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Democracy, Justice, and Equality in Ancient Greece pp 83–138Cite as

Inequality, Intention, and Ignorance: Socrates on Punishment and the Human Good

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Part of the book series: Philosophical Studies Series ((PSSP,volume 132))

Abstract

I examine here a wide array of interlocking Socratic doctrines, especially as they show up in the ideas of Socratic Ignorance and the Examined Life (asking questions every day of others and of oneself)—along with such other Socratic claims as the following. First, that No one errs willingly. Second, that, in acting intentionally, everyone is always seeking their own greatest available good, given their present circumstances, where that greatest good is taken over the rest of their lives. Third, that those who don’t see that harming others will not, over the rest of their lives, serve their own greatest good, deserve not punishment but instruction. I conduct this examination with my eye on two blatant contemporary inequalities across race and class. The first is that involved in differentially funding different schools and thereby shortchanging the ability of those of our children who need it most to work out better means to their own greatest good over the rest of their lives; the second is that across race, class, and educational background in our extensive incarceration practices. In the longest part of this essay, I argue that a principal philosophical presupposition of punishment practices can be shown to be well wide of the mark by the Socratic theory I explore here. This is the presupposition that there is some kind of philosophical justification—for example, in modern “under the description” theories—for the decidedly questionable view that we can almost always determine quite sufficiently what a person’s intentions are for purposes of justifiably and usefully punishing supposed malefactors.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the USA, African Americans are five times more likely than whites to be incarcerated, Hispanics are more than twice as likely as whites. Even the rate at which whites are incarcerated in the USA is four times that for all prisoners in multi-ethnic France, according to Hochschild (2016, p. 32, citing Gottschalk 2016). Among young white high school dropouts in the US, 1 in 8 is incarcerated (Western and Pettit 2010). Incarceration rates in the USA are, generally speaking 10+ times the rates in the five Scandinavian countries, and are the highest of any large country in the world. See http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All

  2. 2.

    See below Sect. 5.1.

  3. 3.

    See Laws 734b, 731c, 860D-863e, Sophist 227e-230e, Timaeus 86c-e.

  4. 4.

    On the “greatest good for any human being”, the first epigraph contains my translation of the actual words at 37e-38a, leading up to the dictum “while (de) the unexamined life is not worth living.” Here I translate the normally unemphatic de as while because I think that in this context, there is a stronger contrast intended with the clause that precedes this isolated de than one would normally expect. This stronger contrast is that between the unexamined life and that “greatest good for any human being” that, in effect, consists in the examined life—the life of Socratic questioning and examination of oneself and others. I only came to see the subordinate character of the double negative concerning the unexamined life thanks to Antonio Chu. The point is, amazingly enough, that the greatest good for any human being is engaging in these Socratic questions every day . I discuss this astonishing suggestion further in the main text.

    Other points of translation: I translate aretê, usually translated “virtue” in such contexts as this one, as “human goodness”; tous logous poieisthai as “engage in those discussions”; and dialegomenou as “in conversation about.”

  5. 5.

    I do not find either of the usual translations “Temperance” and “Moderation” very satisfactory. The idea of Sôphrosunê is something like maintaining one’s good sense (or keeping one’s head) in the face of temptation.

  6. 6.

    The other questions here, besides “What is Virtue ?” consist of my selection from other dialogues of such questions as initiate the discussions in those dialogues (Meno, Laches, Charmides , Republic I, Euthyphro , Lysis, Protagoras, Gorgias , and just below, the Crito , Symposium).

  7. 7.

    I am grateful to Harry Nieves Barber for raising the kind of question I try to answer in this paragraph and the following two paragraphs, about the involvement of the general-looking questions Socrates mentions with those particular every-day questions about what an agent is to do that plainly do arise in everyday contexts.

  8. 8.

    While we do not see Socrates as in any way an enthusiast for morality , it is surely what Euthyphro is thinking of in connection with the gods. (It’s immoral to leave even a murdering slave to die. And it’s morally irrelevant that the person you accuse is your father).

  9. 9.

    There is no room here to explore the—in every way—rich context in which Socratic Ignorance appears. Nor is there space to explore the manifold literary beauties and manifestations of dramatic irony that emerge in Socrates’ preposterous—even blasphemous—distortion of what the god at Delphi has in mind in saying that no one is wiser than Socrates. See my “This man is dangerous: how Athenian moral conservatives were right about Socrates, without having the faintest idea why.”

  10. 10.

    Especially in the Protagoras , the Lesser Hippias , the Euthydemus , Republic I (the Thrasymachus section), and at Gorgias 447a–468e.

  11. 11.

    This is a test that the going theory of Socratic Ignorance nowadays signally fails. I refer to the attractively intense and careful Benson (2000). That going theory reduces Socratic Ignorance to the notion that everyone who, unlike Socrates, thinks that they know the answer to Socrates’ questions can be refuted as follows: by showing that the views of such self-confident people will inevitably be shown to logically entail a contradiction. It utterly escapes me why continuing to engage in such demonstrations of supposedly semantically justified (first-order?) deductive logic every day would constitute the greatest good for every human being.

    In any case, there are two serious difficulties to Benson’s use of an unrestricted notion of logical entailment for the analysis of Socratic arguments. First, this cannot represent how Socrates thought of his dialectical arguments. For the very prototype of logical entailment for a logical language—syllogistic consequence—does not appear in Western thought until Aristotle invents it, out of his own head, using the predicates of ordinary Greek for his logical language. This, in turn, means that the intensional notion of proposition (that flows from the notion of logical entailment: see n. 20 with n. 46 below) is also anachronistic.

    The second difficulty is philosophical—that there is, so far as I know, no notion of logical entailment that is not relative to a logical language that is sufficiently restricted that it will avoid the paradoxes. Again, see n. 54 below, as well as Penner (2007a).

  12. 12.

    See below on the non-monotonic progressions of scientific theory .

  13. 13.

    See LHp 373d-375d, where 375c5-d2; Rep. I 352d-354e. And for Aristotle, see NE I.7 and, better, EE II.1. The Socratic passages in Plato draw the means-ends functional conclusion about human beings, not only from professionals or athletes who aim at certain goods proper to their professions (runners, singers, dancers, archers and the like), but also from such instruments as rudders and pruning-knives, and functional bodily parts, such as eyes and ears. The goodness of a good knife is its being a good thing to use as a means to the end of producing a clean cut—which is the good of knives. The goodness of good eyes is their making us able to contrive the means to the end and good of eyes, namely seeing. See Penner (2005b, p. 159, with note 5); for connections with the theory of Forms , see Penner (2006, pp. 165–167), as well as n. 29 below.

    I discuss the functional theory of goodness and the good (and in particular human goodness and the human good) in greater detail at Penner (2011, pp. 260–261, 266–79, 274, with 268 note 15, 270 note 17, 271 note 19).

  14. 14.

    Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle always speak of the human good as happiness. It seems to me pretty clear that what Socrates has in mind in speaking of happiness is just this maximum balance of available good (benefit, advantage) over harm to which I refer in the main text. In my 1997, I have argued that Socrates is perfectly capable of thinking of the maximum balance of pleasure over pain in a similar way: hence the “expertise at measuring good and/or pleasure ” at Protagoras 351b-357e. See also below, n. 86.

