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SOCRATES' VIEW OF VICE

The philosopher who could be said to have "invented" ethics is Socrates. During the two centuries before Socrates, earlier ancient Greek philosophers had speculated about questions concerning the nature of reality. They were interested in "natural philosophy," what today we would call "science," speculating on questions such as: What is the world made of? Is there a basic element out of which everything else is composed? How does the cosmos work? In the words of the Roman philosopher Cicero, "Socrates was the first one to call philosophy down from the heavens and put it into the cities with people and made it ask questions about life and about right and wrong." He was the first philosopher to take how we should live as his main concern.

Socrates is an interesting figure for a number of reasons. For one thing, he represents the rare case of a major philosopher who never wrote down a word. We know about his ideas primarily through the writings of his pupil Plato, who makes Socrates the main figure in most of his dialogues. For another, Socrates was an eccentric character in ancient Athens, having come to believe that he had a mission from the god Apollo to go around encouraging people to live a moral life.

Socrates did not do what most religious teachers do, however. He did not try to change people by preaching to them about the need for virtue. Instead, he approached his fellow Athenians individually, engaging them in philosophical dialogues that tested the validity of their deepest beliefs. For example, Socrates would ask someone what was most important in life. If the person answered "money," for example, or "fame," Socrates would ask for an explanation. His companion would respond, but Socrates would ask more, pursuing every point of the answer, trying to show the problems with the other person's thinking. Back and forth it went like that until Socrates had convinced his partner. This Socratic method of question/answer, question/answer is still used by many teachers, and it is especially popular in law schools.

An overview of Socrates' ethical beliefs [back to top]

For someone who is universally considered one of philosophy's brightest lights, Socrates advanced some unusual ideas about how to be happy in life, ideas that are very much out of phase with ordinary human experience. In terms of everyday life and the dominant values of Western culture from Athens to the present day, Socrates' moral beliefs seem at best peculiar.

For example, Socrates claims:

--All that we really need in order to be happy is to live a moral life. Even though we suffer poverty, injustice, illness, or other misfortune, moral virtue is enough to guarantee our happiness.

--Our greatest protection is moral virtue. Even though someone may kill us, our virtue makes it impossible for anyone to harm us.

--When we treat someone unethically to get what we want and escape without being punished, we hurt ourselves more than we hurt our victim.

--Using the image that virtue is the soul's health and vice its disease, an idea that Plato developed, Socrates talks about immorality in a way that suggests that moral compromise makes as little sense as deliberately infecting ourselves with a terminal illness.

--If we do something wrong, Socrates believes that we should seek someone to punish us with the same speed and care that we look for someone to cure us when we're sick.

Citing divine revelation, religious teachers preach ideas every bit as peculiar as those of Socrates. But Socrates does not attribute his beliefs to special advice from Apollo. Rather, he believes that the truth of these propositions can be made evident through intellectual examination and rational argument. In fact, Socrates takes these ideas to be absolutely certain, observable facts of human nature. He thinks that these are no more opinions or beliefs than it is somebody's "opinion" that drinking contaminated water makes us sick.

If we look at human behavior from the Athenian agora to Wall Street, however, we find little support for Socrates' ideas. Most people certainly don't live as though they agree with Socrates. Contemporary Americans, like ancient Athenians, believe that success, wealth, power, and fame--not moral virtue--are the keys to happiness. Human opinion does not see virtue as the way to the "good life," and human behavior has not changed much in two thousand years.

Nonetheless, the fact that most people disagree with him would not convince Socrates that he was wrong. (Does the fact that most people at one time thought that the earth was flat convince you that it isn't round?) He would simply find it irrelevant. Socrates takes it as an empirical fact that virtue is necessary for happiness and that when we do something wrong, we're hurt by it. This is a truism of human nature, he believes. And when he talks about virtue as the health of the soul, this is not some figure of speech. Socrates means it literally. No one can be fully healthy without moral virtue. In that unethical people lack certain capacities and strengths, they are genuinely unhealthy. And they are made that way by their wrongdoing.

How did Socrates try to argue for these odd ideas, (1) that we can't be happy without moral virtue and (2) that unethical actions actually harm the soul of those who perform them?

Philosophical interpretation [back to top]

The fact is that Socrates did not provide us with a fully developed explanation and conclusive proof of these ideas. As mentioned above, Socrates wrote down nothing himself, and even Plato's account of Socrates' ideas is incomplete. Getting less explanation about a philosopher's ideas than we want is not, however, an unusual problem when we study the history of philosophy, particularly when we talk about thinkers who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. Many writings have been lost forever over the years; with some thinkers we have only a small percentage of what they wrote or even simply fragments.

