Perspectives on Greek Philosophy

S.V. Keeling Memorial Lectures in Ancient Philosophy 1992-2002

R. W. Sharples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351774062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Title first published in 2003. In commemoration of the philosophical interests of Stanley Victor Keeling, the annual lectures in his memory highlight the interest and importance of ancient philosophy for contemporary study of the subject. This volume brings together the Keeling lectures from leading international figures in ancient and modern philosophy, presented between 1992 and 2002. Including contributions from Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, lectures range across topics such as 'Intrinsic Goodness', Necessity, Fate and Determinism and Quality of Life, extending from Plato through Aristotle to the Stoics. Edited and with a preface by R. W. Sharples.

Chapter One

Plato’s Construction of Intrinsic Goodness^*

Bernard Williams

I

Thrasymachus says in Book I of the Republic that justice is ‘the advantage of the stronger’ (338C). This is not offered as a λóγoς or definition of justice: if it were, it would lead to the conclusion that since the stronger certainly pursues his own advantage, he must pursue justice, which Thrasymachus of course denies. Closer to what he principally wants to say is his later statement (343C) that justice is an ἀλλóτριoν ἀγαθóν, something that always does somebody else some good. Thrasymachus’ own account operates at the very primitive level of dividing agents (whether they be individual people or cities) into two types, the strong and the weak, and identifying justice simply as a device used by the strong to exploit the weak. This immediately raises the question of what makes one agent stronger than another. In particular, what makes a collective agent, such as a city or a group of bandits, strong? Indeed, what makes it a collective agent at all? The answer, as Socrates points out at 351 seq, must be, to a significant degree, the practice of justice between the individuals who form the collective agent. So Thrasymachus’ primitive model must be wrong.

This implies, further, that we cannot go on saying simply that justice ‘always does someone else some good.’ Thrasymachus himself, when he said this, did not mean that the benefits secured by any just act were uniquely benefits to someone other than the agent. He did not deny that when the weaker party acts in accordance with justice, he secures a benefit for himself; he claimed that when this is so, it is only because of power possessed by someone else who is stronger and who also gains a benefit. Justice is always in someone else’s interest, because when an agent has an interest in doing some just act, it is always (leaving aside errors, which are discussed at 339ff.) because it is in someone else’s interest that this itself should be so.

However, not even this much will be true, once we accept that justice helps to make collective agents strong. In place of Thrasymachus’ view, that justice is a device used by the strong to exploit the weak, we have the idea put forward by Glaucon in Book II, that it is a device of the (individually) weak to make themselves (collectively) strong – to make themselves stronger, in fact, than those who, before this association, were individually strong. On this account, Thrasymachus’ first formulation, that justice is the interest of the stronger, might be replaced with an equally crude slogan to the effect that it is the interest of the weaker. When the association of the (previously) weak is formed, and the collective agent comes into being, justice does each of the participants some good in a way that does not depend on its doing some other, exploiting, party some good.

Expressed in these terms, Thrasymachus’ and Glaucon’s accounts seem to be opposed to one another. It is not simply that they can easily be formulated in terms that are contrary to one another: to us, the opposition may seem to extend to their ethical value. The Thrasymachean account, to the extent that it can be made coherent at all, is fiercely reductive and ‘unmasks’ justice as an exploitative device. Glaucon’s theory, on the other hand, is the ancestor of honourable contractualist accounts which show why justice is the basis of collective endeavours and the division of labour, and why it is of great value to human beings.

Granted these differences, it is significant that every party to the discussion in the Republic treats Glaucon’s position (and its elaboration by Adeimantus) as essentially a somewhat refined version of Thrasymachus’. ‘I shall renew Thrasymachus’ argument,’ Glaucon says (358B-C); and Adeimantus, who, like his brother, does not accept this outlook himself but wants to hear it refuted by Socrates, says that he has put as strongly as he can the view of Thrasymachus and others who agree with him (367B). The reason for this is, at one level, obvious. There is an opinion about justice that Thrasymachus on the one hand, and Glaucon and Adeimantus on the other, certainly share, despite their other differences: that the life of justice¹ is in some sense a second best. This is the issue that is picked out at the beginning of Book II, when the distinction is made between things that are valued in themselves, things that are valued for their consequences, and things that are valued for both (357-8).² What Socrates is encouraged to show, contrary to the common opinion which has been expressed in different ways by Thrasymachus and by Glaucon, is that justice falls into the third class. It is obvious that this is the issue, but there is another question to which the answer is rather less obvious: why should the discussion take this form? Why are the standards for the value of justice raised so high?

