Plato: WINNING!

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is lifting the military’s official ban on women in combat, which will open up hundreds of thousands of additional front-line jobs to them, senior defense officials said Wednesday.

“You accept, then, as we have described it, this partnership of the women with our men in the matter of education and children and the guardianship of the other citizens, and you admit that both within the city and when they go forth to war they ought to keep guard together and hunt together as it were like hounds..." [Plato, The Republic 466c]

Philosophical Roots of Our Political Divide

In keeping with the season, Steven Pinker wonders why our nation looks like this...

Conservative thinkers like the economist Thomas Sowell and the Times columnist David Brooks have noted that the political right has a Tragic Vision of human nature, in which people are permanently limited in morality, knowledge and reason. Human beings are perennially tempted by aggression, which can be prevented only by the deterrence of a strong military, of citizens resolved to defend themselves and of the prospect of harsh criminal punishment. No central planner is wise or knowledgeable enough to manage an entire economy, which is better left to the invisible hand of the market, in which intelligence is distributed across a network of hundreds of millions of individuals implicitly transmitting information about scarcity and abundance through the prices they negotiate. Humanity is always in danger of backsliding into barbarism, so we should respect customs in sexuality, religion and public propriety, even if no one can articulate their rationale, because they are time-tested workarounds for our innate shortcomings. The left, in contrast, has a Utopian Vision, which emphasizes the malleability of human nature, puts customs under the microscope, articulates rational plans for a better society and seeks to implement them through public institutions.

Cognitive scientists have recently enriched this theory with details of how the right-left divide is implemented in people’s cognitive and moral intuitions. The linguist George Lakoff suggests that the political right conceives of society as a family ruled by a strict father, whereas the left thinks of it as a family guided by a nurturant parent. The metaphors may be corollaries of the tragic and utopian visions, since different parenting practices are called for depending on whether you think of children as noble savages or as nasty, brutish and short. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that rightists and leftists invest their moral intuitions in different sets of concerns: conservatives place a premium on deference to authority, conformity to norms and the purity and sanctity of the body; liberals restrict theirs to fairness, the provision of care and the avoidance of harm. Once again, the difference may flow from the clashing conceptions of human nature. If individuals are inherently flawed, their behavior must be restrained by custom, authority and sacred values. If they are capable of wisdom and reason, they can determine for themselves what is fair, harmful or hurtful.

Read the full column here.

Can Plato's Cave Help to Explain Addiction?

Of course it can. Peg O'Connor explains how:

[Addicts] engage in faulty yet persuasive alcoholic reasoning, willing to take anything as evidence that they do not have a problem; no amount of reasoning will persuade them otherwise.

Read the article here.

How to Read Plato

Gender Ethics

Those in support of the prohibition against women participating in direct combat often appeal to the fundamental (biological, physiological) differences between men and women. These differences, in turn, provide the bedrock for assumptions about the differences between gender (a social construct) that lead to policy.

One author questions some recently employed science that purports to mark out the biological differences:

No one disputes that the sexes differ physiologically, in hormones and anatomy, or that there are sex differences in the brain related to men’s and women’s different reproductive processes. The eternal question is, and has been, so what?

Here's an interesting point with regards to women in combat:

Over and over, if you watch what people do rather than what they say they would do, and vary the situations in which they do it, gender differences fade to the vanishing point. As Fine puts it, “Pick a gender difference, any difference. Now watch very closely as – poof! – it’s gone”.

Since broadswords and hand-to-hand combat are on the decline in favor of stand-off, button-operated lethality, do the physical differences between men and women matter anymore?

Plato didn't think so.

Read the Times of London review here.

Allegory of the Cave Assignment

PHL 310 – Ethics

Assignment 3 – Draw Plato’s Cave [25 pts]

Due: Lesson 8 (25 Jan 11)


ASSIGNMENT: You will invariably run across people in your career, both up and down the chain, who just don’t get it. They need a picture.

From your reading assignment, take the description of the cave [514a – 521a] and, on one 8 ½” x 11” piece of printer/copier paper, draw it. Socrates describes several important features of the cave. Make sure you get them all.

Remember, your task is to simplify a complicated image for someone who isn’t getting it. Use labels if you need to (i.e., if your stick people might be mistaken for fish in trees), but don’t write paragraphs.

GRADING: This assignment will be graded on your ability to distill basic facts from the source, determining what is pertinent to get the message across, and to represent the major features in Socrates’ description (15 pts). Neatness and overall artistic ability will also be evaluated, insofar as they contribute to the clarity/communication of your rendition (10 pts).

NOTE: If your work is not only complete, but also aesthetically pleasing and suitable for display, I’ll offer 5 pts extra credit in return for the piece. You’ll know you’re eligible if you see “+5” next to your grade.

