 It's neither tragedy nor comedy, but its own thing, philosophy. And I think we'll just let the differences come out as we read it. But one important difference is that there is a focus on the arguments and the ideas, more so than on the plot and characters. There are characters. So this does have a dramatic setting where to imagine people standing outside of a gymnasium or outside of a public building and having a conversation with each other. And these are named characters. Probably all of them were real people. So Socrates was a real person. So was Gorgias, and Polis, and Calakles were probably real people, too. But it's a fictional dialogue in that Plato has created all of this and given all of these words to these people. And this is a point I really need to emphasize, that this is not an historical document that is somebody writing down a conversation that Socrates and Gorgias had. Socrates wrote nothing. So we don't have anything that he wrote. We only know what we know about him is based on what other people like Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon wrote about him, his contemporaries. But this is a work of Plato. And in a way, the Socrates here is a fictional character. And although Gorgias was a real person, and I told you a bit about some of his real writings last week, this dialogue that he engages in is made up. And these responses that he gives are supposed to represent the kinds of things he would say. But it's not actually historically what he said. So this is every bit a piece of fiction just as our tragedies and comedies and epic poetry was. It's just that this is fiction that is actually aimed at determining the truth about something, about some problem, some issue that exists in this society. And we're still talking about this democratic society of Athens, which is the setting. Now, I'll give you an idea of the overall structure of the work because it's quite long. You may have noticed in trying to read it. And the first point is that the exact genre of this work, we call this a Socratic Dialogue. And that just means that it consists of a series of speeches and speech exchange as in a conversation between Socrates and a couple of other characters. So for the bit we're going to discuss today, which is merely the first 14 pages, it's a conversation largely between Socrates and the title character Gorgias. And what we'll be discussing on Wednesday, the next 20 pages or so of the dialogue, represents conversation or dialogue between Socrates and another character named Polis. But over half of the dialogue is a conversation between Socrates and this character Callicles. And so notice for one thing that the reading assignments are escalating throughout the week and it will take longer each time to read it. But another question that arises from this structure and a question to think about is why the dialogue is entitled Gorgias if most of the dialogue consists of a conversation with Callicles and Polis. And I think there's a real answer to that. And those people who really grasp what this dialogue is about should be able to answer that question in the end. But at this point I leave it an open-ended question. Now a bit more about the setting and the title character. So the setting is somewhere in Athens, perhaps a gymnasium. We don't have much description of the setting. But this hotshot professor has just showed up to give a public lecture and a kind of display speech. And the time frame is a period of democracy in Athens, just like the Aristophanes works that we read. And I'll remind you that in this democratic setting decisions are made by a vote of the citizens, which is taken after hearing speeches on both sides of a certain issue. Thus, those who could speak better could persuade others about what to do in legal contexts, in political contexts, in military contexts, in business contexts, and so forth. Thus, being a good speaker was a means to legal and political power, which is why there was a market for people willing to pay to receive instruction. And remember in Aristophanes there was this idea that you'd go down to the thinkery and pay these people to teach you how to argue. And that is exactly what Gorgias actually offered. In fact, Socrates did not accept pay from people. And as we'll see in the dialogue, he does not think you should train people how to persuade others without first teaching them how to reason and how to be good people. But this description of paid teachers of persuasion of the worse argument or the better argument is an accurate description of what Gorgias offered to do. Gorgias himself, real person from Sicily, the presentation that he's supposed to have just given, the dialogue starts when his presentation is ended and Socrates shows up late on the fringes of the lectures letting out and people are filing out and Socrates shows up at that point. We can imagine that he's given some oratorical display using his considerable powers of speaking and composition. And remember that it's always more impressive to be able to defend a paradoxical or absurd or counterintuitive claim than it is to defend something obvious. So if I was to sit here and I could easily give you a speech to convince you that it's Monday and that wouldn't be very interesting and you wouldn't be awed by my rhetorical prowess if I was able to demonstrate that point. But if I was able to demonstrate that Helen of Troy, who you all think is this evil person who was the ultimate cause of the entire Trojan War was actually a great, beautiful person that we should all be celebrating as being wonderful and a savior of Greece, then