Ethical rationalism

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Ethical rationalism

• Lecture 4 Morality and happiness

A Why are you hitting yourself on the head with
that hammer? B Because it feels so good when I
stop!
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Societies and personalities
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Types of desire

• Necessary. 2 kinds
• Unavoidable (hunger)
• Beneficial (desire for making money)
• Unnecessary neither unavoidable nor beneficial.
  Examples
• gluttonous desires
• spendthrift desires

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Social and psychic decline
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Glaucons challenge revisited

• Gs challenge show that the moral person is
  necessarily the happiest
• Socrates will give three answers in Book IX

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1st answer (571-580)

• Tyrannical person will violate morality
• He will be miserable
• More generally, dissatisfaction follows the order
  of psychic decline (580c)

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2nd answer (580-583)

• Each part of the soul has its distinct kind of
  pleasure
• Each type of person thinks his characteristic
  pleasure is the greatest
• Only the the philosophical person has the
  experience and the judgment to compare
• Hence, the person in psychic harmony is the
  happiest

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Personalities and pleasures
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Objection

• The philosophical person may have had
  experience of other desires, but not of other
  lives as a whole. Why then is his viewpoint not
  biased?

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Reply

• Must use reason to make an unbiased judgment
• Appetitive and spirited personalities subordinate
  reason to felt intensity of desire
• Only in philosophical personalities is reason
  making a genuine comparative judgment

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Problem

• This reply suggests that experiences can seem
  pleasurable but not really be so. Does this idea
  make sense? Plato thinks so, and this is why he
  provides a third reply.

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3rd answer (583-588)

• Pleasures of appetitive and spirited
  personalities enter the soul through the body
• These have a sensory aspect that needs to be
  corrected by reason.
• Uncorrected, these pleasures are only pale images
  of true pleasures.
• These personalities are thus like the cave
  prisoners

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Example

• The same state of the body can feel good or bad
  depending on what precedes it.
• But the very same state cannot both be pleasure
  and pain
• There must be an appearance-reality distinction
  for pleasures
• Reason is needed to tell the difference