Virtue Is Knowledge: The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy by Lorraine Smith Pangle

Author:Lorraine Smith Pangle [Pangle, Lorraine Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

The Socratic Thesis Applied: Laws

Turning to the Laws, we enter a different world. Here Socrates is absent, his place taken by a wise old Athenian Stranger, who gives his attention for a day to laying out the framework for the best practicable regime and the best practicable code of laws. The Stranger’s interlocutors are two elderly gentlemen from Crete and Sparta, Kleinias and Megillus, the former of whom has been asked to serve as a legislator for a new Cretan colony, Magnesia. Thus the Laws, like the Republic, consists in the construction of a city in speech, but this one unambiguously intended not only to provide food for reflection on the problem of justice but to serve as a model for actual legislation under favorable but not utopian conditions. Now the Socratic view of moral and criminal responsibility is in its pure form so radical that it is surprising to find it appearing in the soberly practical Laws at all. For as Socrates suggested in the Apology, if virtue is at bottom knowledge of what is good, knowledge so powerful as to guarantee its own efficacy in action, and vice is rooted in ignorance, it becomes hard to see how any political community can justify the criminal sanctions that the rule of law requires. Indeed, not only does the Laws explore deep problems with retributive justice, but it portrays punishment aimed at deterrence as almost equally problematic: only reform and education aimed at crime prevention meet Socrates’ and the Athenian’s high standard of justice. To grasp this standard is to see why a rule that satisfied it could never be implemented in practice in anything like its pure form. Nevertheless, the Laws shows how a wise lawgiver might go quite far in instilling a citizenry with at least a serious recognition of the power of the Socratic thesis, and how a city’s political and moral life might become more rational and humane as a result. Plato has the Athenian Stranger introduce a number of devices—the preludes to the laws; legal reforms that encourage calm deliberation; a new understanding of responsibility; the concepts of pollution, nature, and luck; the equation of justice with psychic health; as well as subtle but far-reaching reforms of both piety and thumos or spiritedness—to bring the citizen’s outlook as close as possible to the gentle humanity of the philosopher. In so doing, he also shows where this project invariably breaks down in the face of the irreducible irrationality of human moral passions. The Laws thus offers a fresh analysis of the relation of virtue to knowledge and an unrivaled exploration of the extent to which it is possible to apply that insight in ordinary political life.

Virtue and Knowledge

From the outset, the Athenian argues that good laws should be aimed at the whole of virtue because virtue is what makes the citizens happy. Here we have on a civic level the familiar Socratic claims about the goodness of virtue. The Athenian first adumbrates a version of the

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