There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency. [1] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is certain he understands what decency requires. The accused, Socrates, is not certain of anything, and says so. They talk.
Euthyphro’s confidence is striking. His own family thinks it is indecent for a son to prosecute his father; Euthyphro insists that true decency demands it, that he understands what the gods require better than his relatives do. Socrates, who is about to be tried for teaching indecency toward the gods, asks Euthyphro to explain what decency actually is, since Euthyphro claims to know, and Socrates will need such knowledge for his own defense.
Euthyphro’s first answer is: decency is what I am doing right now, prosecuting wrongdoers regardless of kinship. Socrates points out that this is an example, not a definition. There are many decent acts; what makes them all decent?
Euthyphro tries again: decency is what the gods love. But the gods disagree among themselves, Socrates observes, so by this definition the same act could be both decent and indecent. Euthyphro refines: decency is what all the gods love. And here Socrates asks a question Euthyphro cannot answer: do the gods love decent things because they are decent, or are things decent because the gods love them? [2]
If decent things are decent because the gods love them, then decency is arbitrary, a matter of divine whim. Socrates is too polite to say so, but the implication is: if decency is defined by the arbitrary whim of our betters, who are you to prosecute your father?
If the gods love decent things because they are decent, then however we know this, we already know the standard for decency ourselves and can cut out the middleman. But then Euthyphro should be able to explain the standard. He can’t.
Euthyphro tries a few more times, suggesting that decency is a kind of service to the gods, a kind of trade with the gods. Each time Socrates gently follows the definition to its consequences, and each time it collapses. Eventually Euthyphro leaves, saying he is in a hurry. Socrates’ last words are a lament: you have abandoned me without the understanding I needed for my own defense.
This is usually read as a proto-academic dialogue about definitions. It is a scene from a civilization in crisis. A man is about to use the legal system to destroy his own father on the basis of a concept he cannot define, in a courthouse where another man is about to be destroyed by the same concept. And the man who cannot define it is not unusual. He is representative.
The indecency for which Socrates was being prosecuted seems to have consisted of asking just the sort of questions Socrates posed to Euthyphro.
Athens in the late fifth century had recently become something it had never been before: the capital of an empire. This changed what it meant to speak in public. When Athens was a small city making decisions about its own affairs, leadership among Athenians involved speaking to communicate your perspective on matters of shared concern. But now that the collective decisions of Athens mattered for a whole lot of other people, those other people were quite naturally going to spend a lot of time thinking about how to get Athenians to decide their way. At the same time, being part of the leadership structure in control of considerable tax revenues became more profitable for more people, and less economically sustainable to opt out of. Now ambitious Athenians started using their speech to seem electable by showing off the quality of their “communicate their perspectives on matters of shared concern” performance.
Sophists were the professionals of this new economy. They specialized in the performance of wisdom, partly to sell their know-how, but always claiming, with some ambiguity, that they were excellent on the same criteria as the great Athenian leaders of the previous generation. And the consequences were not limited to the realm of speech. People were being imprisoned, exiled, and killed, on the basis of deliberative processes that had become unmoored from any standard anyone could articulate.
What had happened was not simply that Athenian politics had become venal. Something subtler and more devastating had occurred. People had stopped being alive to each other. They were playing characters. The sophists taught people more sophisticated scripts. Public speech, which had once been the medium through which free men actually thought together about shared problems, had become a performance of thinking. The performance could be very impressive. It could sound like wisdom. But there was no one home behind it, except an intelligent but inarticulate terrified hairless ape with no friends.
And then there was Socrates. He described himself not as a sophist, a possessor of wisdom, but a philosopher, someone who likes wisdom, who has an affinity for it.
In the Apology, Plato has Socrates report that his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi whether anyone was wiser, and was told no one was. But a different tradition, preserved in Origen’s Contra Celsum, claims to quote the oracle’s actual verse. It ranked three men:
Sophocles is wise
Euripides is wiser
But of all men, Socrates is wisest
Sophocles and Euripides were not scientific thinkers like Thales or Democritus, who investigated the underlying structure of physical reality. They were not mathematicians. They were not statesmen like Pericles, who managed Athens’s rise from preeminent city to imperial capital. Sophocles and Euripides were the men who could inhabit other minds, who could construct characters who, to all appearances, each had their own distinctive interiority. They imagined all these people well enough to put words in their mouths for declamation in a public theater. They could dramatize what it is like to be Medea deciding to kill her children, or Neoptolemus discovering he cannot bring himself to trick a suffering man. If someone at Delphi had met Socrates and reached for a comparison, they did not reach for a statesman or a priest. They reached for the people who were most alive to other people’s experience.
The oracle’s pronouncement likely came before Socrates was famous for questioning people. Chaerephon, an excitable and devoted friend, likely went to Delphi on his own initiative, to get divine confirmation of something he had already noticed. And what he had noticed was not a method. It was a quality. Speaking with Socrates, one felt the presence of a living intelligence, curious about one’s situation. One felt excitingly seen and at the same time uncomfortably exposed. In a city where public life had become a drama where the actors were principally concerned with their own appearance, this was so unusual that it shone brilliantly to anyone looking for intelligent life, like a beacon ablaze on a clear moonless night.