that would be an impressive speech. Or if I was to sit here and prove to you that you exist or that this classroom exists, actually that's a lot more difficult than it sounds. In fact, it might be impossible to prove that. But that would be easier to prove than what Gorgias tries to prove in this work called On Not Being where he tries to prove three theses I told you about before. Let's all ring them out in succession. The first one is that nothing exists. The second proposition is even if something existed, you couldn't know anything about it. And even if something existed and you could know something about it, you couldn't communicate anything about it to anybody else. Those paradoxical claims, he wrote a speech to defend and then gave this speech as a display to people to show, I can prove that nothing exists or I can prove that Helen of Troy was a great person. Therefore, I can prove people to make persuasive speeches about anything. So you wanna sign up for my school because while Monty Johnson might be able to prove to you that it's Monday, I can prove to you that nothing exists. And so I can give you all the power to persuade you to persuade people about anything whatsoever. So he teaches people how to compose and deliver speeches. And these speeches are delivered at public gatherings, but the most important public gatherings are of course court procedures and deliberative bodies like in making up legislative decisions or decisions about whether to go to war or not. And by the way, as usual, stop me at any point in time if you want clarification of anything I'm saying or if you want to ask about a passage in the text or comment on it. Now I wanna say a little bit more. Our translation I think uses the term oratory for the Greek word rhetoricae, which we also have just an English word that means rhetoric. And that is ostensibly what the entire dialogue is about. So in antiquity, the Gorgias was actually given the title Gorgias or on rhetoric or on oratory. And indeed the question of what rhetoric is and what it can do frames the entire dialogue. Now we no longer have teachers of rhetoric as such, like we don't have a department of rhetoric here that you can go study rhetoric. There are some rhetoric classes in the philosophy department, there's some rhetoric classes in the communication studies department, but these talk you about, teach you about rhetorical criticism and criticizing other people's rhetorical speeches like presidential speeches or state of the union speeches. Does not necessarily teach you how to compose rhetoric or oratory yourself. But that doesn't mean that we're no longer concerned with the subject matter of this dialogue. In fact, we now have many more specialized disciplines that teach you how to persuade other people and how to give the equivalent of oratorical or rhetorical display speeches. For example, attorneys. So it's a sad fact of the matter that a certain number of you will go on after college to law school and become attorneys or lawyers. There's no way to avoid it. And in fact, I'll end up writing letters of recommendation for some of you to go on to law school. But let's just focus for a second on what attorneys and lawyers actually do. Their aim is to persuade juries and judges about the guilt or innocence of their clients or those accused of crime. And what makes a good attorney is that that attorney is capable of persuading those people. He may be the most brilliant scientist in the world, but if he can't persuade people to either let his client off or to prosecute this person, then he or she is not a good attorney and not a good lawyer. Think of politicians the same way. Maybe I have a cynical view about politicians despite all these great ones that we have nowadays. It seems that other people share that view and public opinion approval ratings are very low, not just for the president, but for Congress and everybody else. And you might just think that the point of politicians is to persuade the public to vote them into office or now not even the public, but to persuade corporations to fund them so that they can buy TV commercials that can entice the public into voting for them or supporting their policies. They probably really don't care about the truth, they probably just care about getting elected and getting their own policy things persuaded. Even if they did care about the truth, they'd have to be more concerned with how to persuade people to go along with what they're saying than telling them what the truth is. Otherwise they won't get elected, they won't get their legislative priorities passed. This is all pretty obvious for advertisers, marketers, business people, their goal is to persuade us to buy products or to buy more specifically to buy specific brands of products. They don't care about the truth at all of any of these claims, except insofar as laws make them have to tell the truth to some extent. But if you're wondering how much truth-telling and how much science and so forth there is in advertising, just watch a car advertisement or something where cars drive straight up cliffs and so forth and are able to fly and that you'll have a beautiful girlfriend if you drive this kind of car and so forth. Nothing to do with the truth of any of that. But it is effective at persuading you to buy the car. So it's a kind of rhetoric or oratory. Finally, public relations, which is an industry that was invented in the mid 20th century, prior to that it was just called propaganda. But then that got a bad name from the Nazis and various things that happened during World War II so that we changed the