Plato's Two Forms of Second-Best Morality

Abstract

Plato's Two Forms of Second-Best Morality 1 "Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind)" (Milton, Lycidas ll. 70-1) "[W]e may notice the love of Fame as an important and widely operative motive, which would be ranked very differently by different persons: for some would place the former 'spur that the clear spirit doth raise' among the most elevated impulses after the moral sentiments; while others think it degrading to depend for one's happiness on the breath of popular favour." (Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics p. 368) At the end of Republic Book 4 shortly after the basic structure of Kallipolis and the corresponding soul has been established, Socrates announces that although Kallipolis is the singular example of a truly virtuous city there are many different examples of vicious cities, four of which warrant discussion. 2 Socrates returns to this list in Books 8-9 where he discusses each of these four cities along with the corresponding souls. One of the things we learn in this discussion is that these forms of vice are not all on a par. Rather, we are told that the five cities form a hierarchy of virtue and vice with the aristocratic Kallipolis being the most just, followed by timocracy, oligarchy and democracy, and finally tyranny which is the most unjust. Hence, although Plato is in some sense reserving the term "virtuous" for the Kallipolis alone, he is also assigning virtue in a scalar manner such that each of these cities and souls can partake in more or less of it. 3 The argument, however, for the

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“…I take it that this is what finally explains Socrates' rank ordering of the three most corrupt kinds of soul. ""' Era Gavrielides (2010) has recently argued that the basic problem with all degenerate souls on Socrates' account is not simply that they lack unity (as is supposed for example by Annas 1981, Wilberding 2009), but rather that they are unified only by force. She is in my I conclude that the soul of the 'democratic man', as this person is depicted in the Republic, is not ruled in an enduring way by any one of its elements or parts, or by any single kind of desire.…”

Plato’s Laws: A Critical Guide. Edited by Christopher Bobonich

“…While a failure to refer to previous literature is sometimes justified when an article asks an innovative question, it is not always justified here. For instance, Kraut's paper on civic virtue takes no account of recent work on these topics in Plato (for example, Kamtekar 1998, Wilberding 2009, or Broadie 2004) and makes only two references to previous literature. Likewise, Kamtekar's article is only the latest in a recent series of essays on non-verbal elements of moral education: for example Schofield 2010, following Ford 2004.…”