in the statement that one can be moved to follow particular courses of action based upon judgements of relative value. But how can one then account for the weakness of will? Plato could reply that when somebody appears to take the wrong choice, they simply make a bad judgement, but personal experience shows that to be untrue.

Since desire involves a judgement, and Plato held us to be, at least in part, rational beings, then one must accept that chosing the wrong option is an incorrect rational judgement based upon one's previous rational judgements of what is good / best. In other words, one may correctly judge which action is best, but one will then chose a different action.

One must change Plato's maxim to say that if I believe that action X is best, then I am either motivated to do action X, or I am irrational. One must remove the suggestion that one is moved to do anything. But then this itself seems wrong, since we are often moved to act upon a brief judgement without feeling the need to make further judgements as to which course of action is correct, e.g. saving a child from a fire. Am I always irrational if I believe that action X is best, and yet I am not motivated to do X? And would I be irrational for then not doing X?

It seems that one must either accept other motivations other than the results of rational analysis, or one must simply claim that we are constantly making bad, irrational choices, and that our will is weak.

The Euthyphro dilemma

In Euthyphro, Plato considers the nature of Hosion, knowledge and performance of religious ritual. In other words, he tackles the nature of religiousness and piety.

The central question is: "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? (Euthyphro, 10)

If the former, then does piety and morality derive entirely from God, or the gods?

If the latter, how can an omnipotent God be constrained by an external and independent moral realm? Of course, to Plato the gods weren't omnipotent and they certainly would have been constrained by such a realm, but then to those who don't share this belief, what is the value of piety?

To Plato this is not a dilemna; he deals with it by rejecting Euthyphro's definition of piety in two steps:

1) He forced Euthyphro to identify piety with that which is loved by all of the gods
2) He shows that therefore the gods cannot love acts because they are pious if they are pious because they are loved by the gods. In other words, he demonstrates to Euthyphro that since piety is defined by what the gods love, vice versa cannot be true.

This still causes a dilemna for those in the Christian, Muslim, Jewish etc. traditions, where God must be seen as primary, and so cannot love some independent moral framework. The circular nature of the argument can be broken by differentiating between explanatory and definitional identities: God's commands can define what is wrong, and what is wrong can explain God's commands. This opens the door to theological voluntarism, a position that hols that God voluntarily subscribes to His own moral framework.

But if, on the other hand, we consider God's commands to be identical to morality, then there can be no room for causal explanation, and so the explanatory connection cannot be entertained. In this case, we are left solely with definitions, and so we must again assert either God or a moral framework to be primary.

What follows is my essay on this topic.

What is the relation between what God commands and what is right?

The relation between God and rightness is one that has puzzled theologists and philosophers for millennia. Is God the source of all morality, or is God understood as being moral because of his relation to an independent moral framework? Even before Christianity, Plato asked the selfsame question, albeit in a different context, and came to similar conclusions as many more contemporary thinkers. Before we ask this question, however, we must make passing reference to the fact that for many people, God is illusory, and so morality is not necessarily related to God at all. In a sense then, the question of the relation between God and morality presupposes the existence of God, and so invites a discussion on His existence, but that is outside the scope of my essay, which shall instead take the existence of God to be a possibility, and which will then look at the hypothetical relation, given what we can say about God without using purely theological arguments.

The first question that arises if we accept God's existence is: how can we interpret God's commands without first having moral knowledge? In the Euthyphro, Plato suggests that we commonly hold two conflicting assumptions; first, that that which is pious is that which is loved by the gods, and second that the gods love piety because it is pious. In the context of Christian morality, it could be asked: how can we say both that that which is right is so because God commands it, and that God loves moral actions because they are moral? In the first statement we establish that God is the source of morality, and in the second we assert that God refers to an independent moral framework to establish what is right. Plato rightly points out to Euthyphro that one must either claim that the gods are the source of piety, or there is an independent framework by which gods understand what is pious.