    For “over an entire life”, see Symposium 205a, d, 206a, 207a, as well as Protagoras 356a-357c, and, more generally below; for “maximum available balance of good over bad”, see Euthydemus 279c-280b, 281b, 282a. (Here the argument is that Wisdom is good luck because it best brings success. I take it that this could only be true when one’s circumstances are antecedently given: if your circumstances chanced to be better mightn’t you have better luck? Hence “maximum available” = maximum available in your present circumstances). For “all desire is for good things as a means to happiness ”, see Meno 77e5–78a5. For the love of wisdom as to means to the end of happiness, and the desire for happiness as coming to the same thing in the Lysis, see Penner and Rowe (2005, chapter 11).

  15. 15.

    See Hampshire (1959, chapter 4). In meaning-determines-reference mode (Hampshire speaks of our concepts rather than of what our words mean), Hampshire here makes argument tantamount to claiming that the goodness of good parents, good friends, and the like is as plainly functional as that of good administrators, and cannot be gerrymandered by appeals to someone’s values, norms , or moral principles. Ayn-Randian values or moral principles cannot make someone who doesn’t look after their children a good parent.

  16. 16.

    I do not want to claim too much here. It is true that theories in the hard sciences must, in places where practical circumstances allow, face fine-grained quantitative counter-evidence. But these sciences are not immune to that pitting of one theory against another on matters involving simplicity, degree of dissonance with existing conceptual schemes, conflicting choices of possibly questionable attributes to measure (especially in the social sciences), and so forth.

  17. 17.

    See Boys-Stones and Rowe (2013).

  18. 18.

    Here is my view of how to interpret what a philosopher says when we have some reason to suppose that he or she is insightful or profound. Treat the truth of the matter under discussion as evidence—defeasible evidence, of course—for what the philosopher thinks. Such an interpretive view is, alas, becoming increasingly rare these days in the treatment of historical philosophers. I make essentially the same argument in my 1987 (pp. xiii–xvi, 43–44).

  19. 19.

    For Vlastos’ views in a late formulation, see his (1991) (pp. 45–106). If memory serves, these views are scarcely changed from Vlastos’ views in the second half of the 1960s, when I was his colleague and attended his undergraduate lectures and some of his graduate seminars. The only major exception I can think of is his repositioning of the Lysis, Euthydemus , and Greater Hippias as later than the Gorgias , but earlier than the Meno. For Aristotle, see the next note.

  20. 20.

    On differences in psychology of action between Socrates and Plato, notice how at Nicomachean Ethics VII.2, Aristotle treats the views at Protagoras 351b-357e as those of Socrates; and for a clear contrast between Socrates and Plato in their psychologies of action, see the passage from the Magna Moralia (probably from Aristotle’s school) cited below, n. 24.

    My complaint about Aristotle on Socrates and “universals” originates in Penner (1987, pp. 2–11). See also index to that work under “this-es,” “such-es,” “types.” The complaint is this. Aristotle’s sophisticated (but arguably fatally flawed) concept-object logical grammar astoundingly—and utterly anachronistically—identifies Socratic universals with Aristotelian such-es. It is true that this concept-object logical grammar works well for constructivist notions of logic (on which, see Gödel 1944 on Russell’s theory of logical types), as well as for Platonist-looking systems of logic with the Law of the Excluded Middle . These latter systems, however, are always relative only to particularly carefully constructed logical languages where the application of the Law of the Excluded Middle is—in effect—carefully restricted so that it as cannot generate the paradoxes. What we do not have is what Aristotle supposes, in common with all too many students of ancient philosophy, a relation of logical entailment that, like his Law of Excluded Middle, applies to everything whatever—all objects, but also all properties and all relations—without antecedently limited domains. See further Penner (1987, clarification VIII) and below.

  21. 21.

    I do not find the remarks at Brickhouse and Smith (2010, pp. 7–8), defending the Socratic character of these parts of the Gorgias to amount to much of an argument. Just to be clear, it is not a consequence of my view that if some parts of a dialogue show non-Socratic influence, that none of the dialogue shows Socratic influence, as Brickhouse and Smith seem to presuppose. Indeed, there is much in Republic IV–X that remains Socratic, in spite of the fact that there is also much thought in those books that is plainly anti-Socratic.

  22. 22.

    With 470a, 472d-e, 474b. The unSocratic idea that the Socrates of this part of the dialogue allows to go uncontested is that physical punishments can improve the soul of malefactors (see 473b-d, 478e, and perhaps also 478a).

  23. 23.

    Fair warning: I was myself rather uncritically Vlastosian in my approach to stylometry until Kahn (2002) persuaded me otherwise. At the same time, even in my 1992, I felt no temptation to attribute to the historical Socrates the Pythagorean views put in the mouth of Socrates in his discussion with Callicles in the Gorgias .

  24. 24.

    I read the claim that All desire is for the good , as the contrapositive of No one errs willingly , which is about actions—about actions that fail to gain a person what he or she wants. On this reading, All desire is for the good is in reality speaking of all desires that bring about intentional actions .

    Socrates is not denying that we feel other desires or passions, e.g., for food, drink, or sex. Nor is he denying that to act in order to gain one’s good sometimes involves assessing the degree of good to be gained by satisfying one or more of these felt desires or passions. The point is just that when one’s actions involve satisfying one of those other desires, one will only do the action because one sees action as, over all, good. (Analogy: consider the views of someone who thinks all action is selfish, being indifferent to the good of others, and concerned only with what he or she thinks is for his or her own good. Is he or she refuted when he or she wants to drink something—as if this had nothing to do with his or her over-all selfish good? Isn’t the desire that brings about the action the desire, on this view, the desire for over-all selfish good that in this case includes, as a part, satisfying a desire to drink?)

    We’ll see later on, that, for Socrates, the good desired in an action is indeed the agent’s own good (Sect. 5.6, last six paragraphs)—though of course Socrates would not suppose that indifference to the good of others serves an agent’s own good.

    I have not so far found good Xenophontic evidence for the claim that Socrates held that all desire that brings about intentional action is desire for the good. On the other hand, the Aristotelian Magna Moralia I.1 (1182a15–30) makes it quite clear that Plato and Aristotle are disagreeing with Socrates in supposing that there are actions (in Aristotle’s terminology, “voluntary” actions) brought about contrary to the agent’s rational desire (which I take to be desire for the agent’s own good)—those actions being brought about instead by an irrational part of the soul. The Magna Moralia concludes (rightly) that Socrates—by anticipation, as it were—does away with (anairein) any irrational part of the soul, as well as doing away with character. (For Socrates, the issue is always one of degree of understanding, not of habituation-generated character). But the Magna Moralia appears wrongly to conclude that Socrates does away with passion or feeling (pathos); see sentences 3–5 of this note.

  25. 25.

    It is only stretching things a little to speak of a pair of friends, one of whom blames the other for doing something that has harmed the friendship, as an organization . Social morality grinds small. For more on authorities and suspects, see below.

  26. 26.

    On the various forms of inequality in the Republic see Santas (this volume). For the negative effect of distancing the punished from the authorities via bureaucracy , see, for example, Bauman (1989, pp. 88–107).

  27. 27.

