‘No Man does Evil Willingly’

Abstract

I had argued earlier that moral knowledge is love of the good, and that in the domain of the spiritual to love the good is to possess it¹: Knowledge is virtue. Socrates claims that if one possesses the good, if one is virtuous, one cannot do wrong: ‘A righteous man performs right actions’ (460). I dissented: One can love the good and still do wrong on a particular occasion. But if that love is blemished then to that extent one does not possess the good and so one is vulnerable before temptation. Perhaps Socrates does allow for this. Perhaps what he tries to say is that a man who has moral knowledge cannot succumb to temptation without losing touch with the knowledge he has. This needs further consideration.