What came after was Socrates trying to figure out what the oracle could have meant. If I am the wisest, what does that say about everyone else? So, by his own account, he went to talk to the people who were supposed to be wise, the politicians and the poets and the craftsmen, and he found that the politicians and the poets could not give a coherent account of the knowledge they claimed to possess. The craftsmen could, within their crafts. But the knowledge that was being wielded with lethal force in the courts and the Assembly, the knowledge of justice and piety and how the city should be governed, that knowledge was nowhere. The people who claimed it were performing a script, and the script could not survive contact with someone who was trying to make sense of what they were saying. The performative, advantage-seeking political culture of Athens could only make sense of their discomfiture at Socrates’s active listening, as Socrates winning debates. So, as illustrated in dialogues like the Gorgias, big-shot sophists would seek him out, eager to be seen confronting the most formidable debater in Athens. Meanwhile, in a society that would eventually produce Aristotle’s claim that slaves cannot reason, Socrates finds it the most natural thing to turn to a slave to help him work out a mathematical proof, in the dialogue Meno.
Xenophon, who knew Socrates as a person and not only as a character in philosophical dialogues, shows us what this same aliveness looked like when it met people who wanted help. During the civil war around the Thirty Tyrants, a man named Aristarchus had fourteen of his sisters, nieces, and cousins sheltering in his house as refugees. The land had been seized by enemies. There was no money, and he saw no way to borrow, because he had nothing productive to spend it on. He couldn’t feed fourteen people on nothing. Socrates noticed that the women already knew how to work wool. He told Aristarchus to borrow capital, buy materials, and put them to work. Now there was a reason to borrow, and they did. Xenophon says the suspicious glances turned to smiles, the household became productive and harmonious, and eventually Aristarchus came back to Socrates delighted, reporting that the only complaint was that he was now the sole member of the household eating the bread of idleness.
In another episode, a man is harassed by lawsuits because of his deep pockets, but has a poor friend who’s articulate and virtuous; Socrates advises him to pay his friend to start suing the people who are suing him, as a deterrent.
The cross-examination and the practical advice are not two different activities by two different Socrateses. They are both what it looks like when a living mind engages with the world: whether the world presents a man performing authority he cannot account for, or a household full of hungry refugees sitting next to a loom.
At his trial, Socrates gave his own account of what he had been doing. In the Apology, he makes his limited claim to wisdom. Craftsmen really are wise about some things, but he doesn’t think that kind of wisdom is relevant to his interests as a free Athenian trying to participate in deliberations about public matters. Others falsely claim and believe themselves to have scientific knowledge of ethical or political truths. Socrates can claim distinctive wisdom only insofar as he clearly knows himself not to know such things.
This is usually read as a philosophical thesis about the limits of human knowledge. It is a man on trial for his life, explaining to the jury that the people who condemned him are exercising lethal authority on the basis of knowledge they do not possess, which makes implementing any standard impossible; and that pointing out that the laws are incoherent cannot be a violation of the laws, because that sort of criticism is necessary if we are to have laws at all.
In the Theaetetus, set just before the Euthyphro, Socrates finally finds a young man in Athens he can respect for his intelligence and honesty. But the man is not a peer Socrates can consult for advice; he is a promising youth in need of guidance, and the conversation has to end: Socrates excuses himself to go to the courthouse to be indicted. It is my favorite of Plato’s dialogues.
Plato also responded to his beloved mentor’s death by founding the Academy, a great house in Athens where philosophical reasoning was taught methodically. We still have our Academics.
Agnes Callard, in her recent book Open Socrates, wants Socrates to be timeless. She strips out the historical situation, strips out the aliveness that preceded the method, and ends up defending a method that’s obviously inapplicable in many of the cases where she claims it applies. Aristarchus did not need his assumptions questioned at random. He needed someone who could ask probing questions about his actual problem, from a perspective that didn’t share his assumptions about what was and wasn’t possible.
Zvi Mowshowitz, in his review of Callard’s book (part 1, part 2), argues at considerable length that the decontextualized version is bad. He is right. Cached beliefs are usually fine. Destabilizing them is usually harmful. Most people do not want to spend their lives in Socratic questioning, and they are right.
But Zvi has written a long polemic in two installments on the winning side of an incredibly lame debate about whether we should anxiously doubt ourselves all the time, responding to Callard’s decontextualized Socrates, not the real one. The real one did not devise a method and then apply it. He had a quality, something the oracle reached for the language of the tragedians to describe. And what was memorialized as a “method” was what happened when that quality met a city where every other participant in public life had stopped being alive.
Socrates invokes timeless considerations like logical coherence, and committing (even provisionally) to specific claims; these are very natural things to try to appeal to when people are being squirmy, dramatic, hard to pin down, and fleeing to abstractions that resist falsification.
Spinoza, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, similarly resituated the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in their proper context. The political teachings of the Gospels to turn the other cheek, forgive debts, and render unto Caesar what is due to him, are instructions for people living under a hostile and extractive system of domination. Citizens of a free republic have entirely different duties. They have an affirmative obligation to hold each other accountable, to sue people who have wronged them, to participate in collective self-governance. The teachings are not wrong. They are addressed to a specific situation, and become wrong when mechanically transplanted into an inappropriate context.
The reason to recover the historical Socrates is not only accuracy about the distant past; it is that by seeing this relevant aspect of the past more clearly, we might see more clearly what we are up against now.
Socratic cross-examination requires an interlocutor who at least would feel ashamed not to put on a show of accountability. The people Socrates questioned were performing wisdom, but they were performing it because the culture still demanded that leaders seem accountable. They would sit for the examination, because refusing would be disgraceful, like breaking formation in a hoplite phalanx. Their scripts collapsed because the scripts were designed to look like real accountability, and real accountability is what Socrates brought.