    In my 2000 and 2004, I have made a start on arguing that, even in the Crito , Socrates has nothing to say about political obligation generally. (Socrates sees one’s city as a kind of parent). And I see no signs that Socrates thinks—any more than I do—that we have moral obligations to our parents, or that Socrates thinks Euthyphro’s prosecuting his father is immoral rather than simply unwise, and even foolish. But I acknowledge that there is more to be done to make this claim convincing. See also nn. 74 and 93, the text to n. 80, and the last four paragraphs of this essay.

  28. 28.

    For a different view of blame as a social (or moral) institution, see Scanlon’s (2000) What We Owe to Each Other—a theory apparently based on Strawson’s stimulating I-Thou account of a Kant-style reconciliation of free will and determinism . From what I have been saying about punishment, it may be clear by the end of this essay why I find very doubtful the idea that blame provides useful inter-personal information as to my reactions to some harmful thing you have done—if, as all too often, I have very little idea of what you understood in your action, let alone of what I understand of your action in blaming you. (Blamers also often tend to take themselves to be in a position of moral authority). At any rate, I suppose that we have far more need to understand each other better than to express to one another our moral or emotional reactions to actions of each other’s to which we are averse. For what I take to be the Socratic view of determinism, see Penner (2005a, pp. 29–33). (I am grateful to Scanlon, a long-time friend, for some necessarily brief discussion, years ago now, of these matters, and for showing me some of his then unpublished work. I have the impression that Scanlon views legal punishment with rather more reserve than his views of blame might suggest).

  29. 29.

    I think of metaphysical realism about the human good precisely in the terms indicated in the preceding paragraph: that (a) there is such a thing as the human good—of course, differently embodied in different lives in accordance with the differences in the person’s current and potential attributes and their circumstances; and that (b) what that human good is, is (as philosophers of logic might put it) a single objective logical function taking us from these individual differences in people, and in their circumstances , to what each person’s individual good objectively, is, in their particular circumstances. This is so, a Socrates will suppose, however difficult it might be for us to determine just what any given individual’s own real good is. The thought here is: what is good for a human being is not just something we make up, or create by means of our “values .”

    On the view I am presenting here, Socrates is at the opposite pole from those to whom, in other respects, his position might not seem so very different. (On Christie, see below) . On the Form of the Good, see, for example, Penner (2005b, pp. 158–159, 2006, pp. 165–167, and the argument in 2007b pp. 93–123, to the effect that the Form of the Good = the Form of Benefit or Advantage = the Good simpliciter that we all seek).

    This understanding of Plato’s Form of the Good, and so of such inspirational passages as the Sun, the Line, and the Cave, thus differs sharply from St. Augustine’s suggestion, e.g., at City of God, XIV.15, that our pursuit of the Good cannot be identified with the (sinful) love of mortal things, but must rather be redirected towards some world beyond ours. On Augustine’s suggestion this sinful love must then include the longing for something as spatio-temporal as the best life open to oneself, and to those one cares for, given their circumstances .

    This Augustinian interpretation of our pursuit of the Good, in terms of flight from this world to another world, is still quite common among modern interpreters of Plato. But the undoubtedly inspirational character of such interpretations in Augustine and in similarly inspirational modern interpretations of Sun, Line, and Cave in Plato—finding an individual’s good in fleeing this world for another world—still seem to me totally to misrepresent the metaphysical realism of both Socrates and Plato concerning the good (and so also the human good) which I see Plato presenting in the many immortal passages on the Forms in the Republic.

  30. 30.

    With whatever consequences the use of these means may bring. These means do not differ in kind from those of the oratorical skill, or rhetoric , that Socrates criticizes at Gorgias 461d-466a and 466a-468e. I have discussed these two Socratic passages concerning Socrates’ paradoxical claim that this oratorical skill is no science or expertise, but at best a knack in my 1987 and my 1991. This oratory Socrates characterizes as a form of kolakeia: flattery , pandering: gaining what one thinks one wants by telling people what they like to hear regardless of whether or not it is true.

  31. 31.

    See the first chapter of Jonathan Kozol’s (1991) Savage Inequality.

  32. 32.

    See the wonderful discussion of Socrates with the two (as it happens, rather wealthy) fathers, Melesias and Lysimachus, at Laches 187d-189b. In particular, notice the striking accounts that the two famous Athenian generals, Laches and Nicias, give of their own encounters with Socrates, whether these encounters are merely personal, as with Laches, or both intellectual and personal, as with Nicias. Nicias understands, very well indeed, how fundamental Socrates’ philosophical questions are—to one’s whole person and to one’s whole life. I am frankly astonished that skeptical scholars (see para. 3 of Sect. 5.1 above) should go so far as to suggest that this passage represents not Plato giving his own picture of what the historical Socrates was like, but a sheer made-up literary fiction.

    Going up to the level of university education , we may imagine the likely view of Socrates on the following changes that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker recently attempted to write into the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin: removing words that commanded the university to “search for truth” and “improve the human condition” and replacing them with “meet the state’s workforce needs.”

    For the exact changes, see Hamer (2016).

  33. 33.

    See below, Sect. 5.9.

  34. 34.

    For a recent exhaustive review of historical, legal, and sociological evidence for the view being presented here, see Alexander (2012), and the impressive array of scholars she cites.

    Dreisinger (2016, pp. 204) claims that the imprisonment rate for aboriginals in Western Australia is actually even higher than that of African Americans in the USA. She also reports that capitalist enterprise may be at work, for example, in the private prison industry (which, in the USA, spent $18 million on lobbying alone between 1999 and 2009), supported by such entities as the American Legislative Exchange Council. See also Hochschild (2016, pp. 32) on the prison boom as a way to make money:

    One private prison company alone … is the country’s fifth-largest prison system after those of the federal government and the three biggest states. … In 2011, the two biggest private prison firms donated nearly $3 million to political candidates and hired 242 lobbyists around the country.

    Hochschild also suggests the point—obvious, once seen—that the profit motive rather conflicts with the desirability of cutting down on the recidivism rate. The sight of how ill the market serves us here evokes astonishingly little concern among all too many majorities of the representatives of the people. For another way in which private enterprise enters into the prison system, see Hager and Santo (2016).

  35. 35.

    If I seem to speak too little here of the evident dangers of violent crime , or of the evident need for a network of emergency responders, that is more a matter of my having less to say about them at the moment than that I do not recognize such dangers and needs. I am grateful to various friends for making this point to me. My point at the moment is merely that putting some young man or young woman in prison is not just a matter of putting a fire out—important as that last task may in some cases be. I find it shocking that a life, when its direction forward has been hijacked by a few serious, and often astonishingly short-sighted misjudgments on the young person’s part, should just be thrown on the scrap heap.

  36. 36.

    See Bozelko (2016).

  37. 37.

    In Wisconsin alone, 88,000 children have at least one parent in prison: 7% of children under 18. See Annie E. Casey foundation (2016).

  38. 38.

    I shall not consider questions of strict liability here, such as negligence of some damaging factor, as opposed to intentional passing over of some damaging factor.

  39. 39.

