Autor: Plato

Buch: Gorgias

Titel: Gorgias

Stichwort: Verhältniss: Tugend - Glückseligkeit (happiness); Tugend als Mittel zur Glückseligkeit? (Irwin)

Kurzinhalt: ... they say that the value of virtue is purely instrumental: it is a means to happiness; Craft Analogy

Textausschnitt: XXIc Virtue is, on this view, the chief component of happiness. If asked what happiness consists in, Socrates would reply: above all, it consists in being moral and behaving morally. See his reply to Polus at 470e about the happiness of the Persian king. Other scholars (most notably Irwin), however, interpret the evidence differently. Rather than saying that virtue specifies, or all but specifies, the content of happiness, they say that the value of virtue is purely instrumental: it is a means to happiness. (Fs) (notabene)
XXIIa A reader might think that this is all a scholarly storm in a teacup. Both interpretations, he or she might say, are simply claiming in different ways that virtue makes me happy. But there is rather more to it than that. I have already mentioned that in normal language, happiness and pleasure operate in much the same way. Now, consider the sentence, 'Gardening gives me pleasure.' The pleasure which gardening gives me is just the pleasure of gardening; it cannot be any other kind of pleasure, such as the pleasure of hang-gliding. Pleasure is, in technical terminology, an epiphenomenon; a given pleasure attends a given activity and no other activity. (Fs) (notabene)

XXIIb Much the same is surely true of happiness (except that pleasure operates episode by episode, whereas happiness is more accurately assessed as an overall state). Happiness too is a state of being rather than an activity or set of activities. Its nature does not need extra specification: once you have specified the activity or activities which make you happy, you have gone as far as you can. Vlastos's interpretation satisfies this criterion: to say that virtue is the chief component of happiness is to say that happiness attends, above all, virtue. Irwin's instrumentalist interpretation, however, does not satisfy this criterion: it introduces such a gap between virtue and happiness that it is unclear what the content of happiness is. It is the equivalent of interpreting the sentence 'Gardening gives me pleasure' as if the pleasure was detachable from the gardening. (Fs) (notabene)

XXIIc Although I have not seen precisely this criticism of the instrumentalist view before, it may not be out of place to assure the reader that a majority of scholars nowadays would agree that Irwin's instrumentalist view is incorrect. It relies heavily on a feature which he calls the Craft Analogy. According to the Craft Analogy, the knowledge which, Socrates repeatedly tells us, is virtue, is like craft knowledge: just as a craft has a definite product, so virtue has a product and that product is happiness. However, this over-emphasizes one aspect of Socrates' talk about 'craft' {tekhne-see p. xi): not everything that is called a tekhne has a product. Within Gorgias, for instance, purely theoretical disciplines such as mathematics are called tekhnai (450d). So it is certainly not clear that in likening virtue to tekhnai Plato means us to infer that virtue has a product, namely happiness. What Socrates seems to mean by the so-called 'paradox' that virtue is knowledge is that virtue involves knowledge of what is good and bad for oneself. (Fs) (notabene)