Are Socrates and I being fair to the natural human inclinations toward pleasure and sociability? Do they really serve as such poor guides for life? Even if you accept the argument that weakness of will and revenge show us how body and kin (respectively) incline to savage self-contradiction, you might think that tamed versions of these commands could escape those problems. Couldn’t we appease the body without overvaluing proximate pleasures, and, to take the taming a step further, without ignoring the needs of other people? Isn’t there a way to prevent kinship from turning on itself, and, better yet, to make the great variety of demands springing from the great variety of kinship groups consistent with one another? Could the demands of kinship perhaps be, quite generally, harmonized with those of the body?
Socrates never asked himself these questions, but later philosophers did. They sought to rehabilitate one or both of the savage commands in the wake of criticisms leveled by Socrates. In this chapter, we will take a look—though it will have to be a cursory, synoptic one—at both the ancient seeds, and the modern fruits, of those efforts.
There are three main strands of ethical theorizing in the West: the first is Kantian ethics, also known as “deontology” or, in one of its currently popular forms, “contractualism”; the second is what Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick called “Utilitarianism,” and that some of its modern day proponents generalize to a position they call “consequentialism”; the third is Virtue Ethics, which, being inspired by the thought of Aristotle, also goes by the name “Neo-Aristotelian ethics.” The fundamental principle of Kantian ethics is that of constraining one’s actions by respect for humanity (in one’s own person and that of others); that of Utilitarian ethics is to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number; and that of Virtue Ethics is to act virtuously, which is to say, do whatever the decent (just, kind, courageous, prudent, and so on) person would do if he were in the situation you are in.
I will do more to explain these theories, and how they differ from one another, in what follows, with a view to claiming that the ethical theory presented in this book represents a genuine alternative to all three. Indeed, as I suggested in the introduction to this book, one of my purposes is to develop and propose a new strand of ethical thought, one we could label “Neo-Socratic,” in that it is, first, based on the thought of Socrates; but, second, extrapolates and generalizes that thought into a method of continued relevance for the living of one’s life; and third, differs not only in what it prescribes but in its very foundations from the ethical systems derived from Kant, Mill, and Aristotle.
However, before I get to describing differences, I will begin with a surprising point of agreement. Common sense distinguishes between what justice demands and what is personally advantageous: although it is valuable to do what is just, and it is valuable to do what benefits oneself, everyday intuition says that these two values do not always overlap, and one can be torn between them. The surprise is that not only does Socrates disagree with common sense on this point, but so do all the other ethical theories described above. Let’s begin with Socrates.
At one point, Socrates’ interlocutor Alcibiades makes the claim that “the just differs from the advantageous.” When Alcibiades distinguishes between what is just and what is advantageous, he is really distinguishing between the kinship answer and the bodily answer. Alcibiades uses words such as “just,” “admirable,” “proper,” and “right” to describe his implicit, socially absorbed knowledge of how a person should act: this is the kinship answer. He contrasts justice with being motivated to pursue one’s own private advantage, for example in a case where one’s survival is on the line. Socrates clarifies: the idea that “the just” differs from “the advantageous” amounts to the claim that some just things, though admirable, are bad.
Socrates: So all just things are admirable.
Alcibiades: Yes.
Socrates: Now what about admirable things? Are they all good, or are some good and others not good?
Alcibiades: What I think, Socrates, is that some admirable things are bad.
Socrates: And some contemptible things are good?
Alcibiades: Yes.
Socrates: Are you thinking of this sort of case? Many people get wounded and killed trying to rescue their friends and relatives in battle, while those who don’t go to rescue them, as they should, escape safe and sound. Is this what you’re referring to?1
What Alcibiades is envisioning, when he claims that justice and advantage conflict, is the fact that the demands of one’s body to escape wounds or death can stand in tension with the bonds of solidarity to behave admirably or justly in rescuing friends and relatives. When Alcibiades insists that what is just or admirable isn’t necessarily good, he is talking from his experience of situations where what the kinship answer tells you to do will often be exactly what the bodily answer tells you to avoid.
If weakness of will is how the bodily command wavers—undermining itself—and revenge is how the kinship command wavers, the scenario under discussion between Socrates and Alcibiades is one in which the person wavers because the two commands come into conflict with one another. Alcibiades wants to describe this scenario—in which one is subject both to the command “Run away to save yourself!” and “Stay and fight to save your kin!”—as an experience of being torn between the value of advantage and the value of justice. He transforms a division of voices into a division into two distinctive goods, and Socrates objects. Consider an analog. Suppose you seek investment advice and your two friends, A and B, give you different advice, each insisting that following the other’s advice would be a mistake. You wouldn’t be inclined to conclude that “there are two kinds of money out there, each valuable in its own way: A is telling me how to maximize A’s kind of money, whereas B is advising me on how to maximize B’s kind.” Rather, you’d understand, first, that A and B are both trying to help you get as much as possible of one same thing—money—second, that they disagree about how to do that, and third, they cannot both be right. Likewise, thinks Socrates, the bodily and kinship command are both trying to tell you what the best thing to do is, they are giving you different answers, and these answers cannot both be right. To the extent that you find one compelling, that speaks against your having reason to trust the other. To the extent that you find them both compelling, that speaks to your being confused.