name of it to public relations. But again, the point of public relations is to persuade us about political, economic, lifestyle choices, things like that, no concern whatsoever for the truth. So I think it's clear that persuasion, rhetoric and oratory exist in our society at least as much as they did in Greek society at the time. And in fact, since they now have access to mass media like radio, television and the internet and so forth, newspapers printing if those still exist, but mass public demonstrations and so forth, then the role of persuasion by language has, if anything, massively increased in our society. In fact, we're saturated with attempts to persuade us. And this is the whole crisis over fake news and the legitimacy of journalists and everybody setting up their own echo chambers on Facebook and these other places that just keep telling them things to persuade them of their own beliefs and not really challenge them and certainly not seek out the truth. So I think that the basic problem that the dialogue is talking about is much worse for us than it was at the time. The fundamental moral issue here about whether you should teach people to be able to persuade others, whether they have good or bad motives in persuading is still a big deal. And so now we teach this art in the context of specialized fields like law, business, marketing, communications, journalism, political science and so forth. And so these arguments apply to all of those fields where these kinds of skills are taught. But fundamentally there's an ethical issue. It's not the dialogue isn't about how to do this persuasion. It's about whether teaching people how to do this persuasion is a good idea or not. And so the ancients realized already that the subject matter of this is much broader than just rhetoric or oratory. According to Olympiadorus it's quote, to discuss the ethical postulates required for social well-being. So what are the moral requirements for the society to be doing well and living well? And in general what is the moral basis for political action? And notice how the dialogue ends. The very ending of the dialogue. Here's a translation from 527e. Socrates says, let's use the account that has just been disclosed to us as our guide. One that indicates to us that this way of life is the best to practice justice and the rest of virtue both in life and in death. Let us follow it then and call on others to do so. That is to practice justice and the rest of virtue both in life and in death. And let's not follow the one that you believe in. And here he's talking to Gorgias, Calakles, and Polis, the way of life you believe in which is just persuading people however by whatever means you want. And let's not follow that and don't call on me to follow that because that way of life is worthless. So it ends by making an extremely strong moral point and a strong moral condemnation of the kind of activity Gorgias is involved in. So it ends up that teaching itself, teaching rhetoric, which is what the book is about, but teaching itself becomes morally problematic and there's a question whether teaching people is a morally neutral enterprise. So suppose I teach you a skill like how to use a firearm or some kind of martial arts, like I teach you boxing. But I don't give you any moral instruction about who you should shoot or who you should clobber with this martial arts ability that I've taught you. Well, then you could use that skill, use those weapons either for good or for ill. But if you use them more for ill, then you do worse both for yourself and for other people in the society than if I had not taught you those skills. So therefore there is a moral problem with teaching people skills like that. Like there might be a moral problem with teaching people nuclear physics because after all they could use nuclear physics to create a nuclear weapon and that could be a big problem for them and for other people. And if rhetoric really is the most powerful skill around as Gorgias and his students claim, then it can bring about the greatest ills and injustices if it's misused. And it seems to follow that I should not give any instruction in this skill without also giving instruction and in morality and justice. So the notion of morally neutral skills of rhetoric or oratory or in general skills in general, including martial arts or any other skill or technique that can possibly be abused in any way is highly problematic. And I think it applies to this very class. To what extent should teachers of skills like interpreting texts, like writing about texts, speaking about texts and discussing them, shouldn't we have to make sure that you're moral people before we teach you to do that? Because otherwise some of you will go out and you'll take these skills and then you'll even develop them in say law school and then go use them to defend corporations doing evil things like polluting the earth. And you'll use these linguistic and skills for speaking, reading, interpreting, arguing. You'll use those to do harmful bad things. Or some of you will go to work for marketing or advertising firms and convince people to buy things that are bad for them. And so forth. So what are we doing here? We're just, we're teaching you how to have these skills without even making sure that you're good people. Isn't that kind of a problematic thing for us to be doing? We don't know how you're gonna go on to use these skills. And we can almost be sure that many of you will go on to use them for ways that will be harmful both to yourself and to society in general. So that is the problem that this dialogue deals with