So what do we do? Speculate and interpret. We look at what writings we do have and we try to fill in the gaps as best we can. We try to imagine what Socrates, for example, might have meant by certain ideas or how he might have answered our questions. We take what we know for certain as our point of reference and see what other ideas are consistent with this. Thus, when we do philosophy, not only do we speculate about life's basic issues, but we often also speculate about the missing pieces of philosophers' explanations. When we do this we must keep in mind that our speculations might not be correct, and we have to remain open to opposing interpretations. Nonetheless, at times like this, speculation and interpretation are our only choice.

In getting a detailed understanding of Socrates' ideas that happiness depends on virtue and that vice harms the doer, then, we will be forced to speculate. We will begin with teachings that Socrates unquestionably held, but in short order we will enter the world of philosophical interpretation.

So what might Socrates mean by these unusual ideas? Let's begin with his idea that vice harms the doer. That will lay the groundwork for his belief that virtue is all we need for happiness.

How vice changes us: an ordinary example [back to top]

The idea that doing wrong harms the doer is a prominent Socratic idea, yet it is puzzling. Socrates says, "Wrongdoing is in every way harmful and shameful to the wrongdoer." It's so harmful that even if somebody else hurts us first, counsels Socrates, "we should never do wrong in return, nor injure any man, whatever injury we have suffered at his hands." But precisely how are we hurt if we do something wrong? How are we harmed if we hurt somebody else, especially if they have already wronged us? And what is it that we have to lose?

At stake here is what Socrates calls "that part of ourselves that is improved by just actions and destroyed by unjust actions." Today we call this our character, or our personality, or our self. As you saw earlier, the Greeks called it the soul. Whatever we call it, it is that essence which we feel is most uniquely who we really are, and Socrates takes it to be far more important than our bodies.

Because Socrates believes that moral virtue is all we need to be happy, the only thing he sees as harmful for him is something that makes us less able to be virtuous--and therefore less able to be happy. Unethical actions corrupt us and break down our ability to act virtuously. Thus, each unethical act makes it more likely that we'll act unethically in the future by weakening those capacities and faculties we need in order to act more morally.

At first, Socrates' belief that doing wrong hurts the wrongdoer may strike you as odd. Hurting other people--that seems obvious. But hurting ourselves--that seems unlikely.

But take a simple example. Most people think there's something wrong with telling lies. (Virtually all of us do it at sometime or other, but we still believe there's something not quite right about it.) Think back to the first time you told a lie. It was probably after you'd disobeyed your parents and knew you'd get in big trouble if they found out. That first lie was probably hard to tell, and you most likely felt guilty afterwards. But if your parents believed you, you found out that lying can get you out of some tough spots. Now think of your second lie, your third lie, and on down the line. Odds are that it got easier and you felt less guilty the more you did it. At this point in your life, you probably feel that lying isn't as wrong as you once thought it was, and you probably feel less guilty when you do it.

The question here is, what's happened to you? Socrates would say that you've been corrupted by this whole, gradual process. You haven't turned into Jack the Ripper, but you're less likely now to tell the truth than you were before. Face it, you've lost some ground. Getting away with lying lowers our resistance to it in the future. It makes it easier to do, and increases the odds that we'll do it again in tight spots. It also changes our thinking about how wrong it is. Most people come to feel that there's some good in any act that gets you out of trouble, even though it's not completely right.

How did this happen to you? Did someone force this on you? No, you chose it each time, little by little, by doing what you did. Your allegiance to the truth lessened, even if only to a small degree, with each falsehood. Socrates would argue that you harmed, or weakened, yourself each time by acting unethically. He would claim that it is now less likely and more difficult for you to do the right thing and tell the truth in a tight spot.

Now whether you agree that you've been harmed or weakened in this process, it's clear that you've been changed by it. What you do and what you think about what you do has been changed by actions that were initially at odds with your original values. So Socrates' argument has a common-sense validity. We have not seen enough specifics about precisely how you were harmed for you to judge whether you completely accept this notion, but you can probably agree that the process actually exists.

How vice harms us: an example from the Gorgias [back to top]

If the process that Socrates is talking about is plausible, is his claim that it leads to serious harm equally plausible? If we are to have good reason to be ethical, we should also have good reason not to be unethical. So far, we are still missing a description of exactly how Socrates sees such vice harming us.

