An absolutist Socrates

We often think of Socrates as the ultimate "critical free thinker". He antagonized many in Athens through his relentless questioning of shared assumptions about ethics, the gods, and the nature of knowledge and belief. And, as a result, he was also thought to have "corrupted the youth", leading many young men of the Athenian elite into a skeptical rejection of the knowledge, wisdom, and authority of their seniors. 

So what are we to make of Socrates' principled rejection of the efforts of Crito and other friends to persuade him to flee Athens and avoid the sentence of death to which his trial led? Crito offers a series of pragmatic reasons why Socrates should flee: the welfare of his children, the avoidance of harm for his friends, who will be thought to have been too afraid or too penurious to help Socrates escape, his own ability to lead a happy and fulfilling life in another city.

Socrates' reply is that he is not willing to consider reasons of self-interest (or the interests of others) until he has satisfied himself on what virtue or justice requires of him. Socrates insists that he wants to make the virtuous choice, not the most advantageous choice. He focuses on what justice requires of a citizen when the laws of the city have led to a command that requires great sacrifice of the citizen. In his own case, the laws of the city have been observed: charges have been lawfully brought forward; he has been given the opportunity to rebut the charges; and a majority of the jury has found him guilty of the charges and a separate majority has voted in favor of the penalty of death. The laws of the city have spoken; so what now is the unconditional obligation of the citizen?

Socrates' reasoned answer is unequivocal. He concludes that the lawfully enacted commands of the city create unconditional obligations of compliance for the citizen.

So: Do we say that we should never willingly act unjustly, or that we should in some instances and not in others? Or is acting unjustly never good or noble, as we often agreed on previous occasions? (Crito 49a)

...

So: And so one must never act unjustly.

Cr: By no means.

So: And so one should not repay an injustice with an injustice, as the many think, since one should never act unjustly. (49b)

Here Socrates believes he has established the unconditional, unqualified obligation to act justly. So all that remains is to determine whether "acting justly" requires complying with the lawfully executed commands of the state. But first, are there exceptions to this principle -- for example, in cases where the state's commands are themselves unjust? And second, are there qualifications about the "legitimate" state that must be respected in order to create obligations at all?

Or will we say to them "The city treated us unjustly and did not decide the case properly"? Will we say this or something like it?

Cr: By Zeus, that's what we'll say, Socrates. (50c)

Socrates emphatically rejects this idea: there is no exception for "unjust commands" by the state.

So: What if the laws then said, "Socrates, did we agree on this, we and you, to honor the decisions that the city makes?" And if we were surprised to hear them say this, perhaps they would say, "Socrates, don't be surprised at what we're saying but answer, since you are used to participating in questioning and answering. Come then, what reason can you give us and the city for trying to destroy us? Did we not, to begin with, give birth to you? And wasn't it through us that your father married your mother and conceived you? So show those of us, the laws concerning marriages, what fault you find that keeps them from being good?" "I find no fault with them," I would say. (50c)

And the crucial lines:

"Well, then. Since you have been born and brought up and educated, could you say that you were not our offspring and slave from the beginning, both you and your ancestors? And if this is so, do you suppose that justice between you and us is based on equality, and do you think that whatever we might try to do to you, it is just for you to do these things to us in return? (50e)

The authority of the city, then, depends on two things: the citizen's agreement (explicit or implicit) to comply with decisions the city makes; and the idea that the city created the citizen and rightly "owns" the citizen as offspring and slave. The first reason is fundamentally a social-contract argument for the origins of political obligation, while the second is an even older argument based on the idea of "moral parentage" of the citizen by the city and its laws. And, conjoined with arguments described above, the obligations described here are unconditional: the city has the inherent right to command (enact its laws) without limitation, and the citizen has the absolute duty of compliance. The city and its laws have a moral status higher than that of the citizen.

This is an absolutist theory of the state and its authority. It is, among other things, a complete refutation of the legitimacy of principled civil disobedience; disobedience and non-compliance are never "just". It is also a procedural conception of justice: if the laws stipulate that capital cases must be decided in a day, then there is no place for argument or resistance to the effect that this requirement is unjust to the accused. 

It is worth noticing that Socrates (or Plato) stacks the deck a bit here, by considering only the city's command and the consequence for the individual citizen. The citizen must comply, no matter what the cost to his own interests. But surely this is a special case. If the individual wishes to sacrifice his own interests or life in obedience to the commands of the state, perhaps we should simply regard this as an individual choice. However, the arguments seem to have the same force if the city's commands require the citizen to inflict harm on others -- innocent civilians, members of family, other citizens. If the laws had allowed as punishment for the crimes for which Socrates was convicted the execution of the accused and his children, would Socrates be equally obliged by the requirement of justice to comply? More historically, if the city had commanded that Cleon had unlimited authority to choose the means of war against Sparta (delegating its unconditional right to command) and Cleon had ordered the massacre at Melos, would any Athenian soldier have the moral right to refuse the order? It appears that Socrates' arguments to Crito would persist in holding that the authority to command is absolute; therefore soldiers must comply.

This argument for the duty of compliance appears to present a theory of the state that is wholly unlimited in its justification of the unconstrained authority of the state. There are no limits on the actions the state can undertake; there are no rights of citizens that the state must respect; there is no recourse for the citizen against "illegitimate or mistaken" commands by the state. There is no constitution or bill of rights defining the legitimate scope and limits of state power, and nothing that secures an inviolable zone of protection for the rights of the individual citizen.

Socrates was executed by a judicial process conducted under the terms of Athenian democracy. But what about the commands of the city and its laws during the rule of the Tyrants? Were Athenian citizens equally obligated to comply with the commands of the Tyrants during the period in which they ruled? If so, what distinguishes a legitimate state from an illegitimate one? For that matter, how are we to understand Socrates' own refusal to do the bidding of the Tyrants? Why did he not regard their commands as being as absolute and binding as those of the democracy?

Athens' condemnation of Socrates for his speech and teaching is one thing; legitimation of the massacres committed by Cleon in the name of Athens is another. And yet the arguments offered by Socrates in the Crito seem to equally support both. (See these earlier posts for more discussion of crimes of war committed during the Peloponnesian War; link, link.) This suggests that the political theory defended in Crito is fundamentally wrong, and wrong in a very deep way. It provides an absolutist, even totalitarian, basis for thinking about the relationship between state and citizen that is antithetical to the idea of the moral autonomy of the citizen.

Psychology of morality

Morality is a part of everyday life and personal experience. It is also, of course, the subject of a large field of philosophy -- philosophical ethics. What principles should I follow in action? What kind of person do I want to be? What do I owe to other people in a range of circumstances? 

We can also study moral thinking and action from the point of view of empirical psychology. Several areas of method and theory have been developed in psychology for the study of moral reasoning and behavior, including cognitive studies of moral thinking, social-psychological studies of the influence of external social factors on moral behavior, evolutionary studies of the evolutionary development of moral emotions, and ethnomethodological studies of "morality in interaction".

So it is worth asking how much we can learn about real everyday moral behavior from the empirical research psychologists have done on these questions to date. What insights can we gain from empirical research into the question, “why do people behave as they do in ‘morally’ salient circumstances”? And of particular interest — are there findings that are useful for understanding the behavior of “ordinary people” in times of catastrophe?

