"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" by Phineas Upham

By Phineas Upham

One can only stare in awe at the Socratic Elenchus at work. Elegant, simple, and powerful, it simultaneously routes out inconsistency within a belief-matrix while testing the interlocutor moral content. It is the extraordinary link between knowledge and morality that is explored between 77c and 78b of the Meno. Socrates and Meno initially disagree over whether all men desire good things. Through incisive argument, careful parsing of the issues involved, and by invoking commonly accepted premises, Socrates slices through Meno’s claim, and forces him to capitulate. But we must not let Socrates’ cunning rhetorical ability blind us to the underlying validity of his argument, its logical consequences, and the profound speculations on human nature and the nature of morality that it raises. Do we still accept the premises of the argument or even agree with it? What is the link between knowledge and moral actions, and the link between moral actions and good actions? What logical implications can be generated from this passage? Do we agree with these implications? If not, what aspect of the argument might be unsound or incomplete?

In just 34 lines ( 77c to 78b) Socrates is able to route Meno’s claim that “all men desire good things” (77c). Examining the exact route he took, and the precise arguments he used, we may be able to shed more light on the conclusion. Socrates’ first step is to clearly delineate the argument he will attack. “Do you mean that [those that desire bad things] believe the things to be good, or that they know they are bad, and nevertheless desire them?” (77c) Socrates asks. He here makes clear that he is arguing that all men desire good things, not that all men always do good things. He cannot plausibly argue that no bad acts are committed, he will instead make a clear division between actively desiring a bad, and unintentionally desiring a bad through ignorance. If this distinction were not made, it would be difficult to explain differing desires and differing decisions in similar situations (say running away from the enemy in a battle or remaining to fight). We therefor disregard the ignorant wrongdoers, and focus on the claim that knowledgeable wrongdoers exist. Socrates now begins to force Meno to commit to logically necessary statements that he will be later forced to contradict. “Do you think, Meno, that anyone, knowing that bad things are bad nevertheless desires them?” (77c). This seems an innocuous extension of the original argument, and Meno accepts it.

The meat of the argument now begins to show itself. After getting Meno to agree that to desire is to want to possess for oneself, Socrates asks “Does he think that bad things benefit him who posses them, or does he know that they harm him?” (77d). Meno answers that there are both types. The use of the word “know” juxtaposed to the word “think” reveals an implicit assumption both men are accepting. This assumption will prove to be an important one, and it may be one that we choose question and explore. Socrates asserts that bad things necessarily harm. What kind of harm are we speaking of? Modern intention-theory (Moya, for example) has come to the consensus that to say “I am going to do (intend to do) X and I know it is bad for me from every point of view” is a contradiction. One must have reasons (even if they stem from ignorance) for doing an action, else one is acting irrationally. To avoid reducing Socrates to rebutting only an irrational contradiction, we might be justified in surmising that Socrates is not speaking of harm in an all-inclusive sense but rather in a narrower, moral sense. In the Akrasia Handout a distinction is made between prudential harm and moral harm. I believe that Socrates is claiming that to do a bad thing will cause moral harm, which is a reasonable premise, but he ignores pragmatic, or at least worldly, benefits. It implies that no tradeoff between the pragmatic and the moral is ever justified (else if the pragmatic gain were large enough it might be “beneficial” to do a bad thing). But it seems clear in the perspective of Socrates’ life that he believed in absolute moral principles and would not compromise them. He proved this by refusing to escape prison even in the face of death because he felt it would be morally wrong. Thus he is at least consistant in maintaining that moral considerations are paramount.

“And do you think that those who believe that bad things benefit them know they are bad?,” asks Socrates. “No…,” responds Meno (77d). Socrates then claims that those who believe that bad things are beneficial are ignorant of their bad nature, and thus desire good but lack knowledge of the good. Thus this group is not germane to Meno’s claim that there are those that desire bad things. The argument now increases in tempo. “Those whom you say desire bad things, believing that bad things harm their possessor, know that they will be harmed by them?” (77e) asks Socrates. Meno has already committed himself to agreeing and does so. We ought to remember though, that we are speaking of moral harm not prudential harm here, otherwise the statement looks to be non-sensible. “Do they not think that those who are harmed are miserable to the extent that they are harmed?” (77e) Socrates asks. This is yet another assertion, but Meno has no troubles with it. Schopenhauer, Neitzche, and Freud might invoke the Death Drive as a counter-argument here. If there is an aspect of ourselves that wants us to die or be injured this part may be happy if we are harmed. Nevertheless, this is accepted as an implicit premise to the argument and Meno, sensing his argument’s oncoming collapse agrees reluctantly. Now all Socrates must do is link misery to unhappiness, and assert that no one wants to be unhappy. If to do bad knowingly does harm to you, and doing harm to yourself makes you unhappy, and no one wants to be unhappy, then if naturally follows that no one would knowingly do bad.

