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Non-cognitive harm: insatiable desires and loss of control

The first kind of harm that comes from vice, then, is to make the person who indulges in it uncontrolled and intemperate. Socrates' wine jar analogy implies that the intemperate person lives a life out of his or her own control. Driven by the need to satisfy the gnawing hunger of unfulfilled want, unethical individuals experience only transient satisfactions because such people are essentially unsatisfiable. This literally compels them to seek more and different pleasures.

There are three important points here. First, the fact that a vice-ridden person's desires become insatiable must mean that at least part of vice's harmful effect is on the non-cognitive dimension of the human personality. That is, the first kind of harm that Socrates points out involves not the mind, but the will and our feelings of desire and satisfaction. The point at which we're satisfied by food, money, sex, power, or whatever is largely a psychological, not an intellectual matter. For example, people with eating disorders "know" perfectly well that their behavior makes no sense, but some psychological difficulty makes them unable to control themselves. If we become "leaky wine jars," a psychological mechanism, the one that produces feelings that our wants have been satisfied, has been disabled. In this case, instead of feeling a stable sense of contentment with what we have and how we get it, we feel unsatisfied.

Second, it does seem as if genuine harm has been done. To go from master to servant in one's own life is a significant reversal. It is much like the dynamic of addiction in which most of the addict's life becomes geared to gratifying the desire for whatever he or she craves. Although Socrates did not have the concept of "addiction" that we have today, he describes it well where he claims that the "leaky-jar" person "suffers extreme distress" if he doesn't satisfy his desires. With desires so compelling, the victim won't spend much time worrying about the ethical character of what has to be done to satisfy them. This means that such a person is in a downward spiral, becoming even more harmed, more out of control, and more corrupt as his or her intensifying desires dictate.

Third, Socrates does describe a behavior that seems real enough. Think about what happens to people once they give themselves over to self-interest and start acting unethically. Nothing is ever enough for them. Think about the number of times you've heard about someone rich and powerful--a stockbroker, a politician, a minister--who gets caught doing something crooked to get a little more. Haven't you said to yourself, "I don't get it. This guy already has it all, and now he risks losing everything." There's a regular stream of such people, many of them otherwise bright, accomplished people who were caught taking incredibly stupid chances for what amounted to small change. The only explanation that makes sense is that these people somehow lost control. Their strength of will must have all but evaporated. On this evidence, at least, we can say that Socrates has a real point in suggesting that once we cross the line from ethical to unethical behavior to get what we want, our "wine jar" starts to erode, and we lose some control over what we want and what we do.

This loss of control that is caused by vice, then, is quite serious. To use an analogy of our own, we might say that vice turns the unethical individual into someone trying to navigate a rudderless sailboat, at the mercy of the winds of his or her own desires. If virtue and happiness are analogous to reaching a safe harbor, this person doesn't stand a chance of getting there.

Cognitive harm: weakened intellect and damaged moral vision

It may surprise you that the first kind of harm that Socrates sees as coming from vice is not of an intellectual nature. After all, Socrates is a philosopher. If vice harms the doer, you'd think he would find that the mind would be affected. Actually, he does find that this is so. We just have to dig for it a little.

Socrates sometimes refers to unscrupulous people who make mistakes in judging what is actually in their own interest. Vice, he implies, has somehow clouded their view of situations and altered their perception of what advances their own ends.

This is nothing new, by the way. Let's return to the example of, let's say, a financier who is already a multi-millionaire but who gets caught trying to cheat his way to a little more money. To an outside observer, there's no way this man could be thinking straight. In terms of what he gets by breaking the law, the risks of losing what he already has are astonishingly high. A little more money, bending the rules, outwitting a few more "straight" people--none of this adds anything significant to his life. Yet the cost is astronomically high--public disgrace, divorce, a ruined career, lifelong dreams shattered, jail.

What was he--and everyone like him--thinking when he took the first step over the line and then got himself in deeper and deeper? It's unlikely that he didn't think at all--he's a bright, accomplished, highly rational person. The answer is that somehow he just didn't think straight. Socrates' would probably say that he didn't think straight because he couldn't think straight. His earlier unethical behavior had dramatically eroded that ability.