An excellent place to find such a description is in the ideas attributed to Socrates in the philosophical dialogue entitled Gorgias. This dialogue begins with a discussion of the value of rhetoric (the art of public speaking). But then the question of how we should live our lives and the value of moral virtue is introduced and takes over as the heart of the discussion.

Four characters speak in the dialogue. There's Socrates, of course. Then there's Gorgias, a well-known and highly respected teacher of public speaking, for whom the dialogue is named. Gorgias travels from city to city teaching the skills of rhetoric, and, at the beginning of the dialogue, he has just arrived in Athens. Such teachers were common in ancient Greece and they were particularly popular in Athens where speaking eloquently was essential to success. Athens was a democracy in which any citizen could speak at the city's democratic Assembly, and politics was at the heart of the life of the city. The surest key to success in Athens was a reputation as an intelligent and effective speaker. The third character, Polus, is Gorgias' rambunctious young student and follower. And then there's Callicles.

Callicles is a very bright, ambitious young Athenian who's hungry for wealth and power. He's talented, educated, refined--but also quite immoral. He believes that people who are bright and cunning should rule the city because they're superior to the rest of the citizenry. He also thinks the strong should take whatever they want as long as they can get away with it, and indulge themselves in all kinds of pleasures as well. He rejects fairness, equality, and moderation as conventional ideas of morality which he dismisses as ways that inferior people make virtues out of their own weaknesses and hold superior people in check. It's in Socrates' discussion with Callicles that we get a clear picture of the harm vice does. After all, considering how unethical--and dangerous--Callicles is, he ought to be a prime example of the damage wrongdoing can do.

Setting up the issue [back to top]

The dialogue starts as a conversation between Socrates and Gorgias about the nature of rhetoric. Gorgias sings the praises of the art he teaches, but Socrates points out its weaknesses--especially that it can be used for unjust ends.

At this point Polus speaks up. Unlike Gorgias, who is a man of great integrity, Polus isn't really bothered that rhetoric can be abused. The discussion slides from the nature of rhetoric to how we ought to live. And Polus holds up the example of Archelaus, the king of Macedonia, who acquired his throne through injustice and brutality. To be a tyrant and to have your evil go unpunished, claims Polus, is a life that everyone envies. Socrates disagrees, however. He argues that doing wrong--particularly if you go unpunished--is the greatest of evils. It's always better, argues Socrates, to be the victim of injustice rather than the person who does it. Polus laughs at Socrates, but is eventually shamed into silence. In the presence of his teacher, the virtuous Gorgias, he is obviously embarrassed to press his point with Socrates.

Callicles, however, has no such shame. Taking up the dialogue at this point, Callicles too ridicules Socrates' idea that the key to happiness lies in moral virtue, justice, and self-control. Then he launches into a passionate defense of the unbridled pursuit of pleasure and of the strong dominating the weak. "A man who is going to live a full life," proclaims Callicles,

must allow his desires to become as mighty as may be and never repress them. When his passions have come to full maturity, he must be able to serve them through his courage and intelligence and gratify every fleeting desire as it comes into his heart. This, I fancy, is impossible for the mob. That is why they censure the rest of us, because they are ashamed of themselves and want to conceal their own incapacity. And, of course, they maintain that licentiousness is disgraceful, as I said before, since they are trying to enslave men of a better nature. Because they can't accomplish the fulfillment of their own desires, they sing the praises of temperance and justice out of the depths of their own cowardice. But take men who have come of princely stock, men whose nature can attain some commanding position, a tyranny, absolute power; what could be lower and baser than temperance and justice for such men who, when they might enjoy the good things of life without hindrance, of their own accord drag in a master to subdue them: the law, the language, and the censure of the vulgar? How could such men fail to be wretched under the sway of your "beauty of justice and temperance" when they can award nothing more to their friends than to their enemies? And that, too, when they are the rulers of the state! The truth, which you claim to pursue, Socrates, is really this: luxury, license, and liberty, when they have the upper hand, are really virtue, and happiness as well; everything else is a set of fine terms, man-made conventions, warped against nature, a pack of stuff and nonsense! This speech establishes sets the terms of the long debate between Socrates and Callicles that dominates the rest of the dialogue. The philosopher champions virtue and self-control--a life of being "one's own ruler." The aspiring politician endorses the uncontrolled and totally self-interested pursuit of pleasure by whatever means you can get away with.

