 All right, so I like to do a little bit of recap each time that we do this, in part because I want you to be able to see how these different perspectives are coming together and to differentiate them apart from each other. You notice that I've got, on this thing, this listing of participants in the republic. I've got a couple isms, a couple different moral theories listed. That's because, at this point, you guys have been introduced to three different moral theories. Introduced. We haven't gone into them in any great depth, but you've been introduced to them. You've also been introduced to a traditional conception, which we don't actually have a name for, of moral theory as well. So we're looking at book four today, and that's focusing on the parts of the soul. That's actually going to give us the beginnings of Socrates' own perspective, Plato's moral theory, which is a type of virtue about us. So we're going to talk a lot about virtue today, not a term that you're used to hearing, except perhaps in very restricted circumstances. Those of you who grew up Catholic or in certain Protestants' denominations may have heard the term in part because of the catechism or the moral theory that uses those terms. And they talk about virtues. But you may still not have any idea what a virtue is. We're in a society that uses virtue language but doesn't use the word virtue. And we'll talk more about that. So first, let's sort of recap here. So we started out in book one with this guy Paul Marcus, Catholic's son. Remember, he inherited the argument. Catholic shuffled off the scene as soon as Socrates asked him a difficult question, what is justice? And what did Paul Marcus say? He said, well, this guy, Simonides, a famous poet, said justice is giving people what does there do? And there's really two kinds of people in life. There is friends and enemies. What should you give friends? Should we close these? Would that be better than a thing? I see you kind of blinding. You OK? Yeah. OK. You've got friends. What should you give your friends? Good things. Otherwise, they're not going to be friends very long. He doesn't say they are, but this makes sense. And friends intend good to you, right? That's how you know they're friends. So friends are good people, and enemies are bad people. You've all met enemies, right? You've had enemies at one point or another in elementary school, middle school, and high school. It could have been a kid that you just didn't get along with on the playground, and you had to get in a scrap. It could have been somebody who spread rumors about you behind your back. It could have been somebody competing with you over the same things that you liked. It could have been competing for approval. It could have been competing for the boy or the girl who you were interested in. It could have been competing to be the best in some athletic thing. It could have been competing to be the best in some academic thing. What do you give to enemies? What do they deserve? Bad things. Right? Does this sound fairly consensical? Yeah. Every society has a version of this. Think about the golden rule. Do unto others as you and I have them do unto you. Does that mean you have to be nice to everybody all the time? Is there any way to twist that? When your mom or dad said that to you, it's to try to get you to act nicer? Yeah. Well, you could be the one not doing night sleep when you get it back. You could say, I don't have any problem with somebody when I act the fool knocking me down. I'd like somebody to do that. So I quit acting like a jerk. Therefore, I'm going to do that to this person. Some of these rules don't achieve what they're intended to. It's also similar to the eye for an eye tooth for a tooth. Kind of philosophy, isn't it? You've all heard that before. Somebody crosses you. What should you do? Somebody hurts you. Heard him back. That's what they deserve. So that's, if you're saying they deserve it, that's justice. Somebody kills your cousin. Kill their cousin. This is the way a lot of ancient societies function, or societies that don't have what we call rule of law. Somebody talks about you behind your back. Maybe you don't have to do exactly that. Maybe you could do something else, like find some incriminating photos of them and send them to their boss or something like that. But under this sort of view, that would be a perfectly just thing to do, wouldn't it? So this is one view of how to behave, how you ought to be thinking about things, how to be an ethical person. As a matter of fact, if this is the right way, then what about somebody who forgives people too easily? What's going on there? How many of you, because you've all been hurt by people, plenty of times in your life, how many of you, when you were hurt wrongly, you didn't have a comment to you, had somebody else who told you that you should get over it, or that the other person really isn't that bad, that this is uncharacteristic of them, that you need to be the bigger man or bigger woman and for good? Yeah, everybody? How did you feel? How many of you forget? I don't know once in a while, I did, but I'm more of a brunch holder, which is a bad thing. How many of you felt kind of, as if a second harm had been done to you, by being told you should take it? It depends, you're right, there's a lot of circumstances. This is a very deeply rooted conception of justice. There's a reason why every culture, every society has some version of this. We want to try to get beyond this, because this by itself isn't important. Socrates pointed out some problems with that. But it's understandable if somebody was there. It's understandable if that was the way somebody reasoned. Thracymachus comes on the scene, and Thracymachus is much more radical, isn't he? He's saying things like justice is just the interest of the stronger, the weak are a bunch of sheep to be fleeced by the shepherd. How does he treat Socrates? He's not very nice in conversation, is he? He kind of represents his own philosophy. He's a jerk. He tries to impose his will on everybody else. He actually doesn't want to say anything until they give him some money. He has to get something from them, right? It's all about taking, taking, taking, or imposing on other people. That's a common frame too, isn't it? When you got hurt by somebody in the past, you might have had somebody like Thracymachus. There are people out there who espouse