This is an introductory essay for an ethics class from 2011.
A Personal Introduction to
Ethics 120W -- February 7, 2011
I introduced some ideas
and examples. We will now work with those, try to see what they mean, by
themselves and also in their multiple relationships to each other.
They ask the questions of
ethics from a particular point of view; I hope they make those questions live.
A question without context goes dead. To own a question, know why it matters –
discover the reason that it matters to you. That’s the point of this early
material.
I was sheltered from
ethical questions as a kid – brought up in a stable family, on a small farm. We
were members of the local Catholic church and took the basic framework it
offered more or less for granted. We ran a small truck gardening business,
selling to individual customers. We treated our customers well, and they
appreciated the service we provided: fresh produce at reasonable prices.
There were, as Karl Marx
might put it, contradictions in my childhood: my mother was Mormon, so there
was an alternative to the teachings at church. The Catholic Church itself went
through a major revolution when I was about ten, and some of what I had come to
take as absolutely true was called into question – from the highest
authorities. Also, I was always reminded by the readings in church on Sunday
that the moral standard preached in the gospels – radical forgiveness, the
giving up of revenge under any circumstances, and especially the call to care
for the poor – was different from American practice and different from my
parents’ practice. My dad was a veteran of World War II; my mother worked in
munitions plants during the war. Both were committed to the necessity of
answering violence with violence, even if innocent people got killed as
collateral damage. We helped people when we could, but not to the extent of
endangering our own financial security – as people in the gospels did.
So, even early on, I ran
into differences in moral examples and standards that raised questions for me:
which of these recommendations is right? Which should I live by?
Yet my moral world had a
coherence that not every kid’s world has. On most issues, my parents and the
people around me practiced what they preached. The people in my community
helped each other and respected each other and were committed to similar
ideals: neighborliness, hard work, strong relationships in families, with
friends, in marriages, taking care of those who had bad luck. I never felt
betrayed or had reason to doubt fundamentals.
I also never had reason to
betray the fundamental way of life I grew up in. I was never tempted by
drinking, drugs or social pressure to act in ways my parents would disapprove.
My life would have made a boring 50s television show, a rural version of
“Father Knows Best” or “Leave it to Beaver.”
I think that this kind of
world, this kind of childhood, is a reasonably good introduction to Confucius.
For me, as for Confucius, the tradition either worked or seemed fixable. It
wasn’t crazy or crazy-making. The life was satisfying; the ideals I was presented
seemed achievable. Confucius’ moral goal, the development over time of
sympathetic understanding for others and affection for them in their
differences and peculiarities, was one I saw my parents struggling with, day by
day, with neighbors and relatives and students.
The rituals I encountered
did what rituals are supposed to do, for Confucius: they helped me to explore
human emotional possibilities and they gave me a sense of connection to my
community. Literature – things like “The Little House on the Prairie” books by
Laura Ingalls Wilder – developed my ability to sympathetically understand
people different from myself. I lacked serious music and archery, which
Confucius also recommends, but, otherwise, he would have approved of the
community I was growing up in.
I can imagine staying in
that community, living out a Confucian life. It would have been like this:
striving with all the intelligence I had to understand the deep strengths of
the community I lived in, the values that held it together, and then working
very hard to maintain and improve that community by making those values more
pronounced, clearer, more adequately lived out, day by day. Some of my
elementary school classmates did just that, and they have fine lives,
continuing the church and farming traditions of their parents and grandparents.
Because of lots of
changes, in the economy, in the relative attractions of city and country, in
education, most of the people I grew up with have moved away from their home
communities, have adopted lifestyles that would be pretty unfamiliar to their
parents.
Yet I think many would
still be recognizably Confucian in their continued loyalty to traditions of
their youth, in their attempts to pass on to their children some version of
what they received, in their continuing attachment to their families of origin.
