Great Ideas of Philosophy

Lecture NineCan Virtue Be Taught?Scope: In the dialogue Protagoras, Socrates must learn from Protagoras how his young friend Hippocrates shouldbe educated and where he should be schooled if were he to become a fine sculptor or an expert physician.Receiving predictable replies from Protagoras, Socrates then asks what it is that young Hippocrates shouldaspire to be for it to make sense for him to study with Protagoras! The answer given by Protagoras is“virtue,” but then Socrates must ask whether this is the sort of thing that can be taught.OutlineI. The skeptics ask: Why is the conduct of life problematical? Why is it that we cannot simply live in such a wayas to maximize our own satisfactions and take others into account only insofar as they stand in our way andmust be avoided or defeated?A. There may be truths in mathematics but not in the conduct of life, which is a matter of personal taste anddesire. Nobody can tell others how to live.B. To counter the skeptics’ position, Socrates must make a case that there is a problem of conduct and that itcan be solved with the same argumentative and analytical resources that proved successful in the search forknowledge itself.II. In the dialogue Protagoras, Socrates deferentially asks the famed Sophist Protagoras how his young friendHippocrates should be educated: Where should he be schooled? What is it he might learn from Protagoras?A. Protagoras goes along with the inquiry: were Hippocrates to be a fine sculptor, he ought to study withPhidias; to be an expert physician, with the Aesculapian school. Socrates then asks what it is that youngHippocrates might become expert in studying with Protagoras.B. The answer given by Protagoras is “virtue,” moral excellence, arête. Socrates must then ask what is virtueand whether it is the sort of thing that can be taught. The dialogue explores these questions.III. To teach anything one must know what it is. What is virtue? Is it one thing or many?A. Are justice, holiness, and temperance separate virtues or parts of virtue as a whole? It makes a difference,because if they are separate, it should be possible for a person to be, for example, just but intemperate orholy but unjust. Protagoras’s answer, that these qualities are parts of virtue, introduces confusion. If justiceis separate from and not in any way like temperance, then temperance must match up with what is not just,that is, with injustice!B. Socrates then pursues the question of whether virtue can be taught. Why would he raise this question?Socrates appreciates that there’s something about moral excellence that defies merely academic exercisesor pedagogical undertakings. There seems to be something in the human being that reflects, generates,expresses virtue. How can something of this nature be “taught”?C. We do not say of persons that they are virtuous in the morning but not so in the afternoon. We tend to thinkthat a person is virtuous when there is a quality about the person that expresses itself in almost everycontext. For that to be the case, it must be because the actions of the person are guided by a principle orprecept that is at once unified and universally applicable.D. Obedience to this principle is not blind, however. Expressions of virtue presuppose knowledge; courage,for example, arises not from ignorance of what is involved in one’s actions but with full knowledge of therisks.E. Thus, virtue seems to be a quality regulative of conduct, but if it is a universal, then it cannot be accessedby the senses. The senses can pick up only particulars, not universals. If behind persons of virtue, therestands a universal principle, an impelling principle, applicable in all contexts and known in some nonsensoryway, then virtue is like the Pythagorean theorem—a matter of relationships.F. If virtue cannot be learned by experience—that is, by some sort of perceptual activity—then how can it betaught at all?1. In most contents, we teach by pointing to instances of what we are teaching, but we cannot point tovirtue, which is a universal. A universal precept cannot be the subject of ostensible definition.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 23