1 Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010 ...

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Socrates to investigate it to see whether they should agree. Socrates himself had
advanced only the more limited claim that ‘a pleasant thing is good just insofar as it is
pleasant’: i.e., qua pleasant, its goodness consists in pleasantness. While this claim
implies that no pleasant things are bad, and that all pleasant things are ‘good just insofar
as’ they are pleasant (351c), it does not imply that ‘pleasure and the good are the same’.
Compare the Gorgias 499b-500d, where Socrates employs the contention that
what is pleasant is good, builds from this to the assertion that we do what is pleasant for
the sake of the good, but then concludes that the pleasant and the good are distinct. There
too, the initial prompt for this line of argument is Callicles’ assertion that some pleasures
are better, others worse: Socrates at first challenges this (based as it is, like Protagoras’
scruples, on a supercilious view of honor and value) but then uses it to introduce the need
for a true knowledge of the good. Hence, from Socrates’ point of view, the real question
on the table at this juncture in the Protagoras is whether in saying ‘to live pleasantly is
good’ means that one is condemned to whatever passing or immediate pleasures attract
one, as opposed to being able to construct a pleasant life which fits the test of the rational
good. Thus Socrates’ refutation of the many is not the establishment of a thoroughgoing
hedonism for himself but rather of an endorsement of pleasure as part of a rational good:
the nucleus of the same view that will be defended in the Philebus. And so I endorse a
compatibilism across the dialogues on these issues, but not on the grounds of Rudebusch
2000, who reads and endorses Socrates’ position as the ‘hedonist thesis that there is a
single standard of pleasure by which all our choices can be measured’ (23); rather on the
inverse ground that Socrates is showing that even hedonism must be interpreted and
constrained by an overall theory of the good as the rational aim.
The inner frame: the refutation of the many
The question that Socrates now presses on Protagoras is where knowledge fits in the
relation between the pleasant and the good. Remember that the wider issue in the middle
frame is whether courage is a form of knowledge: Protagoras’ views about pleasure and
the good must therefore be tested to see whether they can make room for knowledge. I
now recapitulate the challenge of ‘the many’ which Socrates introduces in what I call the