One other course
connection to this childhood story: it fits pretty neatly with Silberbauer’s
account of small-scale societies. There was no good place to hide in Forest
City, Minnesota. If you didn’t treat people well, that got around. So even
folks with no hint of sympathy or compassion or respect behaved themselves,
much of the time, because they were stuck with these people, and they could not
afford to alienate them. Temptation to
rip other people off is tied very closely to anonymity, the ability (in Plato’s
fine metaphor) to put on a “ring of invisibility.” There were not many
invisible people in such a small community, at least with respect to their
public actions. (Behavior within families had some invisible features, and
terrible things sometimes happened behind closed doors.)
The course opened with
Confucius because the world pictured by
Confucius is where lots of people begin: a world of consistent and
trustworthy tradition, contributing to a prosperous, satisfying, and stable way
of life. In such a world, ethics comes to seem like a pretty simple matter:
purify, maintain, live out the heritage you have received, or, to put it in a
more Confucian way: grow up, over seventy years of practice, into a mature,
sensitive, powerful and socially skillful adult – within the culture you were
born into. That’s how most of the world has understood ethics for most of
history. It deserves to be the first word in this course.
Our first video, “Four
Hours in My Lai,” was in one way an illustration of what Confucius is saying.
We see a bunch of young and relatively uncultured guys under inhuman stress.
Most of them, in a crisis, end up acting against their basic sympathy and
compassion for helpless people, doing extreme and totally unjustified violence,
and paying the price in either life-long remorse and pain or life-long deadness
of spirit. Confucius is the first great
advocate of education in sympathy, of the idea that morally strong people are
not born but made over time, by mastering the unequal relations in the family,
by going through the great rituals that shape feeling, and by partaking of
music and poetry and literature, which enlarge their capacities for feeling. He
provides a way of understanding how young people could be seduced into doing
horrible things.
At the same time, our
first video is a challenge to Confucius. It pictures a military culture that
gradually eases people into actions that they would have found horrifying a few
months earlier. Perhaps Confucius has reason to trust HIS culture; he is, after
all, an historian who has thought carefully about the benefits of Chinese
society. But the My Lai story makes it clear that not all cultures are
trustworthy, that people can be trained to do terrible things with the same
mechanisms that train them to be decent and honorable. So, “Four Hours in My
Lai” warns us off of taking a purely Confucian attitude towards our own
heritage; whether traditionalists become saints or monsters in a matter of luck
– the luck of stumbling into a culture that is healthy or sick.
One might wonder: how can
one tell whether one’s culture is healthy or sick? What standard exists,
outside of culture, for judging culture? That of course is a huge question. It is
one of the questions we will keep thinking about, over the whole length of this
course, and it will be a question we will all keep revisiting for the rest of
our lives. But, as a preliminary answer, it is worth pointing out that one
particular moral ideal has come up over and over again, in very different
circumstances, as the standard for measuring individuals and cultures: the
Golden Rule, variously stated as:
Do unto others as you
would have others do unto you.
What you don’t want done
to you, don’t do to others.
Love your neighbor as
yourself.
Whatever ethics is
studying, whatever the content of ethical thinking is, it has to be in that
direction. That is the human consensus.
Notice that it is an ideal
formulation. It doesn’t say: do to others what they do to you. It does not
recommend, that is, that you let other people’s behavior set your standards.
That’s a different kind of morality altogether. Rather, it says: decide how you
want to be treated and let that be your standard of action, REGARDLESS OF HOW
OTHER PEOPLE RESPOND. In some
situations, behaving this way will bring one respect, admiration, and
prosperity. In others, it will get you tortured and killed. But that’s the
ideal.
If we say that the content
of ethics is somehow in the direction of this close to universal human ideal,
then that content divides into three basic sub-questions:
- What does ethics require? How do I make sense of my moral obligations, given that the basic standard is so indefinite? What else is available, to clarify how I should act? Can I find reasonable principles for guiding my action so that it remains decent?
- How do I become a person who acts decently in a natural, habitual, spontaneous way? How do I develop the resilience to follow my principles in the face of temptation or under threats of violence?