Let’s look at how Socrates conveys his analysis of the conflict between the two commands to Alcibiades:
Socrates: You agreed that the rescue is admirable, in that it’s courageous. Now consider this very thing—courage. Is it good or bad? Look at it like this: which would you rather have, good things or bad things?
Alcibiades: Good things.
Socrates: Namely the greatest goods?
Alcibiades: Very much so.
Socrates: And wouldn’t you be least willing to be deprived of such things?
Alcibiades: Of course.
Socrates: What would you say about courage? How much would you have to be offered to be deprived of that?
Alcibiades: I wouldn’t even want to go on living if I were a coward.
Socrates: So you think that cowardice is the worst thing in the world.
Alcibiades: I do.
Socrates: On a par with death, it would seem.
Alcibiades: That’s what I say.2
When he asks Alcibiades, “How much would you have to be offered to be deprived of that?” we can imagine Socrates offering Alcibiades financial compensation for cowardice. Alcibiades’ indignant rebuff suggests that no amount of bodily goods could compensate him for a sacrifice in the sphere of goods the body wholly ignores. To one sufficiently inflamed by the spirit of the kinship command, only honor matters. Cowardice is the worst thing in the world—but so is death. Can there be two worst things? Socrates will go on to show him that there cannot. The first step is to observe that Alcibiades can no longer say that what is just but not advantageous is bad:
Socrates: Then when you say that rescuing one’s friends in battle is admirable but bad, you mean exactly the same as if you’d called it good but bad.3
Socrates completes the argument by showing Alcibiades that all the terms now line up:
Socrates: So if we find that something is admirable, we’ll also find that it’s good—according to this argument, at least.
Alcibiades: We’ll have to.
Socrates: Well then, are good things advantageous, or not?
Alcibiades: Advantageous.
Socrates: Do you remember what we agreed about doing just things?
Alcibiades: I think we agreed that someone who does what’s just must also be doing what’s admirable.
Socrates: And didn’t we also agree that someone who does what’s admirable must also be doing what’s good?
Alcibiades: Yes.
Socrates: And that what’s good is advantageous?
Alcibiades: Yes.
Socrates: So, Alcibiades, just things are advantageous.4
Alcibiades’ predicament should be recognizable to anyone who has ever taken it for granted that “what’s in my self-interest and what’s moral can diverge” or that “fulfilling my duties to others can come at a substantial cost to my happiness.” Most of us are, like Alcibiades, drawn to the conceit that we have the resources to distinguish between what is just and what is to our advantage. It seems obvious that there is a particular way that the body picks out something as good—it points us to what’s in our personal interest—whereas our kin groups point us to what’s good from the point of view of the group: the courageous, the admirable, the right, the fair. These cues lead us to conclude that the world contains two distinctive types of goods that we might pursue. Socrates thinks that is a mistake. We’ve mapped our own subjective confusion about the good—our inability to decide what’s best, our inclination to waver back and forth between two incompatible answers to that question—onto the world, as if it were a divide in the things themselves.
At the heart of Socrates’ argument is the claim that all of us would rather have good things than bad things, and that we are “least willing to be deprived” of “the greatest goods.”5 Socrates would say that “self-interest” and “happiness” and “advantage” are one set of names we apply to this greatest good, and “duty,” “morality,” “justice,” and “what is good for others” are another set of names for the same thing. The first set of names reflect the influence of the bodily command, the second that of the kinship command, so there is a subjective difference between them; nonetheless, there aren’t two kinds of goods “out there.” There is no objective difference; there is no distinctive kind of good to which the bodily command, or the kindship demand, directs us. When Alcibiades goes back and forth between describing the good as “the just,” and describing it as “the advantageous,” he is not describing two things out there. He’s just wavering. There’s only one thing out there: the good.
And yet: surely there is more to be said on behalf of each of these commands than what the philosophically inexperienced Alcibiades manages to blurt out the first time he is pressed to articulate his intuitions. Perhaps it was in anticipation of such skepticism that Plato goes over this territory many, many times. The most obvious examples are provided by Socrates’ long exchanges with Callicles and Thrasymachus, each of whom enters their respective conversation with Socrates determined to uphold the thesis that what is moral and what is in a person’s interest can diverge. Socrates pursues their arguments down many twists and turns, all of which result in dead ends. The question of the diversity of goods also rears its head inside longer exchanges on different topics, such as when Socrates gets Protagoras to agree that when a courageous man advances toward danger, he goes “toward the more honorable, the better, and more pleasant.”6 According to Socrates, those are not three different things; they are one thing. (At his trial, when Socrates has been accused of corrupting the youth, and he accuses his accusers of being unable to supply a motive for this crime—because how could anything but harm accrue to a person who harms those around him?—the unity of the good once again lurks in the background.)*
Still, even if we considered the sum of Socrates’ conversations on the question, the result would not be anything close to a conclusive case against taking guidance from body or kin. This is because Socrates is always limited by his interlocutors’ answers, and his interlocutors share the assumption that the road from savage commands to ethical theory is very short—indeed, immediate. One might assert that, once tamed from its original wild, wavering self-contradictions, a savage command does point us to a distinctive object and offers us a vision of the good. Perhaps it takes philosophical work, the work of organizing and ordering the various forms that the command takes, and separating legitimate instances of it from the illegitimate ones, to bring the true object of the command into view. Socrates did not encounter anyone who had done this work, but he did inspire later thinkers to take it up.