    The most frequent Socratic questions are of the form “What is Courage anyway ?”—ti pot’ estin hê andreia: literally, “What ever is Courage?”, more idiomatically put not in terms of time, but in terms of space: “What in the world is Courage?” My own preferred translation, “What is Courage anyway?” seems to me to convey a little more clearly the radical, no-holds-barred character of Socratic questions that always range far more widely than any set of questions an analytical philosopher would ask in trying to characterize a “concept ” or a “definition ” or a set of “necessary and sufficient conditions” for Courage. Socrates clearly envisages the possibility that we’ll have to give up all of our preconceptions about what Courage is, and start again from square one. I add that, for this reason, those who come to the discussion of justice in Republic Book I for the first time are bound to encounter all sorts of extraordinary perplexities in assessing what Socrates is up to there. See Penner (2005a, pp. 34–35).

  40. 40.

    Nowadays, it is out of date to speak of “paying one’s debt to society” by serving a term in prison. That expression presupposes that imprisonment is the punishment that in most cases the court provides. But recent remarks of Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama make it clear that this presupposition is quite wrong. Wegman (2016) reports that, faced with prison violence involving stabbings of prisoners, guards and even of a warden, this public servant remarked, “Part of the prison sentence is punishment. We know that. But we need to protect people.”

    What is the Governor supposing here? That there is more included in the sentence to prison—short of stabbings, of course—than the judge happened to mention in sentencing? A little cruelty here, a little inhumanity there?

    My failure to understand here seems confirmed by the fact that, in some states, a judge, in handing down a prison sentence, is forced, willy-nilly, into also disenfranchising the accused, even once released, and making it virtually impossible for him or her to get a job when the supposed debt to society has been paid. Is there then, in these states, a mandatory surcharge , imposed by legislators and prison officials, to legal punishment, which one might innocently have thought consisted, even without judicial discretion, precisely in the imprisonment?

    For an astonishingly rare exception, see Wegman (2016). It should be noted, however, that what the judge in question described as forgiveness —which consists in the convict’s not having to report having gone to prison—is of course no such thing. It is an ad hominem grant of what, but for mandatory and indiscriminately biased legislation, would never have been part of the sentence at all. What ever was wrong with the idea of paying one’s debt to society and thenceforward being free to find opportunity on its merits? Are we, as a society, saying that everyone we have convicted is far more guilty than the courts have found them to be?

  41. 41.

    From Anscombe’s great 1958 book, Intention (pp. 37–47, esp. 37).

  42. 42.

    There are two ways in which we might think of the A position in this schema: either (a) as above—as the action itself, no matter how referred to or described, and no matter what we may know or not know about it; or (b) as the reference determined by the sense or meaning of the referring expression we put into the A position. Both of these ways—the Platonist way in (a) and the (at least partially language-generated) way in (b)—derive from Frege (1884).

    It is my view that the notion of reference begins—even in Frege (1884, 1891, 1892)—with the notion of identity. The idea here is that the truth of any number of unknown identities about numbers is presupposed in the idea of reference. In the post-Cantorian era, we can see that this would have to cover non-denumerably many true numerical identities. Thus, the origin of the notion of reference, even in Frege, should never have been limited by the denumerable languages used by speakers. Of course descriptions, or referring expressions, are thus limited.

    I myself hold that this (Platonist) notion of identity, applicable even to the real numbers, is the right way to approach reference. So it is method (a), above, of describing reference that I am employing here.

    I realize that Anscombe’s approach to the A position of the schema “doing action A under the description D” may rather be the linguistically-generated, meaning-determines-reference approach that is also in Frege, cheek by jowl with the more Platonist notion of identity. This meaning (or sense)-determines-reference notion, I believe, arises in Frege (1884, 1892), as follows. First, (1) we have the Fregean sense (or meaning) of the linguistic description being determined by its being the way the linguistic description in question picks out that particular actually existing object that is the reference of that description. But then, (2) Frege understandably wants us to be able to discover that certain referring expressions, such as “the least rapidly converging infinite series with limit 2,” have no reference—refer to no existing object whatever. Thus we arrive at (3) the belief that Putnam later spoke of in terms of meaning determining reference, though, for Frege (1884, 1892), that would be better put in terms of meaning determining reference—if any. The result is that now, instead of, as in (1), reference determining sense or meaning, Frege wants the order of determining reversed, so that now (3) sense or meaning determines reference if any. One difficulty of (3)—which gives us the converse operation meaning determines reference—is something not at all suggested by the original determination of sense or meaning by reference. The difficulty is that, at this rate, our choice of meanings for words of our language in part determines what the things are that we can refer to, think about, or suppose might exist. I find such a view implausible. (I can’t think about things for which I have no adequate means in my present language for constructing a description? For example, certain lawless infinite decimals?)

    Accordingly, I proceed using what I call the Platonist approach to reference. This has consequences below when I speak of the “inside-outside” view of some proponents of UDT.

    There is more on metaphysical realism both above, n. 29, and below, Sects. 5.7 and 5.8. I note in passing that in earlier works, e.g., in my (2005b), I called this Platonist realism an ultra-realism, to contrast it with the (to me) rather incoherent realism for which there is a reality outside our minds, and what that reality is, is determined by the meanings of our words.

  43. 43.

    See the preceding note.

  44. 44.

    See Davidson (1963), which argues (to my mind, conclusively) that reasons (beliefs plus desires) are causes. Thus, in Davidson’s conception, reasons are a combining of an appropriate belief with an appropriate desire or pro-attitude (that is, in Davidson, one of any number of kinds of desires or pro-attitudes). The idea seems to be that (a) the various different kinds of pro-attitudes will potentially motivate some intentional action , while (b) the belief gives that motive a particular direction onto realization in the world. If both the belief and the pro-attitude are themselves in every case caused, then determinism is the necessary result. I have spoken of Socratic (teleological) determinism elsewhere (2005a, pp. 30–31, 2011, pp. 288–290).

  45. 45.

    There are of course other versions of Socratic Intellectualism than mine, e.g., those of Devereux (1995) and of Brickhouse and Smith (2010).

  46. 46.

    Looked at in one way, the notion of a proposition is just anything anyone proposes or puts forward. But for those who use the technical semantical notions of logical validity, entailment , or logical consequence—as almost all students of Socratic thought have done, since Vlastos (1956)—that more technical notion of proposition is very dubious. (Along such semantical lines, propositions are individuated by their entailment relations, and there is no perfectly general notion of entailment, but only any number of entailment-relations relative to the corresponding artificial logical languages , as per above. Hence there is also no perfectly general entailment-related notion of proposition . Only any number of different notions, each relative to a different artificial, and carefully restricted language).

    If I am right that almost all uses of the notions of entailment and the proposition that have been exploited in order to give exact logical analyses of Socratic arguments have flowed from the uncritical supposition that first-order logic , say, gives us a universally applicable notion of entailment and the propositions, then it needs to be pointed out that such notions are indefensible and subject to the paradoxes. (I would not want to deny that a better notion of proposition might be constructed by more sophisticated logician-philosophers. I just don’t know whether there is such a notion. But a lot of philosophical work will have to be done if one is to think an unproblematic notion is available).

    On the use of the semantics of first-order logic to get a notion of entailment when one is analyzing Socratic arguments that refer both to just persons and to such a thing (pragma ti: Protagoras 330C1) as Justice —as do discussions of the Unity of Virtue—see Penner (2007a, pp. 17–19, appendix), as well as n. 11 above.

    Of course my use of propositions at this point in the main text is not in proria persona, but rather from the point of view of proponents of UDT. And for an example of how different Socratic interpretations can look if we eschew propositions, see Penner (1988).

  47. 47.

