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.
Lesson 6 Part 5: The Ring of Gyges
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Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato
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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.
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John Holbo, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT of PHILOSOPHY
When we left our hero, Diocese, he had
just started the successful chain, pretty good restaurants, Justice.
It's the second best option people just can't get enough of.
And you know what's worse?
There's a good chance they actually won't be able to get enough of it, that is.
Why not?
For two reasons basically. What if I mess with the percentages.
Like so. Basically
I'm about to play that game we've played before.
Again, the wrong game And this time I'm going to assume you will do
wrong and furthermore you got a good shot at getting away with it kid.
90% chance plus 100.
You do wrong without suffering it, 0% chance.
Neither do wrong nor suffer it. That's $0.
Why is this zero?
Because we're assuming you're going to do wrong.
10% chance negative 400.
Do wrong and suffer it 0% chance negative 500.
Not do but suffer.
More simply deleting the 0% from the mix because their irrelevant 90% chance win a
$100 do without suffering. 10% chance, negative $400.
Do and suffer.
Okay, this is now non obvious enough that it is worth making it into a quiz.
Haven't had one of those for quite a while.
Would you be willing to take the following bet?
You have a 90% chance of winning $100 and a 10% chance of losing $400.
Take the bet? A, yes.
B, no. I have to accept both answers.
Obviously it depends on your personal situation.
If it's a one shot game, and losing 400 is intolerable
to you, maybe because it means you're evicted from your house or
go hungry, then don't play.
But otherwise and most definitely, if you are allowed to play
the game over and over, your expected return is very good.
To be exact, your expected return is $50 per round.
If there was a table in the casino where you can play this game
over and over, everyone would be playing
and collectively, they would break the house.
The house of justice that is.
Because that's what we're talking about here.
Breaking the house of justice.
And then you won't be able to play the justice game any more.
Wrong, bad as its payouts are, will go back to being the only game in town.
Which brings us to a very famous image, or allegory, myth.
Call it what you like. From Plato.
The ring of Gyges.
For a long time I just mis-remembered that Socrates tells this
myth, because it's so very weird, and he's usually the guy
for that.
But actually it's Glaucon who's usually more of a straight arrow.
Anyways here's the story.
We're still in book two, republic by the way.
Once upon a time, there was a shepherd named Gyges from Lydia.
Or maybe he was the ancestor of Gyges.
Never mind about that. Dum, dum, da dum.
Taking care of the sheep.
Dum, dum, da dum. Living in tune with nature.
When suddenly cracka thoon, an earthquake, a crack and the earth opens up.
The shepherd goes down, down into the cave.
Hint, hint, a cave and there he finds a giant
bronze statue of a horse with little openings into it.
And inside the bronze horse is the corpse of a man, larger
than a man, and on the giant's hand is a gold ring.
The shepherd takes the ring.
Later he figures out that the ring is magic.
Twist it one way you turn invisible, twist it the other way you turn visible again.
You know how this story goes right?
Being a good Kansas farm boy, from Smallville, Lydia, which is in Asia Minor.
The shepherd goes home, where ma and pa Gyges tell him he has a destiny
to help all of mankind fight for justice. He assumes the identity of the shepherd.
Crime cannot see him, but he sees it.
Eat crook, crooks.
He fights for truth, justice and the Lydian way.
No, who am I kidding?
He seduces the queen, kills the king and rules tyrannically every after.
This time, I double checked and I got it right.
He becomes
an unjust tyrant.
Yeah.
But how often is there going to be an earthquake,
a cave, a bronze horse and a ring of invisibility?
Kind of a weird day for Gyges wasn't it?
But obviously the ring on invisibility is a metaphor.
An attempt to model something more ordinary.
Competent criminality or even just occasional opportunism.
If you've got what it takes to be a successful super-villain,
get down with your bad self. You know you would.
But the same point applies now all down the line,
if you can cheat on your taxes, cheat on your taxes.
If someone drops their wallet and you pick it
up, should you return it, no just keep it.
After you look around to make sure no one's seeing you do it.
Which is to say, invisibility may not seem
like the most awesome super power, but it's paradigmatic.
What do I mean by that?
The justice I've been sketching is just a minimal form of reciprocal altruism.
I talked about that two videos ago.
It's basically the so called silver rule.
Do not do unto others as you would not want them to do to you.
Makes for a dull board game by itself.
But like I said, the game design is still very much to be admired.
If you read the wikipedia entry for reciprocal altruism.