his loss. Everybody's just out there to use everybody else. So if that's really the case, what should you do? You should try to claw your way to the top, right? If it's just about having power, you'd be a dummy, not just weak, deserving of being, that word again, deserving. Deserving of being treated badly. If you don't actually assert yourself. That's Thracymachus' position. We can identify this with what we call egoism. Egoism is a moral theory. We haven't talked about this in great detail. Egoism is one of those moral theories out there that says what's good? Doing what satisfies your desires. Your desires, not his desires, not my desires, your desires. Now, of course, how do I see it? What's good is what satisfies my desires. And if it happens to go against your desires, too bad for you, you're screwed. So if I'm the one in charge and I'm an egoist, I'm gonna set things up so that they work out really great for me. Like, I wouldn't be any problem for, if I was an egoist, to think that I should exploit you. Maybe what I do is I give you assignments that later on I'm going to use and toggle together into a book. I'm not gonna give you any credit or any money or anything like that because it was there to be used, right? And if you wanna be on equal terms with me, you can find some way, we can work out some mutually agreeable arrangement whereby I use you and you use me. Doesn't that sound good? Like, you know, for instance. It'd be a little cutthroat after a while. Well, in some circumstances it will get cutthroat, especially if there's a lot of competition over the same goods. Because let's think about it in terms of that. I want, let's not use money. I want to be heard. I want to get my point across. And let's say it's not a classroom where it's mostly me talking and you guys, you know, just responding and all that. Let's say we're interested in having a conversation. I want to talk and get my point across. But that cuts into your time. And he's not even being heard from. And he's not getting in his time at all. And these two would like to talk just as much as we would. So, you know, we might like team up just to shut him up. And then once we've done that, now it's you and me. Right? It could get very cutthroat. It can get cutthroat resources. It can get cutthroat prestige. All the things that matter to us. The perspective of egoism says that really there aren't any restrictions in and of themselves on what counts as satisfying my interests, what would be good for me. We might agree on those. I might not act a jerk. Well, for instance, I am dependent on you in a certain respect. How do you have power over me as students? I don't feel banned together and didn't show up to any of your classes. The administration might look at that as maybe, yeah, he's a lot of the teacher, but I don't know him that. You have other recourses, right? Yeah. You're valuing your range, sir. Say that again. You're valuing your range, sir. You have still a lot of valuations at the end of the semester, right? I had a friend back at my old school. And I don't know what he did to this class. He was kind of an arrogant guy a little bit, you know, a little bit full of himself. And but he didn't deserve what he happened to him. His students teamed up. And when it came to evaluation time, you know, the professor leaves the classroom, right? I don't know what it's done here, but that's the way it's been done every place that I, and the students got together and they said, let's screw this guy. And I think it was probably one of those cases where three or four of the students were very upset and the rest of them said, yeah, okay. That's fine with me. I don't really like this guy particularly. And they all gave him very low evaluations. Well, those get used to decide whether you get promoted, whether you get tenure, all sorts of things along those lines. And of course, you know, when your evaluations come in at all really low, your boss wants to know, what's going on? What did you do to these students that made them so angry? So that's one. You could also go and rate myprofessor.com, right? Although now I think you have to have an account in order to use it. I've gone and looked at some of my peers and I've looked at my own from my old school. Some of them are kind of funny. One person, one student actually wrote in the comments that I was lenient but strict. Let's see, I have a problem with that. This is in a critical thinking class. Lenient but strict. What would be the problem with that? If you're strict, you're not giving any room really, but if you're lenient, you're supposed to be giving a little leash. Yeah, so I think they wanted to compliment, you know, two ways, but the compliments didn't quite go together. They'd say, be like, smart, yet stupid. So, but yeah, we could work out some sort of deal. Professors do this sort of thing where they say, I'm gonna make it really easy on you and you're gonna give me good evaluations. And that can be done from an egoist perspective, right? When you get into your career, you might find something that works out like that. But one of the things that goes along with this is you only consider your perspective or that of others who can affect your desires. So everybody else, forget about them. So we might get together and make a business deal that would benefit both me and you, but screw all the consumers or the people who are financing it or things like along those lines. So that's a moral theory. It's not a moral theory in the sense that it's very moral to act that way, but this is one way in which people make sense out of right and wrong. It's a very low level, isn't it? Low would be your incentive to be good to other people. You wanna get something from them, that's it. Or you don't want them to hurt you. So if you get really angry at somebody, don't kill them, why? Not because killing is a bad thing or because you'd be taking their life away and along with it all the other things that could happen just because you don't wanna go to prison, right? Because going to prison would be a bad thing for you. That would be the egoism. So that's Thrasymachus' position. Lawson is taking a position that gets us past the egoism and towards something that we call contractarianism. There's a long fancy word for saying we've got some sort of arrangement that we work out in society. And that arrangement, for the most part, we don't actually