    Here is a recent example of this you-choose approach, from Mark Hertsgaard (2016):

    Mr. Snowden has admitted he broke the law. But he did so, he explained, because of an overriding public interest: People had a right to know about the warrantless surveillance of them.

    Mr. Snowden has said that he will return to the United States if he can get a fair trial . In his view, that means being allowed to offer a “public interest defense.” His lawyers would argue that he had to commit one crime —leaking documents to journalists—to report a greater crime: warrantless surveillance.

    But the law forbids this approach. The Espionage Act does not allow a public interest defense: The accused either leaked documents or he didn’t, and if he did, guilty is the only possible verdict.

  48. 48.

    See Anscombe (1958a, passim, esp. pp. 66–83)—an elegant and stimulating introduction to the idea of there being such a thing as the description-under-which an action is being or has been done.

  49. 49.

    For Socrates, see the references above, n. 14, which contain references to desiring the means to a final end of any one of wisdom, happiness, good luck , the good and (in the Lysis) the “first friend.” This final end is what I have called the agent’s real good . For Aristotle, there is conflicting evidence. In Nicomachean Ethics I.1–2 (1094a1–22), it seems perfectly plain that Aristotle can only be following Socrates in talking about the agent’s real good (see the remarks about the sciences in I.1)—here following Socrates. On the other hand, Aristotle seems clearly enough to contradict this view at III. iv, where he insists that if one wants to account for all cases where an agent “desires the good”, the good in question can only be the apparent good —what the agent thinks is his or her good. With good people, the apparent good is the real good, but with bad people, Aristotle holds at III.4, the end wanted is the apparent good and not the real good.

    Later in the work, Aristotle introduces two further kinds of cases. First, we have cases of akrasia (weakness of will, so called, where an agent voluntarily acts on irrational desire that overwhelms the desire for the good). Second, we have cases of akolasia (self-indulgence, wickedness). In akolasia , we have the agent’s beliefs as to what kinds of things are good perverted by the agent’s having become habituated to thinking good the indulgence in excessive irrational desires (see nn. 105–6, as well as the discussion of “ignorance in the choice ” at III.1). In my view, the conception of intellectualism that we find in the challenging Brickhouse and Smith (2010) in effect makes Socrates a believer in Aristotelian akolasia . This is not at all Aristotle’s own view of Socrates.

  50. 50.

    To repeat: throughout this essay, I take a person’s good and what is good for, or beneficial to, a person to be an entirely factual matter—however difficult it may be to arrive at just what the facts are about what that good is. That is, I take it that there is no meta-ethical is-ought question lurking here.

  51. 51.

    For “the final answer”, see Anscombe (1958a, p. 71). For “the description under which”, see Anscombe (1958a, pp. 37–47).

  52. 52.

    “Explanation comes to an end” (Wittgenstein 1953, I, §§1, 81) . Yes, but where does explanation come to an end? Wittgensteinians might put it this way in a particular case: at this end-point, we know what the language-game is within which we say “Ah now we understand the action”. Compare the way in which Wittgenstein seems to think we should rest satisfied with his language-game for attributing pain by referring to the behavior of people in pain. Faced with the objection, “But you’re saying that there is no distinction between being in pain and showing pain-behavior when not in pain!” (§§281, 304), one may suspect Wittgenstein’s reply would, in the end, come down to “No, there’s pain-behavior accompanied by a context of pretend-behavior, and pain behavior where there is no such context of pretend-behavior. That’s the difference” (1953, II.xi., pp. 227–9; with I, §§156, 244–50).

  53. 53.

    Anscombe (1958a, pp. 37–47, 69–77).

  54. 54.

    Even Frege implicitly makes this assumption that agents know the content of their own thought. Otherwise, why would Frege think that his theory of Sense and Reference was in any way a solution to the “Paradox of Identity”? The Paradox of identity asks “How come everyone knows that the Morning Star is the Morning Star, while some people don’t know that the Morning Star is the Evening Star, given that the Morning Star precisely is the very same heavenly body as the Evening Star, i.e., the planet Venus?” Frege’s solution is that while there is no difference between the Morning Star and the Evening Star, there is (always) a difference between some people’s Morning-Star-way-of-thinking-of stuff in the world and those persons’ Evening-Star-way-of-thinking-of that same stuff in the world. But is there? (And at this point, we come upon the “Paradox of Analysis ”). Frege is evidently supposing that people know from the inside, and with certainty, what our Morning-Star-way-of-thinking is and that it is different from what our Evening-Star-way-of-thinking is. If we know none of these things with certainty, Frege’s solution will be no help. But Frege clearly thought his solution did help.

    As will be seen immediately below, Socratic Intellectualism is not an “inside-outside” theory.

  55. 55.

    Since at least the late 1960s, when I first encountered Goodman (1952), and, at the same time fell into a lucky misunderstanding of Rorty (1965), I have regarded the thesis that we have incorrigible inner states, not as meaningless (as in Wittgenstein and Rorty), but as false. This is so whether these inner states are perceptual (“I know how I am being appeared to”) or conceptual (as in the meaning-Platonism of G. E. Moore: I may be wrong about what I am referring to, but I know what I mean”) or having to do with our intentions (“I may be wrong about what I have done, but at the moment of action I knew what I intended to do”). See my 1987 (s. v. “incorrigibility ”, esp. pp. 78–80; pp. 342, note 34; p. 349, note 44). The promissory notes on Plato’s rejection of meaning- (or conceptual-) incorrigibility at 314–17 are to some extent redeemed in Penner (2013, pp. 201–208). The name “inside-outside theory ” comes from Penner and Rowe (1994, note 2). For more on the inside-outside theory, see Penner and Rowe (2005, pp. 160–172, 186–187).

  56. 56.

    Anscombe’s account here of desirability characterizations and the description-under-which an agent’s act was intentional is a recognizable first cousin of the account of the belief-desire “primary reason” for an intentional action in Davidson (1963)—right down to two essential features (Anscombe 1958a, pp. 74–76; Davidson 1963, p. 4). First, as to the desire element: in Anscombe, all actions aim at some good, but there are multiple goods. Bonum est multiplex (the good is multiple), she says. In Davidson, we have, for the desire element, many different kinds of pro-attitudes . Second, as to the belief-element: in Anscombe, what gives that desire a direction onto the world is the agent’s belief as to what is good (arrived at when one has identified which action will best satisfy the desirability-characterization). And in Davidson, the belief element that gives the pro-attitude a direction onto the world is similarly what the agent believes will satisfy the pro-attitude.

    The multiplicity of desirability characterizations and pro-attitudes symbolizes a kind of ethical incommensurabilism , allowing of multiple incommensurable “values ” as desirability characterizations or pro-attitudes. See also Penner and Rowe (2005, pp. 291–294); and, for the use of an incommensurabilism to attempt to rationalize the irrational parts of the soul in Plato, see Penner and Rowe (2005, note 39).

  57. 57.

    In Scandinavian social systems there is far less of this sheer lack of concern for the imprisoned and their families. See Christie (2004) and Dreisinger (2016, chapter 8).

  58. 58.

    Apology 31c-33a, esp. 31d-e, 32e. See also Penner (2000).

  59. 59.

