Question I always wondered at Socrates' idea that if you know that a certain way to live or that certain actions are evil, you couldn't do them. I know people do things, and later regret them. And that means that have some knowledge after the fact that if they had had before would have made it impossible to do what they regret. And that we can rationalize almost anything to keep ourselves from knowing exactly what we are doing. But doesn't, say, Macbeth know that what he is doing is evil, and does it anyway? Are there any good arguments for Socrates?

Accepted:
February 24, 2011

Comments

Although it does indeed seem to be the case that agents seem knowingly to do evil--one thinks of Milton's Satan, who says, "evil be now my good"--and that Socratic intellectualism, most clearly expressed, if I remember correctly, in the Protagoras--cannot be correct. But it seems to me that Socratic intellectualism--as it is sometimes called--presupposes a very strong conception of knowledge, one which most agents, including, probably, Milton's Satan, fail to achieve. The basic idea seems to me to be that if one had full or complete knowledge, then one couldn't do evil willingly. (In part because one would thereby know that in doing evil, one was failing to act in accordance with some virtue or another. So Socratic intellectualism seems to be closely connected to the Socratic view that all virtues are connected--the 'unity of the virtues'--and that all virtues are identical to knowledge. Given those assumptions, the Socratic view seems to be plausible; independent of the views attributed to the character Socrates in Plato's 'early dialogues', however, it seems to me that the view is plausible. If one knew what was good, if one's vision of the good wasn't occluded in some way or another, and if--as I think is the case--one always acts 'under the guise of the good', that is, if one always does what seems best to one, at the moment that one acts--then, I think, Socratic intellectualism is true. To be sure, we finite rational agents nearly always fall short of this nearly unattainable ideal, which is why we commit wrong or evil acts, but if such knowledge could be attained, then I am inclined to think, Socrates might very well be right. (To be sure, my basis for thinking this rests on certain assumptions, which others might very well contest and, indeed, have contested, but nevertheless, given those assumptions, which I think are independently defensible and plausible, it seems to me very plausible that Socratic intellectualism might well be correct, even if it is rarely manifest in human action. To be sure, making out this claim would require considerable independent argumentation, but I think that such arguments can be given--although, sadly, I don't myself quite know how to give them!!)