Naomi Ellemers, Jojanneke van der Toorn, Yavor Paunov, and Thed van Leeuwen's "The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017" (link) provides a large literature review of research in the psychology of morality since 1940. Based on content analysis of almost 1,300 research articles. published since 1996, they have classified research topics and empirical methods into a small number of categories. Here is a cluster graph of their analysis.

Their analysis permits them to categorize the field of moral psychology around several groups of research questions and empirical approaches.

Research questions: The authors find that the roughly 2,000 articles considered permit identification of five large areas of research: moral reasoning; moral judgments; moral behavior; moral emotions; and moral self-views. These categories complement each other, in the sense that findings in one area can serve to explain findings in another area.

Empirical approaches and measures: The authors find several fairly distinctive empirical approaches to problems in moral psychology. Most of these approaches primarily make use of self-reports and questionnaires by subjects in response to morally relevant questions. Topics include —

• hypothetical moral dilemmas
• lists of traits or behaviors,
• endorsement of abstract moral rules, and
• position on specific moral issues (Table 1).

The bulk of these studies rely on correlational analysis. Some of the research papers reviewed make use of controlled experiments in which a set of controlled laboratory circumstances or a series of questions are presented to the subject, and the researcher hopes to discover causal relationships based on variations in behavior resulting from changing experimental conditions. (It is striking that neither of the most famous experiments on moral behavior are mentioned or placed within the conceptual structure of the authors' findings: the Milgram experiment and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment.)

Ellemers et al further differentiate studies of morality according to the level of mechanism that is the primary object of investigation: intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup mechanisms. Here is their brief summary of these levels of mechanisms:

(a) research on intrapersonal mechanisms, which studies how a single individual considers, evaluates, or makes decisions about rules, objects, situations, and courses of action; (b) research on interpersonal mechanisms, which examines how individuals perceive, evaluate, and interact with other individuals; (c) research on intragroup mechanisms, investigating how people perceive, evaluate, and respond to norms or behaviors displayed by other members of the same group, work or sports team, religious community, or organization; and (d) research on intergroup mechanisms, focusing on how people perceive, evaluate, and interact with members of different cultural, ethnic, or national groups. (342)

Here is their tabulation of "number of publications" classified by mechanism and research theme.

"Intrapersonal" mechanisms are the predominant object of research in all research areas except "Moral judgments", and "Intragroup" mechanisms are least frequently examined across the board.

The authors identify three "seminal publications" in the field of the psychology of morality: Haidt 2001, Greene et al. 2001, and Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway 2003. They also provide the top three seminal publications for each research area. These are selected based on the total number of citation each article received. 

This article succeeds in providing an abstract map of topics, methods, and levels of analysis across a reasonably comprehensive set of research articles published between 1960 and 2017. The extensive list of references the authors provide is a course in itself on the current state of empirical moral psychology. (Interested readers will also find much relevant discussion in Hellemers' monograph, Morality and the Regulation of Social Behavior: Groups as Moral Anchors.)

Two other articles are worth considering on the question of how we should go about trying to understand "human morality and moral behavior" using empirical methods.

Kristen Monroe's "Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers, Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust" (link) is particularly interesting in connection with the problem of understanding how "ordinary people" can commit evil actions. Her article provides both a useful survey of a large literature of social-psychology studies of individual genocidal behavior, and her own original research based on close analysis of extensive interviews with genociders, bystanders, and rescuers. Especially important among the sources included in Monroe's literature review is The Courage to Care (Rittener, C., & Myers, S. (1986)), which provides a large collection of Holocaust-era survivor interviews from each category. Monroe's 2012 monograph Ethics in an Age of Terror and Genocide: Identity and Moral Choice goes into more extensive detail on the main findings of "Cracking the Code of Genocide" concerning what we can learn from interviews with participants about the nature of moral conduct.

Most interesting is Monroe's own work in which she performs detailed analyses of 100 interviews in order to identify underlying themes and psychological factors. She uses "narrative interpretive analytic methodology" (706) to sort out factors of psychological importance. Monroe's analysis finds that there are distinctive differences in self-images, worldview, and cognitive classifications (700) across these three groups of participants.

A narrative interpretive analysis of in-depth interviews with bystanders, Nazis, and rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust reveals the intricate but critical importance of psychological factors in explaining behavior during genocides.... Bystanders see themselves as passive people, lacking in control and low in efficacy. The Nazi self-image is as victims who need to protect themselves and their community. Rescuers consider themselves connected to all human beings through bonds of a common humanity. The rescuers' idealized cognitive model of what it means to be a human being is far more expansive and inclusive than the model employed by bystanders or Nazis. (700)

She offers six major findings:

1. Self-image is the central psychological variable
2. Identity constrains choice for all individuals
3. Character and self-image are not all. A critical ethical aspect of identity is relational
4. The ethical importance of values works through the fashion in which values are integrated into the speaker's sense of self and worldview
5. Personal suffering, in the form of past trauma, heightens awareness of the plight of others for rescuers; for bystanders and Nazis, however, it increases a sense of vulnerability
6. Speakers' cognitive categorization systems carry strong ethical overtones. (711)

Gabriel Abend looks at the field of moral psychology from the other end of the telescope in "What the Science of Morality Doesn’t Say About Morality" (link). He provides a literature review the current research area in moral psychology that aims to discover a neuroscience analysis of morality. This field of research program attempts to provide neurophysiological correlates with moral judgments. "What brain areas are “activated,” “recruited,” “implicated,” “responsible for,” or “associated with” making moral judgments?" (162). Abend's article provides a sustained critique of the assumptions in use in this field, and what he regards as its over-emphasis on one small aspect of "morality in everyday life": the question of moral judgment. Against the idea that this line of research constitutes the whole of a "new science of morality", Abend asks for methodological and theoretical pluralism. "I call for a pluralism of methods and objects of inquiry in the scientific investigation of morality, so that it transcends its problematic overemphasis on a particular kind of individual moral judgment" (abstract).

The approach to empirical research in moral psychology that appeals most to me is one that begins with a rich conception of the human moral subject — the human being capable of reflective thought and imagination, the person possessed with a social identity and self-image, the person situated within a set of meaningful social relationships, the person embodying a range of moral emotions. With a rich conception like this underlying the research agenda, there is ample space for empirical study of the causal and meaning-laden processes that influence action in difficult circumstances. And this approach brings empirical research into closer dialogue with philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Susan Neiman.

*     *     *     *     *

The topic of explaining brutal and violent actions in times of social upheaval is directly relevant to the violence of China's Cultural Revolution represented in the photograph above. Here is a brief description of the violence by students against teachers and administrators in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.