- What are the good things for human beings, the content of what I wish for myself and for others? (Obviously, if I get my values wrong, then what I wish for myself will be crazy and what I wish for others will be crazy. I will become a moral fool.)
Different philosophers we
will study emphasize different questions here. For Confucius, the requirements
of ethics are reasonably clear: he doesn’t spend much time with moral dilemmas.
Similarly, he is quite confident that the picture of human goods he has
inherited from ancient times is an adequate picture. His emphasis is on
question 2: most of his energy is spent explaining how to become good, helping
his students on the long path toward moral maturity.
When we move to the
Athenians, we see an important shift in emphasis. Question 2 remains important,
but questions 1 and 3 also become urgent. For Socrates, it is not clear how to
act. Contradictions and puzzles abound. Also, it is not obvious what the good
life for humans is – what we might reasonably strive for ourselves and attempt
to gain for others.
This difference in
questions reflects a difference in situation. Athens has grown in less than a
hundred years from a small, grubby town to the center of great empire. It has
pioneered a form of government, direct rule by citizens (or democracy) that has
never been tried before on a large scale. Its economic growth and its political
power have confronted it with challenges for which there are no precedent in
its traditions. If Confucius is someone who is conscious that the old ways are
best and need to be restored, reanimated, Socrates is a person who has come to
think that the city has grown beyond the old ways, and that those who continue
to think in old patterns will lead the city to disaster.
If Confucius is like
someone who has grown up in a safe and sane community, Socrates is like someone
who has grown up in a terribly disrupted community, in which the traditional
wisdom can’t be trusted, in which the authorities betray you, in which you have
to figure things out for yourself. Carol Bly is eloquent about this situation:
She begins her anthology
with the words of Thomas McGrath, whose
poem, “Ode to the Americans Dead in Asia” gives a picture in images of a sick
and dangerous culture:
A natural response to
living in a disrupted and dangerous environment is “whistling in the dark,”
pretending that everything is all right, that we know our way around. What is
most striking about Greek culture, in many of its manifestations, is that it
doesn’t do that: it confronts the darkness, the ambiguity, the contradictions
head on. That happens in science, in mathematics, in philosophy of being and
time, in history, in artistic production,
and in human relationships.
Our course materials make
reference to two such confrontations: the Socratic dialogue and the Greek
tragedy.
The Bill Moyers
conversation with Martha Nussbaum illustrates the “edginess” of Greek tragic
drama: stories of people caught between absolute obligations that conflict
(Antigone, Agamemnon), people loaded down with the full guilt for crimes they
were unconscious of having committed (Oedipus), good people destroyed and
debased by sufferings beyond their capacities (Hecuba). It is important to
remember that these drama festivals, which lasted all day, were attended by
almost all the male citizens of Athens; they were community events for which
our only possible counterparts are things like the Superbowl.
At first glance, the
dramas Plato presents are much duller and more conservative: long conversations
about concepts that define the life worth living in Athens: courage, justice,
knowledge, piety, friendship, erotic love, poetic inspiration. This
ordinariness is an illusion, however. Almost always, the darkness is just
outside the door, in the historical context of the drama. The dramas are set
back in time thirty or forty years. That means that they portray a time when
Athens was still an empire and a major military power, engaged in a long war
with Sparta. They are written after Athens has lost that war, suffering a
series of humiliating defeats, more humiliating because they were avoidable,
the results of mistakes, miscalculations, and over-eagerness. In many of the
dialogues, the history of the characters in very dark. Laches and Nicias are
both killed in battles that Athens loses, in part because of their mistakes.
Some of the guests at Cephalus’ party return twenty years later to steal his
property and kill his son.
