Socrates of Athens
469-399 BCE
“The unexamined life is not worth living”
Philosophy of Nature
Moral Philosophy
“Why do you do what you do?”
“What’s your purpose?”
“What do you expect to achieve by making those
choices?”
“What are you living for?”
“What is the chief end in life that is alone worthy of desire?”
The Greatest Good: The Sumum Bonum (Ultimate Good)
End
Choice
Choice
Instrumental goods
choice
The one universal end that all people have in
common is:
Happiness
Not everyone is happy. So, it is not self-evident what
constitutes happiness. What is happiness? In other words,
what is the chief end in life that is alone worthy of desire?
Socrates was able to divide people into three, on the basis
of what each one regarded as happiness.
Majority
Second to
majority
Minority. The
philosophers.
Pleasure
Most people regard pleasure as happiness.
• Money (in order to purchase things that give
pleasure)
• Food and drink
• Sex
• Entertainment
• Feeling good (good weather, no work, bathe in the
sun, sipping Pina Coladas all day.
This class argued that happiness is not
pleasure. Some of the reasons:
•Pleasure is temporary (fleeting). It does not endure.
•Pleasure comes from the outside. It is not from “within”.
•It is possible to have many pleasures in life (wealth that
can buy any pleasure), yet still be unhappy.
• Suicide rate is highest among the wealthy, who have many
pleasures in their lives.
Honors (Fame)
You discovered a foolproof cheating method so that you
would never get caught, and that enabled you to Ace every
test and exam. You made it to the honor roll. You win the
Governor General’s Award. Would you be happy?
No. There would be something non-genuine about the award.
You didn’t earn it.
But, you are still honored, still celebrated as the best student in
the school.
If honor = happiness, one should be happy regardless.
Honors (Fame)
It isn’t the “honor” itself that makes one happy, but the
honorability.
The excellence that follows upon honor is not there, so one is
not happy to receive honors.
Perhaps happiness has something to do with excellence?
This accords with the insights of the class, for excellence is
not:
• fleeting, but enduring.
• from within, not from without.
• Not everyone who is honored and famous has “excellence”.
Wisdom (knowledge)
Socrates argues that happiness is not found in pleasure and
honors, for the reasons that you provided.
Rather, happiness is:
The perfection of the soul
This means: “Making the soul as good as possible”
Happiness is “goodness”, moral goodness.
But I thought happiness is “wisdom”?
•For Socrates, it is “wisdom”. Not just any knowledge, but
wisdom, which is the knowledge of “how to perfect the
soul”.
•Wisdom is the knowledge of the highest end, the chief end
that is alone worthy of desire.
•Wisdom is the Knowledge of Virtue.
•Happiness is virtue (moral excellence, goodness), which
requires wisdom.
Wisdom
Know Thyself (self knowledge).
• That the true self is the soul, not the body
(pleasure seekers think the true self is the body).
The Examined Life (worth living)
• The ability to discern the soul’s judgment from the
urgings of the body.
Freedom (self-rule)
• The ability to govern one’s passions, to rule over
them.
Freedom
To the moral relativist: doing what you want to do.
For Socrates: Wanting what you ought to want, and knowing
what that is.
Ruled by passions. No
more free than a bitch
in heat.
Enslaved by lust for
recognition.
Governed by truth (reason).
Such a one is truly free.
Happiness is not doing what you want. Rather, happiness is
moral virtue, that is, goodness. This is true because happiness
is an achievement, namely the perfection of the soul.
Why are most people unhappy? Why do most people find
the quest for happiness frustrating?
Because they are pursuing the wrong ends (I.e., pleasure,
honors).
The only end worthy of pursuit is goodness and the highest
perfection of the soul.
Some Students said: “Happiness is in some way a kind of
“self-love”. It has to do with self-respect.
Socrates might agree with this:
I maintain, Callicles, that it is not the most shameful of things to
be wrongfully boxed on the ears, nor again to have either my
purse or my person cut, but it is both more disgraceful and more
wicked to strike or to cut me or what is mine wrongfully, and,
further, theft and kidnapping and burglary and in a word any
wrong done to me and mine is at once more shameful and worse
for the wrongdoer than for me the sufferer.
Plato, (Gorgias, 508)
You are what you choose (not what you eat)
For Socrates, the person who “chooses” the good is good. The
person who chooses evil becomes evil. Now “goodness” is the
object of desire. We desire what we regard as good. Hence,
the more evil we become through evil choices, the less there is
in us to love.
The evil among us cannot love themselves, but they loath
themselves.
Happiness is not in “self-loathing”, but in true self-love, which
can only be present via moral excellence or goodness.
Only those who have a kind of moral excellence have any kind of
self-respect. Have you ever met a criminal with self-respect?
Dialectical Reasoning
The process of trying to reach a conclusion by examining
all possibilities until the right one is found.
Dialectic usually involves reductio ad absurdum.
REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM: Reduction to the absurd. In
logic, showing that an initial statement is false by showing that
it leads to a contradiction. E.g., X says that all Xs are always
lying. If true then X must be lying about Xs always lying,
which means that X regards the statement as false. Hence the
contradiction: All Xs both are and are not always lying. It
must be that the statement is false to begin with.
Consider:
There is no truth.
If it is true that there is no truth, then the statement “there is
no truth” cannot be true. Hence, the statement is false. If
the statement is false, then it follows that there is truth.
A statement is true because it is false violates the principle
of non-contradiction: “Nothing can be both true and false at
the same time and in the same respect”.
Without the principle of non-contradiction, one cannot have
a coherent dialogue.
Socrates