There is a useful framework for understanding how public discourse degrades, which distinguishes between guilt, shame, and depravity. A guilty person has violated a norm and intends to repair the breach by owning up and making amends. An ashamed person intends to conceal the violation, which means deflecting investigation. A depraved person has generalized the intent to conceal into a coalitional strategy: I will cover for you if you cover for me, and together we will derail any investigation that threatens either of us.
The leaders Socrates questioned were, at worst, ashamed. They had taken on roles they couldn’t account for, and they wanted to hide that fact, but they still felt the force of the demand for accountability. When Socrates pressed them, they squirmed, they went in circles, they eventually fled. But they engaged. They felt they had to engage. The culture of Athens, even in its degraded state, still held that a man who refused to give an account of his claims was disgraced.
Depravity is a further stage, and Sartre described it precisely in his book Anti-Semite and Jew:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The depraved person does not perform accountability. He plays with the forms of accountability to exhaust and humiliate the person who still takes them seriously. He is not running a script that is trying to pass as a perspective, collapsing only under the kind of questioning we still call Socratic. He is amusing himself at the expense of the questioner. Cross-examination does not expose him, because he was never trying to seem consistent. He was trying to demonstrate that consistency is for suckers. The Socratic method will not help him.
The Socratic method, if we can rightly call it that, was forged by the pressures confronted by a living mind in a city of the ashamed, people who still cared enough about accountability to fake it. It has nothing to say to the depraved themselves, who have dispensed with the pretense, though in a transitional period might expose them to the judgment of the naïve.
But the quality that preceded the method is something else.
What the oracle recognized in Socrates was not the ability to cross-examine. It was something closer to what it recognized in Euripides: the capacity to be present to what is happening, to see the person in front of you rather than the drama you are supposed to enact with them, to respond to the situation rather than to your script about the situation. To be alive.
We do not need a new method. Methods are what you formalize after you understand the problem, and we are not there yet. What might still help us is the quality that precedes method: the willingness to see what is in front of us, to say the obvious thing that everyone embedded in the performance is too scripted to see, and to keep reaching out to others even when the response is usually not even embarrassment but indifference, not even a failed defense but a smirk.
The oracle didn’t say Socrates had the best method. It said he was the wisest man, in a society oriented against wisdom. The “method” was just how aliveness was memorialized by a city that still cared enough to be ashamed of being dead.
The question for us is what aliveness looks like in a city beyond shame.
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Usually translated “impiety,” but the Greek hosion and its negation anosion are broader. “Piety” to us generally means deference (though I’m not familiar with any contemporary unironic use of the term) which doesn’t make sense to attribute to the gods, but Euthyphro uses the gods’ own actions as the standard for hosion, so we might try “holiness,” since we speak both of holy gods and holy men. But the connotations of “holiness” don’t match up well with the context of a prosecution. “Decency” is at a lower register of formality than “piety” or “holiness” in a way that sounds a bit odd, but it is the best fit as far as its explicit meaning.
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Contemporary readers may have difficulty relating to the idea of multiple gods who might legitimately disagree about what decency requires. But one can substitute the less iconographic authorities we have now: religions, ethical systems, philosophical traditions. Someone might plausibly claim that decent behavior is whatever all the major ethical traditions recommend. Socrates’ challenge still works: if these traditions can decide arbitrarily, then what stops them from endorsing indecent behavior? If we trust that they are constituted to endorse decency, then we already have some idea what the common factor is, and should be able to say what it is.
When I first read the dialogue many years ago, my impression was that Euthyphro was a kind of proto-Christian, having the correct moral feeling that murder ought to be punished even if the murderer is your relative. And standing up for that feeling, even in the face of opposition from other relatives. I thought that was pretty cool. In comparison, the fact that he couldn’t logically explain it under cross-examination and fell back to “that’s what the gods want” doesn’t worry me so much. It isn’t a sign of decline of public life or anything; people are just bad at explaining their feelings, always have been, always will be. So yeah, pencil me in on the anti-Socrates side I guess. (Though I did upvote your post: it’s well written, even if the argument falls apart for me.)
Is Socrates implying Euthyphro must be wrong because he can’t respond adequately? Or is Socrates pushing Euthyphro to develop further clarity of thought?
When people understand how actions arise from values, they’ll be able to explain their decisions to others, and others will be able to verify their integrity.
And when people start getting sneaky, they’ll know what’s missing from the speech of “shamed”/”depraved” people.
Do you think there’s an answer Socrates would have accepted, had Euthyphro given it? Is that a crux?
There is a strong analogy to grammar here. Native speakers can very confidently determine whether a particular utterance is grammatical without being able to explain their reasoning in technical terms. Strong justified confidence in a conclusion does not require the ability to explain the underlying reasoning.
(as an example, try asking a native speaker to explain how to form English questions grammatically, including subject/aux inversion and do-insertion)
Yes, exactly. And I’d say more: there’s a strong analogy to everything here. Baking bread? Imagine a baker a few hundred years ago getting interrogated by a philosopher about “but how do you really know what yeast is and why it’s needed?” Or music, imagine the early rock-n-roll groups being interrogated by a philosopher about what makes rock music good, and the philosopher doing the Socratic “five whys” thing. It’s just nonsense. Lots of things in life are art: you do it and then later, maybe, someday, someone else understands it. Law and morality too, that’s why we have juries, you can’t take the subjectivity out and you shouldn’t, sometimes there should be lenience because people just feel it.
Athens gathered a jury of 500 people for Socrates. What more can any of us ask? When a philosopher proposes to replace all this with “but do you know what piety is? come on, define exactly how all your morals work by which you’re judging me!” this is not a neutral thing, this is a bid for something, for a certain direction of society. His student evolved it into the philosopher-king proposal; yep, checks out. Benquo likes this direction and I don’t.