make that arrangement. We come to it and we're raised in it and it's already there. For instance, we were talking before class began about New York and gun laws. Apparently in New York, it's illegal even to have a pistol in your hand unless you have a permit for it. That's not the case in Indiana where I was living or in North Carolina where I was living, but it is the case in New York. Why is that the case here? Because people pass that as a law. Why do you think they did that? We were talking a little bit about that at the beginning, yeah. So you can't hide a gun in your pocket or anywhere else, I'm sure of anyone who wears a shotgun and you can't hide it. Yeah, it's hard to tell. I mean, you can't. Well, you need like a trench coat or something. Yeah, the idea was it was supposed to cut down crime by removing one of the things that is typically involved in crimes by making that a legal. Why should we follow that? I don't have a gun, but I don't actually have anything against guns. Why shouldn't I get a pistol and walk around with it and just keep it in my pocket or side holster or something like that? Well, not just because they could send me to jail for it or actually prison, I'm assuming it's a felony, a felony, yeah. That's a kind of serious thing, right? That would be egoism. Why else shouldn't I do that? Well, because I'd be breaking the law and I'd be disrupting public order and I'd be sort of upsetting the arrangement that we have. I should care about that. Not because I really love justice for its own sake, but because what happens if I start breaking the social contract, if I start violating the norms, well, you might start doing it too. If enough people start breaking the rules, which protect us all, then the rules are gonna fall apart, aren't they? And that would be bad because then we all would actually like to be committing injustice. Remember that we talked about this in the Ring of Guiders last class. If you had this ring that turned you invisible, how many of you would be resisting the opportunity to take revenge on your enemies, to steal money, to have whatever you want? That would be a very difficult thing to resist. I'm gonna say, look, we really do have all these desires for other people's stuff to take advantage of people. Life for some of us is the same, but we get together and we say, okay, I'm not gonna do that to you and you're not gonna do that to me and we don't do it individually, we do it as a society. And that's what laws are. Think about, we use traffic and speed limits last class as an example. How many of you think that it's okay to drive five over the speed limit? Almost every one. How many of you think that it's okay to drive 10 over the speed limit channel? Few less. How many of you think it's okay to drive as fast as you want? Really? One. Well, now why, you know, what's the difference between driving 10 over and driving, say 100 over, well you can't drive 100 over. Driving 30 over. How is that different for you? The reason why I say it's that, you know, might as well drive as fast as you want, because to me, I mean, if you're speeding, you're speeding, it doesn't matter if it's five, 10 over, 20 over. Yeah, you're speeding, you're speeding, so I mean. You have the view that if you break the rule, you break the rule and that's it and that's understandable. What about the rest of you? Why did you say it was okay to drive 10 over, but not 30, yeah. Because the law is different, why did I go 30 and not get a polka dot and lose my license. Okay, so it's based on an egoist thing. Anybody else have any other reasons? Yeah. You could kill someone. Well, you could kill somebody, you know, driving the speed limit, right? But if you're more likely. Like, you're more likely to slow down. Yeah. That's good, yeah. It is a thing that, like, if you're driving 30 miles an hour, you hit somebody. Yeah. There's a 70% chance they'll live. And say you're driving 10 over that, so you're going 40. Uh-huh. 70% chance they'll die. So the greater the impact, I don't know if you're driving like 60 miles an hour if you're getting it, right? Yeah. Okay, so you're doing sort of prudential, we call sort of calculator things about odds of people getting hurt. Let's say we do this on a large scale. Let's see. We're actually coming to some sort of agreement. Clearly, none of us respect the traffic laws as they are. We all feel they're too restrictive, right? But there is some sort of boundary for how much wiggle room there is. At least with this classroom, we feel, as it was said, with the exception of one person, which, you know, and that's not a bad position to take them. Well, let's say you're 50 miles an hour over, I'm saying, yeah, and you're gonna break it, there's not really much of a difference between five and 10. But that's what's now over. But that's what's interesting. Right, that's what's interesting. There is a difference felt by most of the people in class. There's some sort of limit. 10 over, okay, that's fine. But if you're going more than that, now you're really acting recklessly, you're violating some, it's not actually the law of the land, it's more like something that we feel and we agree to. I mean, I asked you, I think about this before, how many of you get irritated with people in the left lane who aren't breaking the speed limit, right? That's kind of strange, isn't it? We're getting angry at people for following the law. Why? What is it about the left lane that makes us feel like this person is a jerk for sitting there, driving 55? Because the left lane's supposed to be the passing lane. Yeah, the person in the right lane is going slow, you're supposed to pass them, and they go back into the right lane, so someone else wants to go faster than they can. So again, there's sort of an agreement among us, right? This way is okay to act, this way isn't okay to act. The left lane is for this, right? That's contractarianism. The idea is we have these rules and these agreements, and if we follow them, we're doing the right thing, being just. If we break them, we're being unjust. And they could be based on some sort of egoist thing ultimately, but contractarianism goes beyond egoism. We're gonna get to virtue ethics next with Socrates, and I wanna talk a little bit about this term virtue ethics. So how many of you heard this term virtue before, probably in a religious context? Just a few, okay. How many of you heard