What if, instead of considering the untutored versions of the bodily or the kinship command, we considered the maximally rational versions of those commands? This is the task to which the two dominant strands of ethical theorizing in the West have set themselves.
Ancient Epicureanism offered the first attempt at an enlightened version of the bodily answer. It was an entire worldview organized around the possibility of identifying, in a consistent way, the set of pleasures that are natural to us. The philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) enjoins a person to eliminate unnecessary sources of pain (among them, the fear of death), and to select pleasures carefully:
And it is just because this [i.e., pleasure] is the first innate good that we do not choose every pleasure; but sometimes we pass up many pleasures when we get a larger amount of what is uncongenial from them. And we believe many pains to be better than pleasures when a greater pleasure follows for a long while if we endure the pains. So every pleasure is a good thing, since it has a nature congenial [to us], but not every one is to be chosen. Just as every pain too is a bad thing, but not every one is such as to be always avoided. It is, however, appropriate to make all these decisions by comparative measurement and an examination of the advantages and disadvantages. For at some times we treat the good thing as bad and, conversely, the bad thing as good.7
When Epicurus speaks of “comparative measurement,” he is describing what later philosophers will call a “hedonic calculus.” Epicureans showed that it is possible to pursue pleasure without heedlessly opting for the pleasure that is closest at hand. Pleasure lovers who consider the consequences of their choices, and who give future pleasures their proper weight, are also lovers of prudence. The careful, calculative selection of pleasure is the Epicurean response to the problem of weakness of will.
I mentioned in chapter 3 that intimate friendship naturally straddles the boundary between body and kin; Epicureans take pains to drag it all the way onto the side of the body: “The wise man feels no more pain when he is tortured than when his friend is tortured, and will die on his behalf; for if he betrays his friend, his entire life will be confounded and utterly upset because of his treachery.”8 So long as the Epicurean is able to translate whatever values he wishes to preserve into the language of pleasure and pain, and these pleasures and pains can be weighed against one another, the resulting hedonism becomes a stable guide for life.
Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick cite Epicurus as a precursor to their own “Utilitarian” view, which offers a systematic way of ensuring consistency in bodily answers: whereas my body tells me what I have to do now in order to avoid what feels like my death, the Utilitarian systematization of this answer tells me that every such demand matters equally.9 This means my future pains matter as much as my present ones, and this also means yours matter as much as mine. In order to figure out what ought to be done, one must do the math. The problem may be complex, and there may be many unknowns, but in principle there is an answer—a fixed and unwavering one—as to what I ought to do: whatever will maximize pleasure and minimize pain for humanity considered as a totality (and, potentially, for the totality of all sentient beings).
Ancient stoicism offered the first attempt at an enlightened version of the kinship answer. My kin are the people who are “mine” or on my side. Stoic cosmopolitanism posits a world community that includes everyone in this group, as the Roman philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) writes:
Let us grasp the idea that there are two commonwealths—the one, a vast and truly common state, which embraces alike gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner of earth nor to that, but measure the bounds of our citizenship by the path of the sun; the other the one to which we have been assigned by the accident of birth.10
The Stoics believed that our truest attachments are not to our families, or associates, or country, but to a world order governed by fixed universal laws. If you understand your place within this larger order, you will see that within it there can be no conflicting interests, and that you never have any reason for revenge. They advocated against all passions, but especially against anger. The Greek Stoic Epictetus (50–135 CE), for instance, instructs his reader on how to feel pity, instead of anger, for wrongdoers.11 When human beings or even animals more generally appear to be pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, according to the Stoics what is really going on is that they are moved to act in a manner that befits the kind of creature they are: in effect, Stoics analyze appetitive motivation in terms of an animal’s kinship relation to itself. When you appear to be selfishly following the individual dictates of your particular body, what you are really doing is participating in a larger whole by following the rules that govern the kind of thing you are.12
Stoic cosmopolitanism is the ancestor of Kantian deontology, which offers an account of kinship grounded in the power of practical rationality. The correct action, on Kant’s theory, is the one that is consistent with respect for the activity of rational thought—in myself and in every other rational being—and thereby allows me to see myself as a member in an (ideal) universal community of beings capable of mutual recognition. Kant calls this community “the kingdom of ends.” Kantianism includes a test—called “the categorical imperative”—that provides a fixed and unwavering answer as to whether an action is permitted or not. The power of reason is here understood as the power of an individual to legislate for oneself—to give oneself rules that work universally, for every member of one’s kind.
Classical Utilitarianism foregrounds the maximization of pleasure, offering up a way to stabilize the bodily answer, whereas deontology foregrounds respect for each individual’s place in a larger whole, stabilizing the kinship answer. The first type of ethical theory centers ethics around experience (“I feel pleasure and pain”), the second around membership (“I belong to the group of rational beings”). It is important to note that while both counsel rationality, it is of different kinds. One operates by creating a giant aggregate of everyone’s experiences, positive or negative, which is then the target of maximization. The other gives a central place to the idea of a moral law. Law is a kinship concept, addressed to a creature who understands itself not as part of an aggregate but as belonging to a kind: a group of individuals who likewise subject themselves to that same law. Utilitarian rationality takes a calculative form; it works by cost-benefit analysis. In contrast, deontological rationality takes a legalistic, regulative form—it works by subjecting what you were antecedently inclined to do to a constraint. The first is a way of caring about advantage, the second about justice.