Based on this and your other comments in this thread, I suspect you’re mixing up questions of
What’s good?
How do we know what’s good?
How should we treat other people who disagree with us about what’s good?
It’s possible to think someone is baking bread wrong without thinking that you should use violence to force them to do it differently. It’s possible to think that bakers should be allowed to pick their own baking methods without thinking that all methods produce equally tasty bread.
Civilization typically uses many different levels of coercion for different sorts of rules. Different offenses might get you jail, or fines, or social censure. This difference isn’t because some of those offenses are Wrong and others are Not Wrong; it’s because creating effective policies of enforced cooperation is more complicated than just asking whether some action is Wrong. (I think this essay from Scott Alexander significantly improved my thinking on this topic.)
I think your hypothetical baker has a good and sufficient answer to your hypothetical philosopher, which is that they actually make good bread. I broadly agree that you don’t need a theoretical understanding of why your practices are good if you have some other valid reason for thinking they’re good.
But while the bakers with the best recipes won’t necessarily have good theoretical explanations, that doesn’t mean that there are no bad recipes, or that you can identify good recipes by sheer intuition. You do still need actual entangled evidence of some kind to reach accurate conclusions.
If we accept (as you wrote in another comment) that “success in convincing is the sole criterion”, then the best conclusion is one enforced by a mind control ray. I think that’s nonsense. In real life, people frequently believe things for reasons that are not much correlated with accuracy.
Furthermore, using this as the defense of any specific conclusion is circular. We, who are questioning the conclusion, are included in the group of “people”, and we have not been convinced. Insofar as your proposed system works at all, it only works because you are depending on “people” to be more likely to be convinced of correct conclusions than incorrect conclusions. If everyone who might object to the decision allowed themselves to be convinced merely because others are convinced, we’d be removing the only element of this system that makes it better than chance.
If you keep fabricating opinions I didn’t assert and don’t believe and explicitly disavowed in the comments on this page, and falsely attributing them to me, I’m going to ban you from this thread.
I think we might have a factual disagreement, which to you looks like “cousin_it is misrepresenting my opinion as being anti-democratic” and to me looks like “Benquo is misrepresenting my opinion as agreeing with Moldbug”. But it’s also ok to let things simmer down a bit, so I’ll check out.
Accountability might or might not be better served by some modes of power distribution than others, but we need accountability even to have contracts, discourse, and other types of commitment at the distances required for scale in the first place. Without relations of accountability, why should I believe that there really were 500 jurors and an unrigged ballot, or that the best explanation for some soldiers’ behavior is that there really is a living human king whose orders they follow?
It seems to me like you are assuming that any demand for an account is a bid to become the self-appointed enforcer for the relations between others. But I don’t accept that premise, so if you don’t like something that follows from what I said plus that premise, you’d need to argue for that premise to have a conversation with me.
This would explain why you are saying things that sound Moldbuggian to me but not to you. My important disagreement with Moldbug is that I do not think that monarchy is particularly helpful for substantive accountability. Because I think accountability is empirically distinct from monarchy, I don’t see why calling for accountability should seem monarchistic if we assume sincerity. But if someone thought that all calls for accountability were insincere, and really bids for “enforcer” (i.e. dominator) status, they might still dislike Moldbug’s call for accountability because they want more widely distributed patterns of domination rather than a single central pecking order. And such a person might say things that would register to me as Moldbuggian, like declaring that praise for accountability is a call for monarchy.
If that’s not an accurate characterization of your view, please explain.
I think yeah, this is very close. Though I wouldn’t call the category “accountability”; that’s your word and I think it makes the thing sound better than it actually is.
You’ve read Demons, right? You have the older generation, still basically decent guy popularizing nihilistic views (S.T.) and the younger guy putting it into practice with horrible results (Petr), at which the older guy is appalled, but the novel makes it clear that a lot of the fault is his. There’s a parallel between this and the Critias situation; I know you dismiss the link, but I wouldn’t dismiss it. Plato also felt Athenian democracy was too messy and subjective and preferred Sparta as more logical.
So instead of “accountability” maybe “nihilism”? Or “dissolving the subjective in favor of the logical”? To be clear, I do think this view can be held sincerely, without a power motive. It’s an appealing view. But I think it leads away from democracy. To have a democracy, we have to trust that people with their messy subjectivity can still be right. Otherwise we eventually end up with a system with more power at the top, and even less accountability at the top, where it matters.
EDIT: Maybe this comment should be taken as a package with Karl Krueger’s comment. In the response to him, you ask “what hazardous info”, and here I try to explain basically that.
I’ve gone to a lot of effort to say something very specific, and it seems like you’re just not interested, and have decided to try to use the comments section to try to project something stupider and simpler that’s already been said elsewhere onto what I’m saying. You could go argue with someone who has the opinion you’re trying to argue against, or you could try to explain to me specifically how what you’re saying is relevant.
You could start by describing what “the thing” you’re talking about is and how it relates to expecting people to mean something definite when they assert a justification for some action.
It is not clear to me this behavior is particularly christian, nor its inverse particularly a-christian. Nor even that Socrates/Plato would say Euthyphro has even come to a wrong conclusion! Indeed, in The Republic, Plato argues his perfect society would eliminate the family as a unit, so he clearly does not feel it particularly Good to treat your family different simply because they’re your family. He generally treats the institution as a competing loyalty against the Good.
Unless by “proto-Christian” you simply mean coming to occasionally correct, but mostly incorrect poorly-thought-out conclusions. If that is what you mean, then I would again argue that Plato and Socrates beat you to it, and indeed this particular mode of behavior is a human universal.