To get at the spirit of
the dialogues, think of those horror movies that begin with an extraordinarily
ordinary and sometimes very happy scene – a pleasant little village, a family
camping trip, a few friends getting away for the weekend, a visit to an elderly
relative. There are maybe ten minutes of calm before the aliens take over the
village, the snakes turn up in the tents, they sadistic killer makes his
appearance at the summer camp, the elderly relative turns out to have extremely
odd and painful hobbies. Those reading Plato’s drama know how what horrors
followed these pleasant conversations. They also know that, at the point at
which these conversations took place, it was still possible to avoid those
horrors. Plato chooses his moments very carefully, to make that point. The
reader is forced to ask: what could have been done to make history come out
differently? The tool of change is – critical conversation, question and
answer, the Socratic game called elenchus.
Think about how these
dialogues might have been used. We know that Plato had a school, the Academy.
Imagine these dialogues read out, studied, dissected, with the aim partly of
understanding deeply Athens’ failures and defeat in order to construct ways of
thinking and talking that would make similar failures less likely. They replay
the basic mistakes, in great detail, in order to avoid making them again and
also in order to learn what can be learned from them, to keep the loss from
being totally pointless.
The dialogues show courage
with respect to history and willingness to admit painful truths, to which I
find no good counterpart in contemporary life.
Just as the tragedies confront people with the painful things that can
happen in any human life, forcing people to come to terms with the worst that
can happen, so the dialogues present the mistakes, blunders, and
misunderstandings that cost Athens its empire and its glorious place in
cultural history, as the most exciting city in the world. This willingness to
confront ignorance, perplexity, mistakes, weakness, without jumping to easy
answers, to comforting accounts, could be the most important gift that the
Athenians gave to western culture. It is certainly the spirit that enlivens
western moral philosophy.
Contrast the Confucian
tradition. In the writings of one of Confucius’ successors, there’s a story
about a father who steals sheep. The question that is raised: what is the son’s
obligation? Should he protect and help his father or should he turn him into
the police? The answer is to sort of split the difference: persuade your father
to move to a new place, don’t turn him in. The Athenians would be all over this story: the tragedy of the loyal
son and the criminal father. (The movie version of Oliver gives some indication
of what that kind of tragedy might look like.) But for the Confucians, this is
an isolated story, not the center of their intellectual life. Their main
concern is to celebrate what they know, the reaffirm and clarify traditional
values, to point out a generally secure path for the next generation to walk.
Sure, some of that next generation will have sheep thieves for fathers. But
that’s not the point to emphasize: IN GENERAL, sons should be obedient and
respectful to their parents.
The Athenians could have
taken a more comforting approach to dark material, spurning tragedy in favor of
patriotic dramas, regarding the events that led to their downfall as isolated
incidents, aberrations, without significance for the future. But instead, over
and over, they turn their attention to the disturbing events, the things that
don’t make sense, that don’t fit into any comfortable world-view.
What enables them to do
this? Their faith in reason, in the power of the human mind, working through
argument and intuition, to see new structures, new relationships, to make
progress, to make order out of chaos. The story of the rise of Athens is the
story of victory through unconventional cleverness. The economic vitality of
Athens comes from the introduction of a radical new form of political
organization in which all citizens have a vote in every major public
decision. The first victory against the
Persians, the foundation of the empire, is accomplished because the Athenians
are able to do the unthinkable, to sacrifice their city in order to win the
war. The Athenians allow the Persians to burn Athens, retreating to their
ships. They win the naval war through a further series of tricks and strategic
retreats. Their successful strategy in the early part of the war with Sparta
consists in refusing to fight – retreating inside the walls of the city and
allowing the Spartans to wear themselves out in a very long siege. All of these
moves are untraditional, counter to common sense, the product of logic
over-riding impulse and emotion and habit. It is understandable that, after
some successes with reason guiding action, the Athenians might have found it a
plausible strategy in life generally: to confront the hard questions, with some
assurance that progress could be made, that new answers and new resolutions
would emerge.
In the remainder of this
course, I want to hold on to these two ways of proceeding: the purification and
clarification of tradition exemplified by Confucius, and the confrontation of
paradox and dilemma and darkness using reason to come up with new ways of
thinking, new ways of shaping human life, exemplified by Socrates and by his
friend and disciple, Plato. For convenience, I will speak of these as
“traditional” and “critical” ethics.
