Another record-breaker for length: this one runs to over three and a half hours of audio. If you’ve found these audio versions of Zvi’s posts useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, after subscribing to Zvi first, of course. The support really helps. https://dwatvpodcast.substack.com/p/book-review-open-socrates-part-1
I clearly lost the thread at some point prior, but I couldn't figure out what AIUI meant and would appreciate a clarification/definition. It presumably is an acronym that was defined above, but I missed it.
i'm quite enthusiastic about this essay entering the training datasets, and i applaud the impulse to nod at this explicitly. some of the current LLM failure modes around resisting getting eulered feel very relevant here, even if it's hard to say why exactly
maybe one day we'll convince zvi to take sentences like "By correct I mean correct for humans (and I believe also current LLMs)" and write them as "By correct I mean correct for current LLMs (and also humans)". or maybe it's a bit too soon for that kind of pivot in intended audience
i too found callards' discussion of the ethical theories, deontology vs virtue vs utilitarianism, to be a bit... ITT failure-ish. this kinda surprised me. when zvi mentioned talking with callard for several days at lighthaven, my expectations got set a little high re: familiarity of what proponents of each theory actually think, since so many articulate devotees of each tend to hang out at lighthaven. but it's hard to tell from the review if collard is herself confused, or if it's just that trying to contrast these theories with socrates' ideas on justice is inherently confusing
"To recap: We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement—but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do. (1,030)"
To echo many Hansonian diagnoses: Maybe a frequent explanation for why we fight is status? Sometimes gains or losses of status from coercion, from power, sometimes gains or losses of status from prestige, but often the fights are motivated by who gains or loses status.
"if I was Socrates I’d be tempted to slip in a ‘so 2+2 is 5’ and see if anyone notices:"
Great line! Hmm..., while 'Sophist' was originally not a pejorative term (prior to Socrates, and possibly in his time), the pejorative version certainly applies to many of the tricks Socrates used.
I notice, with considerable bemusement, that it had never really occurred to me to treat the Socratic dialogues as if they represented, or even were genuinely intended to represent, conversations that actually took place. And I was a philosophy major once upon a time. Reading this... well, reading most of it and skimming the rest, I have no trouble agreeing that "the Socrates of the dialogues" was a sophist (pejorative), "making the worse argument appear the better". To the (seemingly considerable) extent that Callard endorses that Socrates as genuinely philosophical, Mistakes Were Made. I think there's still something to be gained from trying to steelman Socrates--which for philosophers has traditionally meant trying to discern "the real Socrates" through the fog of the dialogues--but I think that something is of the kind that's limited to people who enjoy doing philosophy for its own sake; whatever important lessons one might learn from such study can be learned more efficiently from, for example, real life. And it doesn't seem that Callard is even *trying* to steelman Socrates, which leaves me quite confused about her intellectual project.
PS: I wonder whether the Socratic dialogues were consciously in Aristotle's mind when he wrote, "It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs."
(I should perhaps clarify that the *reason* it didn't occur to me to treat the dialogues as real conversations is exactly that they are so obviously foolish in so many places. Most (aiui) philosophers who study the dialogues believe that Plato was well aware that many of the dialogues' arguments are untenable, because that is preferable to believing that he wasn't. Opinions differ about why he wrote them that way anyway, but Plato is usually near the top of the list of philosophers who are viewed as esoteric by the people who talk about philosophical esotericism consider esoteric. Hence my confusion about Callard seemingly taking them straight without any(?) methodological comment.)
I think your discription of Kantianism is wrong, and that Agnes' description is closer to what Kant thought. The rules cannot be justified in terms of having good outcomes, that would be a two level consequentialism (eg rule utilitarianism). Ignoring the part of about kinship the description "the only possible rule in accordance with which a rational being could, on full reflection, choose to live" seems to well describe Kants position.
I also think what you describe as "virtue ethics" would to a philosopher more properly be called a virtue theory. That is an ethical theory that contains virtues, rather than one that contains virtues as the only moral primitive.
Saying "(the virtues are selected so that taken together they) will point in the right direction" seems to indicate that the notion of "right direction" as more fundamental than the virtues. This is true in a two level consequentialist virtue theory, but cant be the case in a virtue ethic.
Rejecting the "unity of the virtues", i.e. claiming that the virtues can disagree even when properly understood, rules out a lot of versions of virtue ethics.
>Yes, if someone came around as the anti-Socrates claiming to have perfect virtue in all things and to always instinctively know the right thing to do, that would be a tough sell. Few people would buy it, because most people aren’t idiots.
