From the Beginning to Plato

CHAPTER 11
Plato: ethics and politics
A.W.Price
I
Plato followed his teacher Socrates into ethics by way of a question that
remained central in Greek thought: what is the relation between the virtues or
excellences (aretai) of character, and happiness (eudaimonia)? 1 Both concepts
were vague but inescapable, and inescapably linked: happiness is the final end of
action, and constitutes success in life (cf. Symposium 205a2–3); so virtue, for
which we commend agents and actions, needed to be recommended by reference
to happiness. The happiness that gives reason for action is primarily the agent’s;
all Greek moralists hoped to grant the egocentricity without licensing egoism. At
least examples of moral virtues were generally agreed: justice, piety, courage,
temperance and the like. Happiness was more elusive, and its paradigms more
debatable. Herodotus has Croesus and Solon disagree about whether the greatest
happiness consists in enjoying the greatest riches, or in living simply and dying
well (I.30–2). The demands of the virtues needed to be defined, and their status as
virtues justified by a conception of what it is for a human being to be happy.
Otherwise, there could be no telling whether it was pious of Euthyphro to
prosecute his own father for murder (Euthyphro 3e4–4e3), nor whether
Thrasymachus might be correct to claim injustice as a virtue (Republic 1.348b8–
64). Plato’s central treatment of these matters is in the Republic, the masterpiece
of his so-called ‘middle’ period. I shall also pay attention to four works that
consensus places as follows: the Symposium, before the Republic, the Phaedrus,
after the Republic, the Politicus (or Statesman), after the Phaedrus; and finally
(but perfunctorily) the Laws, the long labour of his old age. An initial question
was properly abstract: what is the appropriate kind of way in which to define a
virtue? He poses this question in the Republic through presenting variants on an
approach that is not his own.
Perhaps moral virtue relates to action as follows: a virtue is a practice of
acting, or a disposition to act, in a determinate way definable by a rule. 2 Thus, in
the case of justice, Socrates—who, in tribute to the historical Socrates, appears
as protagonist in most of the dialogues I shall be considering, but as a quasi-