INTRODUCTION

Even a casual reader of the Apology understands that Socrates believes that virtue is more important than anything else, even his own life. What has not been recognized, or at least not accorded any significance, is that for Socrates virtue is an aim. He believes that you should never aim simply at saving your life at the expense of aiming at what is virtuous; in other words, your life counts for nothing as an aim when compared with virtue as an aim. But “the supremacy of virtue” does not imply the quite implausible view that many readers apparently attribute to Socrates, that one's loss of life is not relevant to the deliberation about what is in fact the virtuous action in some circumstances; that is, the view that one's life counts for nothing in a different sense. It is not as though one could determine what the virtuous action is independently of considerations of life, death, pleasure, pain, or material loss or gain. Socrates is not saying that we should ignore these things absolutely. Any fact described in non-evaluative terms may in principle be relevant in a deliberation that seeks to determine what the virtuous action is here and now. Certainly factors like pleasure and pain, life and death, wealth, and the welfare of friends and family will be most relevant to such deliberations. We must ignore such things, however, as aims of action when they conflict with what virtue requires.