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Socrates, the Philosopher Citizen

Gerasimos Santas

According to many people, Socrates was many things -- a shameless

sophist, a critic of everybody and everything, a political subversive, a free

thinker, a skeptic, a civil disobedient, a wise man, maybe even a lover of

wisdom. According to what we know, Socrates was a citizen of Athens, he

was put to trial for impiety and corrupting the young men of Athens, found

guilty, sentenced to death and executed in 399BC. According to Plato, he

was mainly and above all a philosopher. And it is primarily as a philosopher

that Socrates, through Plato’s great dramatic art, has been immensely

influential.

Today I will make a few remarks about Plato’s portrait of Socrates,

because in it we get a clear answer to what Socrates’ citizenship meant to

Socrates himself.i In Plato’s Apology Socrates tells of a few occasions when

he fought bravely for Athens, when he upheld the law contrary to popular

will in the Council of democratic Athens, and when he disobeyed an unjust

order by the Thirty Tyrants. And in Plato’s Crito he decides that he should

not escape from jail, because he reasons that though the sentence of death

was unjust, even so he would be harming Athens and breaking his agreement

with its laws. All these are cases in which we would say Socrates was acting

as a citizen of Athens.

But in Plato’s Apology(21-4) Socrates also tells us what he did most of his

time, at least in the last half of his life: he was carrying out, he claims, an

order by god to philosophize: this is how he interpreted the Delphic saying

that no man was wiser than Socrates. Since he thought he had no knowledge,

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he sought to find out what the god meant by examining those who thought

they had knowledge -- statesmen, poets, sophists, religious experts,

craftsmen; not knowledge about anything and everything, but knowledge of

the human virtues and of good and evil, practical knowledge -- what we

might call choice guiding wisdom. What he found in each examination, he

claims, is that these people did not have the knowledge they thought they

had, and that he was wiser than they, since he was aware of his own

ignorance, whereas they were both ignorant of the virtues and of good and

evil, and also ignorant of their own ignorance. For example, in Plato’s

Euthyphro, a self proclaimed religious expert is unable to find a definition of

piety that escapes Socrates’ refutations; Euthyphro was prosecuting his own

father for doing something impious, even though he did not know what piety

is; by implication, Socrates’ jurors who found him guilty of impiety were in

the same boat – ignorant of piety and ignorant of their ignorance.

Now we might think that in doing these examinations and refutations

Socrates was acting as a private person, or as a religious person in obedience

to what he thought was god’s command. But in the Apology Socrates

proclaims that by doing these things he was benefiting his fellow citizens

(29de); indeed, that this work in obedience to god was the greatest good for

the city of Athens (30a), and himself no less than god’s gift to Athens

(31ab). By his own lights, his work as a philosopher was nearly inseparable

from his work as a citizen of Athens. And Plato confirms this in the Gorgias

(520-21), when he has Socrates make the unusual claim that the aim of the

true art of politics is not freedom, peace, and prosperity, but to make the

citizens as good as possible, wise and virtuous;ii and he, Socrates, is the only

statesman who did that! If we re-conceptualize the art of politics, Socrates’

philosophical mission was political!iii

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What then was this philosophizing that Socrates thought was good for his

fellow citizens and so immensely influential on subsequent generations?

What was “the moral reflection,” as Prof. Ahbel-Rappe aptly phrased it, that

Socrates urged on his fellow citizens? What examination of our lives did

Socrates have in mind and practice?

Like all answers to nearly all questions about Socrates, answers to this

question are controversial. But if we don’t press details too far, some of

Plato’s dialogues make it very clear, I think, that Socrates’ philosophizing

was made up of three main ideas and practices.

HOW SOCRATES MADE IMPORTANT CHOICES

To begin with, the Crito (and to some extent the Apology) makes it clear

that Socrates had definite ideas about how to make important choices in life,

and he practiced these ideas when he had to make the choice of his life,

whether to escape from jail.