I don’t want to claim that
either of these approaches is the right way. Obviously, they arose in response
to very different circumstances. Confucius, an historian, sees a system that is
largely working, and thinks about ways of tuning it up, to make it work better.
Socrates confronts a situation in which disastrous decisions are being made, in
which economic, military, and social change have pushed Athens out to sea,
beyond any clear landmarks. He naturally wants to think things through from the
ground up, to invent a new way of proceeding. He doesn’t have much choice.
Given that both situations, the situation of inheriting a viable tradition and
the situation of being at sea with no landmarks visible, are represented in
every class I teach, I am inclined to say that both approaches should be
studied carefully by anyone wanting to understand what moral philosophy has to
offer.
The two approaches are
also not exclusive. The Confucian tradition does address dilemmas and
questions; they just aren’t central. The Socratic tradition is all questions,
but, when Plato takes up the issue later on, after Socrates is executed, he
points out the limits of any effort to change society by reasoning alone. He
ends up, in the Republic, suggesting the construction of a society with very
strong “givens” that are not open to question, a society in which the philosopher
Socrates would be confined to a very bordered role and prevented from wandering
around, raising questions for everybody about everything. It is not clear how
seriously Plato intends this suggestion. The fact that he even entertains such
an idea suggests that he feels the power of established traditions and rituals
to shape feeling and behavior in ways beyond the power of reason and argument.
A conversation between Plato and Confucius would be a very interesting event.
The first weeks of the course
do three central jobs:
- They point a direction for ethics, making clear what sort of case is ethically interesting. Ethics is somewhere in the direction of the Golden Rule. Moral standards are those standards that most of the soldiers at My Lai ignored and the most of the villagers in Le Chambon acknowledged.
- They identify three major moral questions: questions about what to do, questions about how to become a good person, and questions about what is valuable in human life.
- They give us access to two old and venerable ways of going about moral thinking: the traditionalist approach and the critical approach.
Our next task is to pay
very close attention to what was going on in Athens: to Socrates’ method, and
to Plato’s response to that method – and to the life of Socrates – as visible
in his masterwork, the Republic.
The Many Dimensions of Socratic Elenchus
One way of distinguishing
Socrates from Confucius: Confucius gives us advice, pronouncements, a
perspective on life. Socrates leaves us a method, a way of thinking that we can
practice ourselves, that can help us move forward on ANY issue, from whatever
point we may begin.
The method is called
“elenchus.” DeBotton gives a good summary of it in his chapter on Socrates.
One might think of elenchus
as a method of definition and counter-example.
The first step of elenchus
is to think about what we understand, what we somehow intuitively know about.
Socrates never questions people about matters outside their experience. He
talks to generals about courage, to lovers about erotic love, to politicians
about justice, to religious initiates about piety.
Socrates makes an unusual
demand of such people: that they give an account of that which they know – a
general account that covers all cases. This is sometimes talked about as a
definition.
He then works with them to
find cases that don’t fit their definition, to find counter-examples, and
encourages them to build new accounts, more inclusive definitions that are not
vulnerable to these counter-examples.
Socrates offers this
“service” freely to anyone, anytime. He is maybe the most talkative person in a
very talkative culture. People respond in a variety of ways. In the Laches, we
saw a fairly respectful and benign response. Faced with clear evidence that
their accounts were deficient, the generals bravely proposed new accounts,
which also turned out to be deficient. At the end, they blamed themselves, not
Socrates, for their failure to bring the discussion to a satisfying close.
Other people who talk to
Socrates get angry, blaming him for the pain and uncertainty they are feeling.