For Plato, the answer is simple; he forces Euthyphro to modify his first statement to say that that what is pious is that which is loved by all the gods, and then reaches agreement with Euthyphro that gods love what is pious because it is pious. Plato has now trapped Euthyphro, because these two statements are clearly contradictory for reasons already mentioned, and so Euthyphro is forced to take a position on one of them alone. Since Greek gods weren't the arbiters of morality, the creators of the Universe nor inherently moral themselves, the logical conclusion for Plato was that the gods love piety because it is pious, and that they refer to an independent moral framework.

But this creates a problem, because Plato implies that the relation between the gods and what is right is that if the gods love something then it must be right, and vice versa. But this need not necessarily be true, since the rightness of a thing and whether or not it is god-beloved can be two properties of a thing which may be co-instantiated, or which may be separable in the same way that a rose may be both red and has a distinctive smell; these two properties aren't identical, and the presence of one therefore doesn't necessitate the presence of the other. In the same way, the gods may love an action and that action may be wrong, since there is no reason, either in Greek theology or in terms of logic to suppose that the Greek gods were inherently moral.

Murray MacBeath argues that it is possible that an action's being god-beloved and it's being right may merely be coincidental. For example, I might always read dog-eared books; one might conclude from this that the books are dog-eared because I read them, or that I read them because they are dog-eared, but one couldn't prove either of these without some empirical proof, e.g. that I made books dog-eared (MacBeath, 1982). In the case of God, we have no empirical proof, and so we cannot say with any certainty whether they are coincidental or whether there is a causal relationship.

Furthermore, we cannot even say that there is a direct connection between God and morality. To return to MacBeath's example, it might be that my friend Jenny happens to make the books dog-eared, and that I always read her books once she has finished reading them (MacBeath, 1982). In this case there is an indirect relationship between myself and the dog-eared books that is neither causal nor coincidental, so it is conceivable that what God commands and what is right happen to be related in an analogous way.

This intermediate connection could be a moral framework that God follows and that makes an action right. It is not that an action is right because God commands it, nor that God commands an action because it is right, but that an action is right because it fulfils certain rules or guidelines according to a particular moral framework, and that God likewise commands an action. So if we accept, for example, the truth of utilitarianism, then we can say that God is concerned with the welfare and happiness of his creation, and that insofar as he commands to pursue his own goal, he acts according to the moral framework, hence his commands are right. This means that Plato's Euthyphro Dilemma sets up a false dichotomy, since God would not command an action because it is right, but because of the properties or features of that action that make it right.

But this poses a theological dilemma, for this indirect relationship doesn't necessitate God's inherent goodness, and in fact suggests that God is only good insofar as He continues to act in the way He does. "If one were to deny that God is good... one would call one's own competence in the use of the term 'God' into question" (Murphy, 2002, 3.1) Murphy suggests that we can get around this problem with a position called theological voluntarism, which states that God is considered good because he has met his own standards. What Murphy means by this is that God's goodness comes not from his fulfilling a moral obligation according to an independent moral framework, but from his being inherently good, and encoding and meeting his own moral framework. In other words, we state that God by nature knows good, and voluntarily upholds his own standards (Murphy, 2002, 3.1).

But is this enough to justify the claim that God is good? Does it not make morality entirely arbitrary, and suggest that those who don't believe in God are either immoral, or subscribing to God's moral framework without believing in Him? These problems can only be answered if one can explain morality in terms of God's will; a theological voluntarist must say that God's goodness is not to be understood in what we might usually regard as 'moral terms', but in terms of His being good to His creations. God commands in each of us what will be good for us, and we understand what is good for us, and what is right, by what God commands. This answers Plato's dilemma, but only insofar as we can claim that God is inherently good.

The alternative is that God might on occasion command a person to do something we would regard as wrong, such as be cruel to another. If God is inherently moral, we must either say that this is logically impossible, or that God commanding cruelty would make it right, but that it is so unlikely as to not be worth serious consideration, or that my concepts of right and wrong would break down. The argument that it is logically impossible for God to command cruelty can only be accepted as an item of faith, since we have no reason to believe it. We can support the notion that it is unbelievable that God could command cruelty based upon theological reasons, taken largely from religious texts; since all that we know about God from theology suggests that he is good, it is not entirely unreasonable to suggest that he must be inherently good. If we base our understanding of morality on this reason, and if God were to command cruelty on one occasion, our moral concepts would inexorably become unintelligible, since their basis would have changed (Adams, p.90); if X is right, it is by the command of a loving God; if God commands cruelty, He cannot be considered to be a loving God; therefore if God commands cruelty, X can no longer be considered right, nor wrong, and in fact cannot be morally judged at all.