Mill’s and Kant’s own intellectual descendants have tended to remove many traces of the original commands by pushing their theories in a more abstract direction: Utilitarians today often call themselves “consequentialists,” to mark their willingness to broaden the scope of what gets maximized, from pleasure alone to whatever the best outcomes are. A parallel point can be made about modern-day Kantians. For example, consider the “contractualism” of T. M. Scanlon, who does not mention membership in an ideal community, or the categorical imperative, but nonetheless gestures in those directions by defining an act as wrong if it violates principles that anyone would reasonably accept as a basis for general agreement. Other contractualists, such as John Rawls and Christine Korsgaard, likewise invoke idealized acceptance procedures descended from Kant’s categorical imperative.
Even if consequentialists don’t mention pleasure and even if contractualists don’t mention citizenship, the former nonetheless describe rationality in calculative and maximizing terms, whereas the latter describe it in legalistic and regulative (restraining) terms. In each case, the original savage command makes itself known in the shape into which it organizes rationality.
Both traditions have a response to the Socratic complaint, articulated at the end of chapter 3, about our blind obedience to savage commands. Contractualists and other modern-day Kantians deny that morality makes us hostage to inarticulate commands: the cleaned-up kinship command is so clean, they insist, that it constitutes the only possible rule in accordance with which a rational being could, on full reflection, choose to live. Blind obedience to arbitrary commands—“heteronomy” in Kant’s lingo—is precisely the fate of beings who don’t give themselves the moral law; by contrast, obedience to the categorical imperative is self-rule, or “autonomy.” The Utilitarian (or, more generally, consequentialist) way of managing our rebellious impulses is to embrace them. Whatever it is you were hoping to get out of whatever you were going to do, they are proposing a way to get more of that. There is no possible reason to rebel, since none of the goods in the service of which you might rebel lie outside all the good that can be brought about by your actions. But notice that the measures taken to render the two commands rebellion-proof also serve to obscure the divide between the just and the advantageous. The war between the just and the advantageous becomes a war that cannot be articulated within Kantianism or Utilitarianism, because it is the war between those theories.
This war is characteristically fought in ethics classrooms, by means of a set of hypothetical scenarios known as “trolley problems.” Suppose a trolley is barreling down tracks to which a dozen people have been tied, and you are positioned to be able to switch it over to a different track, where only one person is tied. Your inner Utilitarian might well urge you to make the switch, on the grounds that one death is better than twelve. Now suppose that instead of being positioned at the switch, you are standing at a bridge that overlooks the tracks, such that in order to save the twelve you have to push someone off the bridge. Only one man is large enough to stop the trolley. Should you push him off the bridge? Your inner Utilitarian may at this point take a backseat to your inner Kantian, who tells you that violently hurling someone to their death counts as “using him as a mere means,” which is to say, refusing to afford him the recognition they are due as a fellow rational creature.
Our responses to these scenarios don’t take a consistently Kantian or a consistently Utilitarian shape, revealing that each theory leaves something unaccounted for. The Kantian cannot see the good of acting on one’s inclination, against duty; he thinks you never have any reason to act in such a mistaken way. The Kantian finds himself in the same position as Alcibiades when, having insisted that cowardice is the worst thing there is, he sees no way to assert that death is an evil. Likewise, the Utilitarian cannot see the good of achieving less pleasure—or less well-being, or more relief from suffering, or however one wants to consequentialize it—when one could achieve more. The idea that a person can be torn between the value of justice and the value of personal advantage is not available to the Kantian or the Utilitarian any more than it is to Socrates. This is where, as mentioned above, Socratism is in fact similar to Kantianism and Utilitarianism.
Trolley problems are traditionally understood as a basis for objecting to the completeness of either Kantianism or Utilitarianism as a system. It would be premature to pass judgment here on these objections without careful consultation not only of the large literature on trolley problems, but also the other debates between deontology and consequentialism, and, in addition, the intramural disputes between the myriad factions into which each one has splintered. That said, the very existence of all this scholarship attests to the reality that the fault line over which Alcibiades (and Callicles, and Thrasymachus, and so on) stumbled runs deep. Post-Socratic ethical theory does reveal the possibility of a more systematic and coherent articulation of the objects of the two commands, the goods pertaining to the body and the goods pertaining to kinship. But it also reveals, at the same time, how difficult it is to construct a single system that includes both of these sorts of goods. It seems that if you allow the one, you exclude the other.
In short, the distinction we take for granted every time we blithely notice a conflict between justice and advantage is one that philosophers have not settled how to draw. We think we are speaking from some stable position when we insist that there is a difference between justice and advantage, but Socrates would say we are merely being blown back and forth. We can now supplement what he would say: we are being blown back and forth between an impulse whose best available rational articulation takes a calculative form, and an impulse whose best available rational articulation takes a legalistic form.