He thinks that the decisive question before him is whether it is just or

unjust for him to escape, given his present situation and his whole life

(48bc). He tells Crito that he will make this choice not by listening to what

most people would say if he does not escape, but to the expert of the issue at

hand, presumably a person who knows what justice is (47a-48b). Choices

should be made on the basis of knowledge of the just, the admirable, and the

good ((47cd), not on the basis of the opinions of the many or by majority

vote. But he does not explicitly claim to be such an expert;iv and in the

absence of an expert, he is going to proceed as he always has, he says: “by

following the argument [or the reason] that on reflection seems best to me”

(46b)

Socrates is going to make his choice of what is the just thing to do by

arguments or by reflecting on reasons – it may fall short of knowledge, but it

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is reason or argument nevertheless. By dialogue with Crito, he then proceeds

to tell us what shape these arguments or reasons are going to have: the

beginning of his deliberation, he says (48e, 49d, 50a), will to be some

general principles; he will then apply these principles to his case by putting

them together with the particular facts of his situation and by drawing the

logical conclusion from both together, principles and facts. (There is an

instructive parallel here with the way in which verdicts of guilt or not guilt

are to be reached in a court of law, by reasoning from the applicable law and

the particular facts of the case to the conclusion that the defendant did or did

not do something illegal).

Socrates identifies two such general principles: first, that it is never just to

injure or harm another human being, not even in return for similar injury or

harm done to oneself (49ce). He then puts this principle together with the

factual claim that if he were to escape he would be annulling the law that

court verdicts are to be obeyed, and through harming such a law he would be

harming the citizens of Athens and the city (50ab). Therefore, even though

the sentence was unjust, even so it would not be just for him to escape.

The second principle is that agreements should be carried out provided

they are just (49e). In an imaginary conversation with the laws of Athens,

Socrates then agrees to the Laws’ factual claim that he very much has agreed

freely to obey the laws of Athens (51de); and to their argument, from an

analogy between children and parents on the one hand and city and citizens

on the other, that this agreement with the laws, to persuade them about

justice or to obey them, is just (50d-51c). Therefore, once more, it would not

be just for him to escape.v

It is for this approach to making choices – what we might call a pioneering

theory of rational choice – that William Frankena of this university called

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Socrates “the patron saint of moral philosophy.” (in his influential book,

Ethics, Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp. 1, 2). Frankena attributes to Socrates’ the

following main points about making decisions in ethics: “We must not let

our decision be affected by our emotions, but must examine the question and

follow the best reasoning. We must try to get our facts straight and keep our

minds clear. Questions like these can and should be settled by reason…. We

cannot answer such questions by appealing to what people generally

think…We must think for ourselves.”. Frankena, who was not a specialist in

ancient Greek philosophy but a prominent expert in ethics, chose these

passages in the Crito to begin his book with, and to illustrate how Socrates

tried to bring reason into ethics, reason in making choices.vi

HOW SOCRATES REASONED ABOUT MORAL PRINCIPLES

But this approach is far from complete and Plato has Socrates recognize it.

In the Crito (49d) Socrates remarks that most people would not agree to a

part of his first principle: they might agree that generally it is not just to

harm or injure another human being, but they would claim that it is just to

return harm or injury; justice generally forbids harming others, but allows us

to harm or injure those who have harmed or injured us.

Socrates and most people can’t both be correct on this, or so Socrates

thinks (contrary to the sophist Protagoras’ relativistic view, that what seems

just to a person (or a city) is just to him).vii Who then is correct? Let us ask a

more modest question: why did Socrates think he is correct and most people

incorrect? Can his famous reliance on “the argument that on reflection

seems best to me” help us here?

There is a passage in the Euthyphro (7b-e) in which Plato has Socrates

remark on how difficult this question is. He says that when we disagree

about things that can be counted, measured, or weighed, we can use the

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mathematical arts to resolve our disagreement. If the Nile has flooded our

land, erased the old plot boundaries, and we now disagree about our borders,

we can resolve such disagreements by applying the science of geometry to

the problem at hand. But, Socrates says, if we disagree about what is just,

what is admirable, or what is good (the three main concepts of ethics – see

also Crito 47c), we cannot similarly use the sciences of counting, measuring,

and weighing to resolve such disagreements; implying that the just, the

admirable, and the good, cannot be counted, measured, or weighed.viii The

mathematical sciences are perhaps the clearest examples of human reason at

work; but if they are not available to resolve ethical disputes, how can

human reason help?

In response to this question, Socrates had two other main ideas and

practices.

