Class Reflections: Plato's Meno (part 1)
while we don't learn what virtue is, we do learn what we need it for
The second main text I have my students read for my Intro to Philosophy/Foundations of Philosophy courses (you can get the list of texts here) is a second one by Plato, his dialogue The Meno. It’s a good one, I’ve found over years of teaching, for not just introducing them to some key ideas and approaches of Platonic philosophy that most likely do stem from his teacher Socrates, but also for developing several overarching themes that run throughout the class.
Ethics (along with metaphysics and epistemology) is a significant part of this introductory course which is required for all students at Marquette. But we don’t do the usual textbook schtick of “now here’s utilitarianism, and here’s some Kant, and as an alternative to those here’s some virtue ethics, and hey look! A runaway trolley”. Instead, we grapple with portions of texts by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone De Beauvoir, all of which articulate interesting, important, and applicable perspectives on ethical matters.
I start this particular class session asking my students for their takes about two matters we’ll return to over and over again throughout the semester.
What are the general classes of things you think are good, that you desire, that make up a good life?
What character traits do you think make a person a good person?
Most classes will come up with more or less the same range of answers to these two questions. And that’s good - we’re not looking for originality at this point. There are certain more or less constants that span generations, cultures, centuries when it comes to thinking about what people consider goods and as components of the good life.
They’ll list off health, wealth, friendships, romantic relationships. The bolder classes will also discuss social status (what up to early modern times, we’d label “honor”) and pleasure. If they’re a bit more uncertain of themselves, it will take me bringing these up, and then they’ll admit they do in fact want those.
We usually see a similar constancy in the character traits they identify as belonging to a good person. Honesty, respectfulness, patience, kindness, trustworthiness, and compassion tend to get named first, and then interestingly we’ll start to get to more traditional virtue-traits like courage. It usually takes a little prompting on my part for them to realize that they also think justice and temperance (under the rubric of “moderation” or “self-control”) are important as well. I usually get those out of them by having them think about what sort of roommates or bosses they would like to have or not to have
So we have a set of what they consider good things in life. And we have a set of character traits that they think make a person a good person. There’s two things I do at this point.
One of them is to draw an arrow with a big question mark in the middle of it from the list of virtues to the list of goods, and to ask them: “do you think that developing and having these virtues will lead you to getting and enjoying these goods?” Are the virtues good things for us because they lead to these good things? Or are the good things rewards for being a good person?
The other thing I do is line up a different list of virtues that are mentioned in the Meno and compare them to the virtues my students named. The main moral virtues that Meno and Socrates reference are the four cardinal virtues many of us are familiar with, namely wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. And then piety and magnanimity get briefly mentioned. And we spend just a little time thinking about what in their late modern list of the virtues might fit into the ancient Greek paradigm reflected in this dialogue.
After all of that warm-up, we’re ready to look at the three unsuccessful attempts that Meno makes to define virtue. And here, there’s a bit of slight of hand going on in the dialogue. You know how that works, right? The prestidigitator draws your attention to something that you’re then focused on, and you don’t really notice what else is happening. In this dialogue, it’s all about whether we can successfully define virtue, so that we can then say we know what virtue - not virtues, but virtue singular - actually is.
We see Meno step up and try three different ways to define virtue:
virtue is what is appropriate to a person’s role, so there are many distinct definitions of it
virtue is “the power of ruling human beings well”
virtue is “the desire of good things and the power of attaining them”
All of these will fail, under examination, as approaches to defining what virtue is. And this leads to that famous Socratic aporia, being at a loss, getting stuck in (my Midwestern students know this term well) a cul-de-sac, an experience that we’ll discuss towards the end of the class session.
But here’s where the slight of hand comes in. Ready for the magician’s apprentice to reveal the trick? Yes, we don’t get a definition of what virtue as a whole is (that’s where you’re looking). But in the course of Socrates knocking down Meno’s proposals, we do learn something. Something really important that does have to do with the virtues.
Consider the first suggestion Meno brings forth. There’s different kinds of “virtue” for everyone in society, depending on what their social role is. Socrates gets Meno to admit that unless they act with the virtues of temperance and justice, whatever it is that they do isn’t going to come out well. So everyone needs those two virtues, no matter what their role is.
In considering the second proposal, Socrates asks what it means to rule over others well? What does that require of us? We need to have justice to do that. So, once again we need a virtue (or maybe more than one) in order to make sense of this failed definition of justice as a whole.
The third one is the clincher though. Here’s where we go back to that list of good things. Can we use those good things badly, so that they actually end up being bad things for us? For instance, can we manage our wealth badly, and hurt ourselves in the process? What keeps us from doing that? As it turns out, we need another virtue, that of wisdom.
This even holds for the other virtues, according to Socrates. Courage or temperance can go wrong if we don’t have wisdom, so that one virtue turns out to be the master-key to all the other virtues. Even justice is in some sense subordinate to wisdom.
Notice that in all of this, we’ve invoked these various virtues, but we haven’t defined any of them. We use the terms, and assume that people have some sense of what they mean, but we haven’t pinned them down quite yet. But we do know that, if people want to be able to use and enjoy good things within their lives, they will need to cultivate those virtues. And one particular virtue will be more important and determinative than all the rest.
That doesn’t provide us with a definition of virtue, but if we’re paying attention, we do come away from the Meno knowing something important about virtue and the virtues. And that’s where I tend to place the focus in my class sessions at this point of the semester.