is should we be doing that? Now here are some paradoxical claims that Socrates makes in the dialogue. So believe it or not, he defends all of these arguments. Number one, it is actually better to lose an argument than it is to win one. Now I say that's a paradox because that sounds very counterintuitive. You always wanna win an argument, right? None of you set out to lose arguments. I mean just arguments at cocktail parties or in run-ins. You always wanna win those arguments, right? Why would you wanna lose them? Another paradoxical claim. It is better to have someone commit a crime against you to be unjust and do something wrong to you than it is for you to do something wrong to them. And when I say it's better, I don't just mean it in an abstract sense, I mean for you. So it is better for boss if I wrong him and hurt him and commit a crime against him. That is better for him than it would be for him to wrong me and hurt me and do something wrong. And I really want him to believe that, but of course it's a universal statement that applies to me too. It would be better for me to be harmed by him than it would for me to harm him. And mark that in your text, better for me. So it's more in my self-interest to be wronged than to do wrong. Somehow Socrates argues that point. And finally, he argues that it is worse not to be punished. If you do something wrong, it's actually worse not to be punished than it is to be punished for it. It would be better to be punished than to somehow do something wrong and have people not notice or have you get off because you have a good attorney or something like that. Okay, so all of those paradoxical claims are defended. Now let me just give you a sampling of the way that Socrates argues. Here's a passage in which part of the argument in defense of this first paradoxical claim is made. But it goes like this. How could it be in my self-interest to lose an argument? So think about it like this. If we get in an argument, for example, about whether the earth is flat or whether it's spherical, and I think it's flat, and you're able to defeat me in that argument and prove that it's spherical, then I've actually benefited because I've learned the proof and the explanation and the argument for how the earth really is. Whereas if I win that argument and I defeat you, not only does the false view happen, but you don't benefit from it. So if you convince me that the earth really is spherical, that doesn't benefit you. You knew that all along. You're just dealing with some idiot that thinks the earth is flat, okay? But I've been improved because I've now learned how things really are. And so when you win arguments, it's actually really lame because you're just left in the same condition that you were in before. But when you lose arguments and somebody refutes you, then you actually gain somehow. And again, notice that is talking about my self-interest. Not that it's just better because it's right in some abstract sense that the truth should win out or something. It's more in my self-interest to get refuted because then I'm improved and benefited. Whereas if I'm refuting you, I don't get any better. You get better if I defeat you in those arguments. And we'll examine and do course more arguments in support of that paradoxical conclusion and these other ones. But you should be thinking as you read it, how is he gonna prove these points? Prima facia, these seem like ridiculous claims. But he does argue them and arguably he does prove them. Now let's just go to the very beginning in the first question he asks. So Gorgias says, look, I'm a master of rhetoric and persuasion. I can answer, I can give a speech on any topic and it can be a long or a short speech and I can take a question, any sort of question from any comer and I can give in response to that either a short answer or a long answer. So you pick, give me any question and tell me how long you want the answer to be and I can deliver it. Because I'm an absolute master of persuasive technique. So Socrates has the young student who's a charophon who's very enthusiastic about signing up with Gorgias. Wow, this is like going to Harvard Law School. I'm gonna be able to crush people in arguments if I learn from this guy. So I really wanna do it Socrates and Socrates says, well go ask him what skill he actually teaches, right? And so he does and it seems like a very simple question because if you made shoes and I said, what skill do you teach? You'd say cobblery. If you were a painter and I ask what skill you're able to teach, you'd say painting. And so the question here is what skill do you teach? And you say it's rhetoric. So we gotta figure out in what sense that is a skill. That's not as clear as making shoes or paintings or houses or cars or whatever. And in Greek the question is what is your technique? Technique means skill, art or craft. We can translate it in any of these ways. It's the root of a bunch of important English words like technology, which just means the science of mechanical or artistic production. The word technique, which means a mode of production and art, the idea of somebody being technical which means they're an expert or technocracy government by experts. So the fundamental issue is do we have here a skill, art or a craft, a genuine technique and if so what is it able to do? So here's how Gorgias replies. Somebody asks him what skill do you teach? What technique do you teach? And he says I teach the one that partakes of the most admirable skills. And then he says that's speech making which is the most admirable of all. And so then the question is asked