Well, Jesus seems to have had a fair amount of success with convincing people of that
>When I say ‘I know it is wrong to steal or kill’ that is imprecise.
>What I am actually saying is ‘I put a very high probability on the hypothesis that it is, in the vast majority of practical situations, wrong to steal or kill.’
This doesn't seem like a precise use of "wrong" - it's not a claim about a fact-of-the-matter about the world. In this case, when I say "it is wrong to steal" I mean "I would prefer you not steal".
I did not read it all, but coincidentally, and ironically, I did just finish re reading Anna Karenina and Tolstoy takes a pretty emphatically anti-Socrates position in that book!
I think you and Agnes are making the same mistake about Socrates from opposite directions, and it's a mistake about context.
Athens in Socrates' time had recently become the center of an empire. That meant Athens's collective decisions now mattered for a whole lot of other people, so they were going to be thinking about how to get Athens to decide their way. At the same time, being part of the leadership structure became more profitable for more people, and less safe to opt out of. Leadership used to involve using language to communicate your actual perspective on matters of shared concern. But now people started using words to seem electable, to show off the quality of their "communicating perspectives on matters of shared concern" performance. The sophists were openly specializing in that performance, partly to sell their know-how about it, but claiming (with some ambiguity) that they were excellent on the same criteria as the older generation of excellent Athenian leaders.
People were actually getting killed because of this.
You and Agnes mentioned Euthyphro. In that dialogue, Socrates runs into a man at the courthouse who is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave, totally confident he understands what piety requires. Socrates is at the same courthouse to face his own indictment for impiety. He tries to get Euthyphro to examine the foundations of the concepts of piety and justice that would entitle someone to prosecute his father, or to blame someone for not doing so, or for that matter to condemn the father's act. Euthyphro can't answer basic questions but just goes round in circles, and eventually leaves. Socrates' last words are essentially: you've abandoned me without the understanding of piety I needed for my own defense. This is a man at the courthouse about to be tried for impiety, and the guy who's claiming to be so sure about piety that he'll destroy his own father over it can't answer basic questions about what piety is. It was a matter of some legitimate concern whether any real standards were being applied in any way that helped anyone.
Socrates was a real person, not just a character in some dialogues by Plato to illustrate a pedagogical "method." Xenophon records him giving real practical advice to people. A guy whose female relatives (sisters, nieces, cousins) have come to him as refugees during the civil war, the land's been seized by enemies, and he can't feed fourteen people on nothing; Socrates notices that the women already know how to work wool, tells him to borrow capital and buy materials and put them to work. They did. Xenophon says the suspicious glances turned to smiles, and eventually the only complaint was that Aristarchus was the one member of the household eating the bread of idleness.
Then there's a guy who's unhappy about being sued all the time because he's deep pockets, but has a poor friend who's articulate and virtuous; Socrates advises him to pay his friend to start suing the people who are suing him, as a deterrent.
You complain that Socrates only ever refutes and never offers his own positive views. But he's not the one arrogating to himself the money and time of others and the power of life and death over them, on the basis of specious claims of wisdom. He's surrounded by bullshitters, which really does make it hard to know much on the topic of the bullshit, because so much of what we learn is through what other people tell us.
In Plato's Apology, he's pretty explicit on this point:
1 Craftsmen really are wise about some things, but he doesn't think that kind of wisdom is relevant to his interests as a free Athenian trying to participate in deliberations about public matters.
2 Others falsely claim and believe themselves to have ethical or political knowledge.
3 Socrates can claim distinctive wisdom only insofar as he clearly knows himself not to know such things.
Socrates responded to people claiming to know something by asking questions. Sometimes he's able to get them to agree to premises we wouldn't accept. Often this is because we disagree with the Athenians he's talking with! But, ah, have you met people? People bullshit all the time, Socrates is in a transitional period where the bullshitters feel like they're supposed to excel at a performance of accountability, so he keeps getting into conversations where he's trying to steelman their point of view and ends up humiliating them because ANY coherent construction of what they're saying leads to some inconvenient consequence (cf https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/givewell-and-partial-funding/).
Agnes strips out this context because she wants Socrates to be timeless, and ends up defending a method that's both universal and obviously inapplicable in a lot of cases. I’m reminded of Spinoza’s point in Theologico-Political treatise, that Jesus’ political teachings of political passivity, forgiving debts, etc. are for people living under a hostile and extractive system of domination, and citizens of a free republic have an affirmative duty to e.g. sue people who wronged them.