But wait: Isn’t there another option? Utilitarianism and Kantianism tend to dominate the landscape not only of Anglo-American academic ethics, but also of the disciplines that engage with it—law, political theory, medicine, economics, and so on. Nonetheless, they are not the only games in town. Virtue Ethics, the theory that traces its origins to Plato’s student Aristotle, attempts to harmonize the two commands without subordinating either to the other. The Virtue Ethicist believes that to exercise virtue—to behave as a just, and courageous, and wise, and decent person does—is at once the greatest source of pleasure for the individual who so behaves, and at the same time the greatest source of benefit for his society. The work of harmonizing the two commands is not theoretical, but practical: they will come into line given the presence of a supportive culture, the right social norms, the best laws, a good upbringing, and so on. The claim is that if one is raised well in a good society, one becomes habituated to responding as a decent person would in each specific case. Such a person will not hear the command of the body separately from the command of social pressure, because both of these voices will have been harmonized into the single song of virtue. The virtuous person will heed this voice not as one succumbs to the onerous demands of a tyrannical master, but as one rejoices at the opportunity to do something beautiful and noble. The Greek word kalon, which I am translating as “beautiful” and “noble,” deftly combines into a single concept the personal allure of pleasant experience and the social appeal of recognition and honor.
Whereas Kantians command you to constrain your actions to those that are consistent with respect for humanity (in your own person and in that of others) and Utilitarians enjoin the production of good outcomes for everyone, proponents of Virtue Ethics simply tell you to be a decent, kind, fair, brave person. As long as you were well brought up, you will be equipped to act in accordance with those ideals, as each situation requires, without wavering.
So what does a Virtue Ethicist say about trolley problems? She will be happy to accede to the complexity of our natural response: it is sometimes virtuous to kill one to save twelve, and sometimes it is not. The Virtue Ethicist does not feel compelled to give you a theoretical account of which kinds of cases will fall into each category, because she takes ethical knowledge to be knowledge not of universal principles but of particulars. Aristotle describes a virtuous soul as similar to a healthy eye: the virtuous person can simply see what the right thing to do is in each case.
Notice that this means that such a person will, once again, not be torn between justice and advantage. The Virtue Ethicist holds that in a well-ordered society of well-brought-up people there will not be much of a conflict between what is in someone’s personal interest and what is in the interest of the group. If you frequently find yourself torn in this way, something has gone wrong either with you or with the world you live in. Thus, Aristotle agrees with Socrates: there is really no tension between the value of justice and the value of advantage, these are not two separate goods, and any appearance that they are must be chalked up to error—either an error in the way you see things, or an error in the way your society is organized, or (likely) both.
Kantians, Utilitarians, and Aristotelians all end up taking Socrates’ side against Alcibiades. When we refer, alongside Alcibiades, to the clash between justice and advantage, we are confessing our inability to give a coherent, non-wavering answer to the question “How should I act?” The theories of Kant, Mill, Aristotle, and Socrates are designed precisely to yield such an answer.
The crucial question for anyone proposing a novel ethical theory is: How does it differ from the offerings already on the menu?
Socrates believed that savage commands are not the only sources of answers to untimely questions, denying that we are forced to rely on even the cleaned-up versions of those commands posited by the other three traditions. For Socrates, what appears to be a difficulty with life—that it puts us in situations in which we must make “tough choices” between personal and social value—is in fact a difficulty in our thinking about life. What is tough about tough choices is only that we are consigned to approaching them in slavish subjection to savage commands. “What should I do?” is a single question: if you find yourself giving two incompatible answers, that is your ignorance talking. More specifically, what is doing the talking is not any conception you have of the good—if you had one, it would be one conception—but two savage commands, each of which has you at its beck and call, neither of which is willing to explain itself.
For Socrates, ethics consists in inquiring into untimely questions, rather than in finding ways to read answers off of (either, or both) of the savage commands. Socrates’ identification of the quest to be a good person with a quest for knowledge underlies the distinctively Socratic denial that anyone ever acts against their better judgment (“weakness of will”) or does what they know to be wrong. If, unlike Socrates, you think you already know the answers to untimely questions, then you need to explain why you yourself sometimes fail to act on them. How does the Utilitarian explain not donating more to charity? How does the Kantian explain her little white lies? The answer is that neither believes that knowing what you should do suffices for action—they posit an additional something, call it “willpower,” or “effort,” or “commitment” or “respect,” that one has to add to moral knowledge to make it effective.
Kantianism and Utilitarianism must allow for the possibility of residual, untamed savagery, and they can, though only at the cost of invoking an entity, such as “the will,” which will be tasked with battling it. The savagery might come in the form of the command that has supposedly been tamed, for instance the Utilitarian failing to overcome the irrational selfishness of a body that demands my pleasure now!, or it might come in the form of the continued force of a command that has supposedly been superseded, such as the Kantian caving to the impulse to tell a small lie that will make everyone happier. The Virtue Ethicist, by contrast, must count motivational failures as cognitive failures. This is perhaps one reason why Virtue Ethics has had less of an impact outside of the discipline of academic philosophy than the other two approaches: you cannot preach Virtue Ethics without, often dubiously, claiming to have yourself achieved a measure of moral perfection, and you cannot preach it to anyone other than those who have already been well brought up, which is to say, the choir.