Platonic Dialogue

We believe Plato adopted a dramatic style of writing - the dialogue - to produce a particular effect upon and within his readers. Dr. Lane Cooper describes the process as follows:

"The type of writing which Plato chose for his medium of expression, the dialogue, is one that enables an author to approach the truth from various sides, and by gradual stages. In the preliminary stages the speakers may offer tentative expressions of the truth, or half-truths, or positive untruths. The argument advances by elimination of the false and a convergance upon whateversurvives the test of dialectic. The result may or may not be expressly stated in sober prose. In general we may believe that the ultimate truth is seldom reached in the discussion proper, but is finally caught together and embodied in ... the imaginative part of a whole (namely, the dialogue)." 

Recap – Lessons 7-9

Socrates’ turn to ethical questions on how one should live a good life was characterized by (1) the subjects of his inquiry, for example, in The Republic, the question what is justice?; and (2) the technique he employed – dialectic – which provided an example of how one should authentically seek knowledge. Compared to the technique employed by the sophists, which was to “win” an argument without particular regard for the truth, dialectic was both more collaborative and more open-ended. It could also be more frustrating, as the discussions rendered by Plato didn’t always yield a definitive conclusion, and we’re often left to develop our own answers.

That was the case after our first reading from The Republic. Your answers to the question, what is justice?, clustered around the notions of it being external and based on punishment and reward. As we read, Socrates dealt with similar formulations from Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon. Each fell short of providing a satisfactory conception. Glaucon proposed perhaps the greatest challenge to any conception of justice by retelling the story of Gyges Ring: what would you do if you could get away with anything?

To answer, Socrates and his companions undertake an elaborate thought experiment where they build a city from scratch, the goal being to first identify where justice resides in the city, then to find analogues in the individual. Our second reading from The Republic described the virtues – wisdom, courage, and moderation – as they appear in both the city and the soul. Justice, it’s finally agreed, is harmony among these virtues, with each performing its function to sustain that balance.

Since justice is internal and not purely motivated by reward and punishment, Socrates and Plato have to take up the final task of answering why one should be just. By way of explaining, Socrates relates the allegory of the cave, which you skillfully rendered for your third assignment. As a metaphor for Plato’s theory of knowledge (the divided line), the story relays the struggle entailed for humans to break free from the comforts of illusion. There’s also a caution: sharing newly acquired wisdom may be hazardous to your health. The allegory also contains a mystery, which some of you identified: who freed the prisoner, and what was his/her status?

Quotes from The Republic

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. - Alfred North Whitehead

Before we leave Socrates and Plato, if we ever really do, I thought I’d share some of my favorite quotes from The Republic...

[352d] …the argument is not about just any question, but about the way one should live.

[334b] “No, by Zeus,” (Polemarchus) said. “But I no longer know what I did mean.”

[363d] …the finest wage of virtue is an eternal drunk.

[350e] “…if you want to keep on questioning, go ahead and question, and, just as with old wives who tell tales, I shall say to you, ‘All right,’ and I shall nod and shake my head.”

[387d] …the decent man will believe that for the decent man—who happens to be his comrade—being dead is not a terrible thing.

[403a] “It’s ridiculous,” (Glaucon) said, “if the Guardian needs a Guardian.”

[457a] The women guardians must strip, since they’ll clothe themselves in virtue instead of robes, and they must take common part in war …

[459d.] There is a need for the best men to have intercourse as often as possible with the best women.

[338d] “You are disgusting, Socrates.”

[474a] “Socrates, what a phrase and argument you have let burst out. Now that it’s said, you can believe that very many men, and not ordinary ones, will on the spot throw off their clothes, and stripped for action, taking hold of whatever weapon falls under the hand of each, run full speed at you and do wonderful deeds.”

The Republic - Reading Guide II

How to use the reading guide:

The second reading from The Republic is broken down into sections of argument (using the Stephanus pagination). Identify the main points of each section and follow the flow of the overall dialogue as the participants move from one argument to the next.

What is Justice?

Here are the results from the discussions last class on how you would define justice:

Justice is...

1st Period – getting what one deserves in terms of punishment and reward; karma

2nd Period – the fair, balanced and reasonable distribution of “stuff”

3rd Period – the fair dispersal of rewards and punishment

4th Period – the perception of what’s due; the permissibility of making honest mistakes

So for the most part, justice is something external that is done to you, and it’s evenhanded.

When we talked about the Ancient Greek religion (what we refer to now as the Greek myths), we talked about how the myths coalesced into a shared heritage of ancestral memories relayed down generations and later, how they formed patterns of belief that gave meaning to life and formed the basis of moral codes.

One of those patterns might be reflected in your conception of justice, the mythopoeic ethic. In Greek mythology, the “moral of the story” often revolved around punishment and reward: please the gods and be rewarded; oppose the gods and standby for punishment.

Perhaps there’s some resonance between your conception of justice and your life here at the Academy. We’ll see what Socrates has to say about that…

The Republic - Reading Guide I

How to use the reading guide:

The first reading from The Republic is broken down into sections of argument (using the Stephanus pagination). Identify the main points of each section and follow the flow of the overall dialogue as the participants move from one argument to the next.