Part of that erosion occurs in what we can call someone's conscience, or their moral vision--their basic sense of right and wrong. Like Callicles, people who have suffered this damage come to believe that ordinary ideas of right and wrong don't apply to them. As if that weren't bad enough, there also seems to be additional damage to one's practical ability to identify and carry out what is genuinely in one's own interest. Wrongdoers end up misreading the odds, misjudging the likelihood of getting away with their deeds, and taking chances so foolish that they're sure to be caught.

Common sense has shown you how Socrates might be right when he says that vice harms its doer by causing us to lose some control over our desires. Now you can see as well the validity of the idea that vice also causes the deterioration of our rational faculties.

Callicles as the embodiment of vice

Since Callicles embodies so clearly what Socrates regards as vice, we should be able to see in him the full range of the harm Socrates alleges that vice does. Callicles certainly explicitly endorses the unordered, intemperate, and licentious life as the path to happiness. We might expect, then, that he lives that way himself, that is, out of control. If that is so, then we can further expect to see signs of a weakened intellect. In fact, the way that Socrates responds to Callicles' entry into the conversation is very revealing on just these grounds.

Callicles begins by asking Socrates if he really meant what he's been saying to Polus that it's worse to be the doer than to be the victim of injustice. Instead of answering directly, however, Socrates starts by pointing out how out of control Callicles is. Socrates describes Callicles as someone enslaved by the idea of pleasing the two current loves of his life--one, a beautiful young man, the other, the Athenian public. Socrates remarks,

Now I have noticed that in each instance, whatever your favorite says, however his opinions may go, for all your cleverness you are unable to contradict him, but constantly shift back and forth at his whim. If you are making a speech in the Assembly and the Athenian public disagrees, you change and say what it desires; and in the presence of the beautiful young son of Pyrilampes your experience is precisely similar. You are unable to resist the plans or the assertions of your favorite; and the result of this is that if anyone were to express surprise at what you say on various occasions under the influence of your loves, you would tell him, if you wanted to speak true, that unless your favorites can be prevented from speaking as they do, neither can you.

--Gorgias

Socrates' unflattering remarks reinforce our picture of Callicles as someone who can control neither his desires nor the behavior those desires dictate. In the hope of getting their approval, and, probably something more than that, Callicles cannot resist agreeing with either of his two loves, the boy or the people in the Assembly. And because each is fickle, Callicles is also constantly changing. Of course, this is in keeping with Socrates' idea that the person who is analogous to the "leaky wine jar" is going to be constantly seeking gratification. Callicles desperately wants the adulation of the Athenian public and their support for his rise to power in the democracy. He's also looking for admiration and sexual pleasure from the boy. Socrates' point is that Callicles has no strength of will. He can't control himself in either his professional or personal life.

Note that Socrates makes a point of saying that what Callicles says is influenced by his desires. That Callicles' very words are now aligned with his search for pleasure and not his reason and his search for truth is a major sign that his thinking, or his intellect, has been affected by the way he's living--a life Socrates no doubt considers far from virtue.

However, Callicles' unwillingness to change his position during his conversation with Socrates is the most powerful sign that vice has harmed his ability to think rationally. Callicles is Socrates' strongest opponent in the dialogue--far stronger than Gorgias or Polus. Despite all the damage that Callicles has presumably suffered by being unethical, his mental faculties seem undiminished. Callicles hangs in there with Socrates: he doesn't allow Socrates to refute him on trivial grounds, and he even toys with the philosopher a couple of times in the argument to show his mastery of the issue. Socrates gets Gorgias and Polus to back off and change their minds, but he makes no headway with Callicles. Even though Socrates tries to point out a number of contradictions in Callicles' position, Callicles is convinced that he's right and that Socrates hasn't been able to show otherwise.

Callicles no doubt thinks that he's holding his own against Socrates, that his selfish and relentless pursuit of power and pleasure has in no way diminished his intellectual prowess. Socrates would say, however, that the fact that Callicles doesn't budge an inch in their discussion is proof enough of the harm done to him. It's because Callicles' intellect is in such bad shape that he believes he's held his own against Socrates.

The damage to Callicles' intellect shows up in two main ways. First, in the course of the discussion, Socrates tries to show Callicles that as long as he believes the way he does about pleasure and power, right and wrong, his thinking will be riddled with confusion and contradictions. Callicles simply can't see it. His mind has somehow been clouded to the extent that either he doesn't know or he doesn't care whether he contradicts himself or not. And since tolerating contradictions is an obvious sign of weak thinking, to disregard them in such a cavalier fashion is a serious matter.

