One characteristic, however, which I believe we do share with ancient Greece is the presence in both societies of significant numbers of Sophists, and the social-political-ethical disruptiveness they invariably produce.
The ancient Sophists were teachers, often itinerant, who claimed to be able to inculcate the sons of the well-to-do with the “wisdom” (sophia) necessary to be successful in life. In practice, this meant teaching them some basics of what we would call today the “liberal arts” but more particularly the art of rhetoric, with special emphasis on developing the ability to persuade anyone of anything, to argue both sides of a question with equal skill and thus to win any argument – and by fair means or foul.
As Hans-Georg Gadamer points out (in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, translated by P. Christopher Smith; Yale University Press, 1980), the rise of sophism had a deeply disturbing effect on the Athenians. The ability of the Sophists to confound any argument led to something of a crisis of confidence in the principles by which the citizens had lived for centuries. And it was this crisis that led the citizens to condemn Socrates to death, because they believed (mistakenly) that his questioning of people’s assumptions and values was just more of the same sophistry. Plato, of course, believed that Socrates’ dialectical method aimed to uncover truth, not to stultify it as the Sophists did, and spent the rest of his career trying to demonstrate this difference through his dialogues:
Plato must have asked himself how a Socrates was possible in a polis [city] whose political sense was as corrupted as the political sense of the Athens of that time. What power could have enabled someone, quite in contrast to the usual ways of doing things, to hold to what is “just” as though it were something real beyond all question and all dispute? Must not the “just” have been as tangibly evident and inescapably real for him as the tangible facts of our existence are for the rest of us? Plato’s answer to this question was the doctrine of ideas. What is just is not something valid by a convention whose bindingness could be disputed; rather it is something so overwhelmingly real that its existence transcends all behavior established by the social convention and all of a society’s beliefs (doxai). (“Logos and Ergon in Plato’s Lysis,” p. 4)
Plato’s most famous dialogue, the Republic, is devoted in its entirety to the question of what justice really is. It’s important to note that the Greek word translated as justice, diakosynē like so many ancient Greek words, has no exact synonym in English. As Gadamer explains, “Diakosynē is the true political virtue. It means more than the justice which distributes justly … It has the ancient and traditional sense of the quintessential civic virtue underlying any community and any authentic government … Diakosynē is what justice, integrity, rule by law and a civic sense are, all in one.”
The dialogue, in part, pits Socrates against two Sophists, Thrasymachus and Callicles, who claim that justice is “the advantage of the powerful.” In other words, what is called justice is really nothing of the sort, but rather is what rulers use to keep the citizenry cowed, complacent and cooperative. Alternatively, these Sophists argue, justice refers to the structures that the masses create to try to protect themselves from the predations of the powerful. Either way, they see justice in terms of the uses or abuses of power. Socrates (and Plato) naturally reject these claims, as well as the larger sophistic worldview from which they spring. As Gadamer puts it:
Plato’s Socratic insight was that a binding political ethos … no longer existed once sophism had come to define the spirit of education. To be sure, justice and the virtue of the political man were precisely what the Sophists’ education sought to inculcate, too. But Socrates had uncovered the real content and dogma of their new ethos. For the Sophists, justice is only the conventions of the weak which protect the interests of the latter. For the Sophists, ethical principles are no longer valid in themselves but only as a form of our mutual “keeping an eye” on one another. The “just” is that by means of which one person can assert himself against another with help from everyone else, and as such, it is adhered to only out of mutual distrust and fear … And whether the Sophists conceive of themselves as conservative or revolutionary, indeed, even when the Sophists think that they are giving a foundation to the authority of civil law, in principle they have already perverted the sense of justice … Thus Callicles’ and Thrasymachus’ declaration that might makes right only serves to disclose the mentality which prevails in all sophism: No one does what is right voluntarily.
[To Plato, in contrast] What is right and just is not the right that someone has in opposition to another. Rather, it is being just: Each is just by himself and all are just together. Justice does not exist when each person watches the other and guards against him, but when each watches himself and guards the right and just being of his inner constitution. (“Plato and the Poets,” 50-51; emphasis in original)
Now, not to be invidious, but despite the lip service paid by modern historians to the influence of Greek philosophy on the Western world, anyone who looks carefully at the state of our politics and our culture generally must conclude that the teachings of the “great philosophers” have had far less influence on us than those of the Sophists.
To take but one example from contemporary society, there’s a widespread view that the term “business ethics” is an oxymoron. This cynical opinion is based, sad to say, on the actual observed behavior of some business people. But a lot of the things that businesses do – and here we’re talking more about large corporations than small, sole-proprietor-type companies – that have such obviously harmful effects on individuals, communities and the nation as a whole are perfectly allowable under prevailing theories of ethics in business.
There are two main lines of thought in the study of ethics as applied to business, “shareholder values” and “stakeholder values.” The first argues that the sole purpose of a business, and the sole legitimate goal of a business’ owner or owners, is to earn a profit. In the process of doing so, the company will inevitably produce benefits for the community in the form of jobs created, taxes paid and so on. However, these are merely side-effects, and the business’ manager(s) mustn’t allow them to distract him or her from his or her profit-seeking. And equally, any negative effects that follow from the owner’s profit-seeking decisions – pollution of the air and water, destruction of communities by factory closings, perversion of the legislative process through influence-peddling, etc. etc. – should be ignored, because the decision ultimately will conduce to the “greater good” through the always-efficient and semi-divine workings of the free market.
The stakeholder approach differs by arguing that because businesses do not operate in a vacuum, their decisions and practices have an impact on wide swathes of society. Thus, many people besides the owner(s) have a “stake” in what the business does. Certainly, it’s in society’s best interest to have healthy, successful businesses creating jobs and paying taxes, but it’s also important to make sure those businesses aren’t doing more harm than good by causing those negative effects I mentioned above. So if they do cause harm, they must be required to make up for it in some way; for example, by “remediating” polluted sites or destroyed wetlands, or by “investing” in socially laudable enterprises such as job-training programs.
Which of these “theories” is really a sophistic way of evading the demands of a real ethics? Both, actually. The “shareholder” school is simply an updated version of the claim put forth by Thrasymachus: Justice is the advantage of the powerful. And the “stakeholder” view is Callicles’ claim, in modern dress, that justice is “keeping an eye” on each other.
The basis of these sophistic rationalizations is the same modern sociopolitical theories that represent people as atomistic “rational agents” whose pursuit of their own individual benefit will automatically benefit everyone else. Likewise, theories of business ethics claim that corporations also must be allowed maximum freedom to pursue profit by any means they see fit. If coal miners die, if oil-drilling rigs explode and pollute entire seas, if the whole financial industry implodes under the weight of its own misrepresentations, these are just “perturbations” in the process of the economy finding its “equilibrium.” The “greater good” – our energy- and money-intensive lifestyle – will still be served if we just overlook these minor, short-term, isolated, unrepresentative problems (sorry, “challenges”) and remember that the market will eventually sort everything out to everyone’s ultimate benefit.
The very fact that these things are presented as debatable shows how far we’ve strayed from a real understanding of what is ethical; that is, it shows how much we’ve allowed the Sophists of our time to blow smoke and cloud the issues. What the economists and “ethicists” are doing with these “theories” is nothing more than providing a veneer of intellectual justification for businesses doing what they wanted to do in the first place. And the proper response is not to debate the Sophists point-by-point, but to tell them, in all seriousness, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
Forget the “greater good.” Some things are just wrong.
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