More generally, you are again falling for the Nietzscheian reading of history, which frames Christianity as much more of a novel moral innovation than it in fact was. I have argued to you previously about this the last time I noticed you peddling this particular (mis)reading of history.
To chime in on an angle others have touched on: Note that in 1 Corinthians 6:1-8, the apostle Paul specifically talks about how it’s bad for Christians to submit their disputes to external courts, and how they should instead judge them internally or just give up on temporal justice. This is not exactly an anti-prosecution sentiment (Matthew 18:15-20 in fact sets up some sort of procedure for how assemblies of Christians should judge such things), but it seems pretty different from what Euthyphro is doing.
Jesus says something very similar in Matthew 18:15-17.
I’d call that Jewish rather than proto-Christian. Christianity, at least in its canonical texts, moved away from this kind of insistence on legal accountability toward forgiveness and grace. The Hebrew Bible is much more interested in enforcing standards.
But more apropos here: What if there’s more to do here than take sides for or against Euthyphro? What if instead of deciding whether his moral feeling is correct, we’re curious about what’s going on procedurally?
Sure, I understand what you’re asking for, but that’s not a neutral question. It’s basically the heart of the whole disagreement. Either people are free to have moral feelings, even if not very explained, and act on them and try to convince others, and success in so convincing is the sole criterion; a jury of 500 Athenians can decide that they want Socrates gone, and that’s legitimate, they don’t have to have logic behind their vote. This is the democratic view. Or people have to explain and justify their morals, can be second guessed and overridden by philosophers, eventually this leads to philosopher kings. This is antidemocratic and plenty of people have pointed this out about Socrates’ lineage. I know which side I stand on.
This is typically why most specify the need for liberal democracy, which both limits the powers of the populace to arbitrarily and without argument condemn people to death, and limits the ability for one person—philosopher or no—to become king.
Socrates (/his lineage) was anti-democratic, but it should be pointed out that for the longest time both democracies and non-democracies were horrible governments to live under, so personally I forgive them. Liberal democracy has in many ways given historical democracy too good a name.
That seems like Moldbug’s opinion, that participatory republics are fundamentally incapable of standards of behavior or problem-solving and therefore wanting standards pushes you inexorably kingwards, which I’ve argued against elsewhere.
I think participatory leads to better standards than having a king. In general my views are opposite of Moldbug’s on everything.
I don’t know how to reconcile that with your previous comment, which seemed to say that the expectation that people can explain and justify their public actions is antidemocratic and leads to kings.
Moldbug thinks the choice is between first-best (a king with high standards) and second-best (a democracy with low standards). I think, like in many other things, first-best here is not a real option. The real choice is between second-best (a democracy with low standards) and third-best (an unaccountable king with even lower standards—selfish, a believer in wrong theories, a fuckup and so on). This is why Churchill said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms”.
Again I don’t know how to reconcile that with what you said before. Did you change your mind, or did I misunderstand you?
There’s a difference between being unable to express your reasons and expressing incoherent reasons. The former is legitimate debate, whereas the latter is not. You can’t, in good conscience, fall back on “that’s what the gods want”.
Euthyphro does have good motivations for his own actions, but it seems to be implied in the text that Euthyphro is also the kind of person who would vote for Socrates to be sentenced to death. Euthyphro seems to be a stand-in for the average agreeable, righteous Athenian citizen. Euthyphro’s intent to prosecute his father isn’t the sign of decline in public dialogue, the fact that the same argument (importance of “decency”) can be used for both Euthyphro’s righteous prosecution and Socrates’ unjustified death sentence is the sign of decline in public life/dialogue.
Irreverence was one of the charges against Socrates. The other was corrupting the youth. The tyrant Critias and the opportunistic playboy-general Alcibiades had been among Socrates’ followers. So here’s this guy who’s telling people to question the Good — and his students go on to do things like defecting to Sparta and running a murderous oligarchy. Even if that’s not what Socrates meant by questioning the Good, I can see how the Athenian citizens (survivors of the murderous oligarchy) might consider him a bit of an infohazard.
I’m not aware of a clear hypothesis about what hazardous info Socrates might have had that would’ve caused that. It seems much more likely that partially organized and therefore dangerous people, moreso than empty shells of ambition, would actively seek out the fellow whom the Oracle at Delphi declared the wisest man in the world, and that his track record at dissuading them from doing crazy and dangerous things was much less than 100%.
Interesting! I read the Euphythro’s politics of accountability in a nearly opposite direction: *Euphythro* is strongly anti-accountability, or, at least, accountability as it can be delivered under the circumstances of (mortals living in the world of shadows/the Athenian version of democracy/etc.)
Here’s Euphythro’s own rather tragicomic summary of the material facts of the case so far:
So in an aristocratic household, a drunken field hand kills a house slave. The master of the household takes actions that result in the death of the field hand—he has nominally deferred the decision to the gods about whether the first man is to be killed, but the message doesn’t get there in time. The master’s son then takes it upon himself to have his father executed for murder, via recourse to the Athenian court system.
There’s a companion piece of media Plato and his audience would have been familiar with that touches on cycles of revenge, filial piety, the legitimacy of the democratic courts, and disagreements among the gods: the Oresteia. The thematic parallels are so close that I don’t think this can be read as anything other than deliberate. Aggamemnon sacrifices his daughter for success in war and to appease the gods; his wife Clytemnestra kills him upon his return; their son Orestes kills his mother; the cthonic furies demand he be cursed for this; Athena intervenes by setting up the court system as a final word. Metaphorically this is a celebration of the replacement of clan feud laws by a state with a monopoly on violence. By serving as the final word against whom no revenge can be taken without simply annihilating society as a whole, the democratic state puts an end to endless cycles of revenge killings.