1966; August 5: Ms. Bian Zhongyun, the deputy principal of the Beijing Normal University Female Middle School, along with four other school educators, was attacked by the Red Guards on groundless charges. Bian died after several hours of humiliating treatment and brutal beating. This was the first case of the killing of educators in China by the Red Guards and other militant students. Many more cases followed, and the brutality escalated rapidly. Thousands of educators were publicly denounced and physically abused in “struggle sessions” by the rampaging students in Beijing’s secondary schools and universities. This includes 20 documented cases of killings y the Red Guards (Wang, 2004: 3-16 and Guo, 2006: 12) ***. The mass violence soon spread off campus, as the Red Guards beat seven residents of the same middle school to death in the city’s neighborhoods. In the District where this school was located, 333 residents were killed by the Red Guards at middle schools in August 1966 alone (Wang, 2004: 16) ***. [Yongyi Song, "Chronology of mass killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)"; link.)

Song summarizes a wide range of estimates of persons killed during the Cultural Revolution and settles on an estimate in excess of two million people. Many of the participants in these acts of cruelty, violence, humiliation, and murder were ordinary Chinese men and women, as well as teenagers and sub-teenagers. How are we to explain their behavior against their fellow citizens and even their teachers? Here are several earlier posts about the Cultural Revolution (link).

(Also of interest are several earlier posts in Understanding Society reviewing empirical work in psychology on the topic of character as a factor influencing behavior and action; link, link, link, link.)

Can Nietzsche support a decent political philosophy?

Nietzsche's anti-moralism is a key theme in his philosophy and civilizational criticism. He regarded traditional European morality as "herd morality", the deplorable consequence of Christian values of subordination and ressentiment. It is hard enough to find in Beyond Good and Evil or Genealogy of Morals a basis for criticizing even the most grotesque examples of interpersonal brutality and violence, and Nietzsche is contemptuous of the values of kindness and compassion. And it is virtually impossible to find an explicit consideration of the question, are there moral limitations on the behavior of states? To put the point simply: does Nietzsche have the philosophical stuff to condemn the Holocaust or the Holodomor?

How would Nietzsche respond if he were time-transported to the MSNBC studio and interviewed by Rachel Maddow? The session might begin along these lines: "Mr. Nietzsche, welcome to the program. I'd like to ask you the most pressing question today: The armed forces of the Russian Federation are torturing, raping, and murdering civilians in Ukraine today in an effort to defeat Ukraine in its war of aggression. Can you condemn these acts as war crimes and atrocities against the innocent, given your statements about "morality" and the "will to power" in your celebrated work, Beyond Good and Evil?"

It would of course be very interesting to have this conversation with Nietzsche. But today all we have are his texts and letters, and they are unpromising in this context. Given his pervasive anti-moralism, any contemporary reader of Nietzsche is forced to ask: can Nietzsche have a political philosophy?

Two discussions of this question have been noteworthy in the past decade or so. Tamsin Shaw's 2007 monograph Nietzsche's Political Skepticism provides an extended argument about why it is philosophically difficult for Nietzsche to offer a political philosophy. And the essays in Barry Stocker and Manuel Knoll's edited volume Nietzsche as Political Philosopher are insightful as well.

The painful pill presented by Nietzsche's writings to anyone who loves liberal democracy is that Nietzsche's attack on humanistic morality suggests ugly possibilities: the acceptance of totalitarianism and dictatorship, the unfettered use of state power to oppress the citizens of the state, and moral indifference to aggressive war by a powerful state against a weak state. If citizens do not have morally defensible rights against each other and the state; if there are not morally compelling reasons for believing in and entrenching the equality of all citizens; and if there are no morally compelling principles regulating the use of the instruments of war by a state against another state or people -- then there is no basis for criticizing the Gulag, genocide, and brutal aggressive war. So we seem to step directly from Nietzsche to Putinism.

Rolf Zimmermann's essay "The 'Will to Power'", included in the Stocker and Knoll volume, addresses this issue directly, with a conclusion that may surprise the reader. Zimmermann argues that Nietzsche's framework is compatible with both a liberal state and an authoritarian state. It all depends on what we want (that is, what set of primary values about ourselves and our interactions with others we have adopted, as a nation).

Political implications, on the collective level, can be discussed with regard to two conceptions that may be explicated in the sense of a liberal and an authoritarian ideal type. At the same time, we must face the problem as to whether Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism could be consistently integrated into a constitutional democracy of whatever kind. (Zimmerman in Stocker and Knoll 39)

Zimmermann offers a very interesting Nietzschean interpretation of the atrocious regimes of the twentieth century. His basic view is that Nietzsche insists on historicizing "civilizational" systems of values (and takes satisfaction in finding disagreeable features of their genealogies). So Zimmermann's view is not that the totalitarian ideologies of Hitler or Stalin were inspired by Nietzsche's philosophy or his moral nihilism, but rather they are comprehensible as the emergence of new moral-value frameworks following the demise of traditional Christian morality.

My own perspective, however, is quite different. I propose, first of all, to read the radical movements of the 20th century, especially Bolshevism and National Socialism (NS), in terms of their own new moralities that gained force in actual history in order to build socio-political formations. In doing so, these movements verified in a systematically relevant way Nietzsche’s paradigm of moral philosophy that is defined by insight into the appearance of divergent moralities in history conflicting with each other – divergent “wills to power”. This very insight of Nietzsche can be vindicated quite independently of critical objections to his moral-political philosophy in detail. In systematic terms, therefore, it is much more relevant to interpret developments of actual history within a conceptual frame set forth by Nietzsche in an arguable general sense, instead of searching for “influences” of Nietzsche on actual history dozens of years after his lifetime. (Zimmermann in Stocker and Knoll 48-49)

Zimmermann makes a very interesting point here: that the horrific regimes of the twentieth century can be interpreted within a Nietzschean "civilizational" framework, but not as an expression of Nietzschean values or anti-values.

Now, given the comparative descriptions of egalitarian universalism, Nazi-morality and Bolshevist-morality, we come to see the moral history of the 20th century clearly in Nietzschean terms, namely as a history of divergent moralities in conflict with each other, a history of divergent “wills to power” realizing themselves in socio-political forms without precedence, and thereby showing the value-forming capacity of man in disastrous results. (Zimmermann in Stocker and Knoll 55)

Most critically, Zimmermann believes it is consistent with Nietzsche's philosophical ideas to defend a liberal-egalitarian-constitutional theory of the state, along the lines described by JS Mill in On Liberty. But, crucially, "we would have to speak of egalitarian universalism equally as a historical phenomenon, in short as 'historical universalism', specifically related to the history of human rights since the 18th century" (55). Or in other words: real human beings and groups would have to struggle to secure and establish these values as the foundation of their polities.

This conclusion brings us to the central argument offered by Tamsin Shaw. Shaw believes that Nietzsche is profoundly doubtful of the ability of a nation to coalesce around a liberal-democratic consensus. Shaw too has a contribution in the Stocker and Knoll volume, comparing Nietzsche and Weber. But her central ideas on a possible political morality in Nietzsche's thought are conveyed in Nietzsche's Political Skepticism.

