From the Beginning to Plato

SOCRATES AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 315
the agent’s own good and that is associated with those activities that promote the
agent’s own good, whatever they happen to be, Socrates must believe that some
or most of those activities typically associated with traditional morality promote
the agent’s good. 84 But where is the defence of this view?
There are various passages in which Socrates compares the good of the body
to the good of the soul and maintains that virtuous actions promote the health of
the soul and vicious actions make it sick. 85 But as a defence of traditional
morality these passages are rather slight. Either Socrates is not referring
necessarily to traditionally virtuous behaviour or if he is the passages appear to
be merely stipulative. For while a defence of the position maintained in these
passages can be derived from the account of Socratic virtue I have been
proposing no part of that defence requires that the actions that promote the health
of the soul are traditionally virtuous activities. On the other hand, there appears
to be no independent defence in these passages for the claim that traditionally
virtuous activities promote the health of the soul.
Perhaps a more plausible defence can be derived from the longer passages in
which Socrates is arguing against the immoralism of Callicles in the Gorgias and
of Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic. Certainly the argument against
Callicles, for example, purports to defend the claim that virtuous actions are
always more beneficial for the agent than vicious actions against Callicles’ claim
that unbridled pleasure-seeking is most beneficial for the agent. Whatever else
Socrates is attempting to do in this passage he appears to be arguing that at least
one sort of traditionally vicious behaviour harms the soul. While both of these
arguments against immoralism deserve serious further study, there remains
something unsatisfactory about them, a lack of satisfaction that Plato explicitly
notes at the beginning of the second book of the Republic. 86 But it is in these
passages, if anywhere, that Socrates’ defence of traditional morality is to be
found.
CONCLUSION
Let us return briefly to the Ciceronian tradition with which this essay began.
According to this tradition moral philosophy in some sense begins with Socrates.
We have seen a sense in which such a tradition is justified. Socrates is unique, at
least among the average Athenian citizen and the sophists, in maintaining that
morality or virtue is a knowledge or expertise of the good. Against the folk view,
he maintains that morality or virtue is an expertise that is not possessed by
everyone, but which everyone should make it their business to obtain. It is not
easily obtainable, but it is obtainable none the less, and few of us are in the
position to give advice concerning it. Against the sophists, Socrates maintains
that it is not an expertise reducible to others. It is not rhetoric or antilogic or even
polymathy. It is its own unique branch of knowledge. It is knowledge or
expertise of the good. 87 Nevertheless, in saying this Socrates has really only
supplied what might be called the formal features of morality or virtue. Socrates’