Socrates' account of human behaviour will seem plausi- ble only if we revise our notion of what it means to 'know' or 'understand' that something is good or bad. According to Socrates, people always act in accordance with their actual knowledge or beliefs. A smoker may claim to 'know' that she shouldn't do it. But in a Socratic account, she must be deceiving herself. Maybe she does not really understand the health risks involved; she can read the health warning on the label, but she has not thought through what it means. Or perhaps she really believes that the pleasure and consola- tion outweigh the dangers - in which case, she is acting in accordance with her beliefs after all. Similarly, murderers, rapists, thieves and other wrongdoers must always act under the belief that their crime is justified. The murder committed by Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment - he kills an old woman for her money, but believes, at the time, that he is acting for the greater social good - might serve as an example of Socratic crime.
We can see, then, why talking about moral questions should have been the central activity of Socrates' life. Recognising good behaviour turns out, according to Socratic philosophy, to be much harder than we normally think. It is not enough merely to recite the principles we have been told in our childhood - that, for example, murder is wrong. Parroting received opinion is not the same as knowledge. We will 'know' that murder is wrong only when we feel absolutely no temptation to commit it.
Socrates seems to have been interested in the definitions of common evaluative terms. He asked his interlocutors if they knew how to define qualities like courage, or holiness, or friendship. Usually it turns out that they do not under- stand these terms as well as they thought at first.
But Socrates may also have believed that all virtues are fundamentally the same. All good behaviour stems from knowing the right thing to do. In this way, being brave is really no different from being kind or just or holy: they are all just different words for the person who knows what is right.
I have, up to this point, treated prudential and ethical con- siderations as if they were entirely comparable. But normally we assume that prudence and ethics present two entirely dis- tinct and perhaps incommensurable sets of values, and that fulfilling one's moral duty will, fairly often, be incompatible with satisfying one's own best interests. Surely it would be in my best interests to steal a million dollars from the bank, if I could be certain of getting away with it - even if, morally, stealing is wrong. If this could be true, then prudence must be distinct from morality.
Socrates again opposed all our common-sense intuitions by suggesting that there is absolutely no distinction to be made between prudence and ethics. Being good and being happy are the same thing. Doing wrong hurts the perpetra- tor, by deforming his or her moral character. There is no such thing as 'my interests', as distinct from my duty. It is always imprudent to behave badly.
If I robbed the bank, I would assume that having the money would be good for me. But Socrates denies that any material possession could benefit me at all. Even more sur- prisingly, he sometimes seems to deny that any of the things we normally consider bad for us - such as poverty, pain, enslavement, humiliation or death - are actually evils at all. None of these is bad because none of them hurts your soul. The only thing that is bad for you is acting wrongly. This is at least one possible interpretation of Socrates' famous claim, 'To the good man no harm can happen'.
This position is an extreme one and some modern scholars doubt whether Socrates held it. Certainly, there are moments (for instance, in the Crito and the Gorgias) when the Platonic Socrates seems to acknowledge that extreme physical suffer- ing might make one unhappy, and might even make life no longer worth living. It is possible to argue that Socrates did not believe that only damage to the soul is relevant to human happiness, but rather that the soul is far more important for happiness than the body. This is a difficult issue to resolve; for more extensive scholarly discussion, see my suggestions for further reading. I will simply note here that even the modified position is quite surprising from the perspective of common-sense attitudes towards human happiness - either in ancient Athens or today.
Socrates' idea that sin is more harmful than physical suf- fering helps to explain his astonishingly cheerful attitude towards his own death. It was the prosecution, not Socrates, who had behaved badly. It was they, then, who suffered from his trial and execution. Wrongdoing harms the per- petrator more than the victim. Socrates suffered condem- nation, imprisonment and death. But he suffered less than his prosecutors, because he died without doing anything wrong. Death could not threaten his integrity or his virtue. This is why it hardly mattered to Socrates whether he was executed or not. He declared to the jury, 'Either acquit me or do not acquit me, but do so in the knowledge that I will never behave differently, not even if I were going to die many times over' (Plato, Apology 3ob-c).
It should now be clear why Socrates' views about human behaviour are extremely shocking for any society that depends on an ordinary judicial system - including modern Britain and America as well as ancient Athens. Socrates pre- sented his own work as the most important form of social service. Only a gadfly could save his fellow citizen's souls from the worst evil of alclass="underline" moral ignorance. He denied the existence of crime as we normally understand it. The inflic- tion of merely physical harm might have no effect on the vic- tim's well-being. The city's instruments of punishment and political control - such as execution, exile or imprisonment - were feeble, since they primarily affected the body, not the soul. It may seem like a slippery slope from here to anarchy.
Socrates was not interested in making sure that govern- ments punish wrongdoing or in social justice. In his philoso- phy, by far the most important thing in life is whether you, as an individual, understand how to behave well. One may be appalled by this radically individualistic view of ethics, or thrilled, or a bit of both. But it is impossible not to find it challenging.
As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, however, it was his views about politics and society that shocked many of Socrates' contemporaries the most.
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
democracy threatened
Politics was a touchy subject in Athens in the year 399 bc, for good reasons. The lives of most of the population had been dominated by a war with Sparta which had gone on for over thirty years, a whole generation: the Peloponnesian War. Hostilities had broken out in 431 bc.
Sparta was, unlike Athens, not a democracy. It was a mili- taristic society that had two kings but combined this double monarchy with oligarchy. An assembly of twenty-eight men, drawn from the elite members of the population, ruled the country and used force to keep down the mass of the people - the helots, who were treated as slaves.
The Athenians were initially confident of victory in the war. But the war dragged on, and more and more powers in the Mediterranean became involved on one side or another. The Athenians made a number of strategic mistakes, includ- ing a disastrous expedition to Sicily in which most of their navy was destroyed; there were enormous casualties, from disease, thirst and starvation as well as battle. Many of the surviving Athenian citizens were enslaved. The city became demoralised and increasing numbers of people lost faith in the democratic government. In 411 bc democracy was briefly overthrown, and a group of Four Hundred elite citi- zens formed an oligarchic government.
The oligarchy lasted only a few months. But its formation showed the deep political divisions within Athens in the later years of the war. The oligarchs hoped that a non-demo- cratic Athens might negotiate a peace treaty with Sparta. But talks failed and people who favoured oligarchy or opposed democracy looked increasingly like traitors to the city of Athens itself.