So to maintain a direct or indirect relationship between what is right and what God commands, we must believe, without reason for absolute certainty, that God is inherently good.

There is one more step one can take to establish a more reasonable relation between what God commands and what is right. The main objection to any divine command theory is, since we have no empirical or rational evidence to suggest otherwise, it is conceivable that God might command what we would consider to be a cruel act. But this is only a problem if we say that all acts are judged by and according to God, i.e. that all acts should be judged according to a divine law. According to Locke, we can establish that we have three kinds of law, only one of which is civil, so we might break civil laws, and we might damage our reputation, without going against the commands of God (Adams); likewise, God might command us to do something that appears to be against our moral convictions, but which is in fact simply against our own laws, and not contrary to God's commands. From this we must either establish that God's will is contrary to our own convictions in such cases, or that God takes no interest in matters that can be decided according to our own laws, and that divine law only applies to questions of morality.

From this we can establish a somewhat complex but reasonably satisfactory answer to Plato's original question that appears to cohere with Christian doctrine. What God commands is right because God will only command that which coheres with his own inherently good moral framework; what we deem right may be right because God commands it, or because it coheres with a human judicial framework. It still seems to set-up a circular argument, in that God loves right actions because he makes them right, but then there is no more satisfactory answer that will accord God the inherent goodness theologists suggest he must have. Whether this means that God is not inherently good, and that He in fact obeys a higher moral framework, or that such a conclusion is correct, one cannot say - it is a matter of faith. And this suggests a conundrum that hangs over this essay: even if we know actions are right according to God's commands, does that give us a reason why they are right? This essay would suggest a similar answer to that of Plato's question: we can' be sure.

Bibliography

R. M. Adams, 'A Modified Divine Command Theory of Ethical Wrongness', in P. Helm, Divine Commands and Morality (Oxford University Press: Oxford) pp.83-108.

M. MacBeath, 'The Euthyphro Dilemma', in Mind, 1982, vol. xci, 565-571

M. Murphy, 'Theological Voluntarism', 2002, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/voluntarism-theological)

Plato, Euthyphro

More References:

Euthyphro (the text)
An Introduction to Euthyphro
Supplement to Hauptli's Lectures on Plato's Euthyphro

Plato's forms

Plato's theory of forms can be summed up as follows:
1) All things are physical manifestations of forms
2) Knowledge is only ever knowledge of the forms; beliefs are of the material world
3) The highest form is that of the good

The good has two roles:
- epistemological; it allows us to know of relativism (e.g. justice, cleanliness, etc.) and therefore of all things (e.g. one knows what a table is by what a good table is)
- ontological; nothing can exist without the good, without some form from which is is manifest. The good also allows relative properties to exist

Plato distinguishes knowledge (forms) from beliefs (material world):

1) Knowledge is of what is
2) Belief is of what is and what is not
3) The world consists of what is and what is not
The world consists of objects of belief
4) Forms are things which are
Forms are objects of knowledge
(The Republic, 476d-480a)

This represents a distinction similar to Descartes', in that it asserts that knowledge is only of those things about which we are absolutely certain, and those truths aren't of objects in the material world.

Point three only works if the conclusions are accepted; 'what is not' must be held to be an inaccurate perceptual relation to a form, whilst 'what is' must be an accurate perceptual relation to a form. 'What is not' could equally be thought of as an inaccurate perceptual relation to an object held in the mind.

