Christians often ask themselves, as a guide to living, “What would Jesus do?” In her new book Open Socrates, my podcast-cohost Agnes Callard suggests we instead ask “What would Socrates do?”
I'm reminded of this quote attributed to Socrates. "By all means marry: if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher." He regarded both outcomes as good.
Firstly, Athens didn't kill Socrates because they were annoyed by him exposing their ignorance; they killed him because Socrates favored Sparta /during the war with Sparta/, vilified democracy, and taught his students to emulate Sparta in various ways. Many of his students betrayed Athens to Sparta in a surprise attack carried out by Athenian aristocrats from within Athens upon Athens, after which they ruled as tyrants subservient to Sparta (look up "the 30 tyrants"), and then carried out mass murders of everyone in Athens who supported democracy. These traitors included, at the least, Critias (the leader of the 30 tyrants), Plato's uncle Charmides, and Xenophon (who wrote what I think is a much more honest account of Socrates). Another of Socrates' students, Alcibiades, had betrayed the Athenian navy to Sparta earlier, and pretty much single-handedly caused what IIRC were Athens' two greatest defeats in the latter part of the war, at least one intentionally. The Athenians saw Socrates as the ringleader of the traitors who betrayed and destroyed Athens, which never recovered from its decimation under the 30 tyrants. That's why he was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens.
Secondly, Socrates was one of the key philosophers in diverting philosophy away from the path to science, to redirect it towards useless metaphysics. Before Socrates, many philosophers were asking questions about the real world, like, "What is the sun?" and "What are things physically made out of?" Plato's Socrates turned philosophy away from reality into the armchair pondering of imaginary spiritual essences, and calling them The Real, and the real world, unreal.
(The real Socrates probably didn't. Xenophon tells a story in which one of Socrates' students, trying to show off, presents a theory of reality to Socrates which sounds an awful lot like Plato's theory of forms; and Socrates replies by telling the kid that it's ridiculous.)
When you read the dialogues, you'll see that Plato's Socrates--who probably bears little relation to the real Socrates--was a deconstructionist. He began with the assumption that every word must have one eternal, context-free definition, and that the task of philosophers is to find out what all the words they use mean. This is exactly backwards; the way to knowledge is to observe the world, and to invent words to name the things found in it. Whenever Plato's Socrates found a single case in which a given definition of a word seemed inapplicable, he would declare that definition invalid, and then fish around for something more convenient for promoting Plato's sick political program of creating a totalitarian state based on Sparta in which free thought was absolutely forbidden. Most notoriously, he redefined "justice" as "a government in which everyone is enslaved to the State and are purposefully bred by the State to create different caste races, to ensure social stability."
Brilliant,. There were indeed several "socratic schools",I.e.cynics, stoics,; in addition to Plato. While we don't have a lot of other info about Socrates it is highly likely that Plato was a poor interpreter of socraticism and without his being "picked up" by some early Christians might be a very forgotten philosopher.
Strongly agree with Callard and I may buy her book. Socratic inquiry is above all about honesty. In a Socratic dialogue you are asked to lay bare why you think as you do. Socratic dialogue weeds out liars and hypocrites. A liar and hypocrite will refuse to answer questions about their reasoning, and will in fact get mad when you try to question them. It lets you know who is sincere and who is just trying to manipulate you.
It's also a form of therapy; you reconcile your own attitudes. To participate in a Socratic dialogue means to be honest with yourself.
Do you want to be a slave to the culture you grew up in? We know, historically, most cultures and religions are full of lies and propaganda, often to perpetuate the interests of the ruling class. Do you want to let yourself be taken in by that, uncritically? Or do you want to think, and reflect, and understand?
It isn't necessarily about making new philosophical breakthroughs, which may be unlikely for most people, it's about not being a slave. To be free means to make informed choices. To make informed choices you must reflect critically on what you think and why. No one else can do this for you, because before you've thought critically you don't know who to trust, and authorities often try to deceive you.
Great comment. Thank you. Perhaps you’ve neglected to mention some of the most important motivating factors for engaging in Socratic dialogue? Off the top of your head — I’m curious if you might do me the pleasure of listing what might these be? A brainstorming of guesses would be fine. I’m not here to challenge you. I’m just curious what you come up with to see if it matches my thinking. What motivates truth and learning? What motivates honest, respectful inquiry?