In the ensuing discussion, Socrates goes on to identify two distinct ways we harm ourselves when we do something wrong. Our ability to control ourselves is weakened, and so is our intellect. Although Socrates did not put it in these words, we might interpret him as saying that when we do wrong we weaken our strength of will and our moral vision. In other words, Socrates suggests that vice destroys precisely those qualities that, as we saw above, characterize the healthy soul.

The wine jar metaphor: desires and strength of will [back to top]

Socrates would surely see Callicles as an example of someone who's been badly damaged by vice. And the first thing Socrates would point to is that Callicles' remarks show that he has lost control over his desires. What Callicles takes as a strength, Socrates regards as a weakness.

Trying to show Callicles the error of his ways, Socrates contrasts the uncontrolled life his opponent praises with that of a self-controlled and ethical person. To illustrate his point he draws an analogy with wine jars--some intact, others leaky. "See if you don't say," proposes Socrates,

that, in a fashion, this metaphor expresses the difference between the two lives: the self-controlled and the unrestrained. There are two men, both of whom have many jars; those of the first are sound and full, one of wine, another of honey, a third of milk, and many others have a multitude of various commodities, yet the source of supply is meager and hard to obtain and only procurable with a good deal of exertion. Now the first man, when he has filled his jars, troubles no more about procuring supplies, but, so far as they are concerned, rests content; but the other man, though his source of supply is difficult also, yet still possible, and his vessels are perforated and rotten, is forced to keep on trying to fill them both night and day on pain of suffering the utmost agony.

--Gorgias

Socrates' analogy is that the healthy, self-controlled individual is like a solid wine jar, while someone like Callicles, an unethical individual who gives into his desires, is like the leaking wine jar. If you are like a leaky wine jar, Socrates suggests, you inevitably feel the growing hunger of desire, no matter what you do. And the longer you wait to "fill your wine jar," the worse you feel. Thus, your desires are in charge of your life. You must constantly satisfy them or feel pain. By contrast, the individual analogous to the solid wine jar is content and untroubled. He does not feel the growing craving of unsatisfied desire. He does with his life what he wants to do--not what his desires compel him to do.

Socrates' analogy implies that the unethical individual's ability to experience a stable sense of contentment or satisfaction has been harmed. Someone like Callicles can't be satisfied because his desires are unchecked and any satisfaction is only temporary. If an unethical person is like a leaky wine jar, then he or she is ultimately unsatisfiable. Just as she feels a comfortable contentment or fulfillment, the feeling starts slipping away. She's then unsatisfied again and looking around for her next thrill. And this pattern simply repeats itself over and over.

Not surprisingly, Callicles is unpersuaded. He rejects Socrates' ideas saying that the life of someone analogous to the wine jar that is intact is dull and boring, "For the man who is full has no longer the slightest taste for pleasure; his life is the life of a stone. Once he's sated, he no longer feels pleasure or pain. But in the other life is the true pleasure of living, with the greatest possible intake." Callicles needs constant new gratifications of his desires in order to feel pleasure. He feels virtually no stimulation in the temperate and ethical life, that includes only what he has rightfully earned.

Most of us wouldn't succeed if we tried to live as Callicles recommends. Constantly finding new sources of pleasure--more money, power, new jobs, new successes, different lovers, new drugs, exotic places to travel to--is a tall order. Of course, Callicles believes that a truly superior man, a man such as he is, will be able to do this. Surely, he thinks this refutes the idea that he has been damaged in any way. Socrates, of course, disagrees.

The key to this dispute is who is in control. Callicles himself describes the situation as one in which he ministers to, or serves, his desires. He obviously does not see that this then makes his ideal person weaker than his own desires, and, in fact, the servant of those desires. It's not whether someone can satisfy his or her desires that matters to Socrates, but whether a person is his or her "own ruler." An ethical person like Socrates can decide which of his desires he'll satisfy. Callicles doesn't have this choice--his only decision is how to satisfy them. His desires control his life. Furthermore, if Socrates is correct and the desires of someone like Callicles (the leaky wine jar) are ultimately unsatisfiable, the whole project is doomed to fail.

In other words, someone like Callicles doesn't have the strength of will to resist his own desires. In Socrates' opinion, when someone goes from virtue to vice, his "wine jar" goes from being solid to leaky, and that individual has lost some power over his or her own life.

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