Lesson 6 Part 4: The Game of Wrong

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Do curso por National University of Singapore

Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato

155 ratings

National University of Singapore

Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato

155 ratings

In this course we study the ancient, Socratic art of blowing up your beliefs as you go, to make sure they're built to last. We spend six weeks studying three Platonic dialogues - "Euthyphro", "Meno", "Republic" Book I - then two weeks pondering a pair of footnotes to Plato: contemporary moral theory and moral psychology. Platonic? Socratic? Socrates was the teacher, but he said he never did. Plato was the student who put words in his teacher's mouth. You'll get a feel for it. We have a book: the new 4th edition of "Reason and Persuasion", by the instructor (and his wife, Belle Waring, the translator.) It contains the Plato you need, plus introductory material and in-depth, chapter-length commentaries. (Don't worry! John Holbo knows better than to read his book to the camera. The videos cover the same material, but the presentation is different.) The book is offered free in PDF form - the whole thing, and individual chapter slices. It is also available in print and other e-editions. See the course content for links and information. The course is suitable for beginning students of Plato and philosophy, but is intended to offer something to more advanced students as well. We seek new, odd angles on old, basic angles. Tricky! The strategy is to make a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach. Lots of contemporary connections, to make the weird bits intuitive; plus plenty of ancient color, still bright after all these years. So: arguments and ideas, new possibilities, old stories, fun facts. Plus cartoons. The results can get elaborate (some book chapters and some lesson videos run long.) But each video comes with a brief summary of its contents. The lessons progress. I put them in this order for reasons. But there's no reason you can't skip over and around to find whatever seems most interesting. There are any number of self-contained mini-courses contained in this 8-week course. You are welcome to them. Plato has meant different things to different people. He's got his own ideas, no doubt. (Also, his own Ideas.) But these have, over the centuries, been worn into crossing paths for other feet; been built up into new platforms for projecting other voices. (Plato did it to Socrates, so fair is fair.) So your learning outcome should be: arrival somewhere interesting, in your head, where you haven't been before. I wouldn't presume to dictate more exactly.

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Plato's Republic, Book I: Thrasymachus.

We finish up “Republic”, Book I. We have gotten to Thrasymachus, the main attraction. He’s attractive-repulsive, as a person. ‘Justice is the advantage of the stronger!’ In this Lesson I lay out his views. I think it’s best to see him as suspended between a few theoretical possibilities, not really settled on one. But he’s definitely an egoist. But egoism and justice aren’t the same thing, are they? I relate the Thrasymachus material to the rest of “Republic”, in which a refined version of Thrasymachus’ view eventually receives a long, considerate response from Socrates. He builds Utopia to refute Thrasymachus. So the guy must be important.

Lesson 6 Part 1: Practicing Justice13:40

Lesson 6 Part 2: Preaching Injustice13:23

Lesson 6 Part 3: Practicing Justice 2 9:24

Lesson 6 Part 4: The Game of Wrong11:59

Lesson 6 Part 5: The Ring of Gyges12:11

Lesson 6 Part 6: Man and Beast13:21

Lesson 6 Part 7: Medical Improvement9:09

Lesson 6 Part 8: Justice, Inside & Out12:34

Lesson 6 Part 9: The Sociological Imagination5:00

Conheça os instrutores

John Holbo, Associate Professor

DEPARTMENT of PHILOSOPHY

[BLANK_AUDIO]

By the end of the last video I

was already, in my excitement, anticipating quite a

bit about what Glaucon and Adeimantus to say

when they set out to build a better Thrasymachus.

Basically they add in the thing that I said Thrasymachus misses.

Justice is a highly adaptive trait, at least at the group level.

Glaucon says he's going to tell Socrates what they say about the origin of justice.

Who are they?

Oh you know, them, never mind that for now.

Just listen to this exciting origin story.

Here is Glaucon speaking, quote.

