Socrates of Athens469-399 BCE

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

Philosophy of Nature

Moral Philosophy

“What is the chief end in life that is alone worthy of desire?”

“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?”

End

Choice

Choice

choice

The Greatest Good: The Sumum Bonum (Ultimate Good)

Instrumental goods

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.

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.

Pleasure

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)

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?

You are what you choose (not what you eat)

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