Socrates would charge all of these views with creating a false ceiling: what they are calling “knowledge” is not yet knowledge. Another, higher kind of knowledge is possible. The mystery substance with which they insist knowledge be supplemented is, according to Socrates, a fiction constructed to cover the ignorance born of prematurely arrested inquiry. If you actually knew what you should do, you would do it. So long as you don’t know, holds Socrates, the proper ethical attitude is an inquisitive one.
Let me emphasize that I am not putting forward this series of Socratic critiques as valid. I am only putting them forward as Socratic. The brief overview I’ve offered in this chapter cannot hope to have done justice to the three rich philosophical traditions, each with histories spanning thousands of years. My aim has only been to situate Socratic ethics in a broader field of alternative approaches to the problem of answering untimely questions—I have pointed to some shared agreement, namely the response to Alcibiades, and to some disagreements. I do not take myself to have offered a detailed comparison between Socratic ethics and its competitors, let alone any reason to reject them in favor of him. As Socrates insists to Polus in the Gorgias, before you praise something, you need to say what it is that you are praising. When it comes to Socratic ethics, we are still at the stage of saying what it is—and that is a big enough task for one book. The comparative evaluation will have to await another.
The ethical theories currently being used to navigate human life have their roots in the ancient world: in the thought of Aristotle, of the Stoics, and of the Epicureans. If we turn the clock back only slightly earlier, to the man who set all of those thinkers off on their divergent philosophical journeys, we gain access to a very different approach to the question, “How should I live?”—namely, an inquisitive one. You might wonder, if this alternative is available, why hasn’t it been taken up? Why isn’t Socratic ethics already a well-established tradition of its own?
The answer is that Socrates’ ethics is intellectualist, and people have a strong and deep aversion to intellectualism. Let me explain.
I have already mentioned two distinctive features of Socrates’ ethics: that we do not yet have the answers, and that philosophizing is the way to get them. If you put these together, you get the third and perhaps most surprising feature: viewing the activity of philosophical theorizing as itself having ethical significance. When Utilitarians debate Kantians, or Kantians argue among themselves, or Virtue Ethicists vie for recognition in an ethical landscape that persistently treats them as second-class citizens, all participants tend to treat these debates as something of an intellectual sideshow to whatever is going on in what they are prepared to call “the real world.” While the specialists are arguing among themselves, people are being born and dying, they are fighting for political victories and military ones, they are making and enjoying art, they are working to provide for their families, or working to earn money to donate it to charities, or working on scientific breakthroughs that will benefit humanity, or taking care of those who cannot care for themselves, and so on. According to other ethical traditions, those sorts of events bear the hallmarks of real life. Socratics, by contrast, believe that arguing about how one should live is real life. Although it is often necessary to spend some or much of one’s time otherwise, inquiry is the best thing one can do with one’s life, given that one does not know how to lead it. The hard work of struggling to be a good, virtuous, ethical person—Socrates understands that work as, first and foremost, intellectual work.
These three features of Socratism—that we don’t now know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that intellectual conversations are the road to becoming a good person—add up to an “intellectualism” that many people find so implausible as to be ready to dismiss it without serious consideration. “What philosophers and non-philosophers alike have often found disappointing in Socrates is his intellectualism,” writes Socrates scholar Heda Segvic.13
Even Socrates’ fans and defenders tend to share this bleak assessment of intellectualism—the label is almost exclusively treated as an insult—and so they perform interpretative backflips to argue that: he did not, could not, really think that weakness of the will is impossible;14 that he did not quite hold the view that all desire is only for what is, as a matter of fact, good (a view that would entail that good and bad people could only be differentiated by what they know, which is to say, intellectually);15 that he allowed for emotion and motivation to make knowledge-independent contributions to ethical life;16 that he did not really believe that we could have ethical knowledge that would be on par with the kind of knowledge we now have about how to make shoes or clocks;17 that he did not really think that virtue, which is to say, knowledge, could suffice for happiness;18 and generally, that he’s not as much of an intellectualist as he initially appears to be.19 My own approach to Socrates might be described as “hard-line intellectualist”—I think that Socrates is just what he seems to be, namely someone who believes that we don’t know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that philosophy—the pursuit of such knowledge—is the only sure road to becoming a better person. Why is this collection of views so implausible?
If you posed this question to the many scholars who try to save Socrates from his own intellectualism, they would say “because it is obvious that someone could have knowledge—such as the knowledge that it is wrong to steal, or kill—but be unwilling to act on it.” Socrates’ response is: What makes you think that was knowledge? The real source of the opposition to Socratic intellectualism is not the commonsense observation that people often act in ways they are ready to repudiate, but the insistence that what we sometimes act against deserves to be called “knowledge.”
Socratic intellectualism turns its back on a very basic human need: the need to already know. Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Virtue Ethics tell us that we already know how to live, that the formula for how to do so is simply a matter of cleaning up the bodily command, or cleaning up the kinship command, or of looking to the best ways in which the people around us have found to satisfy both at the same time. These ethical theories address the urgent demand for answers now. The human need to know how to live subjects us to its desperate logic: Because I must know, it must be the case that I do know. The passionate confidence with which people are inclined to proclaim their ethical beliefs—often with little ability to defend those beliefs—stems not from flightiness but from a seriousness about the project of living their one and only life. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes. If the encounter with Socratic ethics is destabilizing—being refuted was, for Socrates’ interlocutors, like having the ground shift underneath their feet—those who inhabit it accept a much deeper instability: there is no firm ground, and you don’t ever get to take foundations for granted.