The first point to emphasize is how radically individualistic, at this stage of the discussion, the issue is taken to be. Glaucon’s account might be said to show that we have an interest in pursuing justice, and if we assume that ‘we’ is taken collectively, this is straightforwardly true. Indeed, as we have already seen, granted the collective ‘we’, justice does not even come out as a second best – without justice there will be no collective ‘we’. But the collective ‘we’ has a tendency to unravel, and in the discussion with Thrasymachus we are not allowed to assume it. The question whether we have reason to pursue justice is taken, by Socrates as it is by Thrasymachus, to refer to each of us. The question each of us must ask is ‘what reason do I have to be just?’, ‘what does justice do for me?’. This is the force of Socrates’ earlier remark (352D): our discussion is not about a trivial matter, but about how one should live.³

The question, then, is about the best life for the individual, and already at 347E Socrates has said that he regards it as an issue ‘bigger’ than Thrasymachus’ first formulations, whether he was right in thinking that the life of the unjust person was better⁴ than that of the just. A closely related idea is that no-one would choose to be just if he had an alternative (‘no-one is willingly just,’ 360C.) The force of this is supposedly given to us by the two thought-experiments that Glaucon presents, the ring of invisibility (359D-360) and that in which we are invited to think about two men, one of whom has all the social rewards of justice without being really just, while the other has genuine justice and none of its conventional rewards (360E-361D).

There are difficulties with each of the thought-experiments: the second, because it is not clear what exactly we are invited to suppose,⁵ and the first, because it is unclear what it could tell us about real life. But they are intended, in any case, to sharpen the question ‘do you value justice for its own sake or for the sake of the rewards and the reputation that conventionally go with it?’ The question gains in force when we take into account Adeimantus’ contribution. The general effect of that contribution is to reinforce Glaucon’s insistence that we should ‘take away reputation’ (367B), and we may wonder why he says that the argument has not been adequately expressed by Glaucon, and that ‘what most needed saying has not been said’ (362D). His point is that as Glaucon has put it, it is the enemies of justice such as Thrasymachus who emphasize the idea that people pursue justice for the sake of the conventional rewards. On the contrary, Adeimantus says, the real problem is that the friends of justice, people who are trying to encourage the young to be just, themselves emphasize those rewards, and so sell justice short; and he cites passages from the poets to this effect (prefiguring some of the objections that will be brought against them later in the dialogue).

II

All this, then, gives some sense to the idea of pursuing, and praising, justice ‘for its own sake’. But now we must ask why Plato thinks it so important that we should value justice in this way. What is the point of insisting that one does not value justice properly unless one values it, in this sense, for its own sake? A modern reader may easily be misled at this point, and take the answer to this question to be more familiar than it is. He or she may take Plato to be thinking of a pure, self-sufficient moral motivation, in terms of which the agent does good or right actions simply because that is what they are, and for no other reason. On this conception, if one reflects on the value of a moral life, one will insist simply on its moral value: this is what it is to be concerned with justice and other moral values for their own sake, and it is contrasted with relating those values to anything else at all, such as one’s own happiness. But this, certainly, is not Plato’s concern. His argument can be formulated only because there is one, univocal, kind of question in practical reason, ‘how should I live?’, ‘what is the best life?’, ‘how shall I do best?’, to which Thrasymachus and his friends give the wrong answer, and Socrates, on behalf of justice, will give the right answer. It is not that the pursuit of justice ‘for its own sake’ has a quite special, moral, value which vindicates itself. The question of its value, rather, is the question of what makes a life worth living, a question to which other ‘non-moral’ goods might in principle, as the others suggest, provide the answer.

Another way of putting the point is that the idea of ‘pursuing justice for its own sake’ occurs in Socrates’ answer to the question, not in the question itself. The question is not ‘What is the value of justice pursued for its own sake, as opposed to the sake of its consequences?’ The question is: ‘What is the value of justice?’, and Socrates’ answer is: ‘It has no value (really), unless it has value when it is pursued for its own sake.’ So the question remains: why does Plato’s Socrates think this? Why does he raise the standards for the vindication of justice so high?