Though Meno concedes he has lost, how valid was Socrates’ argument? We could question it from a few distinct angles. We could challenge the premises of the arguments. These were accepted by both men during the discussion, and if they are true the argument looks to be a strong one. These assertions include the claim that bad things necessarily harm, that no one would want bad things to happen to them or to be miserable or unhappy. The flaw in these assertions may rest in the lack of acknowledgment, or at very least the complete discounting of prudential considerations in favor of moral considerations. This violates our everyday intuitions about the way people act and the reasons people do things. We hear stories of students cheating on “Ethics” final exams, we observe the behaviors of some lawyers, and we note the way we and those around us often act in what is in our best interest pragmatically rather than morally. In life there seems to be some tradeoff between prudential and moral considerations, even if the moral considerations have a less elastic slope.
But though this distinction is a fair objection to Socrates’ argument, does it really ring true? If you look at the context of the argument and the weight that would have been put on moral virtue (at least in an intellectual arena) one can perhaps re-examine the argument and it would remain standing. Perhaps our everyday compromises, as reasonable as they seem, are, as Socrates might claim, weighing down our souls. The “bad” in Socrates’ argument seems to be a bad on our soul not a bad in the world. A moral transgression not a pragmatic one is the relevant effects of a bad action. Perhaps it is our ignorance that makes us weigh the pragmatic so heavily. But if we accept this Socrates’ argument becomes perhaps too esoteric. It strikes down so many of our actions, and carves so deeply into our way of life that it seems to be too difficult to follow in a less than perfect world. If we are to believe that Socrates did follow his own beliefs, we can see the price he paid. In many ways like St. Francis, he lives a poor life, depends on others for sustenance, rarely baths, is ridiculed and hated by the leaders of the city for revealing their ignorance, and is finally jailed and killed. His scorning of the material in life is consistent with his intellectual views. Perhaps we live in ignorance then, but even if the dialog presents a consistent set of beliefs, one could imagine our set of beliefs, including a tradeoff between the moral and the prudential, being consistent as well. Furthermore if pragmatic considerations are completely disregarded, it seems Socrates’ argument would force us to accept the logical conclusion that one is not morally responsible for one’s bad actions. One only does bad through ignorance, and one always does the good if one is aware it is good. Thus all men must be equally moral, some simply have more knowledge that others and are therefor able to do the good more effectively. All bad actions must be involuntary (due to ignorance). This does not seem to be consistent with our view of the world. Socrates will have to provide us with more than an assertion that his view of the world is the correct one if he expects us to be fully convinced of his view, no matter how compelling, especially if his view is counterintuitive(a “para-doxa” or paradox).

Ultimately Socrates won his argument with Meno. Using commonly accepted principles he was able to convince Meno that all men desire good things. Thus no man would knowingly do a bad thing. All our actions would be what we though was right. Yet there is still something troubling about the argument. Buried deep within it there lies a further assumption that draws the pieces together. Our criticisms so far have been answerable, even defeasible. What method can we use to untie this Gordean knot? I believe that this underlying assumption that provides harmony to the rest is the assumption of the intrinsic goodness of human nature. Without this assumption the argument unravels. No longer can it be said that man would not desire a bad thing. Dostevevsky’s Underground Man ought to have shocked us out of this fallacy. Even if you grant Socrates other assertions, it still seems this is the keystone that holds the rest together. Ultimately one could even deny that having a clean soul is a goal one aspires to thereby removing even the force of Socrates’ argument. One could say man enjoys some bad - one could claim that man’s nature is ugly. We could remember Thucydides’ reminder that “human nature [is] always ready to offend.”
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"Roman Vanity" by Phineas Upham

By Phineas Upham

This coin illustrates Octavian’s use personal connections, symbolism, icons, and power nodes in order to create a powerful and secure position at the head of the Roman state. He firmly connects himself with his adopted father Caesar, hits his audience over the hear with allusions to Caesar’s divine status, incorporates powerful imagery, and uses religion and tradition to reify his right to power. He accomplishes his goal (to legitimate his right to lead) in various interconnected ways which combine to provide a calculated and complete picture of how he wished to be seen.