If by "socratic dialogue" we mean the type of dialogues found in Plato, then I advise against it. Many of Plato's dialogues are full of rhetorical tricks, bad-faith omissions or straw men, & misdirections. I suspect that some dialogues were meant to be taught by a teacher, and that Plato deliberately put rhetorical tricks in them so that the student could read them once on his own, then re-read them after Plato had pointed out the traps that the student had fallen for.
In others he's stumbling over his own shoelaces, which he tied together with his crazy metaphysical linguistic assumptions. For instance, when he puzzles over how there can be a slave can be named Socrates when Socrates is not a slave; or when he is perplexed by the fact that a rock can be bigger than one thing, but smaller than another thing, and concludes that the rock isn't real, and that then the entire physical world must not be real. Or in the Meno, when he recites the lines of a geometric proof, and then says that the proof is not in any of those lines, therefore he must have recalled it from a past life. He literally could not understand what a proof was because his metaphysics forbade assemblages--new things constructed not just by throwing together old things, but by combining old things in a very special way so that the /relationships/ between them gave the assemblage properties which none of its parts had. This led to his theories of reincarnation, heaven and hell, and other madness that plagues us to this day. And that same dialogue is where he "proves"--in words--that language can't communicate meaning.
I think Plato's epistemology is not just wrong but dangerous and corrupting, and it's hard to see what remains of Socratic dialogue if you remove Plato's epistemology from it. I would separate self-introspection from Plato, because Plato is a bad model. Pretty much everything he said was wrong, often catastrophically wrong. And I question the basic idea of recommending students BEGIN philosophy with questioning themselves rather than with discovering the world. It is impossible to reason correctly about anything without lots of experience studying how things interact and how complex systems work. I would tell any student who wants to study philosophy to begin by spending a few years writing computer programs every day and then debugging them. THAT teaches analysis and critical thinking far better than Plato's dialogues do.
As to what motivates truth and learning, I think it's instinctual. It's like asking what motivates finding and eating food. The motivation to learn is revealed by games and puzzles. We enjoy piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, which is a great metaphor for a very good approach to learning, which is to take pieces of data and start trying to fit them together until a partial picture emerges. Hide-and-seek is a game which has action, but also the search for and discovery of knowledge. Part of musical appreciation is predicting the next note and discovering the structure in the music. Music which has no structure, or an excessively simple structure, like some club dance music, is doing something different, like synchronizing people's movements and providing a strong sensory stimulus to induce collective action and unity.
Well, yes, the ancient Greek philosophers were mostly wrong about everything. But what remains sound about Socratic dialogue is the principle that you should ask questions about a person's position, and that they should answer sincerely, and by this method you can teach them by showing defects in their views, or teach yourself if their views happen to be sound.
Thanks for your perspective on Plato. I will keep that in mind.
If learning and seeking truth is mostly instinctual, does this mean that the reason that those who are unable to figure out truths have poorer instincts? What explains the lack of truth finding in certain people? Why don’t certain people figure out truth about climate change for example? Or the truth about Jesus Christ being perfect? Why can’t certain people find the truth?
Socratic dialogue is a mode of interaction opposed to domination and servitude; you question and try to convince, you do not insist or stand on authority, and you don't try to attack the other person. And nor do you assent, until you have been convinced; and you engage sincerely with the other person's equally sincere questions and arguments. It's the only way that two people can talk sincerely and deeply about something they disagree about, without getting mad and trying to hurt each other.
So why be nice to someone you disagree with?
The argument from reciprocity: if you treat the other person badly, they will return the favor. The fact you think you are right does not justify treating the other person badly, because the same logic applies from their perspective, since they also think they are right.
The argument from fallibility: we are often wrong, even when we think confidently that we are right, and so we should give fair hearing to opposing views.
The argument from teaching: if you want to convince the other person of your beliefs, they will be unwilling to listen if you browbeat and ridicule them. You have to sincerely listen to their objections and understand their point of view, in order to provide an effective argument that leads them from their view to yours.
The argument from compassion: Suppose the other person is in fact wrong. If you were the one wrong, you still wouldn't want to be treated disrespectfully. So out of compassion, you shouldn't treat them that way either.
The argument from nothing to lose: If you are right (as you think), then hearing out the other person's perspective and explaining your own in more depth can do no harm, because it can only shed more light on the truth and why you are right. The only time you'd fear losing something from doing this, would be if you secretly suspect or know that you aren't right.
The argument from pride: It demonstrates self-control to be able to engage sincerely with someone you disagree with. By refraining from trying to hurt them, you prove you are the more logical and reasonable one.