The question has been put in terms of someone’s desiring or valuing or pursuing justice for its own sake. This might equally be expressed in terms of justice being valued or pursued as an end, or as a final good. This, so far, does not give us a sense for justice being a final good, as distinct from some agent’s pursuing it as a final good, but the discussion between Socrates and the Thrasymachean party already suggests a direction in which one might get to that notion: what was to be the Aristotelian way, to the effect that justice is a final good if a rational, reflective, or wise person would pursue it as a final good. We shall need to keep this idea in mind.

However, my title uses a different phrase, ‘intrinsic goodness’, and we must not assume that this is the same idea. Christine Korsgaard has pointed out⁶ that the standard contrast to ‘final’ is ‘instrumental’, while the contrast to ‘intrinsic’ is ‘extrinsic’, and you need a theory to show that these two distinctions come to the same thing. Korsgaard makes several important points, but I do not want simply to accept her account as the basis of my discussion. She writes:

To say that something is intrinsically good is not by definition to say that it is valued for its own sake: it is to say that it has its goodness in itself. It refers to the location or source of the value rather than the way we value the thing.

Extrinsic goodness, on the other hand, is value that something gets from some other source.

One consideration that Korsgaard uses in separating the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction from the final/instrumental distinction does not seem to me to have the effect that her account requires. There are, as she says, various ways in which the goodness of one thing can be dependent on the goodness of another without the first being a means to the second. But many of these possibilities apply to practical reason itself. As David Wiggins and others have pointed out in discussing Aristotle, one may value going to the concert as a way of, not as a causal condition of, having a good evening. This kind of example is among those that Korsgaard uses to distinguish extrinsic from instrumental value. But these examples need not lead us to a notion which, in contrast to the final/instrumental distinction, refers to ‘the source of the value rather than the way we value the thing’. It need lead us only to the conclusion that even within the scope of practical reason, or again, ‘the way we value’ something, the contrast to ‘final’ should be something broader than ‘instrumental’; there are various ways of pursuing something ‘derivatively’, as we might say, as opposed to pursuing it as an end or final good, and one species of this is pursuing it as a means or instrument.

There is a second question about Korsgaard’s account of these distinctions which is very relevant to the present discussion. As Korsgaard formulates her central point:

One [distinction is that] between things valued for their own sakes and things valued for the sake of something else – between ends and means, or final and instrumental goods. The other is the distinction between things which have their value in themselves and things which derive their value from some other source: intrinsically good things versus extrinsically good things.

But we do not need Aristotle to remind us that a rational or wise person can pursue or value a certain thing both for its own sake and for the sake of something else. We have already seen that what Socrates wants to show, and will claim in the end to have shown, is that justice should be valued both for itself and for its consequences – that it is both a final and an instrumental good. Let us take ‘a good’ to be some type or general object of pursuit or valuation, such as justice, or honour, or pleasure. (This is the sense in which two rival politicians each of whom is pursuing honour are both pursuing the same good.) If one and the same good can be both final and instrumental, then that distinction is not one between different classes of goods; it is a distinction between kinds of goodness or ways in which things may be found good, and not, as Korsgaard puts it, a distinction between different things. But the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, as she explains it, must be a distinction between things: if something ‘has its value in itself’ – whatever exactly that means – it presumably cannot also ‘derive its value from some other source’. This shows that we are not merely taking apart two distinctions that operate in the same field.

I do not propose to pursue the idea of intrinsic goodness, as distinct from final goodness or goodness as an end, directly. My aim is to work round, in Plato’s thought, to a certain idea of intrinsic goodness and to see what function it performs there. At the end of the paper I shall suggest that we need, for our purposes, an idea of intrinsic goodness which is rather different from the one that we shall have ascribed to Plato; rather paradoxically, it is Plato’s own argument that will have helped to make this clear.

For the immediate discussion of Plato, at any rate, there are t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Plato’s Construction of Intrinsic Goodness
• 2 Morality and Immutability: a Platonic contribution to meta-ethics
• 3 Quality of Life in Plato and Aristotle
• 4 Do we need new Editions of Ancient Philosophy?
• 5 Aristotle and the Atomists on Forms and Final Causes
• 6 An Aristotelian Theory of the Emotions
• 7 Wittgenstein’s Builders and Aristotle’s Craftsmen
• 8 From Necessity to Fate: a Fallacy?
• 9 Compassion and Terror
• Index of Passages Cited from Ancient Authors
• General Index