Philosophical Courage and Temperance in Plato's Phaedo

The Phaedo, a recounting of Socrates's last conversations with his friends on his deathbed, ostensibly provided by the young man for whom the dialogue is named, includes early on in the discourse a short and startling discussion of the nature of several virtues -- courage and temperance first, and then wisdom and justice.  Plato has Socrates advance a doctrine that is entirely uncompromising, and in some respects paradoxical -- only philosophers actually possess these virtues.

As Socrates explains, everyone else is not only mistaken about the nature of these two virtues, i.e. temperance and courage -- that would not be surprising after all, given that even Socrates concedes a lack of knowledge about these in aporetic dialogues like the Laches and Charmides (or even virtue itself in the Meno!).  The "virtues" they possess, what they call and consider to be "courage" or "temperance" aren't really so.  In fact, the courage of the many (or even the non-philosopher one) is actually a kind of cowardice.  The temperance of the many really amounts to a sort of intemperance (or if you prefer more contemporary language, self-indulgence, lack of self-control).

Boethius on Mistaken Views of Happiness (part 1 of 2)

One of the essays I assign my Ethics students at the beginning of the semester is Alasdair MacIntyre's Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods (included in the Macintyre Reader). One reason I use that short piece is that it introduces an important theme, the idea that we are all, whether we realize it or not, involved in the processes of asking and answering certain fundamental questions:

. . . on an Aristotelian view, the questions posed by the moral philosopher and the questions posed by the plain person are to a certain degree inseparable.  And it is with questions that each begins, for each is engaged in enquiry, the plain person often unsystematically asking"What is my good?" and "What actions will achieve it?" and the moral philosopher systematically enquiring "What is the good for human beings?" and "what kind of actions will achieve the good?"  Any persistent attempt to answer either of these sets of questions soon leads to asking the other.

In MacIntyre's view -- and I think he's right -- we are all of us committed to one or another -- some more some less consistently -- to one moral theory or another, whether explicitly, consciously, deliberately so, or whether only implicitly, accepting it perhaps as the default, following a trajectory of desire we have failed, avoided, or even not had the opportunity to think out.  When we see these sorts of moral matters from a different perspective, we imaginatively place ourselves in the perspective of another, rival moral theory.  When we leave one perspective behind and adopt another -- whether by a gradual process or a sudden conversions -- we shift our allegiance from one moral theory to another.