the term vice? Vice is the opposite of virtue. What do you associate with vices? Let's start with that. What's advice? Like, my interpretation is something that brings you good, but it doesn't have any productive tier of wellness. Everything like. What kind of good does it usually bring you? Like, happiness, you know, it might bring you happiness, but it doesn't really serve a moral purpose. Okay. Let's say, you know, you like drinking, drinking might bring you happiness. It may or may not be acceptable, but it certainly doesn't progress your well-being. Yeah. Well, though, could you say enough to drink a glass of wine per day? It's supposed to, you know, be good for your health. So maybe some drinking in moderation. Moderation is a virtue. We often think of like drinking, smoking, gambling as a vice, right? What else? Frequenting prostitutes, it's why you have vice wads. Those are the things that we typically call vices. Vice in its traditional sense means any sort of bad disposition or habit, something that you don't just do once and then, you know, you never do again. It's something, it's a disposition. It's a part of your character. So if I'm greedy, for example, you've all heard of the seven deadly sins, right? There's also the movie, Seven, and you can probably name them, right? Greed, loss, sloth, you know, you go down the line, right? Those are vices. Originally they were called the eight capital vices and the list got changed along the way. Actually I have a video where I discuss this if you're interested in this sort of thing because people are always fascinated. How did eight become seven, you know? How did they come up with these lists? Well, these are dispositions that make people, according to virtue, I think it's bad people. Greedy person, you can count on them to behave in greedy ways. What would be the opposite of being greedy in your book? Generous. Generous, generosity. Generosity is a virtue that has to do with giving, what you're willing to give. Now, it's interesting because you could be stingy and not give anything, right? That's advice. You can be generous and you give a certain amount. What if you give way too much? Is that generosity? That becomes something bad again. Are the vices an extreme form of something like wrath, extreme anger, anger, like, sometimes. Immigration. Yeah. It's not too lazy, like not lazy, but being too lazy. Yeah, you're right. Vices are a form of extreme. We're gonna get to this more when we read Aristotle, which is gonna happen fairly soon. I just wanna introduce you to the general concept. So virtues are the opposite. They're good character traits. They're not just things that you do once in a while. By the way, one of the virtues that's opposed to greediness is justice. Greed is wanting to have more than your fair share, right? You want the whole cake, not just your piece of the cake. You want what you've got and what your neighbor has. That's more than your fair share. Justice is wanting to give people their fair share, wanting to have your fair share. So virtues you have to do not just with how you behave, but also how you think and how you feel. So if you do the right thing only because somebody compels you, you're not actually virtuous, because as soon as they quit compelling you, what's gonna happen? Think about kids. Think about kids in greed and generosity, right? There's a cake and there's 12 kids and one of the kids gets to slice the cake. If somebody is in there to make sure that that kid actually gives everybody a piece of cake, what's gonna happen? Somebody's gonna get less cake or no cake, right? Now after a while we develop these habits and then you can leave the kid alone in the room and then the kid will come to desire wanting to give everybody their fair share. And some start out like that, right? Some kids seem to be naturally good that way and others, you can train them as much as you want, they always seem to be kind of vicious, don't they? But these virtues and biases, these are part of our care. So we measure whether somebody is doing the right thing or not by how much what they're doing exhibits virtue or is part of promoting virtue. And on the other hand, if what they're doing is promoting vice, like if I'm being a bad example to you, I'm not modeling to you the way, say, somebody ought to approach these texts. If I come in and I'm real sloppy and I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm actually making you worse, aren't I? I'm giving you a bad model to follow and I'm leading you into vice, that would be bad. Before we actually look at Socrates' stuff, let's think about some of these cases. These are fairly easy cases to decide these things. Lying, you know? Well, an egoist would say, it really depends, doesn't it? Am I gonna get hurt if I lie to people? If not, then it's okay for me to lie, especially if it gets me what I want. What about a contractarian, you know, who's concerned with keeping order in society and having a social matrix in which we can depend on each other, how would they see life? Basically, sometimes good, sometimes bad because some people do need to lie. Well, they wouldn't say that because people need to lie, it would be okay. If there's sort of a general social expectation that you tell the truth, violating that social expectation would be bad. Later on in the semester, we're gonna try to imagine whether we could have a society in which it was okay to lie all the time. But most societies say, no, you shouldn't lie. As a matter of fact, a lot of them demand you to tell the truth at certain times. Virtue ethics is gonna say lying is bad too. Because you know, think about it. Being a liar, being somebody who can't be relied on to tell the truth, that's a vicious disposition, isn't it? Then if you wanna live with a liar, you wanna marry a liar, how about being a business partner, you wanna be a business partner with a pathological liar? Only if you have them do sales, right? They don't lie to you. But if they're a liar, that's a problem. If they're lying to customers, they're gonna lie to you too. Similar to the issue of, if you get into a relationship with somebody by stealing them away from their spouse and they're willing to cheat on their spouse, they're probably willing to cheat on you. These things are rooted in our character. Stealing. Again, the egoist kinda depends. Am I gonna get punished? Am I gonna get co-op? Otherwise, hey, it's