The argument from multiple perspectives: Even though you may be mostly right and the other person mostly wrong, there are often multiple valid perspectives on a topic. Hearing and synthesizing these perspectives can add to your own, even though originally you were mostly in the right.
That's a difficult question and it comes back to genes and environment. As a child, you found that learning and understanding things granted you mastery over them. You can't control what you don't have a good enough understanding of. So then once you had this value you applied it to understanding other things - even things that realistically you can't control. You still get that feeling of mastery from understanding it.
And even if you think there would be no practical benefit to understanding something, you often can't tell. How do you know the benefits of knowing something before you know it? Knowledge often yields new insights and benefits in surprising ways.
In addition to that, we likely have an innate genetic drive to seek the truth.
There's also also a genetically based drive to learn the local lore and culture, which evolved to help you fit in with others who know the same lore, as much as to help you learn practically useful things.
And there's the drive for status; by knowing more, we can get recognition for that and earn more status.
All of these factors vary from person to person.
Ultimately either you have the seed of truth seeking or you don't. If you don't already want to seek the truth, I don't think there's an argument that can convince you to do that. Why would you listen to the argument in the first place, if you weren't already interested in whether it was true?
I think Socratic dialogue is bad. It's logocentric. It begins by asking what a word means. That's not a path to new knowledge; it's just a way of re-organizing existing knowledge. But worse; Plato thought that it was a path to knowledge, because he believed that the existence of a word implied there was some eternal, transcendental essence corresponding to that word, and that it was the task of the philosopher to recover the original meanings of words.
He never recognized that, even if you /could/ define a single meaning of "justice" which was true for all time, everywhere, in every case, it would do you no good--because when you change the definition, then you should no longer believe any of your beliefs which you express using that word. Much worse yet, Plato thought that if you believe justice is good, and then Plato convinces you via a long argument that "justice" really means "everyone does exactly what Plato tells them to and nothing more", you should still believe that justice is good.
Platonists are still abusing language this way today. For instance, redefining "racism" to mean "trying to treat people of different races in the same way", and then expecting that redefinition to convince us that treating people of different races in the same way is bad, because we believe racism is bad.
> Let me emphasize that I am not putting forward this series of Socratic critiques as valid. … When it comes to Socratic ethics, we are still at the stage of saying what it is— and that is a big enough task for one book.
because it seems to severely contradict this:
> When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for [Socratic] inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering.
when the time comes to make an emphatic case for Socratic ethics, she hedges in that common modern way that amounts to "idk tho, lol" that tries to head off serious disagreement/critique with a friendly chuckle. she 'wavers' in her appeal to 'not waver'.
charitably, you can read this as callard not being fully comfortable with the shifting line between 'inquiry', 'resolve' and 'doubt', but i think it does a disservice to her thesis. i also notice skilled utlitarians, kantians (why not deontologists?) and virtue polemicists learn quickly to not waver when they're advocating for their worldview.
I think that Taleb's Fat Tony was right about Socrates.
<<SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”
FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.”
FAT TONY: “My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.”>>
Why are people so reluctant to just say that they can't express or explicitly define important things? That's what makes them vulnerable to a Socratic refutation.
I wasn't convinced that his death was the right outcome, but I was convinced that Socrates himself believed that, so I must conclude I disagree with Socrates.
I just read “A Spark Neglected Burns the House” by Tolstoy, and the central theme is something akin to “squash conflict or quarrels with other humans as quickly as possible or a snowball effect occurs, resulting in a larger conflict”. This seemed to strike a chord with me. Which leads me to a question: How many times does retaliation result in this type of dynamic? If it is a lot, retaliation rarely makes much sense. If retaliation leads to deterrence, it makes more sense.
Related: Just because an act makes sense, does not make it “good” or morally right. I do struggle with this though. I understand that from an evolutionary perspective you are likely increasing your chances of being outcompeted (if you "turn the other cheek"), making retaliation seem necessary, even if it isn't necessarily "good".
Knowledge is of instrumental rather than intrinsic value—it helps one achieve good, and Socratic inquiry—theorizing about what one already knows—is instrumental for gaining knowledge; so inquiry is doubly instrumental, not intrinsic. Furthermore, inquiry is not always worth the cost: often it is better to act spontaneously and learn by trial and error.
I'm reminded of this quote attributed to Socrates. "By all means marry: if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher." He regarded both outcomes as good.
She's fallen for the Socrates myth.