They refuse to continue beyond a couple of interchanges, sometimes warning
Socrates that people who ask the questions that he asks are in danger, in a
city in which anyone can bring charges against anyone, even with respect to
capital crimes. (Their threats are well founded. Socrates is eventually brought
to trial, found guilty of corrupting the youth, and sentenced to death – by a
democratic jury of over 500 Athenians.)
To get this trick firmly
anchored in our minds, let’s look at some examples:
Athenian: Bravery is
standing one’s ground in battle.
Socrates: But what about
that time you did a carefully planned retreat and won the battle. Would you
want to say that that wasn’t brave?
Athenian: Ok, I guess
you’re right. So, how about this: “Bravery is standing one’s ground when it is
wise to do so, and fleeing when that is not wise.”
Athenian: Piety is doing
what the gods love.
Socrates: But what about
those stories about one god seducing another god’s wife. Clearly, the god who
does the seducing loves adultery, and the god whose wife is seduced hates
adultery. So is the same act both pious and impious?
Athenian: Ok, I guess
you’re right. So how about this: “Piety is doing what all the gods love.
Athenian: Justice is
paying your debts and keeping your promises.
Socrates: But what about
the case in which your friend lends you his sword, and you agree to give it
back when he asks for it. But then your friend goes crazy, proclaims hatred for
his whole family, and asks for his sword back so that he can kill them. Would
you say it is just to give him back his sword to kill his family?
Athenian: Ok, I guess
you’re right. So how about this: “Justice is giving each person what he or she
deserves.”
Athenian: Knowledge is
just perception. One knows what one sees.
Socrates: But what about a
bull frog the same age as you. It has seen as much as you have. Does that mean
that it knows as much as you do?
Athenian: Happiness is
just the quantity of pleasure. The more pleasure of whatever kind one has, the
happier one is.
Socrates: But what about
the boy prostitutes who have sex from morning til late evening. Don’t they have
more pleasure than the average Athenian by far? So, do you want to say they are
the happiest Athenians.
Think about the dimensions
of Socrates’ practice. He offers people a way of thinking things through, of
making progress, starting where-ever they are. Whatever account one has can be
improved by Socrates’ method. Also, Socrates never goes beyond the experience
of his conversation partner. This person has to agree that each counter-example
IS a counter-example, or the conversation stalls. This leads Socrates to say at
one point that he is showing people that they are in disagreement WITH
THEMSELVES. Another way to put that: they know more than they are able to say,
at first, and Socrates has some talent at eliciting that knowledge from them.
(This leads him to describe himself as a midwife, helping men give to the ideas
that are within them.)
As a way of thinking about
ethics, elenchus has important advantages. It can be used anytime, anywhere, on
any subject. Also, it virtually assures some kinds of progress: when one forces
oneself to state one’s moral views in general, on sees all sorts of important
cases that don’t quite fit, ways that one’s general views are short-sighted.
And the reformulations may actually lead to insights that matter, to
life-changing discoveries.
I think it is pretty
obvious that Plato is presenting Socrates’ conversations with Laches and Nicias
in this light, as opening up new practical options for them. Both Laches and
Nicias see courage in a fairly narrow way, early on: “holding one’s position on
the battlefield.” Socrates first points out that that isn’t even a very good
account of BATTLEFIELD courage: Athenian strategy had moved a long way from the
“armies whacking at each other” model of archaic times. But we need to remember
that Laches and Nicias are not just soldiers: they are prominent Athenian
citizens and generals. For them, courage is facing the the pressure of their
fellow soldiers and the bad advice of other citizens in the assembly, as much
as facing any enemy. Historically, it is in these encounters with fellow Athenians
that they fail. Plato is perhaps suggesting, in his “alternative history” mode,
that, had this conversation actually happened, Laches and Nicias might have
generalized their BATTLEFIELD courage into true CIVIC courage – and saved
Athens from defeat. In this particular case, it seems that Socrates’ method
leads directly to useful, indeed necessary, insight.