Second, and much more important, is why contradictions don't matter to Callicles. It's not that Callicles' unethical behavior fried some neurons in his brain and now he can't think any more. Rather, we can speculate that it's because most of his mental energy is spent on keeping himself convinced that what he thinks is right.

No doubt you've met people who are so intent on being right that they don't listen to anybody else who has some facts to the contrary. Even if they do listen, they're only waiting to shoot back an answer that proves they're right in spite of what you say. Such people often spent lots of energy trying to convince you that they're right about something you don't even care about. You wonder why they're wasting their time with you--you don't care, so who are they trying to convince? And that question is the key to understanding what's going on here, because people like this--and like Callicles--are really only trying to convince themselves that they're right. It may look as if they're trying to convince other people, but other people have nothing to do with it. They are talking only to themselves.

When this happens, some part of us other than our conscious mind is controlling our life. As we've already seen, in Callicles' case it's his physical and emotional desires. And when our desires become so strong, it appears as though the mind is also affected and pulled in to help the cause and keep everything in place. More than anything else, the intellect is supposed to come up with reasons and good arguments for why the course you're following is unquestionably the right way to go. Of course, to the outside observer, you aren't coming up with good reasons. You're finding excuses. You're going to do what you want to anyway. You just want some good excuses to throw at people so that you don't have to consider the possibility that you may be wrong.

Psychologists call this process rationalizing. When confronted with something negative about how we're living, we often feel internal pressure to make ourselves feel better, and so we sometimes reinterpret our behavior to make it seem more rational and acceptable. For example, if you do poorly on an exam, instead of feeling remorse for spending so much time in fraternity activities and not studying very hard for the test, you may convince yourself that academic success is less important than being involved in campus organizations. to change something wrong into something right. In a genuine case of rationalization, we don't even realize that we're just making excuses, so at such a time, unconscious forces rule our lives.

If we interpret Callicles' behavior this way, we can say that his arguments are nothing more than a sophisticated set of rationalizations that keep him from seeing his condition. Because Callicles' mind now serves his desires, he is forced to reinterpret how he is living, justifying it to himself as rational, sensible, and defensible. He has been completely fooled by his own greed, lust, and ambition.

A common-sense assessment

Socrates sees virtue as necessary for the health of our "souls" and vice as unhealthy. Vice, he suggests, harms the doer in two specific ways. First, when we get caught up in the selfish pursuit our own ends at others' expense, we damage a basic mechanism within ourselves that gives us emotional stability and a sense of satisfaction, or contentment, with our lives. This means that we lose some control over ourselves. We don't remain content once our desires are satisfied, we're driven to find and gratify more needs. Ultimately, our desires become insatiable. We're never really happy, we just want, want, want.

Second, when we becomes slaves to our desires, our minds are pulled into their service too. Our intellects become dulled, we may become less sensitive to important contradictions in our thoughts or behavior, and we're pressured from within to devise rationalizations that keep us on the path we've chosen. We may explain to others--but primarily to ourselves--that such behavior is reasonable, good, and fulfilling. But we're only kidding ourselves, and we don't even know it.

Such a claim about the harm done by vice does seem to make good common-sense. Most of us already know that as we do unethical things, they get easier to do and harder to resist. Ultimately, we lose our sense that there's really anything wrong with them. If you've ever cheated on a test, for example, you know that it's easier to do and to live with the next time you do it--and the next. Or look at someone you know who manipulates people all the time. That person doesn't hurt others on purpose. He believes he's only doing what's best for himself, his company, or some cause he believes in, and he doesn't see the suffering he causes. Or take a really rich person who gets caught cheating to avoid paying the sales tax on her jewelry purchases. Somehow these people couldn't see how foolish they were.

This is what corruption is all about. It's a deterioration of strengths and abilities accompanied by an inability to see what is happening. Do you think that corrupt people think they're corrupt? Hardly. They think they've finally gotten smart, or courageous, or just realistic. They think they've now found the guts to do what ordinary innocent people don't dare do. And when they're caught, do they think that punishment is justified? No, they feel that they were trapped unfairly and that they are being held to unreasonable standards while the real crooks get away with murder.

People aren't born corrupt. In most cases no one coerces them into corruption either. How, then, does it happen? Unethical behavior starts with a free choice. But once made, people continue that way, drawn in deeper and deeper until their "souls" have sustained serious harm .