    This is a point at which I worry about certain conceptions of restorative justice (on which see nn. 112, 113 below)—where the emphasis is on repentance and admission of guilt to, and remorse for, actions the convict himself does not yet fully understand. See, in this connection, the terrific remarks of the character “Red” (Morgan Freeman) to his parole board, in the film script by the director, Frank Darabont , for Stephen King’s novel, The Shawshank Redemption. Those remarks—not present in the Stephen King novel the movie is based on—were, for me, the high point of the film. The remarks can be found on screens 37 and 38 in Darabont (1994).

  60. 60.

    On Socratic-style questions, see n. 39 above.

  61. 61.

    If it was not obvious from my presentation of Socratic ideas above, let me say now that I shall not do here what I have done in almost every other publication of mine. For I shall not attempt to build up to what Socrates thought from examination of particular texts. Rather I shall start from conclusions I have come to on the basis of such past work, and try to present those conclusions in such a way as to point to the places where we see that what he has to say about punishment and education via conversation is vastly different from the much later pragmatic approach of UDT. (Evidently, Socrates nowhere discusses any kind of theory of the sort of UDT).

    For the textual evidence as to just how Plato seems to have seen the historical Socrates as presenting his view of intentional action , see Penner (2011) (which argues from a great many of the relevant texts) as well as Penner and Rowe (2005, chapters 10–12). Socrates was obviously not in the business I am engaged in here, in presenting Socratic Intellectualism in contrast with twentieth century views. It is for that purpose that I make many of the arguments in this section, thinking that, by making the arguments in my own way. I can best bring out how Socratic thought differs from the pragmatism of such important thinkers as Anscombe and Davidson .

  62. 62.

    I think I first came on this point decades ago in remarks of one of the teachers who most influenced me, John Ackrill .

  63. 63.

    Some will object that there are cases where we do an action “just for its own sake ,” and without there being any further point to the action. I speak to this objection in the next paragraph in the main text, as it relates to the second intellectualist assumption (SOC.INT-2), along with n. 70.

  64. 64.

    Adding “in the circumstances” is important. Other actions might have been better or as good, abstractly speaking, but if they are not to hand, they may be worse in the circumstances .

  65. 65.

    See Sect. 5.6, seventh paragraph, on how choosing a best means-end chain to the final end differs from choosing a chain of best means to ends terminating in the final end.

  66. 66.

    See, Sect. 5.5, from the twelfth paragraph on, where Anscombe short-circuits her own notion of the description under which an action is intentional by means of a pragmatically determined “desirability characternization .”

  67. 67.

    It is only less dramatic that one takes for granted that there is no future great unknown benefit that one is missing out on.

  68. 68.

    This position is flagrantly in conflict with the position of those philosophers, such as Henry Sidgwick (1907) and Thomas Nagel (1970), who, in defense of pure altruism will argue that we have no more reason to seek our own future good than we have to seek the good of others. See Penner (2005a, note 43).

  69. 69.

    It is worth noting that Aristotle’s brilliant account of happiness in Book I, and in Book X.i-v of the Nicomachean Ethics, is couched in terms of ideal happiness , instead of the maximum of happiness available in one’s present circumstances . See Penner (2011, pp. 265–6, 276–7).

  70. 70.

    This rules out the suggestion I worried about above in n. 63 to the effect that some intentional actions are done “for no reason ” or “just for their own sakes .” To use an example I have been using for years,—Why do you want to go skating?—No reason.—Have you forgotten your parents are calling from Antigua in about 20 min time?—Oh, yes, you’re right . I’ll go another time. The point is that in saying there was no reason, I was also implicitly saying I could see no immediately future reason why this wouldn’t fit pleasantly into an okay future. Such was the defeated reason I had beyond just going skating. Thanks to my questioner, I see that my action had a projected end that I was making a mistake about.

  71. 71.

    As Camus (1946, p. 10) writes: “… and just then it struck me that for quite a while the air had been throbbing with the hum of insects and the rustle of grass warming up.” This example brings out another huge difficulty for the idea of our having incorrigible knowledge of our own inner psychological states: that consciousness of something never involves more than a greater or less degree of awareness of one’s own psychological states.

  72. 72.

    Again, similarly for Davidson’s many “pro-attitudes .”

  73. 73.

    Imagine the sheer thoughtlessness of a parent, as his or her child enters first grade, giving the child following recipe for success: “cheat in exams, steal, and beat other kids up—wherever you can get away with it.”

  74. 74.

    It will not have escaped notice that the above argument is not found in Socrates, any more than the kind of argument we canvassed above, that may suggest that harming others may not be that good for oneself. Socrates himself shows very little anxiety to provide arguments in favor of the thesis that harming others will in the end bring harm to oneself. What we have in the texts seems to be as follows. First, at Apology 25C-26A, Socrates argues that to harm those around one is to gain harm from those one has made worse. Second, at Republic I 335B-336A, he argues that it is not part of the function of a good person to harm others and so make them worse.

    This latter passage is often taken to be a pious reference to the moral principles of a good man. But the talk of function and harming the human goodness of others may well be of a piece with the passages on functional good and functional goodness introduced above (text to nn. 13–14), in which case the passage will be saying that harming others will result in harm to you.

    Third, there is the argument already noted above that the quite different arguments of Book I and of Books IV–X of the Republic take it that on both of these different accounts of what Justice is—the Virtue that is Knowledge and the Virtue that is psychic harmony, respectively—the just person is happier than one who tries to get the better of others. For Socrates, to understand is always the best thing one can do in any given circumstance . For the Plato of Republic IV–X, it is a well-structured personality, in Aristotle, it is habit -ingrained character. Taking advantage of others doesn’t enter into it.

  75. 75.

    And plural pro-attitudes : see n. 56 above with nn. 44 and 72. These pluralities all invite the idea of the incommensurabilism of “values .” It is worth noting, however, that Davidson (1970) at least seems to take a rather different line on pro-attitudes from that with which we have been concerned mostly in this essay. For in Davidson (1970; quoted in Davidson 1980, p. 21), he speaks not of acting counter to one’s pro-attitudes, but as acting counter to “one’s best judgment” … as to what he “believes, would, everything considered, be better.” (Here it begins to look as if all the many pro-attitudes seem to reduce, as in Anscombe , to desires for what the person thinks best—even though Davidson wants “judgment” to be hospitable to evaluative or prescriptive uses of “judgment” as much as for cognitive uses).

  76. 76.

    Among these views are included at least the following: (a) religious and moralist positions that put the good of others actually ahead of one’s own good (as in treating self-love as a sin and selflessness as virtuous); (b) the Aristotelian view, derived from the parts-of-the-soul doctrine of Plato in Republic IV, that there are actions caused by irrational desires contrary to the agent’s desire for good that are nevertheless voluntary and so justly or usefully punished—here we are in the area of punishment as conditioning ; (c) the view of Hutcheson, Butler, Hume, Mill, Sidgwick , and Feinberg , according to which humans sometimes act from pure altruism . In connection with this pure altruism, I note here that this supposed pure altruism had better, in the manner of Kant, be of a kind that gives the agent no increment to the pleasures of caring for others , lest the sympathy, benevolence, or altruism be of a kind that will once more prove to be a benefit to the agent himself or herself. Benevolence or self-sacrifice that brings the agent joy or the avoidance of what would be even worse for them is, on this view, not as convincing as pure altruism. On Kant , see Penner and Rowe (2005, pp. 214–215).