(There’s a counterpart in
the Le Chambon story. The French at first fight the Germans and are quickly
defeated. They then, by and large, give up on resistance. The only kind of
resistance they can imagine is armed resistance, and that is suicide, given the
superiority of the German military. Pastor Trocme does just what Socrates does:
he broadens the discussion, introducing the idea of “Weapons of the Spirit,” of
non-violent resistance.)
There are some faults to
Socrates’ method. It works best with articulate positions, and lots of people
of great wisdom have a kind of moral knowledge that is not easily translated
into general statements. Such people won’t show up well, in Socratic
discussion, and their insights may not be given a proper hearing. Also,
Socrates’ method works on individual beliefs: it is designed for one-on-one
teaching. It would take a very long time to change a society, one person at a
time. Finally, Socrates’ method requires a discussion partner who is willing to
be proved wrong, who is not so committed to his or her current way of life that
no argument can have an effect. Plato’s
construction of the well-governed state in Republic can be seen as suggesting
alternative approaches that address these faults, at least in the imaginary
world of political science fiction.
One feature of Socrates’
conversations is so pronounced that it has a special name. Socrates generally
leaves people puzzled. However many accounts they give of something, he always
finds a problem. That makes people describe those dialogues which come closest
to the practice of the historical Socrates as “aporetic” dialogues, from a word
“aporia” meaning dark
doorway or opening. The dialogues make people feel as if they are standing if
front of a dark doorway, not knowing how to go forward.
For first time readers of
the aporetic dialogues, the fact that they come to no conclusions is
frustrating. One might remember, however, that these are very quick
conversations. It is odd to think that centuries are required to sort out the
physical principles governing our world but that ethical reality can be mapped
in an afternoon. Surely, these are introductory conversations pointing the way
to serious work, over perhaps a lifetime.
If we think back to the
questions of ethics, we might initially align these discussions with
conversations about what should be done. The generals in Laches discuss what a
courageous person would do, and they are reminded that courage may require a
variety of different actions in different circumstances. Their idea of what one should do as a
courageous person is enlarged.
The discussions are also
relevant to another topic, the topic of how one becomes a good person. In that
connection, the role of elenchus is not to arrive at particular results but to
produce just that sort of befuddlement, perplexity that is so uncomfortable for
so many of Socrates’ “victims.” Socrates
combats the attitude: “I know my way around. I have things figured out. I know
enough to act decisively.” What his conversations show, taken together, is that
even the most capable and most respected Athenians are deeply confused about
the ideas at the centers of their lives. This general message, apart from any
particular result, urges caution, restraint, an exploratory attitude generally.
Keep in mind that Athens
had come into great power and wealth very quickly. The Athenian army could –
and did – destroy allies that violated its orders, killing the men, sending
women and children into slavery. The Athenian assembly could launch a thousand
ships on a single vote, after a day of discussion. Athenian juries had life and
death power over any citizen. This power was used sometimes arrogantly,
frivolously, without due deliberation. One might see Socrates’ whole career as
an effort to put brakes on that arrogance, to slow down the exercise of power.
The first writing
assignment in this class was an application to your own life of a sort of
philosophic animal, the duck-rabbit. The choice of this as a first assignment
was not accidental. Recognizing duck-rabbits is the central philosophic
capacity. Socrates’ method, his challenge of definitions, depends on reminding
people that things they see in one way can in fact be reasonably seen in
multiple ways. Think about the generals again. When asked about courage, they
immediately think of an example of UN-courageous action, and they build their
account around that case: cowardice is running away in battle, so courage must
be “standing fast in battle.” Socrates reminds them that running away is a duck
rabbit: it can be seen as a strategy or as a mindless response to terror. Similarly, the people asked to define
justice think of a case of injustice: someone makes a promise and then breaks
it. So they say, “Justice is keeping promises.” Socrates notes that “keeping
promises” is a duck/rabbit: sometimes good, sometimes bad. In each case,
recognizing a duck/rabbit is the first step toward achieving a deeper level of
understanding, the first step on the road to real philosophic thinking. So, in
the same way, if you are to begin to think philosophically about ethics in your
own life, to move beyond the lines you customarily draw, the opinions you customarily
express, it is very important that you recognize those situations that are open
to alternative readings, that are more complicated than they seem at first.
