Philosophers

Do you think that Socrates really believes that moral facts exist? He seems to never decide on an answer.

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By “Socrates,” I’ll assume that you are referring to the characterSocrates found in Plato’s early, so-called Socratic dialogues, acharacter who many (though not all) ancient scholars believe accurately represents theviews of the historical figure Socrates.

It’s easy to bepuzzled by Socrates’ attitude toward moral facts. He’s famous forexposing his fellow Athenians’ lack of moral knowledge and forproclaiming that he has no moral knowledge of his own. One possibleexplanation of everyone’s moral ignorance is that there are no moralfacts to be known.

However, it seems to me that this cannot beSocrates’ explanation, since Socrates justifies many of his own actionsby appeal to moral considerations. Consider, for example, the followingstatements:

“Then I showed again, not in words butin action, that, if it were not rather vulgar to say so, death issomething I couldn’t care less about, but that my whole concern is notto do anything unjust or impious. That government, strong as it was,did not frighten me into any wrong doing” (Apology 32d).

"Nor should one do an injustice to pay back an injustice, as the manythink, since one should in no circumstances do an injustice" (Crito, 49b10-11).

IfSocrates believed that there was no fact of the matter about whichactions count as just or unjust, then it would be odd for him to careso much about whether his own actions counted as just or unjust.

My own view is that Socrates believed that acquiring genuine moralknowledge was very difficult because he was very strict about whichcognitive conditions qualified as knowledge. Nonetheless, hebelieved that he had some access to moral facts – about, e.g., whatsorts of actions counted as just or unjust– through his attempts todiscover the strongest argument:

“We must thereforeexamine whether we should act in this way or not, since not only nowbut at all times I am the kind of man who listens to nothing within mebut the argument that on reflection seems best to me. I cannot, nowthat this fate has come upon me, discard the arguments I used; theyseem to me much the same. I value and respect the same principles asbefore, and if we have no better arguments to bring up at this moment,be sure that I shall not agree with you” (Crito 46b-c)

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