will speech making about what? And he says well about the greatest of all human concerns. So Gorgias replies that he teaches a skill of composing speeches about the greatest human concerns. And Socrates points out that his answer is not as good as he thinks it is. First of all, he merely gives a quality of the skill. He doesn't say what the skill is. So if I ask you what's your major and you say oh it's the best one, it's the most powerful one. But then I'm probably talking to a business major, right? Whereas if you ask a physicist they say something very humble like I'm trying to find out more about nature or something like that, okay? But you know, political scientists. Yes, I'm studying politics, the greatest I'm doing the most important thing. Doesn't tell me what it actually is. Also everyone thinks that what they're doing is the best. So a doctor can say they're doing the best. They have the best skill because they save lives. And the banker can say I have the best skill because I make wealth. And the teacher can say they're the best because I actually provide knowledge or something like that. So everybody thinks what they do is the best and it doesn't answer the question. So Gorgias answers both of those criticisms. The first point that you merely told me a quality of the skill but not what it is by being more specific. He says I teach the ability to persuade by speeches. And he also says in the following contexts especially, judges and juries in law courts, counselors in meetings like bureaucrats or executives and politicians and assemblies, legislatures and parliaments. So that's his paradigm. I teach people how to persuade others by speech in those contexts. And he responds to the second point that hey everybody thinks what they do is best so you haven't really said anything there by arguing that in fact the general ability to persuade people allows his students to subdue or even subjugate all other skilled professions. And for this reason rhetoric is superior to all other skills. It's superior to doctors because if you have rhetoric then you can convince people that you're better and have a better idea about what's healthy than doctors do. That's what advertisers that tell you that eating fruit loops is good for you and contains nine essential vitamins and so forth. Totally false, it'll wreck your health if you do that. But they're better at persuading people on that than doctors are. And that's why half the country's obese and so forth because advertisers and people who don't care about the truth of this are a lot more persuasive than doctors who actually know what we should be eating. And same thing in any of these other domains. So a rhetorician if they're really good sounds a lot better than a banker and convince you to invest in some harebrained scheme. It would have been better to put your money in a money market or whatever but they convince you to buy this real estate at the top of the market or whatever. If they're persuasive they can do that. And the mere banker who says no, you ought to be conservative with your money doesn't sound as persuasive. So in that sense it is the best because it can crush all of the other ones and make them look bad. So then rhetoric gets defined as a producer of persuasion. Socrates offers that definition at 453A. And notice that this definition producer of persuasion works perfectly for all of our contemporary fields of rhetoric like advertising, public relations, marketing, lawyers, all of those people are producers of persuasion. That's exactly what they do. And so Gorgias agrees with this definition but he adds that the kind of persuasion he's most interested in is dealing with matters that are just and unjust. So Gorgias himself says that. He doesn't wanna make it seem like oh I'm able to fleece people out of their money or I'm able to convince people to eat fatty foods when that's really a bad thing for them to do. No I deal with these important things like law and order and justice and injustice. That's what my speech making power is about. Now persuasion, Socrates points out, aims at creating conviction among audiences and listeners that is convincing audiences. And again it does not aim to create knowledge. It doesn't aim to teach students things. It aims to give them an ability to persuade. Now there is a slight tangle here in that one could teach students how to persuade in which case I might be giving them a certain knowledge but that knowledge, what they would know is not how to teach something or about some fact of the matter but how to create conviction in others. So again a lawyer doesn't aim to teach the jury something she aims to convince a jury about the guilt or innocence of a client. And an advertiser doesn't aim to teach you about a product but aims to convince you to buy the product. Now contrast this with learning in fields like engineering, architecture, physics, chemistry, mathematics, et cetera. In those fields one doesn't learn how to persuade other people that one knows a lot about mathematics or chemistry. Rather you actually want to know and learn the truth about that subject area insofar as it is known. And if you have a really good teacher they also explain to you what isn't known in the field and what needs further research. But there is no rhetoric classes that go along with your chemistry classes. I mean there might be a general education requirement but you don't have to take rhetoric for that. Why don't we teach people how to persuade and we're turning them into chemists or physicists or mathematicians? Because it's irrelevant. The point of the field is not to