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:
Now the man who is dead was a poor dependent of mine who worked for us as a field labourer on our farm in Naxos, and one day in a fit of drunken passion he got into a quarrel with one of our domestic servants and slew him. My father bound him hand and foot and threw him into a ditch, and then sent to Athens to ask of a diviner what he should do with him. Meanwhile he never attended to him and took no care about him, for he regarded him as a murderer; and thought that no great harm would be done even if he did die. Now this was just what happened. For such was the effect of cold and hunger and chains upon him, that before the messenger returned from the diviner, he was dead. And my father and family are angry with me for taking the part of the murderer and prosecuting my father.
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.)
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.)