okay. Thrusymachus can say, if you can get away with it, do it. Contract heritism. Can you have a society where people are violating the norm of stealing? How do we usually treat people who steal once social order breaks down? Social order breaks down and they normally cut off their hand or something like that. That's what they do in societies where they still have social order. They just have a very harsh social order. They kill looters, right? You get up on top of your store and you shoot on them as they're trying to get into your store. One of the reasons why prisons are in some ways more humane, out on the frontier, do you know how they dealt with theft? You hang people. You kill them. If somebody was, you know, breaking, if somebody was violating the social order and doing it in a way where you can depend on them to do it next week too, they're too dangerous to leave around. I mean, it's not like they're killing somebody. If they're killing somebody, you probably have to do that too, right? Virtue ethics. Is it virtuous to be a thief? We have movies that make it seem like that, like Motions 12, you know, that sort of thing. But no, for the most part, we don't want to live next to a thief. Virtue ethics, you know, one way of thinking about whether something is a virtue or advice, this may sound kind of silly, but would you like to live next to a person like that? Would you allow that person, somebody like that to marry into your family if you had a choice, you know? Who would you like to have in your family? You'd like to have people who don't steal, right? Maybe even when they find your wallet on the street, they don't just turn it into the lost and found, they look at it and they say, oh, I know who this belongs to. I'm gonna go take it to them, right? We can skip over the rest. What about when we get to these more difficult ones? Like, say, bribes, right? And they don't even have to be like bribing a judge. Let's say it's a matter of, you're getting hired. All of you want to get a job, right? Competition is very tough, isn't it? You take the person who's hiring out to lunch. You know, just talk about the requirements of the job. You say, you know, they say, well, I don't know. I'm not quite comfortable with this, but I'll go along with you anyway. Have anything you want on the menu. My truth. I just want to get you out here and talk about that. Now you know that you're giving yourself a bit of an advantage, don't you? Not everybody's doing that. But is it really wrong? I mean, you know, from an egoist perspective, yeah, do it. All those other people are dummies if they're not doing it, right? And that person obviously is getting something out of it if they're sitting there across from you. What about from a contractarian perspective? You know, if it's bribing judges and subverting the, you know, the courts and stuff like that, that can't be tolerated. But what about, you know, what seems to be much more innocent, you know, or gray area, bribery? I don't know. Does that cause social order to break down? If I take somebody out to lunch, I mean, something like that is popular because if you're in sales, you know, everybody tries to say to a potential client, oh, you know, it's about to dinner, or you know, I don't want you to do this big rooftop party and you know, on a larger scale. You're right. People do that stuff all the time. But it's kind of where it gets bad is when it affects people not within that party. Like, for instance, I judged that took bribe to send kids to juvenile detention centers. Yeah. You know what I mean? So I think there's kind of like a social norm where we think it's acceptable if it kind of somewhat refines the two parties. Okay. And it actually plays out the politics too in our society. We have lobbying, all sorts of things along those lines. That the local, state, and federal level. A virtue ethicist taking bribes doesn't really matter what it is. It's not that taking bribes in and of itself is automatically wrong. Another perspective we're gonna look at later on in the semester is gonna say that. What kind of character does a person have who is willing to prefer others for a lunch? Is that the kind of person that you look up to? No? Yeah. It's all like recruiting stuff. We think their better candidate and you might hire them. Well, that's going the other way around. That's that the room would be buying them lunch. Yeah. You know, that could be an interesting one to look at as well. Especially thinking about athletic recruiting. Because sometimes, you know, there are these cases every once in a while where some athlete has been given way more than they possibly should have been given by some coach and then the coach gets disciplined and then the question gets debated, doesn't it? Sports channels and sports illustrated. Well, is this really wrong? This is the way it goes. You know, somebody says it is wrong and another person says it isn't wrong. You've got a moral disagreement there. I'm gonna sketch out for you Socrates' position. And Socrates is drawing this parallel in this chapter between the city and the human being. And he is sketching out an ideal city, right? You've got the rulers, the guardians, and you've got the soldiers, you've got the lesser guardians, and then you've got the trades people. And each one of these is important, aren't they? They all have their roles. They all have their jobs. What makes them do their job well? What consists in their function? What makes them stay on track? What do they give to the city? It's not just doing something once in a while. It's a state of character. It's a habit. And the habit of a city character that the rulers have is wisdom. Or often we call this not just wisdom, but prudence. Being able to figure out what ought to be done. I mean, if a ruler is a good ruler, they shouldn't just be flying by the seat of their pants. They should actually have some plans ahead of time how we're gonna deal with this problem, how we're going to reconcile all these people who can't seem to get along with each other to each other, how we're gonna promote justice within the city, right? How we're gonna be fair, how we're gonna look ahead for likely issues that are gonna come up. What about soldiers? What's the biggest thing that soldiers need besides weapons? Yeah? Courage. Courage, right, because if you have weapons, but you don't have courage, you're actually