Plato is not a fan of democracy, and part of his indictment is to see the democratic courts as simply another avenue for revenge killing. In our modern culture there are jokes about people killing Socrates because he was annoying, and the “gadfly” language of Apology encourages this, but as @Karl Krueger earlier in the thread points out, it was more like Socrates’ circle was seen as aristocratic fifth columnists, and his execution can be considered part of a long series of political revenge killings that accompanied the aftermath of the Pelopennesian War. From his letters we know that Plato himself, who had family connections to Critias and got involved in the regime in an apparently peripheral way, was not above suspicion here.
To his credit Plato does not egg his discipline on to revenge Socrates in turn, as Critias himself no doubt would have. From the rest of his work Plato has what I see as a pretty consistent line on responsibility for wrongdoing: virtue is a kind of knowledge, and whenever someone does wrong it’s because they were ignorant of what action would in fact be correct. Wrongdoers are incompetent, rather than guilty. So the dark comedy aspects of the material case is a whole string of deaths or attempted deaths based on various forms of incompetence: the field hand is drunk, the father brings about the field hand’s death before the message from the gods arrives, the son prosecutes his father for violating justice but can’t say what justice is.
So I don’t read Plato as indicting his society as one that to bring people to account, so much as one that lacks the competence to be held accountable or to hold others accountable (but nevertheless is eager to do so anyway.)
I don’t know how much we disagree here. A lot of people use accountability as a euphemism for punishment, but I literally just mean accountability. I agree that moral competence is the core issue, although I think Plato was either naïve or self-censoring about the causes of moral incompetence. His description of tyranny as coordination around transgressiveness comes close, though.
Could you please explain more exactly what you mean by accountability? It is not obvious to me. (I apologize if you have already explained it and I just missed it.)
Curated. I have long wanted a handle for this thing I often feel when engaging with (I think most?) people on Twitter. There’s a sadness I feel that isn’t really about any particular interaction but rather about a general sense that a large portion of the population seems to be uninterested in anything even approaching good-faith public argument. I fear that it’s not just a lack of interest. It’s more like we have lost some critical bit of our culture and are in the process of losing the ability to have good-faith public disagreements at all. Benquo’s handle of “a city beyond shame” will stick with me. I also like the guilt, shame, depravity frame. It’s good that Benquo doesn’t offer a method. A method wouldn’t work, and probably wasn’t really what was up with Socrates’s whole deal becoming a big deal. The diagnosis that reasoning with people who have gone to the side of depravity doesn’t work at all seems pretty legit to me, perhaps a bit overstated; I still think good-faith is a pretty surprisingly good rhetorical move in our civ, but it points to something real.
I have a worry about the post, or rather what I imagine to be the vibe behind the post (and the vibe it will activate in its readers): that it is too easy to use as a weapon against others (those terrible wrongthinkers) and quite hard to use against yourself. That’s the case with most such criticisms of some cognitive/cultural pattern, but I think it’s worth flagging because a reader who nods along to this is likely not imagining themselves, and probably should be more than they are. I get more out of this when I remember that I am sometimes depraved (or at least ashamed) wrt a partner, or a coworker, etc, in that in those cases, I have also sometimes given up on good faith disagreement.
We need better handles for thinking together about what is up with the sad state of our civ’s public conversations, and this post gave me some. I hope the post helps me remember to be alive as I continue to go about making contact with others.
I share your worry, but there’s just no substitute for judging on the merits; there’s no way any number of meta-handles for wrong behavior can force us to behave rightly.
The best incentive I think is that behaving wrongly, being dead to others when there’s any reasonable prospect of doing otherwise, generally leads to bad outcomes. I try to remember how much better I feel at the end of a minute or hour or day in which I face up to fear, pleasure, pain, confusion, etc, instead of dissociating from them, but I need plenty of reminding!
I’m not sure if it actually helps, but, when I’m writing posts about cognitive failures, I often try to open with examples of where I fell in the failure mode, so the thing I’m modeling is focused on more “look at where this applies to you” than “look at how it applies to other people.”
For the record, I think this is helpful and will be stealing it for any future advice posts I might write!
It was indeed not very long until the handles in this post became very useful to me.
Do you have (or can you link to) any advice for how to notice one’s own depravity?
Without having much specialized knowledge, I am generally skeptical of claims that what is now a venue for political showmanship were venues of “real thinking” in a prior era. Are there reasons to think that prior to Athens becoming an empire, the debates in the assembly were more authentic, instead of being a place for special interests to rationalize and advocate for their interests?
I feel like we can see something similar in the trajectory of our politics. Go read a speech by dunno, Abraham Lincoln. It’s clear that it appeals to reason and tries to justify its positions logically. This doesn’t tell us that every single politician was therefore a honest and good faith advocate. But it tells us that society at large valued logic and rationality and consistency as fundamental to believable arguments enough that politicians felt a need to perform them, which is a good position to start from. Today a politician with the same style would likely be penalised because they’d appear to be boring and perhaps a bit too snotty compared to the Guys Just Like Us, who speak broken nonsense or parrot thoughtless slogans.
“the debates in the assembly were [...] a place for special interests to rationalize and advocate for their interests” seems like a better situation than the one I described. But I don’t see how even what you describe could build or maintain the capacities that made Athens the preeminent city in Greece in the first place.