His second main idea was to search for definitions of the main ethical

concepts, the just, the admirable, and the good; to test such definitions for

consistency and truth by the use of the elenchus – a question and answer

examination of our beliefs; and then to use definitions that survive the

elenchus to resolve ethical disagreements.ix If, for example, we could

discover a true definition of piety, he says (Euthyphro, 6d), we could use it

as a model or paradigm to tell whether Euthyphro’s action or any other

action is pious. Similarly, if we discovered a true definition of justice, we

could use it as a model to judge whether returning harm for harm is just. So,

even though we may not be able to measure justice, we might be able to

judge more reliably what is just and unjust if we can discover a true

definition of what justice really is.x If we think of the Socratic search for a

definition of justice as a search for the principles that underlie our judgments

of what is just and unjust, we can understand John Rawls’ remark in his

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fundamental work, A Theory of Justice, that “Moral Philosophy is

Socratic.”xi In searching for such principles we would be examining

ourselves and trying to understand our own conception of justice.

But such definitions are hard to discover, hard to test, and even harder for

any of them to pass the Socratic tests – indeed, in the Socratic dialogues no

proposed definition of the virtues gets past Socrates the critic.xii

But wait – all is not lost! Socrates had a third main idea for bringing

reason into ethics, particularly for resolving disputes about moral principles,

even in the absence of measuring and in the absence of definitions. This idea

was to use reasoning by analogy, analogies mostly from the arts and sciences

to ethics. For example, when we consider health, the virtue of the body, we

see that there is an art of medicine, hopefully knowledge of health and

disease and of their causes; perhaps disputes about justice and injustice, a

virtue of the soul, can be handled and resolved as physicians handle and

resolve disputes about health and disease.xiii

There is a passage in the first book of the Republic in which we can see

Socrates applying both of the last two main ideas: to search for, and test, a

definition of justice, and at the same time to try convince Polemarchus, by

reasoning from analogies, that it is not just to harm even those who harm us.

The conversation takes place in the grand house of Cephalus, a wealthy

resident alien in the Piraeus. With a foot in the grave, Cephalus is terrified

by what might happen to him if there is an afterlife, especially if he has done

injustice to anyone in this life. Socrates seizes the occasion to ask him what

justice is, but Cephalus is anxious to make sacrifices and propitiate the gods.

After a brief exchange, his son Polemarchus takes up Socrates’ challenge

and claims that justice consists in giving everyman his due or what is

appropriate to him: since what is due friends is some sort of benefit and to

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enemies some sort of harm, justice consists in benefiting friends and

harming enemies – a definition of justice that seems to capture what is still

considered fair in wars among nations But, Socrates asks, who are friends

and who are enemies? They agree that friends are good men who do benefit

and enemies are bad men who do harm. So this conception of justice seems

to be based on a principle that it is just to benefit those who benefit us and

just to harm those who harm us. And this clearly contradicts one of the

principles on which Socrates founded his conclusion in the Crito, that it

would not be just for him to escape even though the Athenians (the jurors,

not the laws) did injustice to him.

And now Socrates undertakes to test Polemarchus’ definition and to

convince him, by reasoning from analogies, both that his definition is

mistaken, and that it is never just to harm anyone, not even our enemies –

bad men that have done us harm.

The argument proceeds by the use of three sets of analogies (Rep. 335b-

36b).

First, Socrates and Polemarchus agree that when horses are harmed they

are made worse with respect to the virtue of horses; when dogs are harmed

they are made worse with respect to the virtue of dogs; similarly

(analogously), when human beings are harmed they are made worse with

respect to the virtue of human beings. Since justice is the virtue of human

beings, when human beings are harmed they are made more unjust.

Next, it is impossible, they agree, that musician make men unmusical by

exercising their art of music; or that horsemen make men unfit to deal with

horses by exercising their art of horsemanship; similarly (analogously), it is

impossible that just men make men unjust by exercising their art of justice,

or more generally that good men make men bad by exercising their virtue.

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Finally, it is not the function of heat to cool but of the opposite, nor the

function of dryness to moisten but of the opposite; similarly, it is not the

function of the good man to harm but of the opposite, the bad man; and since

the just man is good, it is not the function of the just man to harm, but of the

opposite, the unjust man.

From all these analogies taken together, Socrates concludes that if anyone

says that it is the part of a just man to harm his enemies, such a person is not

a wise man, for what he says is not true.

Clearly Socrates thinks that we can bring reason into ethics not only in

making particular choices, where we reason from general moral principles

and the particular facts of the case; but also when we disagree about general

moral principles: not only we can try to discover definitions of the moral

concepts in the principles, but also reason by analogy from less

controversial, more value-neutral similar cases.xiv

Presumably, some of the premises of this argument, about horses, dogs,

music, horsemanship, heat and dryness, are more value-neutral and less

controversial than the issue at hand about justice. To find out whether they

are true we might look at the aims and practices of the relevant arts and

sciences; we might go to an expert on horses to inquire whether harming a

horse is always making it worse with respect to what he takes to be the

virtues of horses; and to a chemist or physicist or engineer to find out

whether heat can cool.