Here's what it says.
Reciprocal altruism means I give up something now, benefiting you.
And you give up something later, benefiting me.
And we're all better off in the long run.
In order for this to work, there needs to be a long run.
That's condition one.
We have to keep playing the game. Oh, and here's condition two.
No invisibility rings allowed.
It says so in the rules. Quote, a mechanism for detecting cheaters
must exist. Unquote.
But what about adamantium claws?
Surely adamantium claws are cooler than invisibility.
What about super speed?
Nigh invulnerability.
What about heat vision? Okay.
Fine, fine.
You have all chosen your mutant powers very wisely I trust.
Let me just retell the ring of Gyges story a bit differently.
And maybe you'll see why invisibility is
a good paradigm. You like superhero stories.
You're going to love this one.
Once upon a time, there was a shepherd named Gyges.
And there was a earthquake, and blah blah blah.
And he found the corpse of a dwarf in the bronze hamster.
And the dwarf had like this whole box of rings.
They're pretty cheap looking.
And when you put one on, you turned visible.
Now
I mean visible, no matter where you were, someone could see what you were doing.
Pretty much.
And in this way, the shepherd acquired the super power of justice.
He just gave all his friends and neighbors a
ring, and then everyone could see what everyone was doing.
And if anyone did wrong to anyone, they'd beat him with a stick.
If anyone took their ring off, they'd beat him with a stick.
And they called themselves the justice
league, because they all had the super power of visibility.
Justice.
Is that all there is to it? To be fair.
well, you need visibility, plus gossip. The hall of justice, like
everything else that is noble in life, is basically built on a foundation of gossip.
Someone sees you do wrong, people
talk.
So, five minutes later, everyone knows what you did.
Gossip puts the just back in, I just can't keep my mouth shut.
So, now, we are in a position to re-construct [UNKNOWN] point in such a
way that his basic point stands even
if the exposition with something terrible to behold.
Visibility is a super power in its quiet, almost unnoticed way.
Because justice is a tool. It's good tool.
It's a great tool.
But if it's not the best tool for the job,
and if you have the best tool, use that instead.
If you've got a ring of invisibility, the rational thing to do is to be unjust
rather than being just. But, what about justice?
Isn't she like a goddess or something? Anyway,
shouldn't you return someone's wallet? Isn't that the right thing to do?
No.
Justice is, I thought we agreed about this, the second best restaurant in town.
Don't fool yourself.
That there's anything inherently heavenly about such an establishment.
The Greeks were polytheist they had a lot of God's and Goddesses.
They even had a shrine to an unknown God, remember?
But I'll bet it never occurred to them that
there might be a Goddess of the second best.
Our lady of number two tries harder?
Glycon actually starts this challenge by setting up two figures.
Two statues that he had scoured clean as Socrates puts it.
A perfectly unjust man who appears perfectly just.
And a perfectly just man who appears perfectly unjust.
Who would you prefer to be a quiz?
Suppose you have the opportunity to save 500 people, heroically.
At the cost of your own life.
Would you do it?
A, yes. B, no.
C, maybe. All right, let's modify that a bit.
Another quiz.
Suppose you have the opportunity to save 500 people heroically at the cost
of your own life.
But after you do it, everyone, your
family, your friends, everyone on the internet, are
going to think wrongly that you were the
villain, and that the villain was the hero.
Would you save the people anyway? A yes, B No, C maybe.
It just got harder didn't it? Why?
The villain drained
you of your super power. That's what they always do.
He stole your ring of visibility.
No longer able to be just! Looking good in other people's eyes.
Justice sense no longer tingling. Okay.
Enough quizzes.
Basically, Glaucon sets up the following dilemma for Socrates.
Would you like to be the villain who has won, or would you rather be a
hero who has lost? You've been just, but you lost.
Now you'll be tortured, killed.
Your family will be killed. Your reputation is lost.
The villain was so clever.
Everyone thinks you're the villain,. And this is how the story ends.
Combine this dilemma with the point about
justice being the second best restaurant in town.
The place everyone goes because everyone agrees, it's second best.
I lied.
One last quiz.
Would you agree to be killed, tortured,
and have your reputation totally besmirched, your family
living in poverty in shame, just so the
second best restaurant in town can stay open?
That is, would you be a hero for justice?
A, yes.
B, no. See, maybe?
Huh, Plato's republic is turning out to be a total disaster.
Let's make it worse, shall we?
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