Perhaps I should ask more directly: what leads you to think that the the public speech of pre-empire Athens had been “a medium through which free men actually thought together about shared problems”?
Is it because Athens became the preeminent city in Greece?
That, plus the early-empire cultural output of Athens, plus the discussion in Socrates’s time of higher standards in fairly recent memory, plus the much better documented (because mass literacy plus recency) arc in America pre vs postwar.
My impression on Greece and Rome is that there’s not a lot of good info about the more functional eras of their republics because people didn’t feel much need to write for the vindication of history, because there was more opportunity to talk through their differences to solve local problems.
But of course that forces us to speculate if we want to have any opinions at all.
What are you thinking of here?
The most lasting cultural impacts of Athens are works of Plato and Aristotle and the methods of inquiry / intellectual traditions that they started. But those were post-Athenian-empire.
And I’m generally not very convinced that their military success is indicative of a healthy, rational, polity that is openly trying to understand and solve shared problems. Notably, the Spartans ultimately defeated the Athenians, and they do not have a reputation for active and open discourse.
This seems seems like relevant evidence.
Aeschylus and Herodotus [1] seem like they’re trying to contribute to some sort of live conversation about where current norms and institutions came from and what problems they were invented to solve; Aeschylus by trying to imagine e.g. the origins of the jury trial in Oresteia, Herodotus by literally going around asking people in different places questions about the origins of their institutions, and comparing this with the stories he’s heard about Greek origins.
On this particular desideratum I think Sparta is underrated; at the time it was clearly understood to have a deliberative culture (public assemblies, the sort of mixed constitution that prevents unipolar power from accreting), just one with unusually strictly regulated personal conduct, and of course limited to a fairly small class. Spartans weren’t very talkative to foreigners (whence we get the term “laconic”), but I get the impression there was a language barrier because they spoke a very different dialect of Greek. Herodotus reports that they were capable of coherent enough action to be relevant at all to the king of Persia long before Thermopylae, and Thucydides’ testimony seems to imply some level of live collective problem solving as late as the Pelloponesian War, which he compares favorably with Athens’s contemporary discourse.
Xenophon’s Anabasis demonstrates these capacities in a military expedition contemporaneous with Socrates’s trial, which is some evidence against my claims in the essay. Greek soldiers stranded in Mesopotamia defaulted to assemblies, voting, and elected leadership, which suggests deliberative culture was deeply embedded enough to reproduce itself under pressure. Sometimes colonies and military expeditions retain capacities that are already in advanced decay in the imperial core; Imperial Rome documented that pattern pretty well.
Herodotus was not from Athens originally but went there to publish.
I do not understand this reference. Which war are we talking about here?
After the World Wars American public discourse looks to me like it declined very clearly.
Presidential debates shouldn’t suffer from e.g. improvements in access creating the false impression of reduced elite quality. Compare the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the Ford-Carter debate, and the Trump-Biden debate. N-K were dishonest but trying to fool voters who were trying to track arguments and figure out what was going on. I recently watched Nixon’s Checkers speech too; it’s famous as an innovative subject-changing appeal to emotion but to my contemporary ears the main thing that stood out was that most of the speech was an appeal to reason that would be tedious to someone who wasn’t thinking explicitly in terms of argument and evidential value.
Back to debates. F-C was sound bites designed to give the superficial impression of argument. T-B was just trading personal insults. I watched the unofficial version on Rumble where RFK Jr inserted himself and there was a strong contrast between the officially included debaters and RFK Jr, who just … answered the questions, like it was still the ’90s.
Usually the war would be WW2 but I don’t know if that’s the relevant context here.
Excellent review.
I was a little disappointed with Zvi’s review, since it was very clearly against Callard’s Socrates, which was deconstructed and reinterpreted into something (in my opinion) very different from the actual Socrates as presented by Plato and Xenophon.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s almost impossible to have an understanding of something, that is good enough to respond to, from secondhand sources that aren’t explicitly trying to explain the thing. Callard isn’t trying to give the reader a good understanding of Socrates, they’re trying to make “The Case for a Philosophical Life” (the byline of the book). So any response to Callard, that talks about “Socrates” is going to annoy people who are more informed on the subject, since the Socrates being disagreed with is a controversial interpretation of Socrates that loses much of what makes him interesting in the first place.
And then real problem is that this interpretation then supplants the “real” Socrates when Callard communicates it, other people respond to it, and the memory of the discourse of the interpreted Socrates in the audience is now this deformed version that doesn’t correspond well to the original. I wonder how many other things are like that.
(repost from FB comment):
There’s a lot to say in response to this, but what’s most striking to me is the gap between your interpretation of the history and mine. Your interpretation seems to be something about moral or intellectual corruption. My is a simple practical diagnosis and prescription: the Athenians should have abandoned their own empire, because it corrupted their public thinking—and did so with extreme rapidity, in the course of a few generations. I of course feel the same way about the US.
I don’t disagree with the practical recommendation, but without the collective capacity to deliberate rationally, arguments that the collective would benefit from doing one thing or another don’t generally have the desired effect. For instance, “The Sicilian Expedition would be ruinously expensive even if successful” was available obviously good advice in their recent memory, and the Athenians had responded by authorizing the ruinous expenses.
In another recent piece I discussed the moral risks of empire, i.e. ways in which it can compromise central decisionmaking.
I haven’t read the dialogs completely, so the answer may be obvious to others who have, but I’m wondering something now. Was Socrates’ line of questions to Euthyphro sincere? I always read it as a takedown of a pseudo intelectual by an actual intellect. But man does it hit differently if he was asking in hopes of getting an answer! That is such a different mindset. Both more admirable and more tragic.