    I personally regard it as a relief to not have to expect from myself or others what is morally or legally required, what is selfless, what is purely altruistic, or the qualities of those mythically saintly beings who are saintly by nature. (On “saintly”, see the treatment of a similar example in Nietzsche 2003, III.13, p. 86, where Nietzche says of this example that what we have here is “a mere word jammed into an old gap in knowledge.” See also Christie on “crime ” in n. 93 below). I prefer the ground to be even between myself and others. Nor am I anxious that those I care for most, should put the good of others ahead of their own—rather than acquiring the perception (to be found only in the finest and wisest of human beings) of how very much of one’s own good comes from the good of those around them. For more on morality , see Sects. 5.1, fifth last paragraph, and the concluding paragraphs of Sect. 5.9.

  77. 77.

    The example is from Jake Goldberger’s (2013) film about the legendary ex-convict high school chess-teacher, Eugene Brown, The Life of a King, with J. Cuba Gooding, Jr.

  78. 78.

    See the passionate and arresting rhetoric , penetrating analysis, and moving stories throughout Jerome G. Miller’s Last One over the Wall: The Massachusetts Experiment in Closing Reform Schools (1998, esp. pp. ix–xiv, 55–80, 191–198, 229–239). The book describes what Miller—surely rightly—sees as the need for one-on-one and small-group conversation with those who have been labeled “juvenile offenders .”

    I might add that anyone who feels some sympathy with the efforts of Miller with respect to juveniles may be brought to reflect that many poorly educated men and women in their 20s and 30s are just slightly older juveniles that need understanding rather more than they need (or are owed) punishment. Miller’s ideas fit right in with those of Darabont’s “Red” above, n. 59.

  79. 79.

    As Mike Byrd points out to me, the process of finding a best chain of means to a final end will be what logicians and mathematicians call “non-monotonic.” The remarks above about returning to square one also apply to the addition of new evidence to probability estimates, as well as to clashes of a scientific theory with “recalcitrant experiences” or to clashes between scientific theories .

  80. 80.

    It is sometimes said that neither Plato nor Aristotle nor any other ancient philosopher believed in the moral good. See, for example, Anscombe (1958b, 2nd paragraph) and Williams (1993, pp. 5–9). I say that anyone who believes that punishment or blame is ever appropriate—as does Aristotle, and perhaps the mature Plato—believes in the moral good. (On Plato, see Penner 2005b, pp. 158–159). For reform and deterrence are both so obviously ill-served by punishment that the thought must occur that defenders of punishment or blame are probably supposing that punishment is deserved—the quintessential moral notion. (I have childhood memories of adults around me frequently invoking the phrase “It serves them right ” when something went wrong for someone of whose actions they disapproved.)

    The political alternative to moral justifications for punishment and blame will be to treat offenders as hostiles, allowing one’s fear for one’s own skin to do any amount of locking away of those seen as enemies, while denying that such offenders are part of one’s own society. None too attractive an alternative.

  81. 81.

    Aristotle (NE III.1 1110b28-1111a25) contrasts ignorance of particular circumstances that make the action involved involuntary with “ignorance in the choice,” that is, ignorance of what one should be doing or of what kinds of things are good. These latter forms of ignorance, Aristotle holds, are the signs rather of vice or wickedness of one or another kind. Aristotle is plainly supposing that knowing what kinds of things are good is easy enough to see—in Rawls’ terms (see above) they could be so promulgated that everyone would be aware of what kinds of things are good and what kinds of things are bad, so that they can be sanctioned if they do bad acts. Socrates would have regarded such a limited view as hopelessly inadequate. Nothing is ever easy in determining what kinds of things are good, in what kinds of circumstances.

  82. 82.

    See nn. 11, 46, and 54 above for some doubts about any logic-based general notion of the propositions that are taken to differentiate one belief from another. A decent account of the individuation of beliefs about the actual world is still wanting, though holists have a better idea than those (sometime holists themselves) who operate with the propositions generated by some single (presupposed) language-relative notion of logical consequence. Another approach might be this: to start on the question of the individuation of beliefs from what emerges from Socrates’ questioning of his interlocutors. After such questioning, the interlocutors regularly realize how little they know about just what it is that they do believe. In my view, Socratic dialectic tends to show that people hardly ever have the idea of just what they believe, and only begin to have a better idea once they have gone through some pretty wide-ranging Socratic dialectic. Which is not at all to deny that, often enough, we all have a very rough idea of something like what we believe.

  83. 83.

    Until we come to the parts of the soul of Republic IV–X, knowledge of the good and the bad is a (stable because ever judicious) state of soul, not a motive-force . See the implausible motive-force reading of Protagoras 356A-E in Brickhouse and Smith (2010, pp. 70–88), an account that they seem to derive from Devereux (1995). On the stability of knowledge, and the instability of even true belief that is not knowledge, see, especially, Penner (1996, 1997). On the connection of this topic with the unity of Virtue, see Penner (2005a, pp. 34–35, 29–33), where I offer an account of Justice as that utterly stable knowledge that constitutes its strength against intellectual temptations to believe that one’s long-term good will be served by trying to get the better of others—in strict parallel to Temperance (where the same intellectual strength enables one to resist the intellectual temptation to believe that certain bodily pleasures will serve one’s good) or courage (where, again, the very same intellectual strength enables one to resist the intellectual temptation to suppose that running away from certain dangers will serve one’s good)—the same knowledge of the good and the bad in every case.

  84. 84.

    In these circumstances , one’s thought-processes in arriving at a decision as to what to do will again be non-monotonic. As for Socrates’ account of this shifting back and forth in what one decides to do (changing “up and down” in what one decides, in the proverbial Heraclitean mode of speech), see my remarks on this up and down movement at Protagoras 356C8-E2, in Penner (1996, 2011, pp. 262–3, 272 note 20, 280 note 32).

    It was in fact the brilliance of Socrates’ discussion of how mere beliefs about kinds of good and pleasant things—even when true—are weak, and knowledge about such things is strong (that is, intellectually stable), that set me onto exploring various ways in which complexity enters into the intentions with which people do things.

  85. 85.

    That is, as per the abbreviation just given, the really best balance of good over harm over the rest of his or her life that is available to the agent at the moment of action, given his or her present circumstances .

  86. 86.

    In my 1997, I argue that Protagoras 351B-357E (on being overcome by pleasure) with 358A5-C3, 359E1-360A8 (on being overcome by fear), in effect, uses maximum available pleasure interchangeably with maximum available happiness (or good); and that in this, the Socratic view shows the same instincts as Aristotle has about pleasure, where the logical form of (ideal) happiness (a certain unimpeded energeia) is of the same logical form as a pleasure generally. For Xenophon’s Socrates sometimes using pleasure and happiness interchangeably, see Memorabilia IV.8 6–7.

  87. 87.

    Penner (1991, pp. 192–201). The argument in this section is a simplification of the argument at my (2005b, pp. 172–80).

  88. 88.

    I have looked at akrasia diachronically in my 1996 in connection with Socrates’ views on the instability of beliefs that do not rise to the level of knowledge —as per the last six paragraphs of the preceding section.

  89. 89.