Our speculation that this damage takes place on an unconscious level also makes Socrates' claim that vice harms the doer more plausible. The way that self-interest, greed, jealousy, or hatred lead people into self-defeating behavior in which they do not even assess the risks of their actions rationally is explained more effectively by an unconscious, rather than a conscious process. And even though Socrates himself does not talk this way, it seems that his ideas are supported by a contemporary psychological understanding of the human personality.

Is Socrates right that vice harms the doer? Without a doubt.

How virtue leads to happiness

By now you should have be able to guess why Socrates thinks that we need to live virtuous lives in order to be happy. You're familiar with his claim that acting unethically affects both our ability to be satisfied and our ability to see things clearly. If this is right, no matter how much money, power or success we have, we will never be content. We'll constantly want more. And it's hard to imagine such a state of continuous discontent as happiness. Furthermore, vice clouds our minds to the extent that we'll see things wrong, make mistakes, and probably get caught for our wrongdoing. And this surely also makes happiness less likely.

Socrates obviously thinks of happiness as a state of stable contentment produced by satisfying desires that are reasonable and within our power. For this we need to have a realistic view of what is in our reach, enough self-control to keep our desires within bounds, and the good sense not to take foolish, self-destructive risks. And, as we have seen, Socrates claims that we retain these capacities only if we're virtuous. Not that we have to live like saints to be happy. But it looks as if living a basically decent life is the only way to get the inner contentment and sense of freedom and self-control that we need to feel good about life. As Socrates expresses it to Polus, one of the other characters in the Gorgias, "I call a good and honorable man or woman happy, and one who is unjust and evil wretched. ... You believe it is possible for a happy man to be wrong and be unjust, ... and I say this is impossible."

What about a moderate Callicles?

Despite the common-sense validity of Socrates' ideas, you may have some doubts about all of this. "This talk about self-control, rationality, virtue, and happiness seems all well and good," you might say, "but isn't it possible to be a really successful unethical individual. The trick is to let your desires grow, but not let them get out of hand, to be prudent in your larceny, to assess the odds of success and failure realistically. In short, if you can become be a moderate and more restrained Callicles, you'll have the happiest life imaginable. You'll get most of what you want, you'll be satisfied with it, and won't get caught."

This brings us full circle to the unprincipled person with the reputation for integrity that Plato described and rejected at the start of this chapter. The problem with this proposal is, however, that a "moderate Callicles" may simply be impossible. There are too many highly intelligent, successful, accomplished individuals who run foolish risks, make mistakes, and get caught to suggest that all the people who get mired in scandal are second-rate when it comes to using unethical means to achieve their ends. One interpretation of these stories is that objective judgment is one of the first casualties of moral corruption.

So many very bright people get caught--often over seemingly trivial things--that this calls into question whether a moderate, self-controlled Callicles can exist. It's not that these people didn't try to keep their wrongdoing within bounds--surely that's what all unethical people aim at. Rather, it's that they couldn't pull it off. And if we entertain the interpretation of Socrates' ideas that suggests that the harm done by vice takes place on the unconscious level of the personality, it's no surprise that these people would be unable to ride herd on how corrupt they were becoming.

Another way of putting this would be to return to Socrates' "wine jar" analogy. Unethical behavior erodes the "wine jar" of our "soul," and as the jar's contents leak out, the bottom simply becomes more and more porous. As this process progresses we become aware of the resultant empty feeling, but the desire to fill the void is so powerful that it gradually overwhelms us. Our ability to control our desires and our rational perspective become severely damaged. We become like the addict who believes that his next "fix" is worth the risks associated with committing a crime in order to get the money to pay for it.

You still may not be convinced by this. Perhaps you think that all the truly capable wrongdoers never get caught, and you may have a point. However, the issue here is not to settle unequivocally the issue of whether vice harms us. Rather, when we confront a philosophical position that does not have as much detail as we would like, as in the case of Socrates' ideas about vice harming the doer, the task is to try to understand what these ideas might mean and to consider the plausibility of such an interpretation. And at this point, it's fair to say that our interpretation fits well enough with what we know of the human personality that it deserves very serious consideration by anyone who thinks that vice has no cost or that it's possible to be both unethical and genuinely happy in life.