This problem forces us to ask what sense of "to be" Plato is referring to. We have three senses of "to be" in Western philosophy and in English:
existential - what can exist in some way / form
veridical - what is true
predicative - what is a certain way / what has a certain property

Plato cannot be talking of the predicative sense of being since a sensible object can then neither be nor not be, e.g. an object can be neither big nor not big

Nor can he be talking of the veridical sense of being, since truth is binary, and Plato wants the disctinction to allow for relativism of the kind made possible by The Good. In this case, either object A is a good table or it is not a good table; so therefore all tables that exist are good tables, whilst bad tables must be imaginary or illusory.

Plato must be referring to the existential sense of being. But how can one make sense of degrees of existence, neither existing nor not existing, but existing in some way? Perhaps it is not that forms necessarily exist, but that if anything exists, forms must exist, i.e. forms are a necessary condition of existence, and define the various ways in which sensible objects can exist. So we can have knowledge of that which is necessary for the existence of that which we can perceive, and these objects of knowledge neither are nor are not coming in or going out of existence. In that sense, forms can also be immune from change, as Plato suggests, since they have no spatial or temporal properties.

Art and Artists

In Book III of the Republic, Plato considered art. He claimed that there were two kinds of art:

1) Representational - the aritst puts himself in the role(s) of the participants
2) Narrative - the artist observes and reports the actions of the participants through indirect speech, scenes, etc.

Plato objected to representational art, involving mimesis:

a) each should fulfill his own role and not take on others' (397e); this is an echo from his tripartite soul and the idea of justice relating to the correct functioning of this soul
b) putting oneself in the role of a bad person will corrupt you (396c-d)
Representational art is only acceptable when the artist assumes the role of a good person that is similar to his own, such that it promotes virtue

By the end of Book III Plato more or less comes to this conclusion, and bans all representational art that does not imitate good people.

But Plato then changes his mind slightly in Book X, setting up a distinction between the artist and the craftsman:

1) In making things, craftsmen are guided by forms, and instantiate these forms in physical objects, representing these forms as best they can. This form of mimesis is unobjectionable, even laudable, according to Plato.
2) Artists, however, are guided by the physical instantiations of forms, and so are imitating imitations, and thus "the artist's representation stands at third remove from reality" (597e), in that it is an instantiation of an imitation of an imitation.

Plato said that in drawing the soul to consider third removes from forms rather than the forms themselves, artists appeal to the lower parts of the soul, and distract men from the higher virtues of philosophy. Art cannot appeal to reason since the rational person will know how removed from the forms art actually is.

Plato therefore advocates banning all representational art, and claims he came to the selfsame conclusion in Book III. Given its greater coherence with his other claims about the soul and the forms, Book X should be taken to be his more considered opinion, and a refinement of Book III's conclusions.

Objection: Tate, Cross and Woozley distinguish between two senses of imitation:

1) Good imitation - where the artist imitates with the knowledge that the subject is good
2) Bad imitation - where the artist imitates without knowledge or without regard to knowledge of the subject, and so imitates mere appearances

In this sense, they claim, the good kind of imitation ought to be OK since the guardians will be imitating their own ideal character, and so drawing attention to it. But that claim is still open to the problem of its remove from the forms, and Plato might argue in return that though 'good imitation' might be better than 'bad imitation', it still removes the mind further from the forms than philosophy and crafstmanship, and so guardians should take the opportunity to ban art for the sake of the people, that they might concentrate on the higher pursuits.

Objection: some art may merely be a representation of an imitation of an instantiation of a form, but one can distinguish between that base art and higher forms of art, which go beyond crastsmanship to try to represent or communicate ideas based upon the forms. Abstract painting, for example, looks beyond mere appearances and asks us to appreciate the forms behind that instantiation. And a good novel can use third-removed imitation in the form of imaginary characters to explore the highest forms of the good, the beautiful, etc., something that crasfmanship cannot achieve.

Plato's mistake here might in part be based upon the kind and quality of art in his time, and perhaps also on his ability to comprehend and appreciate it. Had he enjoyed a full appreciation of all art from his time until the present day, he might have come to a different conclusion. Then again, one could argue that the art world reacted to Plato's criticisms and looked to the forms for inspiration; this seems unlikely, given the roots of the more expressive artists of our time and from times past, but certainly Plato's legacy of the forms combined with popular religions must have been formative in this movement away from mere imitation.