Of course Socrates’ argument is not conclusive – arguments by analogy

never are. But it does succeed in showing us that we can reason about moral

principles. And it challenges us to think and reason about the concepts of

harm, virtue, and justice. For example, we can see that Socrates wants to tie

the notion of harming a thing (at least animals) to its virtues: to harm

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something is to make it worse relative to the virtues appropriate to it. Later

Socrates in turn ties the notion of virtue to function – virtues are qualities

that enable a thing to function well. In fact, he has a well rounded view,

probably taken from the medicine and biology of the day, that organisms

have functions and qualities that enable them to perform their functions well

– these are their virtues (Rep. 353ab). To harm an organism is to tamper with

its virtues; to harm a human being is to tamper with the virtues appropriate

to human beings; say, to make a human being unjust or a coward – a

profound harm indeed.

We could challenge Socrates’ concept of harm by considering other

analogies: for example, law instead of medicine, and reflect on what the law

counts as harm to a human being – say, theft or property damage, bodily

injury, homicide. Or we could reflect on what evolutionary biology counts as

harm to an organism – say, whatever lessens its chances for survival or its

chances for reproduction or both. Then we could go back to justice, and

consider whether it would ever be just to do to a human being any of the

things that medicine or the law or evolutionary biology count as harm to a

human being. If we did this, Socrates, I suggest, would be delighted: we

would be following his lead in reasoning further about what harm is and

whether it would ever be just to harm a human being, or perhaps any

organism.

SUMMARY

To sum up: I have argued that Plato’s Socrates is rightly regarded as the

patron saint of moral philosophy and the first moral philosopher because he

introduced reason into making ethical choices and moral judgments. He did

that by using and practicing three main ideas: we should make choices of

what is the right or just thing to do by putting together general principles of

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rightness or justice and the facts of case and draw the logical conclusion. If

we disagree about the facts we can appeal to the sciences to resolve the

disagreement. If we disagree about general moral principles, we can try to

discover and test definitions of the moral concepts used in the principles, and

then use the definitions to resolve the disagreement; or we can use reasoning

by analogies from less controversial and more value neutral cases to resolve

the disagreements. In all these cases, we would be making choices or moral

judgments, not on the basis of what people generally think nor by voting nor

by appealing to emotions, but by using our reason.

All three main ideas find practical application in Plato’s portrait of the last

days of Socrates as a citizen of Athens in three dialogues that form a

dramatic unity: in the Euthyphro, where Socrates is on his way to court to

face charges of impiety, and reasonably enough tries to find out what piety

really is; in the Apology where he tells us what his mission was as a

philosopher and citizen of Athens; and in the Crito where he chooses not to

escape by reasoning from general moral principles and facts of his life in

Athens, and from analogies. In his last days, when his life’s work and his life

were at stake, we see Socrates practicing the ideas he taught: as always, he

made choices and moral judgments by cool reasoning about what is right

and wrong, good and bad, admirable and shameful. This striking integration

of life and thought made his achievement all the more admirable and

convincing to generations beyond ancient Athens and his fellow citizens.

But, in conclusion, I do not want to exaggerate that achievement. Plato’s

Socrates, though occasionally arrogant and even hubristic in the Aplogy, is

humble elsewhere: he does not claim to have discovered the expert

knowledge in morals that he sought, nor that he was certain of the general

moral principles he used in his choices. And this seems to me to be correct.

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Socrates and Plato were pioneers – they did not solve all the problems, by

any means. But they were great pioneers who began several disciplines. I

hope I have given some evidence today that Plato’s Socrates really did

succeed in introducing reason into ethics; and that contemporary ethicists are

correct in regarding him as the patron-saint of moral philosophy and their

discipline as Socratic.