Repairing the damage

The two main consequences of vice that we isolated in our speculation about Socrates' ideas occur largely in the unconscious. The essence of the philosopher's claim that vice harms the doer, then, is that it affects that part of our personalities that lies beneath our conscious awareness. Thus, the overwhelming danger of vice is that it hurts us in ways that we can't see, and also builds a psychological mechanism that keeps it in place once we notice it. However, does the fact that we may not be able to see the damage ourselves mean that it can't be repaired? No, there are various ways of reaching and changing unconscious forces. It isn't easy, but it can be done.

Sometimes people don't get the point until they've been hung out to dry as a result of their own vice. Confronting hard, cold reality--getting caught, fired, jailed, having those you love leave you--can shock some people into realizing they were deceiving themselves--and only themselves. The world didn't work the way they thought it did. Seeing the ruin caused by their false ideas, they're then willing to approach life differently.

It doesn't always have to be so painful, however. Socrates obviously thought that a "diseased" soul could be healed by getting the afflicted person to see that he or she can never be happy the way they are living. Psychologists and psychiatrists today also think that unconscious mechanisms can be neutralized and dismantled if they are brought up into conscious awareness. We might say, then, that an effective philosophical dialogue with Socrates aims to bring these self-defeating unconscious mechanisms to the surface. In an exhaustive process, Socrates would engage in conversations with people trying to get them to see the truth about their behavior. Socrates would attempt to convince them that as long as they believed that moral virtue wasn't the most important thing in their life, they couldn't be happy. And if the conversation concentrated on an interlocutor's most prized and fundamental beliefs about what's important in life, an encounter with Socrates could be a very powerful emotional experience--the kind that can get you to doubt some of your most basic values and loosen the grip of unconscious forces.

But you don't need a Socrates to do this. Socrates often told people that "the unexamined life is not worth living." In other words, if you don't scrutinize your own life, there's a chance that you're off course, making some fairly significant moral compromises and thinking that there's no problem. But the unexamined soul may very well be an unhealthy soul. And, as we've seen, an unhealthy soul lacks the freedom, control, and perspective that Socrates thinks is necessary for true human happiness.

And this is one of the most useful things that studying philosophy can do for you. It trains your mind and, in doing so, equips you to examine your own life. If you're absolutely truthful with yourself, you'll see when you're beginning to give into excessive desires, being controlled by your wants, and rationalizing indefensible behavior. And if you're thinking right, you can correct yourself before you go too far.

SUMMARY

The answers that Plato and Socrates give to the question "Why be ethical?" are pretty straightforward. Both think that an unethical person is weak and even unhealthy. Such an individual lacks the freedom, self-control, and intellectual clarity that are necessary to live happily.

Plato talks about this in terms of the proper balance between our intellect, on the one hand, and our physical and emotional desires, on the other. Plato thinks that in the unbalanced, unhealthy soul, people are so driven by physical or emotional wants that they literally do not think straight about right and wrong. Their mental power is put to use in servicing their wants, not in examining the morality of their actions. In contrast, Plato believes that the freedom, control, and balanced perspective that come with the soul's health results in ethical behavior. If you are not dominated by your physical or emotional wants, you can make good decisions. Thus, virtue is an expression of the strong, healthy soul, the soul that is characterized by a clear mind that is the dominant force in someone's life.

Socrates identifies the specific harm that wrongdoing does to us--unleashing our desires, disabling the inner mechanism that determines feelings of contentment, and affecting our intellect. And, as a way of understanding and evaluating Socrates' ideas, we speculated that the harm that Socrates sees vice doing occurs primarily in the unconscious part of our personality.

So now that you've heard from these two philosophers, ponder this yourself. Examine the effects of virtue and vice in your own life. Look at people you know and individuals you read about. Who do you think are healthier, stronger or happier--ethical or unethical people? Also, look at people that are clearly unethical in your opinion. Do you think they've sustained any harm, as Socrates says? And then answer the question, "Is there anything in it for you to live your life trying to do the right thing?"

SELECTED READINGS

For Plato's ideas about ethics, the importance of moral virtue, and the relationship between the different parts of the "soul," see the Republic. Socrates' ideas are set out in Plato's "Socratic" dialogues, especially the Apology, Crito, and Gorgias. The Apology is an account of Socrates' trial and contains Socrates' own account of his life's work. For a highly readable, but sometimes flawed, account of Socrates by a non-specialist see I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1988).

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