Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 6 (Part Two)
Moving away from questions of Socrates’ overall approach to philosophy, it does seem legitimate to think of him as closely associated with a new understanding of the value of morally upright behaviour. Despite the apparently radical nature of the questions he raises about ultimate ends and virtue, he seems to have been implicitly committed to the conventional supposition that the kind of life that human beings ought to embrace would include such traditional moral values as justice, respect for the law, piety, courage, and moderation. However whereas the accepted moral tradition of his culture rejected wrong-doing as shameful, Socrates took the further step of maintaining that wrongdoing is not only shameful but extremely harmful to the doer. Common-sense moral thinking tends to draw a distinction between the claims of personal well-being and the claims of morality such that it acknowledges the possibility of situations in which the agent will do what is morally right only at terrible cost to himself. Somewhat unconvincingly it then maintains that in such situations and indeed all other situations the claims of morality are of overriding importance. Socrates, in contrast, refuses to countenance the possibility of genuine conflict between morality and personal well-being, on the basis that nothing is more truly advantageous to the agent than upright behaviour no matter what the circumstances. To commit wrong is to do the greatest conceivable harm to oneself irrespective of what else may flow from the action.
Unfortunately Socrates’ conviction that this is the case does not seem to have led him to assemble a detailed explanation of how this can be so. In particular, it is worth noting that Socrates doesn’t seem to have supposed that this is the result of potential divine punishments. Despite all his conventional piety, he seems to have been agnostic about the existence of a life after death in which god would dispense punishments for wrong-doing in this life. In effect, it is left to Plato to attempt to work out an account of how wrong-doing can be the worst kind of harm to oneself. If Socrates attempts any defence of this view himself, it lies in his criticisms and refutations of attempts to defend alternative conceptions of the status of wrong-doing.
In the preceding case we seem to have a genuinely Socratic assumption about the moral life that was enthusiastically endorsed by Plato. However there is at least one important aspect of Socrates’ moral views that seems to have been firmly repudiated by Plato. Socrates favours an intellectualist theory of desire, according to which all desires, and not only the desires of the virtuous, are desires for the good – where the good is construed as whatever is best for me in the circumstances I am in. The result is that virtuous people differ from morally reprehensible people not in their motivations but in their intellects. On this view the only way to change someone’s conduct is to change that person’s opinion about what is best. The desire for what is best is a permanently available motive that automatically and inexorably interacts with any belief about what is best in order to generate action aimed at bringing about what is best believed to be best. Thus it is belief and not character that gives rise to the different patterns of behaviour displayed by particular individuals. Aberrant or inappropriate behaviour is not the product of some set of non-rational appetites that need to be battered, cajoled or conditioned into quiescence: in order to change people’s behaviour we will need to talk to them and give them reasons for changing their beliefs rather than their non-instrumental desires. In contrast, Plato is, as we have already seen in earlier lectures, strongly associated with a tripartite view of the human personality that insists on the existence of non-rational desires that are capable, in the wrong circumstances, of overcoming our rational, good-directed desires.
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