Plato 4

Morality

Previously on 1117...

We pursued the question of whether there was anything we could know without establishing it in this life, and without anybody giving us that information in this life.

Now we move back to the question of virtue and re-engage with the question the Meno starts off with: Can virtue be taught, and what is it anyway?

Plato at any rate thinks these questions are closely connected with knowledge and how we come by it.

Can virtue be taught?

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787) Courtesy Martin Frost's site

A first point he makes is this. If virtue is the sort of thing that can be taught it must be a sort of knowledge. Or at least, if virtue is a sort of knowledge then it would be something that could be taught:

'If virtue is some sort of knowledge, clearly it could be taught'(Meno 86c)

The substantial question to pursue then is whether virtue is a sort of knowledge.

Socrates:

All good things are advantageous, are they not?

Meno: Yes

Socrates:

So virtue itself must be something advantageous?

Meno: That follows also.

A crucial step. Socrates seems to be saying that doing the virtuous thing is advantageous to you, is beneficial to you.

Have a look again.

The discussion goes on:

Socrates:

Now suppose we consider what are the sorts of things that profit us. Take them in a list. Health we may say, and strength and good looks, and wealth - these and their like we call advantageous, you agree?

Meno: Yes.

Socrates:

Yet we also speak of these things as sometimes doing harm. Would you object to that statement?

Meno: No, it is so.

Socrates:

"An Argument Against Whiskey Drinking" A Delirium Tremens Patient in the "Horror Cell" in the Inebriates Ward of Blackwell's Island. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1874. Courtesy 360 degrees.

Now look here. What is the controlling factor which determines whether each of these is advantageous or harmful? Isn't it right use that makes them advantageous, or lack of it, harmful?

Meno: Certainly.

Socrates:

We must also take spiritual qualities into consideration. You recognize such things as temperance, justice, courage, quickness of mind, memory, nobility of character, and others?

Meno: Yes, of course I do.

Socrates:

Then take any such qualities which in your view are not knowledge but something different. Don't you think they may be harmful as well as advantageous? Courage for instance, if it is something thoughtless, just a sort of confidence. Isn't it true that to be confident without reason does a man harm, whereas a reasoned confidence profits him?

Meno: Yes.

...

Socrates:

In short, everything that the human spirit undertakes or suffers will lead to happiness when it is guided by wisdom, but to the opposite when guided by folly. If we accept this argument, then virtue, to be something advantageous, must be a sort of wisdom.

Meno: I agree.

So Socrates appears at this stage to be arguing that virtue is a sort of knowledge.

It isn't at all obvious, is it, what Socrates is getting at.

It is true maybe that to do the virtuous thing you need to know what it is. So acting virtuously is connected with knowledge in that way.

That is quite an interesting point, because it implies that actions are guided by what you think, and this needn't necessarily be the case. Can't I sometimes act without thought? Is it impossible for me to act virtuously without knowing it? Maybe it is impossible: I'm just saying that would be an interesting contention. [It was a very widespread assumption in the 18th Century for example that morally good actions had to be the result of thought. This is not so much assumed today, partly because a lot of us believe in some kind of 'unconscious' - ?]

But Socrates anyway seems to be saying not just that knowledge is required by virtuous behaviour but that virtuous behaviour simply is action informed by knowledge.

On the face of it, this would make one of those highly educated expect serial killers that Robson Green and Ken Stott seem to be fascinated by models of virtue.

Can we do any better than this? Is there a way of understanding 'Virtue is knowledge' that makes it interesting?

There is, and I will explain what it is, but I don't want to defend the claim that this is definitely what Plato via Socrates meant. The script does have in it things that support this interpretation, but also lots of things that count against it I suppose. What I am doing is using Socrates' discussion as an excuse to put on the table a theory of ethics which he may or may not have been offering himself. It's hedonism.

Hedonism

Here is one way then of understanding Socrates' insistence that 'virtue is knowledge' and that if you know what the virtuous thing is, you will certainly go ahead and do it.

Your immediate inclinations can sometimes lead maximising personal pleasure.

Suppose you think that the moral thing to do is the thing that yields you - you - the greatest sum of personal pleasure. Then in some situations, doing what you immediately feel you want to do will be the right thing to do. You want to go down to the gym for a workout - great. If that's what promises the most pleasure at a particular time, it's the right thing to do, go enjoy that rush.

If you can think of nothing that will give you more pleasure this evening than getting hold of another of Plato's dialogues, you should go ahead and do it. If it promises the best prospect of pleasure for the evening, it's right to go ahead and do it.

If you enjoy writing letters to political prisoners a la Amnesty International, spend your afternoon doing that. If the right thing is to do what brings you pleasure, and the letter writing is likely to bring you more pleasure than anything else you can think of today, that is the thing to do.

If you hate air travel, avoid it. Holiday in Blackpool instead.