Shaw puts the weight of her argument on two points that she believes Nietzsche would accept: that a modern state requires a fairly high degree of "moral" consensus among its citizens about the actions and requirements of the state, and that modern society is largely incapable of arriving at such a consensus. Instead, the coercive power of the state is used to create a moral and normative consensus, through indoctrination, propaganda, education, and public festivals. This amounts to two core premises:

One concerns the nature of modern states and in particular the fact that their ability to rule a society requires convergence, in that society, on some shared normative beliefs. The other concerns the inability of secular societies to generate the required convergence through noncoercive means. (kl 131)

When religious institutions and beliefs had a powerful grip on the people of a nation, the values inculcated by those institutions provided an independent source of consensus which put some constraints on the nature and actions of the state. But with the collapse of religious identities (the death of God), there was no longer a point of convergence that could provide a basis for consensus. This leaves an open field for the coercive state to establish its own ideological institutions -- whether those of Hitler, Stalin, or Orbán. And, according to Shaw, this makes the normative foundations of a liberal democracy all but impossible:

So legitimacy in this sense requires that political institutions conform to the accepted norms of those over whom they rule, and that acceptance of these norms be uncoerced, at least by the political institutions that they purport to legitimate. But although this weak notion seems helpfully unambitious in demanding conformity to the professed normative beliefs of a population, rather than to the right norms, it presupposes precisely the kind of uncoerced convergence that Nietzsche thinks secularism is making increasingly unlikely. (kl 209)

She refers to this as "political skepticism", and she believes it is ineliminable from Nietzsche's thought.

Nietzsche’s political skepticism, then, consists in the view that we simply cannot reconcile our need for normative authority with our need for political authority. Given [Nietzsche's] own historical situation, as we shall see, he was vividly aware of the fragility of any apparent compromise between these demands. He does, in the later writings, occasionally seem inclined to give up on one or the other. But the real challenge that his skepticism presents to modern politics is somehow to find a way of not giving up on either. (kl 284)

This point is philosophically interesting. But more importantly, it is highly relevant to the politics of liberal democracies today. Anti-liberal, hate-based populists are gaining the narrative upper-hand, and there appears to be a steep decline in support for the traditional civic values of liberal democracy: rule of law, constitutional protections of rights, equality of all citizens. Further, this decline seems to coincide with rising support for authoritarian parties and candidates. There are numerous mechanisms that help to explain the rise of authoritarian and racist political values -- the solid hold that right-wing cable networks have on the "base", the targeted messaging of messages of hatred and distrust by social media platforms, and the increasing boldness of fascist-sounding elected officials. But maintaining strong and nearly universal support for the values of a liberal democracy is increasingly challenging.

Perhaps we need a modern-day Nietzsche to de-mystify the rantings of the far-right, and to help western democracies regain their sane and decent commitment to peace, equality, and freedom.

Here are several prior posts that address the threats to maintaining a democratic consensus (link, link, link, link).

Classification of political systems and theories

Graph of political systems (click image for full resolution)

It is possible to analyze much of the history of modern political philosophy -- political theory since Hobbes and Locke -- in terms of answers to a few primary questions. (This post expands upon a discussion of the "topology" of the space of political theories; link.) The answers to these primary questions can in principle generate a tree-structure of variants of political theories and systems. This is depicted in the graphic above, derived from these primary questions. 

1. Is a system of coercive law required for a peaceful human society?

Hobbes has a decisive answer to this question, based on his analysis of the state of nature. But it is also possible to make a case for a human community based on free cooperation among equals (anarchism).

2. Must a legitimate state provide strict protections of individual rights and liberties? (constitution)

Locke and Jefferson argued for the necessity of establishing protections of central rights and liberties that were essentially protected from legislation by the sovereign state -- a constitution.

a. Are there distinct limits to the exercise and purpose of state power? (constitutionality)

b. Do these limits create constraints on the kinds of legislation that can be adopted by a majority of citizens for the whole of society?

The most common view of the content of a governing constitution for a legitimate state is the idea that it should embody the moral facts of liberty and equality for all citizens. But what does liberty involve? And what kinds of equality must be protected? Here are a few possible answers to the latter question.

a. Equality of worth and treatment
b. Civil and legal equality
c. Equality in opportunities to fulfill human capacities and plans

3. Is majority rule morally mandatory in a just state? (democracy) 

Is democracy required in a legitimate state, given the moral realities of human beings in association with each other? Is majority rule morally superior to other possible political decision rules -- dictatorship, oligarchy, random assignment of citizens to positions in government, ....?

What moral principles are involved in defending the idea that a majority is entitled to impose its will on a minority with respect to various issues of public policy?

4. Are there moral reasons for concluding that a just state must embody programs to ensure the basic needs of all citizens -- health, education, old age, decent housing, adequate nutrition? (public good)

a. Does the moral equality of all citizens create a broad social requirement that all citizens should be in a position to realize their human capacities and freedoms?

b. Do all members of society have obligations of concern for each other?

c. Is a society with extensive welfare provisions more politically stable and cohesive than one without those provisions?

d. Is a society with extensive welfare provisions more economically efficient and progressive than one without those provisions?

5. Do groups, nations, religious communities, classes, or races have independent moral value, over and above the value of the individuals who compose the population? (community)

a. Do citizens owe something to their fellow citizens (beyond not violating their constitutional rights)?
b. Should the state encourage or incentivize involvement in voluntary civil associations?
c. Can / should important collective tasks be left to the authority and competence of community associations?

The graph provided at the top of the post represents a tree diagram of kinds of political theories, depending on the YES/NO answers that a give theory provides to these questions.

If we conclude with Hobbes that a sovereign state is needed in order to secure public order and security in a society of independent and free individuals, then we are committed to the idea of a coercive state and system of law. If we reject that position, then we end with anarchism. (See Robert Paul Wolff's brilliant In Defense of Anarchism for coherent arguments along these lines.) As a next step, we ask whether there are moral limits on the scope of the state. Does a legitimate state require a constitution guaranteeing the rights, liberties, and equality of citizens? If yes, should the constitutional order be governed by majority rule (within the constraints of the constitutional protections)? if yes, then we get liberal democracy. 

We can next ask the question about the need for state-funded programs to ensure the basic needs of all citizens and protecting against life's unfortunate contingencies (illness, unemployment, disability, old age). If yes, we get social democracy (or the welfare state). If no, we get the classic laissez-faire constitutional democracy, the minimal state. 

Taking the anti-democratic route through the tree, we get various forms of authoritarianism and illiberal democracy; and depending on the answer to the question of redistribution for public wellbeing, we get fascism, populist authoritarianism, oligarchy, and populism.

The question of the moral importance of community is to some extent separate from this series of distinctions. But it can be related to a number of the outcomes in the diagram -- on both the conservative and the progressive side of the spectrum. Philosophers defending anarchism have argued for the ability of a community of equals to find cooperative ways of handling its social life. Republicanism attributes independent value to the whole, over and above the value of the individual citizens. Populism in its various versions highlights the primacy of specific groups (racial, ethnic, national, gender, ...). And communism puts the future of society as a whole ahead of the importance of individuals in society. 

One consistent set of political values leads us through this tree to a particular solution: the favored political system should be a constitutional social democracy. If we favor individual freedom, human equality, democracy, and social wellbeing, then what John Rawls refers to as a "property-owning democracy" (link) is the best solution. This system can be spelled out simply:

a. Constitutional guarantees of full and equal rights and liberties as citizens

b. Economic life is carried out in a market economy regulated to ensure fair equality of opportunity.

c. Taxation to ensure inequalities of wealth do not create inequalities of dignity and fulfillment of capacities

d. Public provision (tax-financed) of reasonably high level of basic needs -- food, shelter, education, healthcare

This amounts to Rawls's two principles of justice and his argument for a property-owning democracy (Rawls, Justice as Fairness). The liberty principle ensures the first point and the difference principle ensures the second point. The constraints involved in the idea of a property-owning democracy provide a solution to the apparent tension between liberty and equality.

