Aiming at Virtue in Plato (review)

Iakovos Vasiliou argues for reading Plato’s early dialogues and the Republic in light of “the aiming/determining distinction.” Aiming questions are concerned with the selection of our overriding ends. Determining questions ask how we can identify actions which secure those ends. As Vasiliou argues, Socrates claims to know an answer to the central aiming question, namely that virtue must be supreme (SV). Virtue functions sometimes as an explicit end and always as a limiting condition: we must never do wrong. For wrong action damages the soul, which is the most important locus of harms and benefits for us. Vasiliou traces this argument as it is offered with increasing fullness in the Crito, Gorgias, and Republic. But all this leaves open which actions are virtuous. Socrates’ definitional inquiries into various virtues attempt to answer this determining question, but all end in aporia and failure. To say that virtue is knowledge is not much help, for it gets us no further towards grasping what the virtuous person would do. In the Republic, Vasiliou argues, we are at least given a promissory note: the philosopher-kings will be able to answer determining questions through their knowledge of the Forms. He argues further that non-philosophers, who in the kallipolis will also be committed to SV, will be virtuous inasmuch as they are ruled (albeit indirectly) by that knowledge.

Proposals about the structure and organization of Plato’s thought have to be judged by their ability to illuminate particular texts and solve their puzzles, and this one is highly successful. One important upshot noted by Vasiliou is that although we must never be swayed against virtuous action by prudential considerations, these may well be factors in determining what the virtuous action is. An obvious point, perhaps, but Vasiliou shows convincingly that previous interpreters have gone astray here in discussing the Apology and Crito. There need be nothing illegitimate or merely rhetorical about Socrates’ references to his reputation and his family (for instance) in these texts. Vasiliou’s reading of the Crito as a sample of Socratic deliberation—i.e. as the settling of a particular determining question in the ethical ‘here and now’—is as helpful and convincing as any I know, and makes both Crito’s own arguments and those of the Laws look much stronger and more Socratic than they usually do.

Vasiliou’s presentation of the “determining” question, however, seems to flatten out a number of different philosophical problems. For one thing, it is not quite true that all the what-is-F dialogues are concerned with how to determine virtuous actions: this is urgently the question in the Euthyphro, but in the Laches, Euthydemus, and Protagoras, the problem at hand is rather that of education. And the question, “What course of education will make a young person virtuous?”, is not really reducible to the generic, “What action in my situation is the virtuous one?”. The conception of knowledge deployed here is also a bit undifferentiated. It is one thing for Socrates to “know” SV in the loose sense of having warranted confidence in it; another for him to be able to defend it dialectically; and yet another for it to fit into the kind of systematic grasp of a subject-matter which is constitutive of a technê. Which is in play in any particular context, and how they are related, is open for debate. These epistemic distinctions and the associated puzzles call for much more detailed discussion than Vasiliou gives here. And they leave me skeptical that Socrates can really know SV (in any sense or degree) without knowing (in a correlative sense or degree) what virtue is.

Vasiliou’s discussion of the Republic rightly emphasizes that a principal role of the Forms is to enable the philosopher-kings to answer determining questions unerringly. But since we are not actually told what the form of Justice consists in, he is forced to allow that this is at best a promise of an answer to the determining question...