One the front of the coin Octavian’s head is prominently displayed. His youth and piety are played up though the thin beard that appears to adorn his cheeks (though it is hard to tell if there is a beard. Caesar’s death was long gone). A beard for the ancient Romans was a sign of mourning, as Prof. Tarrant told us in class. This visual sign of youth and (perhaps) devotion to Caesar is underscored by the front inscription: “Caesar divi filius triumvir iterum rei publicae constituendae” [Caesar, son of the divine one, triumvir a second time for managing the state]. Octavian assumes the name of Julius Caesar, granted to him in Caesar’s will, and refers to Julius as “the divine one,” a reference to the deification of Caesar after death. By using Caesar’s name Octavian is underscoring his connection to the leader and thus establishing his legitimate right to rule as Caesar ruled. Then he refers to his powerful position as triumvirate, juxtaposing this with his young appearance in order to create a dynamic tension that ignites sympathy for the youth who is sacrificing in order to help “manage” the state for the people. The term “manage” is no coincidence, it clearly disavows any ownership and stresses the fact that he is making no claim to be king.

On the back side of the coin Octavian provides another set of images designed to strum on slightly more culturally embedded and long established strings. He shows “The Temple of the Divine Julius” with the inscription “to the divine Julius.” On the coin is a picture of a traditional post and lintel, pedimented, temple (even more extensively rooted in its Greek origins). A statue of Julius and a flaming cremation alter are depicted. These symbols conjure the psychological power and awe that religion and death are wont to conjure. These are loaded images that Octavian uses to establish in tradition, and conjure emotional credence for his place as leader. After all, rational goes, one Caesar is dead and buried, and now another Caesar ought to take his place. Even the “crime” of killing such a great man lurks implied in the shadows of the repeated references to divinity and death. And, to gild the Lilly, the comet which was supposed to show the divinity of Julius is in the pediment of the temple.

Octavian is using his relation to Caesar, and the sanctity and emotions that Julius’ death enflamed to solidify and justify his claim to power. He accesses such power nodes as temples, alters, and the gods to reinforce his claims. All in all he presents the audience (the owners of the coins - in other words the people of Rome) with a cohesive and compelling piece of propaganda. In Octavian’s use of such sculpted and Machiavelian propaganda to present himself in a certain light he reveals much. First he reveals that he is crafty and intelligent well beyond his years, and secondly he reveals the importance of the Roman people themselves. If he would go to such trouble over what they think of him rather than ruling by fiat, he must understand that they are the source of his power. So by recognizing and controlling his power base through free state resources (the coinage was a state mint) he maximizes his effectiveness. In fact, the very fact that this is a coin of the Roman empire further legitimizes the message crafted upon it. From the other coins viewed, it seems that Octavian realized (in both senses of the word) the influence and the importance of imagery and propaganda, at least on coinage, to an elevated and comprehensive level. He followed that dictum of life: use what you have to get what you want!

Economic Sociology, by Phineas Upham

By Phineas Upham

Garry Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998, and others have used economics to explain not only the pricing of airplane tickets, but also a broader range of phenomena – the effects of war on savings rates, why we vote or do not vote, and why people discriminate on a racial basis. Recently, sociology, has followed the maxim that the best defense is a good offense and has staged a counter-incursion into the field of economics. But this incursion, unlike Becker’s effort, is one in which the economic and the sociological are blended together to support and reinforce each other. Rather than trying to supplant economics, they attempt to place economic transactions in a social context. Transactions do not exist in a vacuum, and the embeddedness and social trust or distrust, investment or lack of investment, interconnectedness or independence, all make an enormous difference. Given the very different economic systems across the world, across domains, and even within domains, there seems to be a clear need beyond a simple RCT explanation to explain why these variations occur. Perhaps we finally have one. It may not be as neat nor as quantifiable as economic analysis likes, but it seems a powerful explanatory mechanism, despite multiple hurdles, nevertheless.

Randall Collins work on the Rational/Utilitarian school of thought traces out the roots of this tradition from the early philosophies of Locke, Hume and Smith to modern policy implications of the understandings. Lock saw human beings as ceding certain freedoms to have their rights and property protected. He was humans as rational creatures who could make judgments based ones personal observations about the nature of the world. Hume added to this a more arbitrary perceptional factor, he thought the order of ideas mattered and introduced a certain skepticism of truth and inferential type decisions. Adam Smith forged this sort of practical examination of the individual into an economic system of laissez faire economics. As Utilitarian philosophy emerged, a social dimension was added, and this social consideration – how ought and how do social considerations affect the individual – became central to sociology. Social explanations to explain real world phenomena, and to describe the structures in which we function and live proved powerful.
Smeltzer and Swedberg’s work on economic sociology gives a modern summary and analysis of how this interaction is a actually occurring. With the newly emerging evidence of limited rationality, sociologists were able to explain how people actually made decisions rather than how they might – and this explanation depended heavily on their context, their norms, and their social structures. It is in the field of social policies, and explaining and structuring social systems, which have long been more heavily influenced by economics, Collins, Smeltzer, and Swedberg conclude, that sociology is likely to have the most impact and generate the most controversy.