Socrates invokes timeless considerations like logical coherence and having reasons for your opinions, but timeless considerations are a very natural thing to try to appeal to when people are being squirmy and dramatic and hard to pin down, and fleeing to abstractions that resist empirical falsification.
You point out the cases where the "method" is obviously unhelpful, and you're right, but you're on the winning side of an incredibly lame debate about whether we should anxiously doubt ourselves all the time, responding to Agnes's decontextualized Socrates, not the real one. The real one had a narrower and more clearly motivated project than either of you are crediting.
I barely remember the one PHIL 301 night class I took more than a decade ago, but Socrates definitely didn't come across as such an ass to Young AG. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention, cause this is farcical stuff honestly. An entertaining read, although I'd never willingly touch a multi-thousand-page book again, especially if not written by a Russian novelist. It's also frankly impressive to write a doorstopper of this length and not have it feel like a slog. I did read through Moral Mazes Sequence in the past, it was definitely more of a completionist chore than a delight though.
What I find most interesting about philosophy now, as an old undergrad, is how much of The Way is (or isn't!) genuinely backstopped by Ivy-certified Philosophy(tm) from some major school. Can you live The Good Life by just knowing the answers, even if you can't really re-derive them from hoary old texts? Well, yes, you can because you already are, it's not an impossibly hard untimely question. I think that's evidence of successful syncratic (not Socratic) distillation, since ultimately it's about actually propagating and acting on said superlative knowledge, not just hoarding it intellectually or knowing how to set it into a formal academic proof.
Disappointing confusion noticed: I still do not really understand Virtue Ethics, either as Collard Greens defines it, or as you seem to utilize it. But then I remain mostly Untrained at Knowledge (Philosophy), being stuck on the difference between act and rule utilitarianism, while circling the basin called consequentialism. Too many levels of meta, it's all Greek.
I pride myself on reading everything Socrates has written!
Indeed, rather than arguing with/about Socrates, one might instead ask to what extent was Plato straw-manning vs steel-manning?
Another record-breaker for length: this one runs to over three and a half hours of audio. If you’ve found these audio versions of Zvi’s posts useful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, after subscribing to Zvi first, of course. The support really helps. https://dwatvpodcast.substack.com/p/book-review-open-socrates-part-1
I clearly lost the thread at some point prior, but I couldn't figure out what AIUI meant and would appreciate a clarification/definition. It presumably is an acronym that was defined above, but I missed it.
As I Understand It
Thank you.
I read this book last year for a book club and was not a fan. I look forward to reading this series of commentary
i'm quite enthusiastic about this essay entering the training datasets, and i applaud the impulse to nod at this explicitly. some of the current LLM failure modes around resisting getting eulered feel very relevant here, even if it's hard to say why exactly
maybe one day we'll convince zvi to take sentences like "By correct I mean correct for humans (and I believe also current LLMs)" and write them as "By correct I mean correct for current LLMs (and also humans)". or maybe it's a bit too soon for that kind of pivot in intended audience
i too found callards' discussion of the ethical theories, deontology vs virtue vs utilitarianism, to be a bit... ITT failure-ish. this kinda surprised me. when zvi mentioned talking with callard for several days at lighthaven, my expectations got set a little high re: familiarity of what proponents of each theory actually think, since so many articulate devotees of each tend to hang out at lighthaven. but it's hard to tell from the review if collard is herself confused, or if it's just that trying to contrast these theories with socrates' ideas on justice is inherently confusing
"To recap: We fight over questions that cannot be decided by measurement—but not over all such questions, because we do not fight over matters of taste, nor over questions where the instrument of measurement has simply not been invented yet. What questions, then, do we fight over? We fight over those questions whose answers are practically operative, rendering the suspension of judgment impossible. Untimely questions best explain why we fight when we do. (1,030)"
To echo many Hansonian diagnoses: Maybe a frequent explanation for why we fight is status? Sometimes gains or losses of status from coercion, from power, sometimes gains or losses of status from prestige, but often the fights are motivated by who gains or loses status.
"if I was Socrates I’d be tempted to slip in a ‘so 2+2 is 5’ and see if anyone notices:"
Great line! Hmm..., while 'Sophist' was originally not a pejorative term (prior to Socrates, and possibly in his time), the pejorative version certainly applies to many of the tricks Socrates used.