Vasily Grossman on good and evil

Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate was long delayed in its publication because of Soviet censorship but has come to be recognized as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Grossman was a complex and appealing intellectual. Born in 1905, he was raised in a secular Jewish family in Berdichev, Ukraine. He was educated as a chemical engineer, but his vocation was writing and literature. When Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 Grossman became a war correspondent in the Red Army, and quickly emerged as one of the most active and popular observers of the chaos and murder of the German invasion throughout the war. He was present through much of the battle of Stalingrad, he was the first journalist to observe and write about the Treblinka death camp, and he maintained extensive notebooks recording his experiences and observations throughout the war and genocide. Alexandra Popoff's biography Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century offers a masterful account of his life and writings. Grossman began Life and Fate in the 1950s and completed it for publication in 1960. However, the manuscript and supporting materials were confiscated ("arrested") by the KGB and the novel was not published until 1980 (in Switzerland) -- sixteen years after Grossman's death.

The novel is riveting and complex. It represents an important piece of literary creation, a contribution to the history of the Holocaust and the German-Soviet war, and a prolonged critique of Stalinism. What is of special interest on this day in February, 2022 -- today, the first day of Russia's inexcusable and criminal aggressive war against Grossman's homeland, the Ukraine -- is Grossman's willingness to occasionally put the narrative aside and engage in philosophical-historical reflection. One such moment is in part 2, chapter 15, where Grossman presents a series of striking ideas about the nature of good and evil in history.

The theory is presented in a convoluted way. The old Bolshevik Mikhail Mostovskoy is a prisoner in a German concentration camp, and is brought for interrogation or conversation with Liss, a high Gestapo officer and student of Hegel. Liss has an unusual and surprising thesis to discuss with Mostovskoy: that both the Nazi officer and the loyal Bolshevik are involved in the same business -- service to an insane leader and a totalitarian ideology. Liss argues that the ideologies are remarkably similar. And secretly, Mostovskoy has come to see that the Soviet system is not so different from the Nazi system. He muses:

With all the strength of his soul, with all his revolutionary passion, he would have to hate the camps, the Lubyanka, bloodstained Yezhov, Yagoda, Beria! More than that ...! He would have to hate Stalin and his dictatorship! More than that! He would have to condemn Lenin ...! That was the edge of the abyss. (399)

The discussion of good and evil in this chapter is conveyed through the semi-coherent writings of another prisoner, the holy fool Ikonnikov. It is Ikonnikov whose shabby document on scraps of paper reflects on the history of good and evil. But the main lines of the view are Grossman's.

So what is the substance of this conception? To begin, the Ikonnikov manuscript rejects the idea that good and evil can be defined in general religious or philosophical terms. Religious doctrines in particular have given rise to great suffering, and Ikonnikov denies that religious figures or texts give humanity a true understanding of good and evil. He also denies that "good" is a universal concept, as perhaps a philosopher might hold:

People struggling for their particular good always attempt to dress it up as a universal good. They say: my good coincides with the universal good; my good is essential not only to me but to everyone; in achieving my good, I serve the universal good. (405)

Many books have been written about the nature of good and evil and the struggle between them ... There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil -- an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good -- whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed. Not only men, but even God himself is powerless to lessen this evil. (406)

And most pertinent, Ikonnikov (and Grossman) link this critique of "universal theory of the good" to the evils of Soviet actions in the 1930s in Ukraine:

I have seen the unshakeable strength of the idea of social good that was born in my own country. I saw this struggle during the period of general collectivization and again in 1937. I saw people being annihilated in the name of an idea of good as fine and humane as the ideal of Christianity. I saw whole villages dying of hunger; I saw peasant children dying in the snows of Siberia; I saw trains bound for Siberia with hundreds and thousands of men and women from Moscow, Leningrad and every city in Russia -- men and women who had been declared enemies of a great and bright idea of social good. This idea was something fine and noble -- yet it killed some without mercy, crippled the lives of others, and separated wives from husbands and children from fathers. (406-407)

Here Ikonnikov refers to the Holodomor, the terror and purges, and the Gulag -- all created by the deliberate purposes of the Soviet state. It is the utopian ideas of Marxist communism, and the grim realities of the Holodomor, the Stalinist terror, and the Gulag that Grossman is bringing into focus through Ikonnikov. Utopian socialism led to the Holodomor, the NKVD, and the Gulag -- all in pursuit of "socialism in one country." (No wonder the book was "arrested" in 1962; it is surprising that Grossman himself was not shot on the grounds of this passage alone.)

Here, the critique -- whether of religion or of Communism or of Nazism -- is a thorough rejection of the notion of sacrificing human beings to an idea or a future utopia.

Where do we find "good", then, if not in universal principles of religion or philosophy or utopian doctrine? Ikonnikov is very clear about this question: good is found in the concrete actions of ordinary human beings. Ikonnikov's and Grossman's conception of the good is particular to human beings as they exist in specific times and places; it is not adherence to a set of principles, visions of the future, or prescriptions for the ultimate "good" of society. Good is found in concrete humanity in its particular historical circumstances.

Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital 'G', there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother. (407-408)

And what is "kindness", the constant refrain of Grossman's optimism about the future? It is the simple human fact of compassion, the fact that human beings are often able to recognize the reality and the humanity of others around them, and to see that human reality as a concrete impulse to action. It is --

The private kindness of one individual towards another; a petty, thoughtless kindness; an unwitnessed kindness. Something we could call senseless kindness. A kindness outside any system of social or religious good. (408)

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil! This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. (409)

But Mostovskoy the disillusioned Bolshevik is not persuaded by Ikonnikov:

Yes, the man who had written this was unhinged. The ruin of a feeble spirit! The preacher declares that the heavens are empty ... He sees life as a war of everything against everything. And then at the end he starts tinkling the same old bells, praising the kindness of old women and hoping to extinguish a world-wide conflagration with an enema syringe. What trash! (410)

So whose view of good and evil is this -- the holy fool or Grossman himself? I believe it is Grossman's view, or at least an important part of his view. The theme of kindness is very deep in Grossman, and it is fundamental to his humanism and his faith in the future. Take this vignette from "The Old Teacher":

Then six-year-old Katya, the daughter of Weissman, the lieutenant who had been killed, came up to him in her torn dress, shuffling along in galoshes that were falling off her dirty, scratched little feet. Offering him a cold, sour pancake, she said, “Eat, teacher!”