Ronald Dore in his essay Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism, through cross cultural and cross temporal analysis, tries to pry apart the role of goodwill and social trust in modern societies. He first illustrates that goodwill is not taken into consideration of in the proper way in many modern economic theories, and he then demonstrates that this is a significant error. He demonstrates this through cross cultural analysis in a study of Japanese Keiretsu enterprise groups. But I think he intends us to take this analysis and apply it to the finer and less obvious differentiations in all economic systems. Think he means us to start to see goodwill, and other social influences, on all aspects of economic systems. His example is extreme inorder to illustrate, not to limit. Japan, he argues, has interlocking systems of trade partnerships and these partnerships are cemented by goodwill. This goodwill functions as both a trust and a demand on both parties. He shows through this example that the shape of economic systems is heavily influences by the social structures and norms which surround them.

The idea of Social Capital as introduced by James Coleman is a useful, though problematic, construct. He draws form economics the motivational attributes and goal-oriented core but places this drive into a deeply social context. How embedded one is in iones community, the level of trust, integration, feedback, etc, makes a large difference in how successful one in in reaching ones goals and being successful by any given matrix. He grants that social capital is not a single thing in and of itself, but rather is “defined by function… [with] two elements in common: they all consist of some aspects of social structures, and they facilitate certain actions of actors” (98). If there is a tightly integrated community, for example, one would expect to see more trust and higher performance due to the ability to socially monitor and the closedness/closeness of the system. This holds true for Jewish NY diamond markets and religious schools. It is difficult, though, to see how social capital can be quantified or measured. Coleman finds measures such as one-parent vs. two-parent, or attends_church or does_not, as proxies for this measure, but in the end the examples would benefit from some way of directly measuring at least some basic aspects of social capital. This problem, I think, is that he has an open system where the measure is functional and thus, one imagines Coleman is committed to saying they, ALWAYS exists where actors trust, demand, expect, etc in order to facilitate their actions in a social setting. But there is no limit to how this can be accomplished, so no test can therefore capture this number. But perhaps some basic measures such as trust, etc could be captured. Interestingly enough, Coleman does not mention this, but social capital can be “wasted” as well. A community with high social capital can fail to use it to facilitate action. By Coleman’s functionalist definition this community does not have social capital, but by his “closed vs. non-closed” kind of structural logic it does. Is this a contradiction or a problem in this thought?

Mark Granovetter’s piece on Embeddeness generalized on the principle that Coleman explored. He argues that while economic action is embedded in social structures, it is a mistake to err on the side of over socializing this action as well as under socializing it. Through examples and literature review he tries to outline the ways in which this social embeddedness works and to try to understand its limitations. While he does not generate new theories or state explicit hypothesis, this essay is a sophisticated and helpful guide to understanding the interconnect between Sociology and Economics. Clifford Geetz, whom we have read before, it s wonderful example of a close case study of one way in which social structures and economic systems interact. He studies a Middle Eastern bazaar in Morocco in a town called Sefrou. The system of exchange and barter is heavily social and economic simultaneously. The ways in which the social dimension acts to balance and compensate for the lack of guarantee of quality and to create a rich context for information exchange and gathering is a wonderful example of how dynamic, self-referential, and interconnected such social/economic systems are.

Geetz’s Analysis of the Bazaar illustrates how heavily social an economic system can be under certain conditions. But it also strikes the reader that such a system is also intensely inefficient. So much time and energy is spent finding out about the quality of the product and the honestly of the dealer that one cold hardly imagine that this effort would not be internalized into the price of the product. In larger communities (not like small diamond exchanges or local bazaars) where such social monitoring is impossible, laws and customer loyalty seem to take the place of much of this social dimension. Is this a cause or an effect? Do laws spring up where community monitoring is impossible or does community monitoring spring up where laws are impossible? Or, alternately, could laws OR community monitoring be adapted to rule over most (I believe that some types of exchange may HAVE to be in one or the other camp) kinds of transactions?
Cultural norms must also heavily influence what sort of monitoring (social or rules-based) an economic system has. One could see certain societies having a propensity for bartering and others for more rules-based exchange, but this would be misleading. As we saw in the case of Japan, different systems can exist on different levels. On the B2B level one norm can exist, on the B2C another, and on the C2C another. Further, in communities in each case even different norms can exist. I would hypothesize that a lot of these norms have to do with certain macro factors. While there will be variance for culture, I think culture changes to accommodate structural realities as much as structural realities are shaped by culture.

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