Firstly, Athens didn't kill Socrates because they were annoyed by him exposing their ignorance; they killed him because Socrates favored Sparta /during the war with Sparta/, vilified democracy, and taught his students to emulate Sparta in various ways. Many of his students betrayed Athens to Sparta in a surprise attack carried out by Athenian aristocrats from within Athens upon Athens, after which they ruled as tyrants subservient to Sparta (look up "the 30 tyrants"), and then carried out mass murders of everyone in Athens who supported democracy. These traitors included, at the least, Critias (the leader of the 30 tyrants), Plato's uncle Charmides, and Xenophon (who wrote what I think is a much more honest account of Socrates). Another of Socrates' students, Alcibiades, had betrayed the Athenian navy to Sparta earlier, and pretty much single-handedly caused what IIRC were Athens' two greatest defeats in the latter part of the war, at least one intentionally. The Athenians saw Socrates as the ringleader of the traitors who betrayed and destroyed Athens, which never recovered from its decimation under the 30 tyrants. That's why he was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens.
Secondly, Socrates was one of the key philosophers in diverting philosophy away from the path to science, to redirect it towards useless metaphysics. Before Socrates, many philosophers were asking questions about the real world, like, "What is the sun?" and "What are things physically made out of?" Plato's Socrates turned philosophy away from reality into the armchair pondering of imaginary spiritual essences, and calling them The Real, and the real world, unreal.
(The real Socrates probably didn't. Xenophon tells a story in which one of Socrates' students, trying to show off, presents a theory of reality to Socrates which sounds an awful lot like Plato's theory of forms; and Socrates replies by telling the kid that it's ridiculous.)
When you read the dialogues, you'll see that Plato's Socrates--who probably bears little relation to the real Socrates--was a deconstructionist. He began with the assumption that every word must have one eternal, context-free definition, and that the task of philosophers is to find out what all the words they use mean. This is exactly backwards; the way to knowledge is to observe the world, and to invent words to name the things found in it. Whenever Plato's Socrates found a single case in which a given definition of a word seemed inapplicable, he would declare that definition invalid, and then fish around for something more convenient for promoting Plato's sick political program of creating a totalitarian state based on Sparta in which free thought was absolutely forbidden. Most notoriously, he redefined "justice" as "a government in which everyone is enslaved to the State and are purposefully bred by the State to create different caste races, to ensure social stability."
Yes, Socrates assumed a high degree of conceptual coherent and uniformity.
Brilliant,. There were indeed several "socratic schools",I.e.cynics, stoics,; in addition to Plato. While we don't have a lot of other info about Socrates it is highly likely that Plato was a poor interpreter of socraticism and without his being "picked up" by some early Christians might be a very forgotten philosopher.
Eagerly awaiting the next episode of Minds Almost Meeting.
have we perhaps heard the last of that collaboration?
Strongly agree with Callard and I may buy her book. Socratic inquiry is above all about honesty. In a Socratic dialogue you are asked to lay bare why you think as you do. Socratic dialogue weeds out liars and hypocrites. A liar and hypocrite will refuse to answer questions about their reasoning, and will in fact get mad when you try to question them. It lets you know who is sincere and who is just trying to manipulate you.
It's also a form of therapy; you reconcile your own attitudes. To participate in a Socratic dialogue means to be honest with yourself.
Do you want to be a slave to the culture you grew up in? We know, historically, most cultures and religions are full of lies and propaganda, often to perpetuate the interests of the ruling class. Do you want to let yourself be taken in by that, uncritically? Or do you want to think, and reflect, and understand?
It isn't necessarily about making new philosophical breakthroughs, which may be unlikely for most people, it's about not being a slave. To be free means to make informed choices. To make informed choices you must reflect critically on what you think and why. No one else can do this for you, because before you've thought critically you don't know who to trust, and authorities often try to deceive you.
I don't see how you avoid being a slave if your inquiry doesn't actually figure out much.
People who think critically do often break free of the lies they grew up with.
Great comment. Thank you. Perhaps you’ve neglected to mention some of the most important motivating factors for engaging in Socratic dialogue? Off the top of your head — I’m curious if you might do me the pleasure of listing what might these be? A brainstorming of guesses would be fine. I’m not here to challenge you. I’m just curious what you come up with to see if it matches my thinking. What motivates truth and learning? What motivates honest, respectful inquiry?
If by "socratic dialogue" we mean the type of dialogues found in Plato, then I advise against it. Many of Plato's dialogues are full of rhetorical tricks, bad-faith omissions or straw men, & misdirections. I suspect that some dialogues were meant to be taught by a teacher, and that Plato deliberately put rhetorical tricks in them so that the student could read them once on his own, then re-read them after Plato had pointed out the traps that the student had fallen for.
