Virtue and Reason

Abstract

I. Callicles observes that Socrates is always talking about cobblers and fullers and cooks and doctors, as if this had something to do with disputes in ethics (Gorgias 49Ia). In most of Plato's early dialogues Socrates is represented as trying to find analogies between various arts, crafts and skills, and moral virtues such as courage and justice. An art, in the wide archaic sense, is a rational power or capacity, acquired by education, training and practice, for the achievement of certain goods and the avoidance of certain evils. Proficiency in music, poetry and painting, knowledge of medicine, the ability to understand and speak a language, are all arts. In some Platonic dialogues, though not all, Socrates denies that poetry and music are arts, on the ground that their source is divine inspiration, not reason. In the Protagoras and Meno he argues against as well as for the thesis that the virtues are arts: why are there no recognized experts on virtue, if it is a teachable skill or set of skills ? But on the whole he seems to favour the opinion that virtue is, like art, a branch of knowledge. The Republic, and even Aristotle's ethical writings, suggest modification rather than abandonment of this idea. St. Augustine says the ancients agreed in defining virtue as ars bene recteque vivendi (De Civ. Dei IV, xxi). I shall reject most of Aristotle's ways of distinguishing virtue from art. The right account of the matter seems to me to have been adumbrated in Plato's Republic.