    I ignore here irrational pathologies that render a person unable to assess beliefs rationally—say, beliefs of the kind that are supposed to be generated by hypnosis, unbreakable mistaken associations of ideas, those kinds of punishment that set up some supposed analogue to a Pavlovian “conditional reflex”, or receiving a heavy blow to the head.

  90. 90.

    For Aristotle’s objection that if I did this action (the one that I thought best, not the really best action) then I must have wanted to do it, I should perhaps say the following. How the agent thinks of what he is doing is not that

    it is the action I think best.

    Rather it’s that

    it is the really best action i.e., this action.

    When this identity belief is false, the “i.e.”, so to speak, falls apart, and we have to ask: what is the default object of desire? Is it

    the really best action that is not this action,

    or is it

    this action that is not the really best action ?

    The answer here is surely that

    the default desire is the really best action that is not this action that is thought good.

    At the same time,

    the action that is done is this action that is thought good, and is not the really best action.

    See, further, on this idea of instances of “i.e.,” that in certain easily realized circumstances “fall apart,” Penner (2005a, note 28, in response to Santas 2002), as well as the anti-Fregean treatment of false identity-beliefs in Penner (2013).

  91. 91.

    What Socrates says in this passage is, more precisely, that my harming the young will result in the young that I have harmed harming me. To use a point I have already made briefly above, I am evidently also adding into the equation any further harm, for example, that results from my harming the youth. (For example, harm from being seen by others as one who harms others, tends to make others less open with me, so that I lose thereby the counsel a greater openness would have availed me of. In this connection, see my 2011, pp. 289–90, which asks the question Just how are we to function with understanding in our lives if we have deprived ourselves of such counsel from those closest to us?)

  92. 92.

    It might seem that this argument is a one-off, and that possibly Socrates was just making mischief here, and wasn’t seriously claiming that the notion of legal responsibility is in serious trouble. But Lesser Hippias 371D-376B shows yet another bit of mischief-making that we can only regard as, at the same time, seriously intended. (See also my 2011, pp. 273–281, where, conversely, I use Apology 25C-26B as confirmation of my reading of the Lesser Hippias passage).

    In the Lesser Hippias as a whole, Socrates starts from things Achilles and Odysseus say that turn out to be false, and concludes that Odysseus is therein a better person that Achilles. Why? Because Odysseus’ falsehoods are intentional, while Achilles’ falsehoods are unintended! This seems preposterous to Hippias, who invokes the legal system, saying that the law treats people more kindly who do bad things unintentionally. Socrates’ reply? That a runner who loses a race intentionally will generally be a better runner than one who loses it unintentionally. Those who err willingly at a given function are better practitioners of that function than those who err unwillingly. Hence, given the function-theory of human goodness and the human good (above, Sect. 5.1, last nine paragraphs), if

    1. (i)

      being a good person is knowing the best means to the end of the one’s own good,

    and if

    1. (ii)

      no one errs willingly (intentionally) about their own good,

    then

    1. (iii)

      it is true that a man who does bad acts willingly—if there is such a person—is a better man than the one who does a bad act unwillingly.

    The wickedly inserted if-clause in (iii) here—the crucial move that Hippias simply doesn’t see the importance of—in fact speaks directly to those in the audience who can see what Socrates is up to. Socrates is just saying, in a roundabout way that no one errs willingly (at gaining their own good) (376B4–6). Any failure in action is a failure due to ignorance of the science of the good. Hence what will be appropriate is not punishment but instruction! And in the Apology, the instruction would be from Meletus ! Such mischief! See also the work cited in note 9.

  93. 93.

    If Christie were to affirm this sentence in the main text, as a formulation of what he would say, he would not put either of “values ” or “rights” in quotes. As I read him, he thinks there are such things as values—entities constructed by us—which are what they are regardless of any truth there might be about what is good; and he thinks there are such things as rights , though what they are is presumably merely what “our” values declare them to be.

    I should add here that one of the great pleasures of working on the (for me) quite new topic of this essay was getting to read the writings of Nils Christie. See his 2004 for a broad picture of his contributions. (These contributions are in part those of “restorative justice ”—but without the emphasis that notion frequently has on “repentance ,” “forgiveness ,” “restitution ,” and “remorse .” If I am pleased to see that such notions do not enter into Christie’s reflections, they do show up in Zehr (2005). That said, I have no complaints about the magnificent opening two chapters of that book of Zehr’s—chapters treating rather of the deep need for the victim to understand a little more fully what has happened to him or her).

    Christie rightly has retributivists a little nervous about looking back, since Christie’s near-abolitionism may be gaining (See Duff 2013). I see a great deal in Christie’s work that parallels the more radical Socratic position. On the other hand, Christie’s total absorption by Social Constructionism, with its—in this case, entirely persuasive—skepticism about such notions as “crime ”, as current criminal justice systems tend to understand it—puts him in an embarrassment. It does so when he comes to views he pretty clearly thinks are true, but can now express only in terms of what he—or “we”—“value.” On such a showing, there is no real human good which Christie wants for himself and his society. Here this deep and radical scholar seems to betray his own best instincts.

  94. 94.

    The ideas of this paper are ideas I have been pursuing for decades now, entirely in the context of my studies of Socrates. In the months since the wonderful conference on which this volume is based, and as I was in the final stages of drafting this paper, I began to look into the work of Christie and such Christie-inspired proponents of restorative justice as the Mennonite Howard Zehr . My final formulations do owe something to their work, in spite of a number of disagreements. I am grateful to my friend Rev. Jerry Hancock for introducing me to the practice of Restorative Justice as he employs it in Wisconsin prisons. I also owe a great deal to friends and family who have seen me grappling with producing something that both (a) involves Socrates and the kind of philosophy I have spent much of my life defending, and that also (b) involves a larger, social curiosity that I have for some time had about those in authority who punish and those unfortunates under such authority. I can mention only a few of those friends here, and regret that I cannot mention all the specific points where they pushed me in a better direction than I’d have otherwise gone. Georgios Anagnostopoulos , Jerry Santas, and my long-time collaborator Christopher Rowe started me down this road, and have given me indispensable advice along the way. Rosemary Penner believed in the project, if not all its technicalities, and helped me to see things of the greatest importance that I think improved it at absolutely central places. One-time discussions with John Penner, Thomas Kaplan , and Carl Rasmussen each turned out to involve remarks that helped me see matters in a more balanced or clearer way than I might otherwise have done. Comments of Ruth Saunders and Harry Nieves Barber on recent drafts led to a number of valuable improvements. Finally, two indispensable philosophical friends have done more—on an astonishingly regular basis—to help me along the road to half-way philosophical coherence and clarity than I could have conceivably imagined before it happened. They are Michael E. Byrd, logician, philosopher, and educator par excellence; and Antonio Chu, my closest philosophical collaborator—and demanding philosophical conscience—for nearly four decades now. I could easily have given up on this project without the constant influence of these two friends. All of those that I have mentioned above demonstrate to me—to the highest degree—that the greatest good for a human being is, indeed, conversation, every day, with those around one, about human goodness, and the human good .

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  1. University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Terry Penner

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Georgios Anagnostopoulos

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Gerasimos Santas

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Penner, T. (2018). Inequality, Intention, and Ignorance: Socrates on Punishment and the Human Good. In: Anagnostopoulos, G., Santas, G. (eds) Democracy, Justice, and Equality in Ancient Greece. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 132. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96313-6_5

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