They say, to do wrong is naturally good, to be wronged is bad,

but suffering injury so far exceeds in badness the good of inflicting it

that when men have both done wrong and suffered it, have gotten a taste of both.

Those who are unable to avoid the latter and practice the former conclude it is

profitable to come to an agreement with each

other neither to inflict injury nor suffer it.

As a result they begin to make laws and

settlements, and the law's command they call lawful and just.

This, so they say, is the origin and essence of justice.

End of quote. Now, this ain't Darwinism, but it

isn't stretching to call it Darwinish.

There's a kind of natural selection process through which,

even though no one person planned it, necessarily anyway.

Relatively adaptive arrangements are settled upon,

then ratified by a social contract.

A nice result in iterated game theory. What does that mean?

Through repeated playings of the game of

life, humans plausibly arrive at a relatively stable

relatively optimal relatively consistent collective strategy.

What do I mean game?

I certainly don't mean it's all just fun and games, quite the opposite.

Let me rewrite what Glaucon says as an

explicit scheme for possible payout and a gain.

First best, you do wrong but do not suffer it.

Second best, you neither do wrong nor suffer it.

Third best. You do wrong and suffer wrong.

Fourth best, you do no wrong, yet you suffer it.

Life is game like there's a top score as it were.

And people are exploring rational strategies

for climbing up the winner board. As it were.

Let's stick some dummy dollar amounts on to

fix ideas about the relative desirabilities of these options.

Doing wrong is kind of good.

So says Glaucon. Let's say $100.

Suffering wrong is very bad.

Suffering wrong is much badder than doing wrong is good.

So let's say. Negative $500.

Obviously I didn't get that negative five

deposit one scheme from Glaucon, it's artificially exact.

But I'm making vivid the implications of the much

worse than relation he specifies, so here's the payout scheme.

First best, win $100. Do wrong without suffering it.

Second best, zero.

Neither do nor suffer. Third best, really it's third worst by

this point, lose $400, do and suffer. Fourth worst, last, lose $500.

Do not but suffer.

Option 1 is substantially better than option 2, but the really

salient factor overall is the yawning downside chasm, the downside risk.

3 and 4 are very bad options.

If you have even odds of each option, you'd be worrying, wouldn't you?

Playing this game?

If I told you 1 was very unlikely and 4 highly likely, you'd be terrified.

Right?

Now suppose I tell you, you have the option

as a player, to lock in the second best outcome.

You thereby forego any chance of winning $100, but you're insured

against the downside risk of 3 and 4.

I could make this an in-video quiz, but seriously, I think I've

asked enough stupidly obvious in-video quiz

questions by this point of the course.

Any rational person would take this deal in a heartbeat, right?

Let's call it the insurance option for obvious reasons.

But rather, let's call it by its more traditional name, justice.

Justice is a healthy second-best insurance policy.

In the long run, if we're going to be playing this game over and over, justice

A.K.A. neither doing wrong nor suffering it,

is clearly your first best long term option.

Let me re-describe the same game in slightly different terms,

because is this really the game of life we're modeling?

Maybe.

But I think it would be plausible to say it's the game of injustice.

It's the game of wrong, of doing wrong and suffering it.

Those are the only two things that happen in this game.

So here's the payout scheme for the game of wrong.

First best, $100.

Second best, lose $400. Third best, lose $500.

I subtracted two because it involves neither doing wrong nor suffering it.

Now this game is even a bit worse, isn't it.

Let's revisit the insurance option, which is looking better and better.

What if I told you that you had the option to play the

game of wrong for real money or you had the option to not play.

The rational thing to do would be not play.

That's what justice is.

It is rationally opting out of the game of wrong on

the grounds that injustice is, in the long run, a losing game.

It's probably easy to miss this because the game of

justice, the game of right, sounds kind of boring, doesn't it.

Every round you roll the dice, move the piece, draw a

card, whatever, none of that matters, the results are always the same.

Neither wronging nor being wronged. No one wins, no one loses.

But justice isn't as boring as it looks, kids.