He took the pancake and began to eat it, looking at the little girl’s thin face. As he ate, there was a sudden hush in the yard. Everyone—the old women, the big-breasted young women who could no longer remember their husbands, the one-legged lieutenant Voronenko lying on a mattress under a tree—was looking at the old man and the little girl. Rosenthal dropped his book and did not try to pick it up—he was looking at the little girl’s huge eyes, which were intently, even greedily, watching him as he ate. Once again he felt the urge to understand a wonder that never ceased to amaze him: human kindness. Perhaps the answer was there in the child’s eyes. But her eyes must have been too dark, or maybe what got in the way were his own tears—once again he saw nothing and understood nothing. (The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays)

And later, when the Jews of the village are being forced to the ravine to be slaughtered, the old teacher and the girl Katya are united again:

“How can I comfort her? How can I deceive her?” the old man wondered, gripped by a feeling of infinite sorrow. At this last minute too, there would be no one to support him, no one to say what he had longed all his life to hear— the words he had desired more than all the wisdom of books about the great thoughts and labors of man.

The little girl turned toward him. Her face was calm; it was the pale face of an adult, a face full of tolerant compassion. And in a sudden silence he heard her voice.

“Teacher,” she said, “don’t look that way, it will frighten you.” And, like a mother, she covered his eyes with the palms of her hands. (The Road)

A similar compassion and love for the particular human beings who died there is found in the closing lines of "The Hell of Treblinka":

Great is the power of true humanity. Humanity does not die until man dies. And when we see a brief but terrifying period of history, a period during which beasts triumph over human beings, the man being killed by the beast retains to his last breath his strength of spirit, clarity of thought, and passionate love. And the beast that triumphantly kills the man remains a beast. This immortality of spiritual strength is a somber martyrdom—the triumph of a dying man over a living beast. It was this, during the darkest days of 1942, that brought about the beginning of reason’s victory over bestial madness, the victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of the forces of progress over the forces of reaction. A terrible dawn over a field of blood and tears, over an ocean of suffering—a dawn breaking amid the cries of dying mothers and infants, amid the death rattles of the aged.

The beasts and the beasts’ philosophy seemed to portend the sunset of Europe, the sunset of the world, but the red was not the red of a sunset, it was the red blood of humanity—a humanity that was dying yet achieving victory through its death. People remained people. They did not accept the morality and laws of Fascism. They fought it in all ways they could; they fought it by dying as human beings. (The Road)

It is Grossman, then, not simply the holy fool Ikonnikov, who finds enduring value chiefly in ordinary human compassion and kindness. This is the thrust of the closing lines of Ikonnikov's scraps of paper. And this is the heart of Grossman's concrete, intuitive humanism.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer. (Life and Fate, 410)

Herder's philosophy of history and humanity

An earlier post attempted to express the idea that "humanity" and human culture are self-creators: there is no fixed and prior system of meanings, values, allegiances, and ways of acting that constitutes humanity. Instead, human beings have, through the history of millennia of culture formation, created frameworks of value, meaning, and social relationships that have structured human communities and individual lives in different epochs. This view can be described as "historicist", in the sense that it places human nature and human values into contingent historical traces. 

Human beings bring something crucial to this epochs-long process that other living organisms do not (ants, rabbits, lions): a capacity for thinking, experiencing, reflecting, and feeling that leads them to adjust their value systems over time. Through ordinary experience, human relationships of love and hate, poetry and religion, philosophy and story telling, human communities shape their values over time. And sometimes there are revolutions of thought in which profound changes ripple through the value systems and systems of meaning of various human communities.

In reflecting on the history of western philosophy to identify thinkers who have advocated for ideas like these to explain the history of humanity, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) stands out. He stands in contrast to his teacher Kant, but also to the British empiricists and to Platonic philosophy, in his strong philosophical conviction that human beings are fundamentally historical creatures. And in Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions Martha Nussbaum suggests that Rousseau offers a similar view in Emile (link). Michael Forster puts this feature of Herder's philosophy at the center of his philosophy of history (SEP, Herder):

His most intrinsically important achievement arguably rather lies in his development of the thesis already mentioned earlier—contradicting such Enlightenment philosopher-historians as Hume and Voltaire—that there exist radical mental differences between different historical periods (and cultures), that people’s concepts, beliefs, values, sensations, and so on differ in deep ways from one period (or culture) to another. This thesis is already prominent in On the Change of Taste (1766) and it lasts throughout Herder’s career. It had an enormous influence on successors such as the Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dilthey. (Forster, SEP, Herder)

Herder makes the empirical exploration of the realm of mental diversity that this thesis posits the very core of the discipline of history. For, as has often been noted, he takes relatively little interest in the so-called “great” political and military deeds and events of history, focusing instead on the “innerness” of history’s participants. This choice is quite deliberate and self-conscious. Because of it, psychology and interpretation inevitably take center-stage as methods in the discipline of historiography for Herder. (Forster, SEP, Herder)

One way of interpreting this philosophy of history is as a developmental conception of civilization: human history is a sequence of civilizational systems that give way to their successors, with the suggestion that there is a direction or teleological structure to this sequence. That is the way that Hegel's philosophy of history works: great historical epochs (civilizations) represent partial and one-sided ideas of freedom, to be superseded by complementary ideas in future epochs. 

But we can adopt the historicist view of human culture without any commitment whatsoever to directionality, progress, or unified movement. Instead, we can look at the process as contingent, path-dependent, and heterogeneous at any given moment in time.

Here are suggestive excerpts from Herder's Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (link). Here is a very clear statement on the transitory nature of human cultural, civilizational monuments:

Thus everything in history is transient: the inscription on her temple is evanescence and decay. We tread on the ashes of our forefathers, and stalk over the entombed ruins of human institutions and kingdoms. Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, flit before us like shadows: like ghosts they rise from their graves, and appear to us in the field of history. (Book XV)

And here is an especially clear passage commenting on the "self-creation" of human beings:

Thus we everywhere find mankind possessing and exercising the right of forming themselves to a kind of humanity, as soon as they have discerned it. If they have erred, or stopped at the half way of a hereditary tradition; they have suffered the consequences of their error, and done penance for the fault they committed. The deity has in nowise bound their hands, farther than by what they were, by time, place, and their intrinsic powers. When they were guilty of faults, he extricated them not by miracles, but suffered these faults to produce their effects, that man might the better learn to know them. (Book XV, Chapter 1)

This line of thought about human beings, civilization, and history is historicist in a particular sense: human beings create themselves through actions and the process of living, using their consciousness as a way of attempting to understand and guide their actions. Human beings take shape through their histories. From this process emerge culture, norms, and ways of living.

Georg Iggers provides a helpful account of the meaning of "historicism" in his 1995 article, "Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term" (link). And in his telling, only one of the several meanings this term has had in the past two centuries is relevant to my intended use in application to Herder. The meaning that I have in mind is synonymous with the idea of the "self-creation" of human cultures: no Ur-text of human values at the beginning, no necessary path of development, no uniform and homogeneous "world culture" at any point. Instead, there is only humanity, in the persons of specific communities and populations; and the systems of values their poets, philosophers, preachers, and fanatics have proliferated during a period of time. There is diffusion, dispersion, cross-fertilization, innovation, and back-tracking, as living human beings and their poets struggle forward in cooperation and competition in changing circumstances of nature, society, and technology. Sometimes communities emerge with what we would describe as deplorable values; and sometimes there are long stretches of time in which value systems prevail that support benevolence, fairness, and concern for others.

