| |
|
It's difficult to say what Plato's conception of morality was. He wrote mostly dramatic or literary works, not theoretical textbooks. It is true that a philosopher, Socrates, plays the key role in the dialogues, and it may be tempting to think of Socrates as Plato's spokesperson. But that must be a temptation we should resist, just as we should resist the idea that there is a character in Shakespeare who is his spokesperson.
I shall just use Plato as an excuse to put on the table one important and interesting theory about ethics and not want to defend with much conviction any claim that it is actually Plato's view.
But I will keep going back to Plato, because I am rather taken by the idea that this may in fact be his! To me, this week, it sounds quite a plausible, and indeed illuminating, suggestion.
The view that I want to explore is hedonism.
Let me remind you of the discussion in the Meno, which most of you looked at last year.
You will remember that it starts off with the question: Can virtue be taught, and what is it anyway?
Socrates seems to think the key question to pursue 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:
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 Socractes' discussion as an excuse to put on the table this theory of ethics.
 |
| The Pleasure Beach by Rob Wakeling |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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?)
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?
One component of the Platonic stance is a preference for the happiness that he thinks comes from intellectual activity over the pseudo-pleasures that require the body.
This is raised by what is one of the most famous of Plato's figures, the 'myth of the cave', which is presented in the Republic, Book VII 514-18.
|
Courtesy The University of Adelaide Library Electronic Texts Collection. (Terrific resource, much appreciated) (Adelaide text here reformatted. And the translation I use in the body of this presentation is sometimes different from the one Adelaide have used).) |
Socrates is talking with Glaucon:
"And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette-players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
I see.
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?
Yes, he said.
And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
Very true.
And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
No question, he replied.
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
That is certain."
Republic, Book vii 514-18
We are to think of a cave in which a number of people - men of course in Plato's scenario - have been imprisoned since birth. So they have never seen the world as it is outside. Actually the cave is an open one. There is a wide entrance from which the path into the cave slopes down until you reach the back wall at the back of the cave. The prisoners therefore would be able to see something of the world outside if only they could look up and back through the open entrance.
But they can't. They are chained up, and in such a carefully contrived way that they have to face the rear of the cave, and in such a way that they can't even turn their heads to steal even a glance at the exit behind them.
Then we are to imagine that behind the prisoners is a fire. And between the fire and the chained prisoners runs a wall with a path running along by it. People are walking along the path. If the wall hadn't been there the fire would throw their shadows onto the back wall of the cave, but the wall obscures their bodies. However they are carrying things, and these things poke up above the wall. So shadows of these things do appear on the back wall of the cave. The things carried include images and models of all sorts of things - including models of human beings and of animals in various materials.
Human experience for most of us most of the time is like the experience of the prisoners in their fettered state. All they can see are the shadows. They can't see each other, they can't see anything else for real - only those shadows on the wall. And the things producing the shadows are not real animals and plants and other human beings either - but images and models or mock-ups of real people, real animals.
Then Socrates wants us to imagine the situation of a prisoner who somehow breaks free. They can turn round; and they can make their way towards the light.
The brilliance of the light makes it painful to do so however and we will have to think of the freed prisoner being dragged along almost against their will. But when they get used to the light they see the truly limited state of their former existence when they took shadows of models for reality, and they are able to rejoice in the state of 'enlightenment' they have now achieved, in which they see what is truly real - the sun - the thing that is actually responsible for all the appearances they formerly took for real.
Enlightenment costs - involves intense struggle - but a person who has achieved it is not likely to want to go back, Plato imagines. And should they ever try to go back - perhaps to release the other prisoners and urge them to seek enlightenment themselves, they would be likely to meet with incredulity and even ridicule. Self-diagnosis of ignorance is difficult.
Aspects:
Aspects of this vastly influential figure:
First, it can be seen to make the point that 'the realm of the visible' as Plato puts it - is rubbish. It gives us precious little indication of what reality is in the round.
This story of Plato's is a bit rambling and doesn't bear too close an analysis. For example, the sun is outside the cave at one point and identified with the fire inside the cave at another. But it has proved fascinating over the centuries - maybe partly because you can interpret it in more than one way.
One way is to see it as essentially arguing for the superiority of 'understanding' over other kinds of human experience. Maybe there is a contrast between understanding and 'perceiving', for example. You can see things and hear things and touch things and smell things. That is let us say sense experience. But human beings at any rate are also capable of 'understanding', and this it may be said is a completely different type of thing.
These days we might suggest that this difference has to do with understanding involving 'concepts' or 'categories', and that understanding as distinct from sense experience is something humans can do, and maybe higher animals, but not simpler creatures - the planarian worm for example.
It has been very popular to link this with the ability to talk: you need language to have understanding, it has been said. Aquinas thought this.
So Plato might be saying thought as distinct from sense experience is special to human beings and is the thing that human beings should concentrate on - devote themselves to. On the basis of the cave story you might say human being should concentrate on thinking, intellectual thought, because in the end that is the activity which makes them happy.
"Well then, if he recalled to mind his first habitation and what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow bondsmen, do you not think that he would count himself happy in the change and pity them?"
Republic, Book vii 516c
So, second, it conveys the claim that the intellectual life is superior to the life of the senses.
Plato didn't think much of what we would I suspect regard as the ordinary pleasures of life, which generally involve the body (good sex, eating and drinking well, good company, playing games) but thought the good life was intensely cerebral. Living well was a matter of suppressing the lure of body-based pleasures and focusing instead on abstract thought.
Plato's dismissal of some pleasures and elevation of others is still familiar. Is there anything in it? What can be said in favour of the idea that some pleasures are to be preferred to others?
Third, it offers an explanation of why Philosophers like Socrates are subject to ridicule.
Fourth, it erects the form of the Good as the sort of head Form. Just as it is through the sun that things of the realm of the visible become visible, so it is through the Form of the Good that things of the intellectual realm become intelligible.
This is the link - if only we could understand it! - between morality and knowledge. We can only know through an encounter with intelligible Forms, and we can only have an encounter of that kind in virtue of the head Form, the Form of the Good. Goodness is what makes anything graspable. Whatever that means.
Plato argues in the Meno that there is a great difficulty in understanding this connection. If a deity is to be said to be Good, that can only make sense if s/he measures up to some standard that has not been set up arbitrarily.
Why should we listen to the Creator?
Two possible reasons are these:
1. Because GA is the Creator and makes some things good and some things bad.
2. Because GA is all-wise and so sees better than any of us what is good and what is bad.
| Revised 29:10:06 | Prepared by VP Foundations of Ethics Home page A module of the BA Philosophy programme Centre for Professional Ethics | University of Central Lancashire | e-mail kcarruthers1@uclan.ac.uk |
To
Top