First, there's more to life than wrong or be wronged.

Second, even if the gameplay is kind of flat, the

game design really is a landmark achievement in game history.

It's interesting and significant that this game is so consistently playable.

How so?

Well, first let's take note of how

cynical the picture is that Glaucon sketches initially.

Glaucon isn't a cynical guy.

He isn't stating his own opinion, remember?

All this is just what they say.

But obviously he wouldn't be mentioning it if

he didn't think there was something to it.

So think how cynical this is. They say, to do wrong is naturally good.

Now, partly, that may come to this: robbing someone for their

money is good because you want the money, money can be exchanged

for goods and services.

But there's also an element of, shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, here.

As Lisa Simpson says, Bart's pain is funny, mine isn't.

Glaucon is at least hinting that there is a

certain tendency in humanity towards wrong for wrongness' sake.

Bad is good for purpose of us getting along as a species.

That's obviously a problem. If we really think and feel this way.

If this problem can't be overcome, that's rather unimpressive.

Put the point this way.

In my book, in my commentary on

Polemarchus, I mention a speech by Winston Churchill.

He gave it at Aldersbrook, 1928.

It's a parable, of disarmament. Churchill imagines

all the animals in the zoo getting together to talk it over.

Quote, so the Rhinoceros said when he opened the proceedings that the use of

teeth was barbarous and horrible and ought

to be strictly prohibited by general consent.

Horns, which were mainly defensive weapons,

would of course have to be allowed.

But the Lion and the Tiger took a different view.

They defended teeth and even claws, which they described

as honorable weapons of immemorial antiquity.

Then the Bear spoke.

He proposed that both teeth and horns should be

banned And never used again for fighting by any animal.

It would be quite enough if animals were allowed

to give each other a good hug when they quarreled.

End of quote. Okay.

You can see things going downhill fast at the disarmament conference.

Fortunately the zoo keeper shows up and locks everyone back up in their cages.

The end.

That's Churchill's story.

Now here again as with Herodotus, I kind of flubbed it.

Churchill's point isn't what it might seem.

It isn't just that disarmament never ever works period.

His point is that making it work is a delicate business.

It's obvious what's going wrong in these negotiations.

But let's try to put it into words.

It's hard to settle on a common currency of not harming, of not wronging.

Because everyone naturally tries to turn the

occasion of seeking an arrangement that is

to everyone's advantage, into an occasion for

extracting just a little bit of personal advantage.

Fighting for a fair

deal is hard to distinguish from looking for a bargain, which

might just be looking for a deal that's good for me.

In long the run, the game of right, no wrong

is better than the game of wrong, I said it already.

Here's what our little animal parable can add to the mix, however.

Boring as it might seem, justice is a kind of natural, common currency.

We don't have to deal with this whole horns versus

claws versus hugs currency exchange problem, that Churchill is allegorizing.

That gets to be real awkward.

It's a dicey, lex talionis calculation. Apples and oranges.

How many teeth do I have to give up in order to make you willing to lose a claw?

Forget that mess.

We can just

say, the only defensive weapon of immemorial blah, blah,

blah, that anyone is allowed to have is justice.

Period.

End of story. Everyone gets justice.

No one gets anything more than justice. Clear?

Clear.

Let's switch metaphors.

If you have a bunch of people arguing about what restaurant

we should all go to and absolutely no one can agree

about what the best restaurant is, but literally everyone agrees about

what the second best restaurant is, well, we just made our decision.

Second best restaurant, here we come.

Remember, what I said about Deioces.

I joked that it was sort of like a fast food franchise.

Come on down to justice hut.

It ain't great but at least it's always the same.

Now, we can be a bit more precise about the quality of the fare.

Deioces got rich because he opened what everybody

agreed was the second best joint in town.

Since we are social animals, everyone ended up going there a lot of the time.

As a result it was a huge success. Or is it?

What if you found a ring of invisibility?

What then. But that's the next video.

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