As Iggers points out, one of the criticisms of historicism was its supposed "relativism" -- the idea that it implies that all moral and religious belief derives from a community's social and natural circumstances, and that no moral or religious scheme is superior to any other. In a sense this conclusion follows from the view that there is no objective, rational, and extra-historical standard for comparing and judging competing moral systems in concrete human communities. But we can also take the view of "self-creation" very seriously, and can maintain that the struggle to live across time in typical human circumstances has resulted, for us, in a system of values that we can both endorse and continue to criticize and correct. We prefer to be beings who have compassion for each other and who treat other human beings fairly; therefore a moral system that favors benevolence, compassion, and justice is superior to one that favors cruelty, indifference, and exploitation. We are now the kinds of creatures who have defined ourselves partially in terms of those values; and we can judge ourselves, our ancestors, and our fellow human beings accordingly. There is no external "epistemic" basis for these values; rather, they are values we and our predecessors have created for ourselves; we have become (partially) the embodiment of those values. And when Klingons, Nazis, or NKVD officers fundamentally violate those values, we must oppose them if we can.

Sonia Sikka's Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism is an excellent and detailed discussion of this aspect of Herder's philosophy.

Socrates the hoplite

An earlier post considered the Melian massacre and the Athenian conduct of war during the Peloponnesian War (link). Since we know that Socrates served as an armored infantry soldier during that war (a hoplite), it is reasonable to ask whether Socrates would have carried out atrocious orders involving the execution of prisoners, enslavement of women and children, and other acts of retaliation and punishment against the enemies of Athens.

In particular, would Socrates the hoplite have obeyed the order to slaughter the innocent? Ancient historian Mark Anderson offers a detailed analysis of the known context of Athenian warfare and Socrates' military history, and concludes that Socrates did not express moral opposition to these acts of war (Mark Anderson, "Socrates as Hoplite"; link). Anderson argues at length that Socrates was a hoplite during exactly these kinds of campaigns of retaliation, and that he never expressed any moral objection to them. Against the arguments of Gregory Vlastos and other scholars of Athenian philosophy, Anderson argues that the historical record of Socrates’ military service is fairly clear, and it is evident that his participation was voluntary, courageous, extended, and supportive. Anderson argues on the basis of these facts that Socrates did not offer moral objections to this dimension of Athenian military strategy.

Consider first the argument by Gregory Vlastos that Socrates offered a "moral revolution" on these topics. Vlastos is one of the twentieth century's most celebrated scholars of ancient philosophy, and his book Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher is a much-respected study of Socrates. 

Much of the book is relevant to the question considered earlier of the changing nature of morals and values over time (link). Vlastos appears to accept the view advocated several times here that humanity creates its moral framework through long human experience. Here is what Vlastos writes about the morality of a time and place:

By the morality of a society I understand those norms of right and wrong, rules of conduct or excellences of character, publicly acknowledged within it, whose function it is to foster human wellbeing. The sense of justice centers in the concern that those norms be applied impartially. (179)

Here is a clear expression of the idea that values are created over time rather than discovered as timeless truths.

Protagoras in that speech propounds a comprehensive theory of the origins of culture which views all cultural institutions, including morality, as inventions through which men win the struggle for existence against wild beasts. (187)

Further, Vlastos believes that Socrates was one of those thinkers who succeeded in challenging and changing the moral culture of his time. According to Vlastos, Socrates rejected retaliation on very strong philosophical grounds. And this would involve the rejection of the strategy of exterminating the populations of cities in rebellion against Athens.

Vlastos' central aim is to show that Socrates rejected the Athenian moral idea of retaliation against those who have wronged you (lex talionis). This traditional Athenian view of the moral acceptability of retaliation comes to bear in concrete detail when, as reported by Thycydides, the Athenian Assembly of citizens is asked to consider the extermination of Mytilene for rebellion (exactly the fate that befell Melos several years later):

... that rebellious Mytilene, now subdued, should be exterminated, all its adult males executed without trial, and all its women and children sold into slavery. In the speech for the proposal Cleon invokes justice on its behalf and, as we might expect, it is the justice of the talio. (184)

Vlastos works hard to distinguish between punishment and revenge: punishment is morally justified, whereas revenge is motivated by abiding hate. "The distinction of punishment from revenge must be regarded as one of the most momentous of the conceptual discoveries ever made by humanity in the course of its slow, tortuous, precarious, emergence from barbaric tribalism" (187).

Crucially, Vlastos believes that Socrates alone among his contemporaries recognizes the moral repugnancy of revenge. "So far as we know, the first Greek to grasp in full generality this simple and absolutely fundamental moral truth is Socrates" (190).

So how does Vlastos understand Socrates' moral reasoning when it comes to retaliation? He focuses on Socrates' arguments in the Crito. There Vlastos singles out two moral conclusions:

II. "Therefore, we should never return an injustice."

IV. "Therefore, we should never return evil for evil [to anyone]." (194)

So, Vlastos concludes, for Socrates, retaliation in the case of personal actions is always unjust and wrong. And this would imply, if appropriate equivalence could be maintained, that retaliation against Mytilene as was proposed to the Assembly, or against Melos, as was carried out, was wholly unjust and immoral. But there is a catch: Vlastos is not entirely convinced that what is wrong for the individual Athenian is also wrong for the state. As a philosopher and a man, Socrates cannot support the resolution to retaliate against Mytilene; indeed, he cannot be a party to the deliberation (195). But it is not clear that Socrates takes the additional step: if the state decides to retaliate against Mytilene or Melos, it lacks the authority to do so. Socrates does not invoke a duty of civil disobedience upon himself as a citizen; he does not assert that as a citizen he can challenge the state's right to take actions it has duly deliberated.

So there we have Vlastos's argument for Socrates' moral philosophy when it comes to doing good, acting justly, and exacting retaliation. Can we conclude, then, that Socrates the hoplite would have rejected Cleon's authority, duly authorized by the Citizen's Assembly, to execute the male citizens of Mytilene or Melos?

Mark Anderson thinks not. In fact, he finds Vlastos' treatment of Socrates' moral ideas about massacre to be fundamentally flawed. It is unpersuasive because it is entirely based on the philosophical texts without serious attention to historical details documenting what is known about the military career that Socrates experienced as a hoplite. Socrates' military experience was entirely voluntary -- Anderson suggests that he must have had to struggle to be selected as a hoplite, given his age and poverty -- and extensive, taking years of his life. Further, Anderson claims that Vlastos makes major and consequential errors about the nature of Socrates' military life (274). And Anderson rejects Vlastos' contention that Socrates had achieved a major moral revolution through his statement in Crito that one must never do injustice (275). In particular, he rejects the idea advanced by Vlastos in an earlier essay that "not doing injustice" has the implication of rejecting traditional Athenian "military culture" by Socrates (Gregory Vlastos, 1974, "Socrates on Political Obedience and Disobedience," The Yale review 63:4).

[Vlastos] argues that Socrates would have refused to participate, for two reasons: first, the proposed punishment was unprecedented in its ferocity, nearly genocidal, and barbaric (Vlastos 1974, 33); second, it was indiscriminate inasmuch as it condemned the innocent democrats along with the renegade oligarchs. Vlastos concludes that Socrates, had he been commanded to do so, would have declined even to relay the orders to those charged with carrying out the executions (Vlastos 1974, 33-34).

