Plato's Ethics Summary

Summary
Plato's Ethics: An Overview Human being is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct, and the virtues are the requisite skills and dispositions needed to attain it. In Plato’s early works his approach on happiness is largely negative. He treats happiness as a state of perfection that is hard to comprehend because it is based on metaphysical presuppositions that seem both hazy and out of the realm of ordinary understanding. In crucial texts Plato’s moral ideals appear both austere and self-abnegating: the soul is to remain aloof from the pleasure of the body. Moral values presuppose an appropriate political order that can be maintained only by leaders with a rigorous philosophical training. Human beings for the most part simply

According to Plato knowledge does not consist in a mental “gazing” at isolated models, but rather in uncovering the invariant relations that constitute the objects in question. The essential tie between soul and life is clearly not open to sense-perception; instead, it takes a good deal of reflection on what it means to be and to have a soul. Plato gives no advice concerning human conduct beyond the recommendation of a general abstemiousness from worldly temptations. A study of how a city comes to be will supposedly reveal the origin of justice and injustice. Its founding principle is, no high-minded concern but mutual economic need. “A city comes to be because none of us is self-sufficient. And because people need many things, and because one person calls on a second out of one need and on a third out of a different need, many people gather in a single place to live together as partners and helpers.” Economic needs are the basis of the political

There are three parts of the soul corresponding to the classes in the city, the rational part to the wisdom of the rulers, the spirited part to the courage of the soldiers, the appetitive part representing the rest of the population whose defining motivation material gain. Plato clearly goes on the assumption that human beings are happy insofar as they achieve the goals they cherish. Citizens of the third class who supposedly covet nothing but material goods. Plato grants them free enjoyment of all the customary goods that he has denied to the upper classes. The members of the third class are quite neglected in Plato’s ideal city; no education is provided for them. Plato’s ideal city seems to us far from ideal: The system resembles a well-oiled machine where everyone has their pointed function and economic niche; but its machine-like character seems repellent. Plato presupposes that the fulfillment of a person’s function is sufficient to secure her happiness. Plato wants to explain the generation and decay typical of each political system and the psychopathology of its leaders, which is based on the respective constitutions’ characteristic