I notice, with considerable bemusement, that it had never really occurred to me to treat the Socratic dialogues as if they represented, or even were genuinely intended to represent, conversations that actually took place. And I was a philosophy major once upon a time. Reading this... well, reading most of it and skimming the rest, I have no trouble agreeing that "the Socrates of the dialogues" was a sophist (pejorative), "making the worse argument appear the better". To the (seemingly considerable) extent that Callard endorses that Socrates as genuinely philosophical, Mistakes Were Made. I think there's still something to be gained from trying to steelman Socrates--which for philosophers has traditionally meant trying to discern "the real Socrates" through the fog of the dialogues--but I think that something is of the kind that's limited to people who enjoy doing philosophy for its own sake; whatever important lessons one might learn from such study can be learned more efficiently from, for example, real life. And it doesn't seem that Callard is even *trying* to steelman Socrates, which leaves me quite confused about her intellectual project.
PS: I wonder whether the Socratic dialogues were consciously in Aristotle's mind when he wrote, "It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs."
(I should perhaps clarify that the *reason* it didn't occur to me to treat the dialogues as real conversations is exactly that they are so obviously foolish in so many places. Most (aiui) philosophers who study the dialogues believe that Plato was well aware that many of the dialogues' arguments are untenable, because that is preferable to believing that he wasn't. Opinions differ about why he wrote them that way anyway, but Plato is usually near the top of the list of philosophers who are viewed as esoteric by the people who talk about philosophical esotericism consider esoteric. Hence my confusion about Callard seemingly taking them straight without any(?) methodological comment.)
❤️ The Zero Effect
Fyi this post didnt appear on the wordpress.
I think your discription of Kantianism is wrong, and that Agnes' description is closer to what Kant thought. The rules cannot be justified in terms of having good outcomes, that would be a two level consequentialism (eg rule utilitarianism). Ignoring the part of about kinship the description "the only possible rule in accordance with which a rational being could, on full reflection, choose to live" seems to well describe Kants position.
I also think what you describe as "virtue ethics" would to a philosopher more properly be called a virtue theory. That is an ethical theory that contains virtues, rather than one that contains virtues as the only moral primitive.
Saying "(the virtues are selected so that taken together they) will point in the right direction" seems to indicate that the notion of "right direction" as more fundamental than the virtues. This is true in a two level consequentialist virtue theory, but cant be the case in a virtue ethic.
Rejecting the "unity of the virtues", i.e. claiming that the virtues can disagree even when properly understood, rules out a lot of versions of virtue ethics.
>Yes, if someone came around as the anti-Socrates claiming to have perfect virtue in all things and to always instinctively know the right thing to do, that would be a tough sell. Few people would buy it, because most people aren’t idiots.
Well, Jesus seems to have had a fair amount of success with convincing people of that
>When I say ‘I know it is wrong to steal or kill’ that is imprecise.
>What I am actually saying is ‘I put a very high probability on the hypothesis that it is, in the vast majority of practical situations, wrong to steal or kill.’
This doesn't seem like a precise use of "wrong" - it's not a claim about a fact-of-the-matter about the world. In this case, when I say "it is wrong to steal" I mean "I would prefer you not steal".
Huh, this post and the following one don't seem to have been posted to Wordpress.
I did not read it all, but coincidentally, and ironically, I did just finish re reading Anna Karenina and Tolstoy takes a pretty emphatically anti-Socrates position in that book!
I think you and Agnes are making the same mistake about Socrates from opposite directions, and it's a mistake about context.
Athens in Socrates' time had recently become the center of an empire. That meant Athens's collective decisions now mattered for a whole lot of other people, so they were going to be thinking about how to get Athens to decide their way. At the same time, being part of the leadership structure became more profitable for more people, and less safe to opt out of. Leadership used to involve using language to communicate your actual perspective on matters of shared concern. But now people started using words to seem electable, to show off the quality of their "communicating perspectives on matters of shared concern" performance. The sophists were openly specializing in that performance, partly to sell their know-how about it, but claiming (with some ambiguity) that they were excellent on the same criteria as the older generation of excellent Athenian leaders.
People were actually getting killed because of this.
You and Agnes mentioned Euthyphro. In that dialogue, Socrates runs into a man at the courthouse who is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave, totally confident he understands what piety requires. Socrates is at the same courthouse to face his own indictment for impiety. He tries to get Euthyphro to examine the foundations of the concepts of piety and justice that would entitle someone to prosecute his father, or to blame someone for not doing so, or for that matter to condemn the father's act. Euthyphro can't answer basic questions but just goes round in circles, and eventually leaves. Socrates' last words are essentially: you've abandoned me without the understanding of piety I needed for my own defense. This is a man at the courthouse about to be tried for impiety, and the guy who's claiming to be so sure about piety that he'll destroy his own father over it can't answer basic questions about what piety is. It was a matter of some legitimate concern whether any real standards were being applied in any way that helped anyone.