In others he's stumbling over his own shoelaces, which he tied together with his crazy metaphysical linguistic assumptions. For instance, when he puzzles over how there can be a slave can be named Socrates when Socrates is not a slave; or when he is perplexed by the fact that a rock can be bigger than one thing, but smaller than another thing, and concludes that the rock isn't real, and that then the entire physical world must not be real. Or in the Meno, when he recites the lines of a geometric proof, and then says that the proof is not in any of those lines, therefore he must have recalled it from a past life. He literally could not understand what a proof was because his metaphysics forbade assemblages--new things constructed not just by throwing together old things, but by combining old things in a very special way so that the /relationships/ between them gave the assemblage properties which none of its parts had. This led to his theories of reincarnation, heaven and hell, and other madness that plagues us to this day. And that same dialogue is where he "proves"--in words--that language can't communicate meaning.
I think Plato's epistemology is not just wrong but dangerous and corrupting, and it's hard to see what remains of Socratic dialogue if you remove Plato's epistemology from it. I would separate self-introspection from Plato, because Plato is a bad model. Pretty much everything he said was wrong, often catastrophically wrong. And I question the basic idea of recommending students BEGIN philosophy with questioning themselves rather than with discovering the world. It is impossible to reason correctly about anything without lots of experience studying how things interact and how complex systems work. I would tell any student who wants to study philosophy to begin by spending a few years writing computer programs every day and then debugging them. THAT teaches analysis and critical thinking far better than Plato's dialogues do.
As to what motivates truth and learning, I think it's instinctual. It's like asking what motivates finding and eating food. The motivation to learn is revealed by games and puzzles. We enjoy piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, which is a great metaphor for a very good approach to learning, which is to take pieces of data and start trying to fit them together until a partial picture emerges. Hide-and-seek is a game which has action, but also the search for and discovery of knowledge. Part of musical appreciation is predicting the next note and discovering the structure in the music. Music which has no structure, or an excessively simple structure, like some club dance music, is doing something different, like synchronizing people's movements and providing a strong sensory stimulus to induce collective action and unity.
Well, yes, the ancient Greek philosophers were mostly wrong about everything. But what remains sound about Socratic dialogue is the principle that you should ask questions about a person's position, and that they should answer sincerely, and by this method you can teach them by showing defects in their views, or teach yourself if their views happen to be sound.
Thanks for your perspective on Plato. I will keep that in mind.
If learning and seeking truth is mostly instinctual, does this mean that the reason that those who are unable to figure out truths have poorer instincts? What explains the lack of truth finding in certain people? Why don’t certain people figure out truth about climate change for example? Or the truth about Jesus Christ being perfect? Why can’t certain people find the truth?
Socratic dialogue is a mode of interaction opposed to domination and servitude; you question and try to convince, you do not insist or stand on authority, and you don't try to attack the other person. And nor do you assent, until you have been convinced; and you engage sincerely with the other person's equally sincere questions and arguments. It's the only way that two people can talk sincerely and deeply about something they disagree about, without getting mad and trying to hurt each other.
So why be nice to someone you disagree with?
The argument from reciprocity: if you treat the other person badly, they will return the favor. The fact you think you are right does not justify treating the other person badly, because the same logic applies from their perspective, since they also think they are right.
The argument from fallibility: we are often wrong, even when we think confidently that we are right, and so we should give fair hearing to opposing views.
The argument from teaching: if you want to convince the other person of your beliefs, they will be unwilling to listen if you browbeat and ridicule them. You have to sincerely listen to their objections and understand their point of view, in order to provide an effective argument that leads them from their view to yours.
The argument from compassion: Suppose the other person is in fact wrong. If you were the one wrong, you still wouldn't want to be treated disrespectfully. So out of compassion, you shouldn't treat them that way either.
The argument from nothing to lose: If you are right (as you think), then hearing out the other person's perspective and explaining your own in more depth can do no harm, because it can only shed more light on the truth and why you are right. The only time you'd fear losing something from doing this, would be if you secretly suspect or know that you aren't right.
The argument from pride: It demonstrates self-control to be able to engage sincerely with someone you disagree with. By refraining from trying to hurt them, you prove you are the more logical and reasonable one.
The argument from multiple perspectives: Even though you may be mostly right and the other person mostly wrong, there are often multiple valid perspectives on a topic. Hearing and synthesizing these perspectives can add to your own, even though originally you were mostly in the right.
Wow. Those are great reasons to engage in Socratic dialogue.