persuade people that you know what you're talking about but to actually know what you're talking about. And that's a big difference. Now Gorgias holds that rhetoric will be useful in any meeting in which people have to make a decision but Socrates presses him on what kinds of meetings should actually need people that are trained in rhetoric. So if we're meeting to decide whether we should build a bridge or a house or an army then we consult engineers, architects and generals. Since those people presumably know something about bridges, houses and armies. We don't go out and consult advertisers and public relations specialists and attorneys and so forth. And that's because possession of those kinds of skills like how to build a bridge, how to make a house, how to outfit an army actually involves knowledge about these subjects and not mere persuasion. And Gorgias responds that politicians at least persuasive ones are really the ones that call the shots and in fact they do decide what public works get built. Whether housing developments go through or not. Whether the military is funded and to what extent. They actually do decide, it's politicians that decide whether we're supporting the F-18 or not deciding it. We may take advice from generals but it ultimately comes down to persuading some democratic body about whether they're voting for it or not. So the person who is skilled in persuasion can persuade audiences to follow his or her instructions rather than those of experts in a specific skill like doctors, architects, engineers and so on. But in response to this Gorgias says look, one shouldn't abuse rhetoric like that and he has this very almost naive approach to it. They should use rhetoric like any other competitive skill he says and not to just defeat anyone and everyone. And then he makes an analogy to boxing. If I teach someone how to box and they ought to use this skill against other skilled boxers or those who are training to be boxers, maybe they should also use it in self-defense but they shouldn't just use it against friends and family or innocent bystanders, they shouldn't use this skill, right? So there is a moral fact of the matter about who it should be used against and the teacher of that skill wouldn't seem to be responsible for making sure that the person actually is moral. But the fact of the matter is that pupils do pervert the strength and skills of the things we teach them and they misuse those skills. So some of those people who are instructed to how to fire a gun, for example, use it to rob banks or to commit murder and that's a problem. The question is whether the instructor is actually responsible for that misuse. We can all agree the student should use the skill to do good things but what happens if the student uses it instead for a bad purpose is the teacher to blame. Now, to look very carefully at the response Gorgias gives to this, 457B to C. If an orator goes on with this ability and this craft to commit wrongdoing, we shouldn't hate the teacher for while the teacher imparted the knowledge to be used justly, the pupil is making the opposite use of it. So it's the misuser who it's just to hate, not the teacher. So if I was a self-interested person I'd just end the lecture there. Don't blame teachers, it's students that are bad people. It's not our fault if they misuse it. But Gorgias claims that he can make a rhetorician out of anyone who wants to study with him, meaning that he can make anybody capable of persuasion on any topic, not by teaching them, not by teaching them how to teach people on a topic like we do in engineering and physics and mathematics but by teaching them how to persuade people. And the rhetorician will be more persuasive in a gathering even than a doctor. Remember this is crucial to Gorgias' argument that this is the superior art because you can make other skills look like idiots if you're really good at oratory and persuasion. Now by in a gathering Gorgias clarifies that he means among those who don't know because if the audience consisted of doctors then they could immediately detect that this guy's a quack who's just bullshitting people whereas this other doctor who's not as good as the speaker actually knows what he's talking about or engineering, if the audience was full of engineers then the rhetorician would get nowhere because people could tell he doesn't know what he's talking about whereas this other engineer who's not as good at rhetoric can. But if the audience is a bunch of people who aren't skilled up in that training and this is exactly the situation of a democratic decision making or being on a jury, you just have random people from every walk of life, they don't necessarily have skills in that, then in those situations the rhetorician can persuade the people to whatever view he has regardless of the truth. So to put it abstractly, when a rhetorician is more persuasive than some other skill X like medicine or architecture, then a non-knower will be more persuasive than a practitioner of that skill among non-knowers. So rhetoric doesn't need to have any knowledge of the state of their subject matter, it only needs to have discovered some device to produce persuasion in order to make itself appear to those who don't have knowledge that it knows more than those who actually do know it. That is the purpose of rhetoric and advertising and being a lawyer and being a public relations specialist and all of those fields is if you are in a situation where you do not have skilled people who can detect that you don't actually know the truth of what you're talking about, how do you persuade them