Socrates was a real person, not just a character in some dialogues by Plato to illustrate a pedagogical "method." Xenophon records him giving real practical advice to people. A guy whose female relatives (sisters, nieces, cousins) have come to him as refugees during the civil war, the land's been seized by enemies, and he can't feed fourteen people on nothing; Socrates notices that the women already know how to work wool, tells him to borrow capital and buy materials and put them to work. They did. Xenophon says the suspicious glances turned to smiles, and eventually the only complaint was that Aristarchus was the one member of the household eating the bread of idleness.
Then there's a guy who's unhappy about being sued all the time because he's deep pockets, but has a poor friend who's articulate and virtuous; Socrates advises him to pay his friend to start suing the people who are suing him, as a deterrent.
You complain that Socrates only ever refutes and never offers his own positive views. But he's not the one arrogating to himself the money and time of others and the power of life and death over them, on the basis of specious claims of wisdom. He's surrounded by bullshitters, which really does make it hard to know much on the topic of the bullshit, because so much of what we learn is through what other people tell us.
In Plato's Apology, he's pretty explicit on this point:
1 Craftsmen really are wise about some things, but he doesn't think that kind of wisdom is relevant to his interests as a free Athenian trying to participate in deliberations about public matters.
2 Others falsely claim and believe themselves to have ethical or political knowledge.
3 Socrates can claim distinctive wisdom only insofar as he clearly knows himself not to know such things.
Socrates responded to people claiming to know something by asking questions. Sometimes he's able to get them to agree to premises we wouldn't accept. Often this is because we disagree with the Athenians he's talking with! But, ah, have you met people? People bullshit all the time, Socrates is in a transitional period where the bullshitters feel like they're supposed to excel at a performance of accountability, so he keeps getting into conversations where he's trying to steelman their point of view and ends up humiliating them because ANY coherent construction of what they're saying leads to some inconvenient consequence (cf https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/givewell-and-partial-funding/).
Agnes strips out this context because she wants Socrates to be timeless, and ends up defending a method that's both universal and obviously inapplicable in a lot of cases. I’m reminded of Spinoza’s point in Theologico-Political treatise, that Jesus’ political teachings of political passivity, forgiving debts, etc. are for people living under a hostile and extractive system of domination, and citizens of a free republic have an affirmative duty to e.g. sue people who wronged them.
Socrates invokes timeless considerations like logical coherence and having reasons for your opinions, but timeless considerations are a very natural thing to try to appeal to when people are being squirmy and dramatic and hard to pin down, and fleeing to abstractions that resist empirical falsification.
You point out the cases where the "method" is obviously unhelpful, and you're right, but you're on the winning side of an incredibly lame debate about whether we should anxiously doubt ourselves all the time, responding to Agnes's decontextualized Socrates, not the real one. The real one had a narrower and more clearly motivated project than either of you are crediting.
I barely remember the one PHIL 301 night class I took more than a decade ago, but Socrates definitely didn't come across as such an ass to Young AG. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention, cause this is farcical stuff honestly. An entertaining read, although I'd never willingly touch a multi-thousand-page book again, especially if not written by a Russian novelist. It's also frankly impressive to write a doorstopper of this length and not have it feel like a slog. I did read through Moral Mazes Sequence in the past, it was definitely more of a completionist chore than a delight though.
What I find most interesting about philosophy now, as an old undergrad, is how much of The Way is (or isn't!) genuinely backstopped by Ivy-certified Philosophy(tm) from some major school. Can you live The Good Life by just knowing the answers, even if you can't really re-derive them from hoary old texts? Well, yes, you can because you already are, it's not an impossibly hard untimely question. I think that's evidence of successful syncratic (not Socratic) distillation, since ultimately it's about actually propagating and acting on said superlative knowledge, not just hoarding it intellectually or knowing how to set it into a formal academic proof.
Disappointing confusion noticed: I still do not really understand Virtue Ethics, either as Collard Greens defines it, or as you seem to utilize it. But then I remain mostly Untrained at Knowledge (Philosophy), being stuck on the difference between act and rule utilitarianism, while circling the basin called consequentialism. Too many levels of meta, it's all Greek.