Deeper question: What motivates a person to continually seek truth, regardless of means? Why bother with truth?
That's a difficult question and it comes back to genes and environment. As a child, you found that learning and understanding things granted you mastery over them. You can't control what you don't have a good enough understanding of. So then once you had this value you applied it to understanding other things - even things that realistically you can't control. You still get that feeling of mastery from understanding it.
And even if you think there would be no practical benefit to understanding something, you often can't tell. How do you know the benefits of knowing something before you know it? Knowledge often yields new insights and benefits in surprising ways.
In addition to that, we likely have an innate genetic drive to seek the truth.
There's also also a genetically based drive to learn the local lore and culture, which evolved to help you fit in with others who know the same lore, as much as to help you learn practically useful things.
And there's the drive for status; by knowing more, we can get recognition for that and earn more status.
All of these factors vary from person to person.
Ultimately either you have the seed of truth seeking or you don't. If you don't already want to seek the truth, I don't think there's an argument that can convince you to do that. Why would you listen to the argument in the first place, if you weren't already interested in whether it was true?
I think Socratic dialogue is bad. It's logocentric. It begins by asking what a word means. That's not a path to new knowledge; it's just a way of re-organizing existing knowledge. But worse; Plato thought that it was a path to knowledge, because he believed that the existence of a word implied there was some eternal, transcendental essence corresponding to that word, and that it was the task of the philosopher to recover the original meanings of words.
He never recognized that, even if you /could/ define a single meaning of "justice" which was true for all time, everywhere, in every case, it would do you no good--because when you change the definition, then you should no longer believe any of your beliefs which you express using that word. Much worse yet, Plato thought that if you believe justice is good, and then Plato convinces you via a long argument that "justice" really means "everyone does exactly what Plato tells them to and nothing more", you should still believe that justice is good.
Platonists are still abusing language this way today. For instance, redefining "racism" to mean "trying to treat people of different races in the same way", and then expecting that redefinition to convince us that treating people of different races in the same way is bad, because we believe racism is bad.
this stood out to me:
> Let me emphasize that I am not putting forward this series of Socratic critiques as valid. … When it comes to Socratic ethics, we are still at the stage of saying what it is— and that is a big enough task for one book.
because it seems to severely contradict this:
> When we settle on answers to the central questions of our lives without ever having opened up those questions for [Socratic] inquiry, that is a recipe for wavering.
when the time comes to make an emphatic case for Socratic ethics, she hedges in that common modern way that amounts to "idk tho, lol" that tries to head off serious disagreement/critique with a friendly chuckle. she 'wavers' in her appeal to 'not waver'.
charitably, you can read this as callard not being fully comfortable with the shifting line between 'inquiry', 'resolve' and 'doubt', but i think it does a disservice to her thesis. i also notice skilled utlitarians, kantians (why not deontologists?) and virtue polemicists learn quickly to not waver when they're advocating for their worldview.
I think that Taleb's Fat Tony was right about Socrates.
<<SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”
FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.”
FAT TONY: “My dear Socrates … you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people’s illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don’t understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them.”>>
Why are people so reluctant to just say that they can't express or explicitly define important things? That's what makes them vulnerable to a Socratic refutation.
It's worth reading Willmoore Kendall on Socrates drinking the hemlock:
https://modernagejournal.com/was-athens-right-to-kill-socrates/227006/
I wasn't convinced that his death was the right outcome, but I was convinced that Socrates himself believed that, so I must conclude I disagree with Socrates.
I just read “A Spark Neglected Burns the House” by Tolstoy, and the central theme is something akin to “squash conflict or quarrels with other humans as quickly as possible or a snowball effect occurs, resulting in a larger conflict”. This seemed to strike a chord with me. Which leads me to a question: How many times does retaliation result in this type of dynamic? If it is a lot, retaliation rarely makes much sense. If retaliation leads to deterrence, it makes more sense.
Related: Just because an act makes sense, does not make it “good” or morally right. I do struggle with this though. I understand that from an evolutionary perspective you are likely increasing your chances of being outcompeted (if you "turn the other cheek"), making retaliation seem necessary, even if it isn't necessarily "good".
Knowledge is of instrumental rather than intrinsic value—it helps one achieve good, and Socratic inquiry—theorizing about what one already knows—is instrumental for gaining knowledge; so inquiry is doubly instrumental, not intrinsic. Furthermore, inquiry is not always worth the cost: often it is better to act spontaneously and learn by trial and error.
Big, delicious mug of hemlock! WWSD?