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1 results

  • 5 - Being Good at Being Bad: Plato’s Hippias Minor

  • Edited by David Ebrey, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Richard Kraut, Northwestern University, Illinois
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Plato
    Published online:
    21 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022, pp 146-172

  • Summary

    In the Hippias Minor, Socrates argues that the expert in a given domain is the one in a position to voluntarily violate the rules of that domain. For example, the expert archer can ensure that her arrows miss the target, whereas the novice archer might accidentally hit the target she’s trying to miss. Socrates claims, shockingly, that this point holds for justice as well: it is the expert in justice who will have the power to deliberately act unjustly. Though some accuse Socrates of drawing this conclusion on the basis of uncritical reliance on the craft analogy, I argue that in fact Socrates is identifying common ground between a variety of forms of practical normativity. In any activity that can be assessable as going well or badly, those who intentionally flout the norm, by erring on purpose, are better at it than those who unintentially flub the norm, by erring accidentally. Socrates’ argument places powerrather than the exercise of powerat the heart of ethics. The Hippias Minor shows why Socratic ethics is an ethics of virtue, rather than an ethics of virtue activation.