to support your view? Now, since rhetoricians don't need to know about justice and injustice, for example, they only need to appear to those who also don't know anything about justice or injustice. They need to appear that they know more about justice than those who in fact know more about justice. So remember Gorgia said, well, really what my speech is about are these very important things about justice and injustice. But now given the structure of this field that he's claiming to be able to teach, we know that what he actually wants to be able to do is teach somebody how to persuade people that they know about justice and injustice more than some other person who might actually know more about it in the case that they're in front of a forum where people do not know about that area, i.e. a courtroom or a deliberative body like Congress. So Socrates again asked Gorgias, would you teach a student about justice and injustice if this student doesn't know about these things before he comes to you? And Gorgias replies, and it's important that it's a grudging reply. So look at this passage carefully at 460. He says, yeah, I guess I would teach them about justice as well. Okay, so this is like if you ask Monty Johnson, are you gonna make sure that all your students know about justice and injustice before you teach them how to speak and write? And if I said, well, yeah, I guess I would. I don't wanna say that I would teach a bunch of immoral bastards who are gonna go on to do evil things, how to do those. So yeah, I guess I'd make sure that they knew about justice and injustice too. I also don't wanna admit to Socrates that I don't know as much as everybody else does about justice and injustice. But we'll see that this concession is a fatal mistake that the rest of the dialogue hangs on, him making this concession. Because it means that he essentially ends up contradicting himself. And I can show this contradiction by putting into kind of propositional forms various arguments that he is consented to. One, if a student doesn't know anything about justice, then Gorgias says, I'll teach it to him. I'll make sure he knows about justice before I teach him how to persuade. Second, a person who has learned about justice will be just. Just as a person who has learned about music will be a musician and a person who's learned about carpentry will be a carpenter and a person who's learned about engineering will know about engineering, et cetera. So a person who learns about justice will be a just person. Thus, if teaching does imply learning, and I think it does, just flapping your lips in front of a classroom isn't teaching, if the students aren't actually learning anything, then no teaching is going on. If that's true, then any student of Gorgias will be just since he will teach them about justice and the person who learns about something will be a person of that kind. But earlier, Gorgias said that a teacher is not responsible if his or her student uses rhetoric unjustly. Just as a teacher of medicine isn't responsible if the student uses the knowledge not in order to cure diseases but create them. Like the student uses what they learned in biology to create bio weapons or poisons to use on people because they have that knowledge. And we think that the biologists that taught them how to do these things isn't responsible. It's the student themselves. But any student who uses knowledge unjustly will, if so facto, or for that very reason, be unjust. Anybody doing anything unjustly is by definition unjust. So Gorgias' students are both just and unjust at the same time. They're just because they must have learned about justice from him, but they're unjust because they go on to do abusive things. So Gorgias' position is incoherent. He produces both just and unjust people. And the important thing is that he teaches them how to persuade others that they know more about justice than people that actually do know something about justice. And so that is the problem. Now, which argument should Gorgias, where did he go wrong in his reasoning? How did he get led down this annoying path where Socrates shows up a master of argument and persuasion and I can answer any question that you put to me. How did Socrates trip him up and make him contradict himself and come up with an incoherent position? What should he have said or done differently? Or is it just, does he just have the wrong position? Does what he's saying not make any sense? Is there anything he could have said differently in defense of teaching people how to make persuasive speeches? Anybody have any thoughts on this? Yeah. So Socrates, if I could just repeat your answer, I think you're saying that Socrates treats justice like it's an absolute thing. There's just and there's unjust and there are clearly different things. But you say Gorgias was answering as if it's more fluid and there's not as much of a distinction between just and unjust. He thinks it's subjective. So as opposed to being objective, there's a fact of the matter about what's just and unjust. Gorgias thinks that what I think is just is just because I think of it that way. So actually you're giving a way that he could have gone. He could have made that argument. Now that's a smart kind of philosophy argument is say I don't believe there is any such thing as justice and injustice. I mean this is what people that go on to do advertising believe. I don't actually believe in any of that ethic stuff. I just believe in making money or whatever. That's not the course. It's very important that that is not what Gorgias said. Gorgias did play along with Socrates.