arming your enemy. As soon as you drop that weapon, they're gonna pick it up. This is why it's not always a great idea to arm all the citizens against crime. If you like to carry a knife, but you don't have the guts to use it, and somebody attacks you, you're just giving them a knife, because they'll take it away from you and use it on you. Did you say something about it? So, soldiers need courage. It is courage something that you just sort of cap it into. What do we do with our soldiers to try to promote courage? We're in a war, you know, I mean, yeah, I thought you had to do your hand up. What do we do? You kind of build a morale state, so that people can't be breaking down and then build it back up. Exactly. What's the basic work of our team? Yeah, boot camp for the Marines, for Navy people, I think, too, right? And then, basic training for the Army, I don't know what the Air Force has. And they're very similar. You're right, there's a process of breaking people down, and you drill them, and then you build their morale back up, and you also put them into dangerous situations. Like, I remember in basic, one of the things that we had to do, which I didn't actually find all that daunting, and some of the people did, was we had to crawl under machine gun fire through barbed wire and other things blowing up around us, but I kind of like that sort of thing. What I found scary was I had to repel off the tower, so I have a fear of heights. And I actually, this is kind of an interesting digression. When I had somebody yelling at me, and saying, I'm gonna throw you off this tower if you don't get off my tower, you know, I could do it. I was scared, but I could jump off and repel. And I did it several times after that while I was in the military. I got out of the military, and a friend of mine said, hey, let's go repelling. I know this great bridge and we can do it. And I was like, yeah, okay, I'll do that. And I jumped off and my hand would just seize up. When there wasn't anybody pushing me to do it, turned out I didn't really have courage. Because if I really had courage, I could have continued the repelling. We want soldiers to actually have that. Who else do we want to have that? He doesn't talk so much about this, but yeah, fireman. Fireman, yeah, I mean, to go into a building that's actually on fire, totally encumbered in a whole bunch of stuff, that's irrational behavior, but it's done for some good, which makes it rational. And what allows you to do that? Duration. What else? Policeman. Yeah. Let's cover the whole thing. Prison guards need to know that. Especially with some of the prisoners. And we'll leave it here whether anybody else needs courage. I think that actually all of you need courage, whether you're going to be cops or firemen or soldiers or anything like that. Because we'll meet in other circumstances, but we'll talk later. What about tradespeople? Tradespeople are not the rulers, they're not gung-ho soldiers out there, they're just people earning a living. What are the temptations that they're going to be subject to? Agreed. It's one of them, right? Taking too much. What they need is what's called temperance, moderation. You know, if you want to be a good electrician, you can't be a drunk, can you? And you know, why aren't people drunk? Because they like to drink, because it's enjoyable. Drinking is pleasant. And not always. I mean, the hangover the next day isn't. And when you first start doing it, you may not like the taste of some of the things that you're drinking. You know, like when you first taste your dance beer, you know, you open it up and bring it out to them, and you taste it, and you say, how can anybody drink this stuff? It's horrible. But you get older, and then you get the taste for it. Or when you have your first whiskey, that's awful. It's terrible stuff. But then you learn how to appreciate it, right? And once you do, now you gotta watch out. Because drinking feels good. And it's fun. And if you do it too much, you're gonna keep doing it too much, aren't you? You set up habits. There's an added thing here, drink is alcohol's actually addicting. But you know, we can distinguish between psychological addiction, which is a matter of vice, and then you know, physical addiction. Coffee is also addicting. But coffee doesn't always make you act like a jerk. You don't do too much of that. Or fall asleep at the wheel or things like that. So we're less concerned with that. But you know, if the tradespeople are drinking too much, or if the tradespeople are greedy, or if the tradespeople are, you know, what are other pleasures that can lead us astray? They're lazy because they're spending too much time in bed. They're not gonna fulfill their task well, are they? So they need moderation. Everybody else does too. And then according to Socrates, when you have all of these classes having these things, and they're all allowed to do their job, you have justice. Everybody is getting to do what they have to do. So justice is a kind of harmony inside of the city. And people who promote that would be just people, people who go against it would be unjust people. What about with the human being? Here's where it gets really interesting. We can't see our souls, right? There's a very funny, that all of you see the new remake of the plan under the apes. I'm not talking about the one that just came up, or the one that came out about eight, nine years ago, had Tim Roth in it. Mark Wahlberg. Mark Wahlberg, yeah. He's the childhood Eston character in it. Tim Roth is this guerrilla. He's an army general, and of course he hates humans, and he's supposed to be a typical big. There's a really great line in there. Mark Wahlberg is like one of the servants at that time, and they're having a debate, as people do at dinner parties about, well, these servants of ours that they have souls or not. Some people, I'll say, no, they don't. They're just dirty animals. Look at them, they don't even have hair, like apes. And Tim Roth's character, grabs Mark Wahlberg, I don't know if you remember this scene, right? And he pulls open his mouth, and he looks inside and says, I don't see a soul in here, and pushes him away. And that's supposed to add to the conversation. We often imagine when we talk about the soul as something like, you've all seen movies where somebody gets hit, they die, they have an out of body experience. You see this kind of ghostly