In (implicitly) describing Kantianism, Utilitarianism, and Virtue Ethics as uninquisitive, I do not mean to level a charge of dogmatism against any individual: the philosophers who embrace these views tend, like all philosophers, to be open to counterargument, careful not to overclaim, and charitable in interpreting their intellectual opponents. Nonetheless, each of the three theories present their foundations as settled in a way that Socrates’ does not. That is why it makes sense to speak of a Stoic sage, or an Epicurean sage, or an Aristotlean sage (“the phronimos,”) but the very idea of a “Socratic sage” is a contradiction, because a person who had arrived at knowledge would no longer have need of an inquisitive ethics, and thus would no longer be a Socratic. I think this feature—the impossibility of sages—speaks to an advantage of Socratic intellectualism, but the advantage will be easier to articulate if we consider not sages, but utopias. If a sage is a perfect person, then a utopia is a sage writ large: a perfect society.
If asked to sketch an ideal society, the Kantian, or Utilitarian, or Virtue Ethicist does not find that her ethics stands in the way of doing so. And indeed some proponents of each of these theories have provided quite detailed sketches: John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice is a Kantian utopia of sorts, and Aristotle’s description of his preferred constitution in the Politics is an Aristotelian one; to the extent that Utilitarians have tended to hesitate, it is because they are not sure they know how exactly to bring about the world that they take to be self-evidently the best. In his great treatise on Utilitarianism, The Methods of Ethics, Henry Sidgwick explains the difficulty:
We require to contemplate not so much the end supposed to be attained—which is simply the most pleasant consciousness conceivable, lasting as long and as uninterruptedly as possible—but rather some method of realising it, pursued by human beings; and these, again, must be conceived as existing under conditions not too remote from our own, so that we can at least endeavour to imitate them. And for this we must know how far our present circumstances are modifiable; a very difficult question, as the constructions which have actually been made of such ideal societies show.20
Utilitarianism, like Kantianism and Virtue Ethics, is hospitable to the idea of utopia. This is a problem for these theories, because there is a problem with utopia. A good place to see the problem is to consider an encounter, not with a fictional or conceptual or notional utopia, but with one located in the real world, in upstate New York, in the Appalachian highlands ten miles above Lake Erie. A visitor writes:
A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels one’s self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast. You have magnificent music—a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model secondary schools. You have general religious services and special club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and scrambled and striven for under the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.21
This report comes from William James, who visited the Chautauqua Institution, as it is now called, back in 1900. At that time, it was a quarter century old; as of the publication of this book, it has been in existence for 150 years.
Chautauqua seems to check all the utopian boxes. It is hard to see what grounds a Utilitarian, or a Kantian, or an Aristotelian would have for objecting to it, since it is a world in which both the bodily command and the kinship command get their due. James himself finds nothing to fault in how it is organized, or in what goods and services it provides, suggesting that if he had been tasked with describing an ideal society, he would have produced a blueprint for something much like Chautauqua. So one is stunned to see him recount what happened when he departed from this paradise:
I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear. And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: “Ouf! what a relief. Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things—I cannot abide with them.22
I don’t think there’s a single parenthetical more shocking to me in all of philosophical writing than the one containing the phrase “an Armenian massacre,” above. James is saying that his week in a perfect idyll was so horrific that it made the experience of genocide look alluring! His explanation is that what he was missing was the element of struggle in life:
The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still—this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place’s historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer; or on the sides of some player in the ballfield.23
There is a deep problem here. If James wants struggle and effort and difficulty, why couldn’t you dig a few pits in Chautauqua and disguise them well, so that people would fall in and then have to struggle to get out of? What if one citizen were designated “town villain” and he occasionally wreaked havoc and needed punishment? No, I can hear James replying, it needs to be a real struggle, with real villains. But a real struggle must be directed at some goal, the real punishment of real villains must have some end in view, and James would be hard pressed to articulate what more fitting end we could be struggling toward than: ending poverty, disease, crime, inequality, and massacres; ample educational and recreational opportunities for all; perhaps even perpetually running soda-water fountains. All of that is to say: the world James sees us as struggling to bring about is Chautauqua. And, then, when he finds himself actually inhabiting his utopia, he finds he’d rather be in a massacre! It makes no sense to insist that we spend our lives struggling and toiling to bring about a world that, if we were in it, we’d recoil from. We might call this “the paradox of utopia,” and it characterizes the entire tradition of utopian writing.
Readers of Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, or Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis rarely find themselves longing to live in the “perfect” worlds these authors have constructed. We might go case by case with our excuses: we dislike the fact that Kallipolis is founded on a noble lie, that More’s “utopia” features slavery, that Bacon’s Bensalem is so scholastic and so obsessed with “The Spirit of Chastity,” and so on. But as one considers other utopias, too, there appears something suspicious about the reality that we always have some problem or other with them. When I teach Genesis, I find that few students really view leaving the Garden of Eden as a punishment. They’re glad we got kicked out. It is not an accident that much utopian writing takes the form of satire (Samuel Butler, Jonathan Swift). It comes naturally to us to present a utopia sarcastically: “as though this were a utopia!”
