Habituation, actions, and character

At the heart of Aristotle’s account of ethical upbringing is habituation. At least all of the virtues of character – justice, generosity, temperance, courage, and so on – just are habituated states brought about by the repeated doing of actions of a certain ethical type. We are not born courageous or cowardly (although we may have natural dispositions in one direction or the other); rather, we are made courageous or cowardly insofar as we have engaged in courageous or cowardly actions in our lives. Engaging in actions of a certain type gives rise to the corresponding habituated state of character. In short, “we become just by doing just things, temperate by doing temperate things, and courageous by doing courageous things” (N.E. ii.1, 1103a34–b2). Let us call this idea “the habituation principle” (HP). As the explicit analogy with craft (technê) in N.E. ii.1 shows, the habituation principle is itself value neutral: one becomes a good harpist or a good builder if one acquires good building or harp-playing habits, but a bad one if not; similarly one becomes a virtuous person if she engages in virtuous acts, but a bad or vicious person if one doesn’t.

AIMING AND DETERMINING

In the Cleitophon, a short and strange dialogue attributed to Plato, the character “Socrates” speaks only twice. He accuses the eponymous interlocutor on the one hand of telling people that it is a waste of time to associate with him, while on the other of lauding contact with Thrasymachus, the infamous character from Book 1 of Plato's Republic. Cleitophon replies that Socrates has not heard the whole story: he is in certain respects deeply impressed by Socrates, but in other ways sharply critical. Always open to correction and betterment, Socrates is happy to hear Cleitophon's complaints and the last four Stephanus pages of the work consist solely of a speech by Cleitophon in which he sharply distinguishes between two tasks: (1) persuading a person that virtue is more important than anything else; and (2) saying precisely what virtue is. According to Cleitophon, Socrates does an excellent job, better than any other person, at persuading and exhorting people to pursue virtue and the care of their souls (407a7, 410b4–6), but he is utterly unhelpful when it comes to saying what virtue actually is. Because Socrates is so useless with this substantive question, Cleitophon is forced to conclude that either Socrates' ability to champion virtue does not in any way imply that he knows what virtue is, or else Socrates is simply unwilling to tell him. It is Socrates' failure on this second issue that leads Cleitophon to turn to Thrasymachus (410c–d).

It is difficult not to read almost all of Plato's dialogues either as preludes to the Republic, or as subsequent comments and reflections on it. I shall discuss aspects of the Republic on the assumption that one has read the dialogues we have previously discussed. As I have said, I do not assume that all of these must have been composed before the Republic; but I shall discuss how the positions presented in the Republic might usefully be understood in relation to views in those dialogues. As a device of convenience, I shall refer to the dialogues we have already discussed as “earlier,” without that committing me to a view about their relative date of composition. Perhaps, as some commentators argue, the Republic represents a new phase in Plato's philosophical thinking; perhaps, as others claim, many of its views are hinted at in other works which play a more propaedeutic role. With regard to the topics that I am focused on, I shall argue that the Republic elaborates views we have seen in the other dialogues in ways that are more detailed but nevertheless consistent with what we have found so far.

In this chapter I shall show that Plato has Socrates and the interlocutors in Book 1 move back and forth between debating the aiming principle SV and arguing about determining questions about just actions. Keeping the aiming/determining distinction in mind will help to explain and give order to the bewildering and rapid switching of interlocutors and, apparently, topics.

JUST ACTIONS AND THE JUST SOUL IN REPUBLIC 4

Near the end of Book 4, the argument turns back to just actions, a just soul, and the relationship between the two. The infamous tripartite account of the soul has been completed, with its rational, spirited, and appetitive parts, corresponding to the three classes of people in the ideal city. Socrates has also located courage, wisdom, and moderation in the tripartite soul. In terms familiar from chapter four, he has described what it is to be courageous, wise, and so on, rather than providing an account of what courageous or wise actions are. This is largely what leads commentators to say that he has abandoned behavioral definitions of the virtues. And indeed Plato does not attempt to put what all and only virtuous actions have in common into purely non-evaluative terms. But that does not mean that the question of determining which actions are the virtuous ones – that is, the question that such a behavioral definition intended to answer – can be simply skipped over and replaced by the question of what it is to be virtuous. For when we turn to the account of a just soul we find that nothing obviates the necessity of correctly identifying virtuous actions and performing them, if one hopes to become just and put one's soul in the proper order.

This chapter treats five dialogues, all of which attempt to answer determining questions about what virtuous actions are in general as opposed to what the virtuous action is in the here and now. Three of these – the Laches, Charmides, and Euthyphro – are so-called “dialogues of definition” in which Socrates asks a specific “What is F?” question, where F is a specific virtue: courage, temperance, and piety, respectively. The other two, the Protagoras and Euthydemus, do not present a “What is F?” question so starkly, although I shall argue that they too attempt to determine what virtue in general is. It is to be expected that Socrates turns to the question of what virtue is, given that he is committed to, argues for, and claims to know SV. It should also come as no surprise that these dialogues contain the majority of Socrates' disavowals of knowledge, and that, consistently with such disavowals and with Cleitophon's criticism of Socrates, these dialogues never succeed in successfully answering the question for virtue in general or for any particular virtue. The Apology, Crito, and Gorgias, by contrast, do not end in aporia – typically considered one of the hallmarks of “early” or “Socratic” dialogues – because they are primarily concerned with SV and/or determining what the virtuous action is in the here and now.

I proceed in this chapter as follows. I begin with a brief general discussion of these five dialogues, highlighting two of their common features (4.1).