thing floating. Sometimes it's in cartoons. Sometimes it's like some sci-fi thing. And the soul looks like the body, except it's just kind of see-through. Yeah, and that's where the person really is and their body's laying there just like meat now, right? Dead meat, as we say. What would be in there? What actually would be going on? That would be who the person really is, right? Because they're not that slab of meat on the table anymore. But what's in a soul? What makes you, you, other than wearing certain clothes and having certain appearance, which is gonna change over time. It can change overnight. Dye your hair, you can gain weight, lose weight, bulk up, lose your muscles. If you're a good athlete, you can actually change the way you walk, the way you sound, the way you project. What makes you you? Something different. We would often talk about it not necessarily as a soul, but as a personality, right? All of you have a personality? For better or for worse? You might like my personality, you might not like my personality, but I've got one, right? We all have one. Well, is it all just one big thing? Does every action that you're involved in, everything that you think about, everything that you desire to use the whole thing, or maybe could there be parts of you? Have you ever had the experience of being undecided, being torn between two different things, not being able to decide what to do? Like maybe you felt competing loyalties to your family and to your friends, or you attempted to do something and you knew it was bad. Boy, it was tempting. Well, Socrates says if that's the case, then there must be different parts because the same thing can't be acting or feeling and doing the two different ways at the same time, right? Think about it this way. Is he facing this way and facing that way at the same time? Maybe if you actually have the proverbial eyes in the back of your head, you can't. So what do we know that we do have in our soul? That's where it starts. And if you desire anything? Everybody has goals, but I think it goes along with the system of what we call values, like what we value in ourselves and in others that really make so far a character. What do you like about other people? Like that most people are good, caring, you know, they're gonna try to get along. Okay, so those are things that you desire, you know, other people. Those are probably things you desire about yourself, too, right? Yeah. You wanna be that way? Probably one of the people that know that you're that way. For the most part, yeah. That's gonna get us actually to the sort of the second level of the soul. Let's work at the real base level. Why do I drink coffee? It helps me stay awake, but do I need to be drinking coffee? I could be drinking, you know, four hour energy or, you know, taking caffeine pills. Why do I drink coffee? It's real simple. I like it. I like it, exactly. I like the taste of it, it pleases me. I have desire for coffee. When I get up in the morning and there's no coffee left, I'm ticked off. Who forgot to buy coffee to eat with me, right? So I can get ticked off at myself. What else do we have desires like that for? You're hungry, right? What does our body tell us we should do? How many of you are gonna go back to your dorm or something like that and take a nap? A few of you. Probably more than our cop into it. I would if I could myself, you know. But I don't have a dorm in here. So I'll go work. We desire to do that sort of stuff. We desire to lay in the sun. Sunlight feels good on our skin. We desire not to be cold. That's why you wouldn't be sunbathing right now, right? We have all sorts of desires. And Socrates uses a word that's called appetite. Appetite for one kind of desire. Desire for things that please us or don't please us. Sometimes our desire is to get rid of something that's hurting us. Like when you're really hungry, you're not just looking forward to the taste of the food. You want that hurt in your belly to stop, right? Now, caring what other people think about us, that's at a different level. That's not just at the level of satisfying basic appetites and desires. He's got a word here that in Greek that's very difficult to translate. And so we often say something like the spirit, the passionate part. This is the part where it gets angry too, by the way. Not angry like somebody forgot to buy coffee, but somebody forgot to buy coffee and they should have. And I'm put out by it. And that shows that they don't care about me, that they think they're better than me. When we get angry, we get angry not just because we don't have some need in that. It couldn't often have its origin in me. You didn't give me my food or my place in the sun or you're interrupting my sleep or pick anything along those lines. But we really get angry because we care about the way people perceive us. And when somebody does something wrong to us, we think, aha, now I know how you really feel about me. I don't matter to you at all, do I? Or I'm lower than you. You think you're better than me. That's why we get angry. We feel slighted. We feel that the other person has lowered us. This is also the part of us that competes for, for honor. And to be honored by other people, to be respected by other people, often demands that you put your desires on hold, right? All of us have, one of the desires we haven't talked about so far, sexual desire, right? Everybody wants to have sex. And they don't just want to have sex once. They want to have sex many, many times throughout their life, right? Can sexual desire get you in trouble? Anybody ever been in a relationship and even though the relationship was bad because the sex was good? But that was a long time ago. I went to college. Why do we do that? Why do we do stupid things along those lines? Well, here's where we get to another part, actually. Now what would actually tell us that's a bad idea? You think about things. You say, wait a second. This isn't good for me. I'm not getting anything good out of this. Bless you. I remember actually, I broke up with somebody as a New Year's resolution. She was very surprised. And it was because it was a bad relationship. And I reasoned it out. New Year's is the one time in the year where you start saying, what am I doing? Before you go out and start partying and all that. And I thought, what am I doing with this? This is not what I want at all. I don't see myself with this person