The paradox of utopia is that we don’t seem to like it very much. And now we can return to Socrates, because our dislike for utopia is a point in favor of Socratic intellectualism. Socrates will not accept that the problem could be with perfection itself; he will not permit us to say that some life, or some society, is “too happy.” Instead, he will diagnose the problem as this: every utopia that has ever been constructed has been an imperfect person’s idea of a perfect place. When we encounter a world that matches our template for what a happy world would look like, and recoil from the prospect of living there, that is a sign that our template might not be so good. Our “utopias” reflect our ignorance about fundamental questions; they write it large enough for us to see it clearly. The paradox of utopia suggests that our thinking about how we should live may not yet be complete.
Recall this exchange from the opening of the chapter:
Socrates: What would you say about courage? How much would you have to be offered to be deprived of that?
Alcibiades: I wouldn’t even want to go on living if I were a coward.24
The prospect of being paid in exchange for cowardice elicits in Alcibiades a very recognizable form of scorn, one that results from viewing the demands of the body through the lens of kinship. We experience the demands of kinship as elevating us above the selfishness of merely catering to our bodies, which is also why Kantians look down their noses at Utilitarians. It seems doubtful whether kinship will ever allow itself to be organized “from below” by the demands of the body; nor do the demands that issue from one’s various kin groups always cohere with one another. Plato describes this situation by claiming that there is a part of the soul that reflects the demands of kinship—he calls it “the spirited part.” It needs to be ruled—it cannot rule itself—but it will not submit to rule by the part of the soul that reflects the needs of the body, which he calls “the appetitive part.” Thus he posits a third part of the soul, “the rational part,” which he describes as natural ruler over the other two: “in the civil war in the soul [the spirited part] aligns itself far more with the rational part.” The rational part is suited to rule because it possesses answers of a very different sort from those located in the other two parts. Consider this observation from book VI of the Republic:
In the case of just and beautiful things, many people are content with what are believed to be so, even if they aren’t really so, and they act, acquire, and form their own beliefs on that basis. Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good, however, but everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here.
Every soul pursues the good and does its utmost for its sake. It divines that the good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things, and so it misses the benefit, if any, that even those other things may give.25
When it comes to justice, someone might be content to let the social expectations that come packaged with anger guide her; when it comes to aesthetic appreciation, she might be willing to hand that task over to her body’s pleasure and pain responses.26 One need look no further than social media to see examples of outrage that seems driven less by the nature of a given injustice and more by the expectation that others will join in the response. So long as we enjoy a movie, or some food, or some music, taking pleasure in the various looks, smells, sounds, or tastes, we are often prepared to set aside any worries about whether the object of our appetitive responses is “really” or “objectively” beautiful.
But there is something in us that approaches ethics differently, some part that “wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here.” Plato is describing the desires of the rational part of the soul, whose journey begins when “it divines that the good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is,” and ends when it arrives at stable and secure knowledge.
It is worth emphasizing that the tripartite soul is Platonic, not Socratic. The scholarly consensus takes Plato to be departing from the thought of Socrates in the later books of the Republic (that is, after book I), and I agree with that consensus. Socrates is not inclined to explain our departures from prudence and justice by invoking battles among soul-parts, any more than he is inclined to explain them by invoking mysterious motivational entities, such as “the will.” He believes in the unity of the soul just as he believes in the unity of the good. If beauty and justice are different from goodness, that can only be because, in our confusion, sometimes goodness appears to us in the form of beauty, sometimes in the form of justice. What Plato offers us in the Republic, with his extended and elaborate discussions of the kind of upbringing required for a person to be just, and his description of Kallipolis, a utopia organized toward the production of such upbringings, is already halfway to Aristotelian Virtue Ethics.
But even if we recognize all of the ways Plato departs from Socrates, and specifically acknowledge that the representation of the soul as containing an appetitive part and a spirited part is un-Socratic—because Socrates would instead just speak of a single soul, confused about what to do, hearing all sorts of conflicting commands, and whose confusion calls for no impossible feat of psychic surgery, only the very possible acquisition of knowledge—we should nonetheless grant that the addition of a rational part to the other two reflects an importantly Socratic insight.
Rationality, as Plato depicts it, is not only a means of smoothing out the demands of body or kin, but represents a full-fledged alternative, a third and independent source of answers to the question of how we should live. Unlike the other two parts, it doesn’t ever issue savage commands; rather, it is a faculty for truthful inquiry whose inquisitively produced directives never need to be tamed. They come pre-tamed by the fact that they are answers to a question that was asked. The idea that the function of thought is not only to help us get what our body tells us we need, or to behave how our kin want us to behave, but to ask the very questions to which the other two commands provide automatic answers—this is the most important lesson that Plato learned from Socrates.
If you want to know what it would be like to act on the basis of a very different kind of answer to questions about how you—and we—should live, an answer that is not the answer of one’s body, or one’s group, the first step is learning how to ask those questions. If the method of Kantianism is legalistic and regulatory; and the method of Utilitarianism is calculative and maximizing; and the method of Virtue Ethics is to consult one’s well-habituated faculty of practical judgment, in what more precise terms can we describe the Socratic method? That is the question part two of this book is devoted to answering.