Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 3 - Socratic Motivational Intellectualism

  • Nicholas D. Smith, Lewis and Clark College, Portland
  • Book:
    Socrates on Self-Improvement
    Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021, pp 36-67

  • Summary

    Socrates was a motivational intellectualist, which means that he believed that all actions follow the agent’s belief about what is best at the time of acting. This intellectualism entails that all human ethical error involves cognitive error. How do people come to have false ethical beliefs, and how can the processes of evaluative belief-formation be made more reliable? Explores the Socratic account of different etiologies of evaluative belief-formation in such a way as to explain human error but also to indicate ways to improve one’s ability to make appropriate ethical judgments. Discusses the role of punishment in improving one’s ethical condition, not just by causing suffering, but by changing the ways in which a wrongdoer generates and sustains evaluative beliefs.