Reading this post gave me a strong sense of “oh man, Socrates really was autistic and totally struggling with trying to understand neurotypical thinking, wasn’t he”.
That wasn’t my read Freshman year of college, but it pretty much was by Senior year. One dialogue that helped change my mind was the Theaetetus (mentioned in the post). It’s the one where Socrates describes himself as a midwife for ideas. Theaetetus is one of the very few people Plato shows us engaging in intellectual play with Socrates on close to an equal basis, mind to mind. The dialogue is about what it means to know something, and they go through a few hypotheses, rejecting each in turn as unworkable, and end with “we don’t know,” but no one is humiliated or digs in their heels and they learn things along the way. A lot of what can read as Socrates meaning to take people down, is the shape that their defensiveness forces conversations into.
Sometime in between, I met a Freshman who engaged me in conversation, and I asked him some clarifying questions out of curiosity, and ended up mildly disappointed that the conversation hadn’t gone anywhere interesting. Afterwards, someone complimented me on the takedown, which hadn’t been my intention at all.
Epistemic status: musing.
I wonder if a similar aliveness looks like empathy. Though, empathy may have too non-confrontational a connotation for the thing I’m actually thinking. When you are seeing another person in real time and reaching out to what is alive in them, it will often look like connecting on the level of their shared humanity… and may in fact require first systematically disarming the notion that they must be on defense alone in a hostile world. The work of Braver Angels comes to mind in trying to make real conversations happen across the Democrat/Republican divide.
A modern method would also need some awareness and skill in working smoothly around zombies. Because you can’t aim to awaken everybody you interact with, all the time. Not ethically. Destabilizing people’s coping mechanisms is usually harmful.
φιλόσοφος could even be translated as “wisdom-adorer”, someone who’s devoted to wisdom. as opposed to σοφισταί (sophists), the “wise ones”. has a very LessWrong feel to it as orienting toward wisdom and noticing where one falls short of it (rather than claiming competence and success)
>> This is very good, along with the theory that a sense of “necessary” accountability in the population can by itself be seen as a gradient metric for … morality.
There is an idiom in Hindi that says “chori toh chori!, upar se seenazori!”, translated to, “Theft itself is bad enough—its theft! - but on top of it shamelessly defending it—is indefensible!”
As a side note, what happens when such populations at different stages of the gradient collide?
A depraved thief in a just population does not threaten it too much, he is punished, and the population moves on.
But what if a thief who feels guilty for his actions because he is brought up in a society that teaches thievery is wrong is judged by peers who think it stupid to not steal when you have an opportunity? What new soup of effects and side-effects are created? Specifically, what happens to the first society watching? Do they now teach new morals to their kids, the ones which will help them survive among these new peers? So, the whole society moves low on the gradient. Or do they move? Start their society again at a new place? What other options exist?
Even case 1 is not so simple. If the thief is charismatic, he might capture one or multiple institutions, affecting the society much more than one person in general can.
And case 2 is something that many societies today need to answer. What are the options for a law-abiding society—because lawlessness is what the gradient from guilt->shame->depravity will eventually converge to. As you rightly said the Socratic method will not apply.
Do we have answers in existing philosophies? Or are we right now thinking under the gun?
我的母語「正體中文」：
這篇文章是對LessWrong管理團隊的一種隱藏式的諷喻嗎？因為我昨天加入這裡，而我稍微暸解了一下LW的統治結構以及歷史。最近因為AI生成內容造讓管理團隊與部份成員感到不滿，所以新人的發文必須由管理團進行言論審查。此外，如果被檢測到有大篇幅的LLM生成或修飾情況，也將成為拒絕刊登或者禁止發文的理由。原因是管理階層認為這會有害且損及論壇的水準。簡單來說：LLM生成的內容讓論壇的內容變成管理團隊認為的低下情況，而這是不能被容忍的。
然後這篇文章告訴我們：握有權力的人，有時其實連對邏輯與真理的了解都不如一個糟老頭。靠著歷史貢獻或者地位強制性地形使權力，突顯了擁有權力者的無知與軟弱。
更重要的是，一個文明或者一種文化群體最危險的後，就是當掌權者們開始用一些連自己都解釋不清楚的詞彙（例如：公平，學術的，人工智慧，大語言模型）來制裁他人時。
不好意思，我沒有冒犯的意思。我只是想瞭解作者是否有這樣的隱喻？如果沒有，那這篇仍然是一篇上乘的佳作！
使用DeepL翻譯成英文：
Is this post a veiled satire of the LessWrong moderation team? I joined yesterday and have been looking into LW’s governance structure and history. Recently, AI-generated content has caused dissatisfaction among the moderation team and some members, so new users’ posts must now undergo moderation review. Additionally, if significant portions of a post are detected to have been generated or edited by an LLM, this will be grounds for rejection or a posting ban. The reason is that the moderation team believes this is harmful and undermines the forum’s standards. Simply put: LLM-generated content has caused the forum’s content to deteriorate to a level the moderation team deems unacceptable, and this cannot be tolerated.
This post reminds us that those in power sometimes possess less understanding of logic and truth than even a grumpy old man. Exercising power coercively, based solely on historical contributions or status, only highlights the ignorance and weakness of those in power.
More importantly, the most dangerous sign for a civilization or cultural group is when those in power begin to sanction others using terms they themselves cannot clearly explain (such as “fairness,” “academic,” “artificial intelligence,” or “large language models”).
Sorry, I don’t mean to offend. I just wanted to know if the author intended this metaphor. If not, this is still a superb piece of writing!
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)