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ETHICS & POLITICS, ANCIENT & MODERN
Katy Meadows (PhD Stanford, Philosophy): "Ethical Impartialism in Plato's Laws"
Friday November 30, 2012 | 03:15 -05:00 PM | 90

Title: "Ethical Impartialism in Plato's Laws"

Abstract:

Plato in the Laws demands a strikingly impartialist form of other-regarding concern from the citizens of Magnesia: they are told, among other things, that they ought to love the just as such rather than what is their own (731D) and that they as human beings are mere parts that have come to be for the sake of the whole that is the cosmos (903B-D). Insofar as Plato here tells us that we ought to be oriented towards what is of genuine value or towards the cosmos as a whole, it becomes difficult to see how the good of any individual as such could correctly be given priority in ethical deliberation or action. Plato, however, also accepts a strong form of rational eudaimonism in the Laws, treating it as appropriate for an individual to ask of a god or lawgiving ancestor whether a given life was the happiest and the most pleasant before accepting that that god or ancestor was right to recommend it. I think that we can move towards resolving the tension between these two features of Plato’s ethical framework in the Laws by treating the human good as dependent upon human nature, and taking human nature to be determined at least in part by the way in which human beings are said to have been created in the Timaeus. The Timaeus tells us that human beings were created as parts of the whole which is the cosmos, and, in fact, for the sake of completing and making as good as possible the entire cosmos; and it also tells us that there is a divine part of human beings which is such as to have the correct orientation to value. This creation story makes natural a picture on which the good for a human being is to contribute to the good of the cosmos by means of his own proper excellence; and such a story allows us to see both why an individual would rightly seek his own excellence, and why he would rightly be oriented towards the good of the cosmos as a whole. If something like this is correct, it not only helps us to address the tension between the impartialism of the Laws and its rational eudaimonism, but it also tells us something interesting about late Platonic ethics: namely, that it is importantly informed by his natural philosophy.

Commentator: Chris Bobonich (Stanford Philosophy)