So in some cases at any rate it may seem plausible to say the right thing is to follow your immediate urges, your immediate inclinations.

But in other cases, and alas there are a lot of these, following your immediate inclinations is not likely to bring you a positive amount of pleasure in the long run.

- But many times it doesn't

Suppose your inclination is to sit watching tele instead of going to the gym. This is something we are told anyway will not give us much pleasure in the long run. We will get jellied and incapable of reproduction and generally repellent to others but also to ourselves.

If your inclination is not to read Plato but shoot up instead, again in the long run you will lose out on pleasure because shooting up will, we are given to understand, make you shoot up again and again and again, each time with diminishing returns, until the balance is hugely negative and still moving that way so that you die by slow and excruciating degrees.

You get the point. Sometimes our immediate inclinations guide us to the best prospects of pleasure, but very often they don't.

The hedonist therefore needs knowledge

So, if you think the right thing to do is the thing that in the long run gives you the most pleasure, you need knowledge. You need to be able to tell which actions are likely to do this for you and which are not.

The hedonist then will attach the greatest importance to knowledge. If the principle is: act so as to secure for yourself maximum pleasure a sub-principle will be entailed: get as much knowledge as you can about the pleasure potential of anything you may think of doing.

The knowledge you will want to acquire will be of at least three kinds.

- Knowledge of the likely consequences of actions

One is knowledge about the long term consequences of an action. You will want to know what will happen if you knock someone down and steal their phone. Getting the phone may bring a degree of pleasure one way or another, but if it leads to your being pursued by her gang and being seriously done over, the net gain in pleasure is likely to be negative.

The life of the couch potato, the life of the adrenalin addict - the porn addict - the serious hedonist has to know about these things and the dangers of getting hooked into them by engaging in short term pleasure.

- Ignorance about possible sources of pleasure

There another thing. There may be some sources of pleasure I don't know about. If I am a hedonist, this could be serious. There could be something I could do which would give me an absolutely marvellous time - but I don't know about it. I may have never been there.

- Ignorance about what will give you, in particular, pleasure

Alas, there may also be things I haven't experienced yet, and which I think will give me pleasure, but which actually won't. What yields pleasure to others, may not do the same for me because of a different physical or mental make-up. Or we might all be mistaken, fooled somehow into thinking such and such is something human beings really enjoy when in fact nobody enjoys it. Being a bank manager for example, or a ballet dancer, or bungee jumping, or a mother, or eating at Macdonalds, or playing the drums.

This kind of lack of knowledge can be hugely tragic of course. There is something awful, especially for a hedonist, in spending your life climbing up a greasy pole only to find you don't like it when you reach the top.

So the hedonist will be very interested in self-knowledge, as well as knowing about the likely consequences of actions, and all possible sources of pleasure.

It is therefore entirely sensible for the hedonist to think that knowledge and moral behaviour are intimately linked. You can't identify moral behaviour unless you know what is likely to bring you maximum pleasure in the long term.

But does that give us the conclusion that moral behaviour just is knowledgeable behaviour? Does it yield the conclusion that virtue is wisdom? - with its correlative that you can't knowingly do wrong?

If you are in complete control of your actions maybe it does.

How can someone who knows x will bring them most pleasure and who can do y, which they know will bring them less, choose to do y?

So if you sort of take it for granted that virtuous behaviour is behaviour that will give you the most pleasure (and Socrates in the Meno almost clearly lets this out of the bag) you will want to agree that virtuous behaviour is wise or knowledgeable behaviour. It is knowledge which will tell you what to do if what you are going to do is pursue your own pleasure. What is virtue? It is wisdom - ie knowing what is going to lead to most pleasure ...

Knowledge v. right opinion

But there is another point here. How do you get knowledge of pleasure? Doesn't it require experience of it?

You can be told that the highest pleasure is pure crack, but you don't know unless you've done it yourself.

You can interpret Socrates as making this kind of point. If you are just told that it is the best pleasure, you may believe what you've been told. And you may be right. But it's not knowledge. To know it's the best you need to have experience of it yourself.

In other dialogues Plato writes about knowledge of the good, and it's a sort of special experience you get after a programme of arduous intellectual effort - sustained and focused philosophising.

By such a process as that a person comes to have direct experience of what Plato calls 'the Good'. Let's gloss this as his saying that only through such a process is it possible to experience the best pleasure there is. Maybe this is implausible, but it is intelligible. We can understand what is being said. You can be told that philosophising yields in the end the best pleasure, but you will only know this by having direct experience of it yourself...

On this way of looking at Plato, the Good is the best pleasure. (Satisfaction? Fulfillment?)

Could understanding be the best pleasure?

The best pleasure might turn out to be understanding.

Note that if Plato is right we don't know what will give us the best pleasure until we have experienced it. So understanding could turn out to be it ...

What is understanding? For Plato it is some kind of becoming something, since to understand is to share a thing's form....

This is something we will take up later ...