i I do not claim that Plato is our best or most accurate source of the historical Socrates. I do think that the great influence of Socrates in subsequent generations, so well attested and documented in A Companion to Socrates, edited by Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar, Blackwell, 2006, is due primarily to Plato’s portrait of Socrates as a philosopher, in the so called Socratic Dialogues of Plato. In any case, unless otherwise noted, the Socrates I speak of here is the Socrates of Plato’s early or Socratic dialogues. ii See also Euthydemus 292bc: Socrates is made to say that the things that are usually said to belong to the royal art, such as to make the citizens rich and free (compare the modern conception that the main tasks are peace and prosperity), are neither good nor bad; what the citizens need, if they are to be benefited and made happy, is to be made wise, to have knowledge imparted to them. iii For the differences between the art of politics as usually conceived, in Xenophon, for example, and the art of politics as conceived by Socrates in the Gorgia, (and later Plato in the Republic), see G. Vlastos, “The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy,” in W. Prior, Socrates, Routledge, London, 1996, vol. II. iv On Socrates’ claims about what he knows or does not know, see, e.g. G. Vlastos, “Socrates’ Disavowal of Knowledge,” in G. Fine, ed., Plato 1, Oxford, 1999, and about expert knowledge see P. Woodruff, “Plato’s Early Theory of Knowledge,” in H. Benson, ed., The Philosophy of Socrates, Oxford, 1992. v These arguments are far more complex and controversial than I can consider here. For a review of the different interpretations, see Brickhouse and Smith, The Philosophy of Socrates, ch. 6; for the latest interpretation, see C. Young, “Plato’s Crito and the Obligation to Obey the Law,” Philosophical Inquiry, 2006. vi For a similar view of Socrates’ contribution to ethics, also by an expert in ethics, not a specialist in Greek philosophy, see N. Sturgeon, “Can we Know what is Right?”, in Arts and Sciences, Cornell University, Winter, 1990. The article also contains a picture of Socrates, with the caption, “Socrates, the First Moral Philosopher.” vii Plato does not take up Protagoras’ challenge of ethical relativism till the Theaetetus (167), but it is clear enough that in the Crito Socrates thinks that he and the many cannot both be correct on the justice of retaliation. viii In the Protagoras (355-57) Plato has Socrates quite excited about the possibility of measuring, counting, and weighing the good; that possibility arises on the hypothesis that the good is pleasure, since pleasure presumably can be measured in its dimensions of intensity and duration; if that hypothesis were true, the art of measuring pleasure and pain would be “the salvation of life” (357a). But that hypothesis is refuted by Plato in the Gorgias, the Republic, and the Philebus. The debate about measuring the good still goes on; see, e.g., John Broome, Weighing Goods, Oxford, 1996. ix Socrates searches for a definition of justice in the Socratic Bk. I of the Republic, and he himself constructs and uses a definition of the admirable in Gorgias 474d-75e. x The Socratic quest for definitions is also a complex subject. Socrates was not seeking stipulative definitions or lexical definitions, but what the tradition calls “real” definitions, more like as the ancients may have thought of Euclid’s definition of line as length without breadth – what a line really is. Or perhaps

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the scientific definition of water as H2O. For discussion see the author’s Socrates, Routledge, 1979, ch. iv, Mark S. Cohen, “Socrates on the Definition of Piety,” in G. Vlastos, ed. The Philosophy of Socrates, New York, 1971, and P. Woodruff, Plato: Hippias Major, Hackett, 1982. xi A Theory of Justice, Harvard, 1971, p. 49. xii Some readers conclude from these repeated “failures” of the early dialogues that Socrates or Plato thought or were demonstrating that such real definitions of the main ethical concepts are impossible. This is not a sound inference (from “is not” to “cannot”). But in any case, we need to remember that Plato did construct definitions of the virtues in the Republic – so he at least did not draw such an inference from his early dialogues; and his student Aristotle worked up some of the finest definitions of the virtues that we have. xiii For a Socratic analogy between medicine and justice, see, e.g. Gorgias, 463-6. Socrates often uses some similarity between virtue and techne to support some conclusion about virtue. Already in the Crito,47-8, we have the analogy between the trainer or physician and the virtuous man, to support the conclusion that the decision whether it is just to escape should be made by one who knows justice. And later in the Crito, 50-51, we have another piece of reasoning by analogy – between parents and children on the one hand and the city and its citizens on the other – to support the conclusion that the “persuade or obey” relation of city to citizens is just. xiv How far reason can go in resolving ethical disputes is a major controversy in the history of ethics. Hume, for example, might agree that reason can help us instrumentally, to resolve disputes, say, about means to ends; but he would dispute claims that Socrates or Plato might make about reason being competent to resolve disputes about the ultimate ends of life or about things that are good in themselves. For some discussion, see M. Frede and G. Stryker, eds., Rationality in Greek Thought, Oxford, 1996, and the author’s Goodness and Justice, Blackwell, 2001, pp. 129-33. Copyright 2006 Gerasimos Santas