Socrates · Philosophy
Socrates’s startling doctrine that virtue is a kind of knowledge, that no one does wrong willingly, and that all wrongdoing springs ultimately from ignorance.
Socrates advanced one of the most startling and influential doctrines in the history of ethics: that virtue is knowledge. To be virtuous - to be just, courageous, temperate, good - is, on this view, fundamentally a matter of knowing: knowing what is truly good, what is truly in one’s interest, what one ought to do. Courage is knowledge of what is and is not truly to be feared; justice is knowledge of what is truly right; each virtue is, at bottom, a kind of knowledge or wisdom about how to live. This explains Socrates’s relentless search for the definitions of the virtues: if virtue is knowledge, then to become virtuous we must know what virtue is, and the pursuit of these definitions is not idle theorizing but the very path to becoming good. It also implies that virtue can be taught, as knowledge can be taught, and that the vicious are not so much wicked as ignorant - lacking the knowledge of the good that would make them virtuous.
From ‘virtue is knowledge’ follows the most famous and most paradoxical of Socratic doctrines: that no one does wrong willingly. If virtue is knowledge of the good, then vice is ignorance of the good; and if people always pursue what they believe to be good for them (as Socrates held), then anyone who does wrong must do so out of a mistaken belief that the wrong action is somehow good for them - that is, out of ignorance of their true good. No one, on this view, knowingly and deliberately chooses what they fully understand to be bad for them; the wrongdoer is always, at bottom, mistaken, pursuing an apparent good that is really an evil, because they lack the knowledge that would reveal its true nature. Wrongdoing is thus always involuntary in a deep sense - not because the wrongdoer is compelled, but because they would not do the wrong if they truly knew it to be against their own real good. All vice is ultimately a kind of ignorance; all wrongdoing, a mistake.
Socrates’s position commits him to denying what most people take to be an obvious feature of human experience: akrasia, or weakness of will - the phenomenon of knowing the good but failing to do it, of acting against one’s own better judgment. Most people believe this happens constantly: we know we should exercise but don’t, know we shouldn’t overeat but do, know anger is destructive but yield to it anyway. Common sense says that knowledge of the good is often present but overpowered by desire, passion, or weakness. Socrates flatly denies this. Genuine knowledge of the good, he insists, cannot be ‘dragged about like a slave’ by the passions; it is not the sort of thing that can be present and yet overpowered. If we act against the good, it is because we do not, in that moment, truly know it - our supposed knowledge was really opinion, or was clouded by a false estimate of pleasure and pain. There is no such thing, for Socrates, as clearly knowing the better and choosing the worse; the appearance of weakness of will is really a case of ignorance.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Socrates’s doctrine that virtue is knowledge and no one does wrong willingly. His successor Aristotle rejected this, insisting that we often know the good yet fail to do it. State Aristotle’s challenge.
Leads to Aristotle.
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