This says something about
the role of papers in this course generally. We will survey some of the most
important ways of thinking people have ever devised, for making sense of life
and improving life. The writing assignments will be invitations to begin
applying those ways of thinking to your own situation. This is the only
reasonable way for you to evaluate these ways of thinking, to determine whether
they will be useful to you in addressing the challenges of your own life.
The Republic – Plato confronts an objection to
Socrates’ way of working: “Why should I care about being good?”
Silberbauer’s piece,
“Ethics in Small Scale Societies,” reminds us of a couple of basic points: (1) In many social situations, the
intelligent selfish person is going to behave just as the Golden Rule requires,
because behaving any other way will harm his or her interests. (This is
particularly true in societies where everyone is connected in multiple ways and
everyone knows everyone else’s business.) (2) A custom of basic decency is very
much to advantage of even the most selfish person. I might want to behave like
a predator, but I’d be a fool to want my neighbors to behave like predators.
That would mean I could never be secure.
One might teach ethics to
a very mixed class, some full of compassion and loving-kindness and empathy,
others eager to get rich as quickly as possible by any means possible. ALL of
them have an interest in knowing what the standards of decent, appropriate,
just conduct are. The most predatory need to know how to act WHEN PEOPLE ARE
WATCHING and what to fake.
When Socrates asked his questions
in the Athenian marketplace, he was assuming that people were committed to
certain ideals of conduct: that they believed in justice and true friendship
and piety and courage. Plato, when he writes the Republic, knows better. Some
people just don’t care. If they could be perfectly sure that they wouldn’t get
caught, they would become monsters.
Plato takes on the task of
persuading the intelligent monster to care about decency, about justice. Such a
monster realizes that he or she benefits enormously from everybody else being
committed to decency and justice and all those other virtues. It would be
disastrous if everybody started thinking like an intelligent monster. Also,
such a monster realizes that he or she has to pass as decent to be able to undertake
selfish projects: only the dictator, the tyrant, gets to be a public and
obvious monster, and, in Greece, as in the current world, there were not lots
of job openings for absolute dictators. So the question Plato is really
answering in the Republic is just this, “Why should I be good when nobody’s
looking?” One might state this also as: “Why shouldn’t I cheat?” or “Why should
I be decent, when I can get away with being predatory?”
Plato’s answer is a long,
complex argument that lays the foundations for many disciplines: psychology,
political philosophy, criticism of drama, theory of knowledge. The notes on the
Republic sketch the main lines of the argument.
It is important to see how
this question comes up in contemporary society. That’s the point of looking at
“Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room.” In a complex society, very different
from Silberbauer’s small-scale societies, it is possible for people to harm
others anonymously, to profit from others’ misery in ways for which they can
never be held accountable. The energy managers who directed power out of
California during peak use periods were subjecting elderly and fragile people
to great misery and sometimes mortal danger. Imagine being stuck in an elevator
during a power outage, in 100 degree heat, when you are 80 years old or
diabetic or mentally ill. But they likely lived outside of the affected
areas, and their action was masked by the whole corporate structure. No one
would ever call them to account at church or on the golf course. They might use
their profits to make charitable contributions and get a reputation as
community benefactors.
Similarly, company
managers who maximize their own pay and stock profits while setting the company
up for bankruptcy after they depart can hide behind a wall of complex economic
theory to avoid the wrath of the stockholders who find that their retirement
accounts are worthless. Not every scam artist is as crude as Bernie Madoff was.
What the young people at
the party in the Republic demand is a defense of justice that doesn’t depend on
the reputation for justice. That turns into: a demand for an account of justice
and injustice as they affect the soul or mind of the just person, since
trickery can deceive people about all the other effects: persuading the mob
that good people are monsters, that monsters are good people.
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