a year from now. What the hell am I doing? So I reasoned it out. And reason can oppose appetite or desire. If you are trying to diet, your body wants to eat, right? Reason can say to you, I want to lose X amount of pounds. I can only do that if I actually diet. This is what we call practical reasoning. Therefore, I must not follow this desire. So reason can do that. And reason is not all that passion. One second. We also do that for this part of our soul that is concerned with honor, with self-respect, with how we feel about ourselves. Part of us that gets angry. We put things on hold for that. You don't go out and satisfy every sexual desire that you've got, in part because you care about what people think about you. You like people to respect you. Because you know, I mean, you're human beings like everybody else. And these can oppose each other. Sometimes the appetites can so dominate a person that they bring everything else in. One extreme example is addiction. Somebody is addicted to drugs or addicted to alcohol. Or there's, you know, I mean, I don't know if it's a real disorder. There's a lot of debate about this sexual addiction. But certainly food addictions, aren't there? Addicted behavior with respect to food. That's where the appetite takes over and makes all the other parts of the soul subservient to it. That's like in the city, the trade people take over. You can also have the soldiers take over, can't you? You could have that part of your soul that is obsessed with, you know, honor and respect and stuff like that. That could dominate reason too, couldn't it? Reason tells you what the good thing to do is and what the bad thing to do is. Sometimes just doing what you feel like when you're angry is anger always a really good guide to what you want to be doing. What does anger make you want to do? Something impulsive. Yeah, like what? Like going out and buying a latte for your partner? No. What kind of impulsive things do we do when we're angry? We'll file an act or maybe yelling at somebody. Yeah. And who do we yell at? Anybody? Depends on what type of person you're on. Some people just yell at the person next to them. Other people yell at the person they're actually angry at. Yeah, that's true. Some people, their anger spills over into all sorts of other things. Clearly going down reason, right? It might actually be rational to yell at the person that you're angry at. Hey, knock that off. I don't like it. Is it necessarily the best thing to abuse them with all sorts of foul language? Maybe not. That would be up to reason to decide. What does the spirited part of passion say about that? Yes! Or maybe hit them. Or if you can't act right away, maybe you have to sometimes put out a real nice face, but you can get back at them later. But usually it's not, is it? Reason would tell you that. What does a spirit tell you? Hell yeah, do it. It doesn't have the capacity to regulate itself. And a society where the soldiers are in charge, does that have a capacity to keep certain things in check? Do soldiers make really good rulers? Not usually. They tend to look out just for their own interests, don't they? Part of why we try to avoid voluntary dictatorships in the United States. What are you going to do? I was going to say you were talking about dieting and keeping I think you're about, one could still eat, but they could just work out more. Or you're right. And you know what you're doing by saying that? You are reasoning. You're finding alternate ways to make the same desired effect take place. Or one can eat more, but less calories. Like an egg has 90 calories. Seven eight points has 30 calories. So I could eat seven of them in over 18270 calories. Again, using reason, part of your soul that does that, does your hunger distinguish between any of that sort of stuff? That part of your soul doesn't. It just says eat, eat that, eat that. That looks good too. Have some of that. Reason is what allows you to say, that's got so many calories, that's OK for me. That's got too many, that's not OK for me. And reason, if your body and your soul are working right, then all three of these parts work together is what will make you into a just person, a person who is integrated, a person who is in harmony. If your appetites dominate you, think about an addict. Are there any heroin addicts, or crack heads, or math heads, who you would rely on to be just in their dealings with other people? No. But what do they do? What do math heads do to feed their addiction? How do they usually get themselves in trouble? It's not by being on math itself. The cop comes along, you're on math. I'm taking you in. What do they do? Stealing your. Yeah, that's the number one. They steal. Sometimes they kill people. They try to mug them, and it goes bad. Of course, math will make you aggressive too. I guess one of the benefits of heroin over math is that people on heroin just don't lay around. People on math start looking for things to do. So if we had to choose what to addict people to, I guess we'd probably pick heroin. But it's not a good thing, is it? Because their appetites are going to dominate. What if this part is in charge? That's the guy who gets in bar fights, whether he needs to or not. Or that's the more subtle warrior, the friend, the one who puts on a face of being your friend so that they can get close to you and then takes you down. Because what they're really about is being on top. Trasimachus is kind of a person along those lines, isn't he? And people who talk like Trasimachus very often are dominated by this part of their soul. They don't just want to get what pleases them, whether it's food or sacks or comfort or something like that. They want to be in charge. They want to dominate other people. They want to have power. They want to be looked up to. And they want it more than reason would say. And so they will probably be unjust. They will do wrong things. And we see in Trasimachus's case, it not only leads to being unjust. Look at the way he talks to Socrates. He's actually talking to his elder in these cases. And he's talking to them like he's an idiot. He's actually saying, this is the way we ought to be. One of the things that you can think about, and we'll think about this the rest of the semester, does that mean that we just put reason in charge and let that run the whole show? Yeah. And reason and prudence can also be seen as sometimes as a vice.