Prichard vs. Plato: Intuition vs. Reflection

When H.A. Prichard launched his attack on the "mistake" in moral philosophy of "supposing the possibility of proving what can only be apprehended directly by an act of moral thinking," he had Plato squarely in his sights.¹ Plato, in fact, is the poster boy for the strategy of trying to "supply by a process of reflection a proof of the truth of what … they have prior to reflection believed immediately or without proof."² As if this were not mistake enough, Prichard charges Plato with being the "most significant instance" of the error of trying to "justify morality by its profitableness," because Plato's general acuity brings into sharp relief just how pernicious is the temptation to offer such justifications. Prichard has in view Plato's attempt in Republic to demonstrate that justice is oikeion agathon – one's own good – and Prichard complains that at best such an account can make us want to be just, rather than show us that we are obligated to be just, as direct apprehension purports to do.

There is no doubt that Plato's account in Republic looks dodgy in the light in which Prichard casts it.³ If we take Plato to be doing what Prichard charges him with doing, we may be led to conclude, as Prichard does, both that offering a justification for moral obligation is a serious mistake and that appeals to our own interest are the worst form of such a mistake. But matters are different if the argument of Republic is considered in a larger framework of apologetic for morality, a framework Plato develops but which is also deployed by later theorists, including Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics. In this essay I suggest that we read Plato in this larger context of ethical theory. By doing so we can appreciate, in a way Prichard does not, the benefits of reflecting on moral obligation as Plato does.

Prichard's Charges

It is worth recalling in some detail what Prichard's reservations are. In his best-known paper, Prichard sees obligation toward specific actions as called for by specific conditions or circumstances, and our apprehension of this "calling" as "absolutely underivative or immediate."⁴ He likens this apprehension to mathematical insight (e.g., that a three-sided closed figure must have three angles as well), in that "insight into the nature of the subject directly leads us to recognize its possession of the predicate"; such insights are, he says, "self-evident."⁵ We might, he thinks, come to doubt the truth of such insights, but the mistake of moral philosophy is to assume that such doubts can be assuaged by argument.⁶ The only appropriate response, in the moral as in the mathematical case, is that the doubts themselves are illegitimate. Reflection can serve a useful purpose only insofar as it returns us to a place in which we can recognize the self-evidence of the claims we began by doubting.⁷

In a later paper, Prichard is more explicit about how Plato in particular has gone down the garden path with a form of reflection that is worse than useless. Once again, the charge is that Plato fails to appreciate that we think, "and think without having any doubt, that certain actions are right and that certain others are wrong."⁸ Instead, Plato accepts as legitimate the bogus challenge of the Sophists (represented in Republic by Thrasymachus) of showing that what is required of us by justice is really to our own advantage. Here, however, we get a difference in emphasis from the earlier paper. Whereas there Prichard's focus seemed to be on moral epistemology – in particular the mistake of thinking reflection could do something to supplement direct moral intuition – here we get a charge that Plato has supplied what has come to be known as the wrong kind of reason for morality.⁹ Prichard's main point now is that conduciveness to our advantage is simply not what renders an action our duty, though we may be unable to say for sure quite what does render an action so.^10...