DEFINING JUSTICE AND THE PROJECT OF THE REPUBLIC

Whatever may have been the case in previous dialogues, and even in Republic 1, most commentators believe that once Glaucon and Adeimantus take over the argument they “identify being just with a property possessed primarily by psyches.” This point is put in more general terms by saying that Plato moves in the Republic from an act-centered account of justice or virtue to an agent-centered account. The explanation of this is that once Plato has despaired of being able to provide an act-centered account of what justice is, he begins in Book 2 to present an agent-centered one, which culminates in his Book 4 account of “Platonic” justice as harmony in the tripartite soul. The attractiveness of this interpretation is allegedly buttressed by the plausibility of the ethical theory behind it. Plato, one of the original virtue ethicists, rejects the idea that one can specify virtuous actions first and then define the virtuous agent as the one who performs such actions and performs them in the right way. Matters will instead be the other way round. Defining what it is to be a virtuous person first, virtuous actions will then be the actions done by that sort of person.

If the argument of this book is correct, however, this will not be the best way of understanding how the central argument of the Republic develops.

OVERVIEW

When Glaucon and Adeimantus demand that Socrates demonstrate that the just person is happier than the unjust, they are demanding that he show that justice is a good for the soul. Relying on ordinary, common, beliefs, they argue that the consequences of acting unjustly without a reputation for injustice are clearly advantageous. The just person without a just reputation ends up entirely bereft of material possessions, tortured, and finally killed – that is, deprived of absolutely all “external goods.” By contrast, the unjust person who maintains a reputation for justice receives all of the good consequences of that reputation, namely, safety and security for himself and his material possessions, as well as the abundance of material possessions acquired through his unjust behavior, which can then be used to guarantee that one does not suffer any bad consequences in the afterlife by bribing the gods. On “the many's” account justice's and injustice's only value for the soul consists in desire satisfaction or frustration. On this score justice in itself is “painful” (ἐπίπονον) and “harsh” (χαλεπόν), since it thwarts a person's allegedly natural desire for pleonexia. Such a sacrifice of immediate desire may be worth it in circumstances where a person is too weak to ensure that he will not suffer injustice in turn. But since the good consequences of justice can be obtained equally well by successfully seeming to be just, such desire frustration, given propitious circumstances, might not be necessary.

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.

THE GORGIAS AND SV

Unlike the Apology and Crito, the Gorgias is not concerned with determining what a person or people should do in a particular situation. In the Apology, Socrates not only cites various specific actions of his own and explains how they were always done in accordance with SV, but he is also engaged in attempting to persuade the jury to perform a particular action. The jury must make concrete decisions then and there about what is to be done with Socrates and he calls on them to hold to the standard of SV as well. In the Crito, as we have seen, Socrates attempts to persuade Crito that to escape is to do an injustice, while to remain in prison is not. There again a concrete decision about what the virtuous action is must be made in the hic et nunc of the dialogue. No such context is present in the Gorgias. Nor, at least at the beginning, does the heavy atmosphere of Socrates' impending execution weigh over the dialogue.

Although there are these differences between the Apology and Crito on the one hand, and the Gorgias on the other, there are even more important similarities. Although usually considered “early” or “Socratic” dialogues, all three lack some typical criteria for inclusion in that group: none ends in aporia and none attempts to determine in general terms what virtue or a virtue is.

What we have discovered in chapter one about SV and Socrates' relationship to it should lead us to expect that Socrates would be in a particularly difficult situation when it comes to action. Given his commitment to SV, he must do the virtuous action or at least avoid doing the vicious action, and yet, given his disavowal of knowledge of what virtue is, he seems to have no way of knowing which action is or is not virtuous. How does he decide, then, whether to get Leon as he was ordered or whether to go to battle, how to conduct his trial, and, in the Crito, whether or not to escape from prison? We shall see that he has two ways of dealing with this predicament: sometimes his daimonion comes to the rescue and simply tells him that a certain token action he is contemplating is contrary to virtue; that is, the daimonion resolves the outstanding determining question for him. At other times, such as in the Crito where there is no mention of the divine sign, Socrates says that he follows the argument that seems best to him upon reflection (Cr. 46b4–6).

Aside from particular decisions to engage in certain conversations, it is only in the Apology and Crito that we witness Socrates attempt to determine what the virtuous thing to do is in the hic et nunc. Especially in the argument of the personified Laws (Cr. 50a–54c), Socrates deliberates between two specific “actions”: remaining in prison, or escaping.

In this book I provide an interpretation of the dialogues of Plato that most centrally treat the concept of virtue. It may be of interest to some readers to summarize briefly the view that has emerged and in conclusion to say something, albeit brief and tentative, about the philosophical plausibility of this interpretation, its relation to certain later ethical theories with which it has the most in common, and its potential value.

In a number of respects I have treated these very familiar dialogues quite differently from the way they have been approached in recent years. Perhaps the most significant difference in approach is the avoidance of interpreting Plato's ethics in terms of the eudaimonist framework. As I say several times, it is not that I think that Plato's ethics is not eudaimonist. Rather it is that in the texts themselves the overwhelming focus is on virtue as a supreme end and aim. The typical way that the eudaimonist framework operates in interpreting ancient ethics is to say that we know what the highest good, what the supreme aim, is: eudaimonia. What we then need to do next is determine what eudaimonia is. Is it a state or an activity? Does it consist exclusively of virtue or are external goods part of it? The serious downside of this approach to reading Plato is that it obscures, I argue, what are in fact the more central puzzles about ethics in the dialogues.