But Anderson argues two important points: first, that Socrates did in fact participate as a hoplite in campaigns in which exactly these sorts of mass killings occurred; and second, that Socrates never expressed moral objection or dissent to these actions, whether in the Platonic dialogues or in other historical sources about Socrates.

Hardly a passive observer, Socrates actively supported Athens' imperial war effort. As we shall see, he willingly fought with some of the men and on some of the very campaigns that the standard accounts assure us he would have condemned. Moreover, the extent of his military activity is much wider than anyone has recognized. The relevant evidence demonstrates that Socrates fought in many more battles than the three that are commonly acknowledged. On the Potidaean campaign alone he may have seen action at Therme, Pydna, Beroea, and Strepsa. Before returning to Athens he probably served at Spartolus and 'other places' (Thucydides ii 70.4). On the Amphipolitan expedition he served possibly at Mende, definitely (for a time, though perhaps for a very brief time only) at Scione, then at Torone, Gale, Singus, Mecyherna, Thyssus, Cleonae, Acroathos, Olophyxus, Stageira, Bormiscus, Galepsos, and Trailus. (277)

There is a record of Socrates on this [Potidaea] campaign. We know that during the long siege he stood out among the soldiers as something of an eccentric (Symp. 21ge-220e). We hear nothing, however, of his standing out as a moral revolutionary suggestively questioning his comrades about the justice of Pericles' military aggression. That Socrates, so far as we know, raised no objections to serving on this campaign suggests that neither militarism nor imperialism violated his conception of the noble and good life. (279-280)

Socrates served in Cleon's army, and he supported Cleon. But here is Cleon's record of massacre:

Cleon was ruthless; he was brutal to rebellious cities; but Athens needed him. The empire in the north was crumbling; much of Thrace was in open rebellion. The Athenians were livid (iv 122.5, 123.3). The punishment from which they had spared the citizens of Mytilene they imposed upon the defeated Scionians, at Cleon's insistence. They retaliated against Torone almost as severely. Thucydides did not record the sufferings of the many other cities that fell to Cleon's army, but we may be sure that they too felt the bronze edge of the lex talionis. (281)

When Brickhouse and Smith 1994, 153-154 declare that Socrates never actively supported Athens' 'evil' acts, they do so expressly in connection with the Athenians' treatment of Scione. But Socrates may very well have been with the contingent that stormed Scione in the summer of 423. Or he may have sailed with Cleon the following summer. Either way, he served at Scione and he arrived there in full knowledge of the campaign's objectives; he knew that the men were to be executed and the women and children enslaved. Thus the assertion that Socrates never participated in Athens' 'evil actions' cannot be correct. If he were under a legal obligation to serve on these campaigns, then Brickhouse and Smith have gone wrong again. If, as I believe, he served willingly and eagerly, their error is compounded. (282)

In other words, it is Anderson's contention that Socrates was an active participant in Cleon's campaigns of retaliation against cities in rebellion, involving the massacre of the men and the enslavement of the women and children. And further, there is no record of moral objections raised by Socrates to these actions -- viewed at close hand as a combatant -- in any of the Socratic corpus. This implies, to Anderson anyway, that Socrates did not have a moral objection to these military and imperial tactics.

This is a densely argued and damning portrait of Socrates as soldier-citizen-philosopher. Anderson makes a compelling case that Socrates did not rebel against the prevailing Athenian military culture, he did not reject massacre and enslavement as instruments of retaliation in war, and he did not act on the basis of a moral theory of just war -- Athenian or any other. "Nowhere in the dialogues does Socrates give any indication that he had moral objections to hoplite warfare. To the contrary, in the Protagoras he says it is 'noble' and 'good' to go to war" (287). "Socrates fought such battles and was such a man. He did not fight at Marathon himself, of course; but he stood proudly in the long line of hoplites that stretched back to those who did. He identified with these men and accepted that their way--the way of the hoplite--led most nearly to the good life" (288).

To our question above, then, it seems as though there is a reasonably clear answer: in his life choices and in his words, Socrates the hoplite did indeed support the campaigns of slaughter that we would today regard as atrocities.

Do norms and moral attitudes change over generations?

Moral philosophers have often written of ethical obligations, principles, and theories as if they were timeless and unchanging. Kant, for example, argued that moral obligations follow from the structure of rationality itself. The utilitarians -- Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick -- held that moral obligations are defined by the principle of maximizing happiness -- whether in the time of Socrates or Neo (the protagonist in the Matrix).

But really -- it is entirely unbelievable to imagine that philosophy and pure reason can discover an apriori, timeless system of moral truths. Values and norms are created by human beings living in concrete social circumstances. Rather, moral philosophy should be understood as a dialogue with the moral culture of a time and place, rather than an attempt to discover moral certainties valid beyond human experience. Seen in this way, the "reflective equilibrium" approach to moral epistemology advocated by John Rawls is the most plausible way of understanding the epistemic status of moral principles. This is a coherentist rather than a foundationalist epistemology, involving a back-and-forth adjustment of specific judgments and more general principles until a reasonable level of consistency is achieved. (Here is an earlier discussion of these ideas about moral reasoning; link.) And if human beings' considered judgments change over time -- if tormenting animals for entertainment is accepted in 1600 but largely rejected in 1900 -- then the moral theory that corresponds to this system of judgments and principles will be different as well.

Organized religions have advocated for fairly specific "codes of conduct" for practitioners (followers, or even all human beings). Religious codes of conduct are usually based on authority rather than philosophical argument -- authority of the Koran or the Bible, authority of the founders, or authority of specialists who speak for the divine beings. But assuming a naturalistic view of the world, it is clear that the religious codes of a time are somehow an expression of the ambient moral attitudes of the time, perhaps with innovations introduced by charismatic teachers and leaders. Religious moral prescriptions rest upon the practical sets of social and interpersonal norms that exist in the communities in which these groups and bodies of doctrine emerged.

There is also an evolutionary question to be posed. What is it about the evolutionary history of primates and human beings that has led to the evolution of a central nervous system that is capable of normative behavior? Is there an evolutionary dimension to the moral emotions (or the underlying cognitive capacities that permit the embodiment of moral emotions)? Is an inclination to fairness or kindness "in our genes" in some way? This is a question that philosophers and psychologists have undertaken to investigate. Allan Gibbard's analysis in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings is especially nuanced, and serves well as a rebuttal to crude forms of sociobiology (the idea that human behavioral characteristics are hard-wired as a result of our evolutionary history). (I discuss these issues in a 2010 post on the moral sentiments (link).) Significantly, Gibbard's view leaves a great deal of room for "plasticity" in the moral emotions and the normative systems that are embodied in concrete social traditions and groups. So biology does not entail a particular moral system.

All of this means that we need to consider the question of "moral thinking and choice" in a historically and empirically specific way. We need to investigate the moral psychology or culture of moral attitudes that exist at a time and place. Plainly human beings do in fact have a capacity to act normatively -- to make choices based on their moral emotions, moral perceptions, and moral reasons with regard to a situation. What are the particulars of this embodied set of psychologically real perceptions, motivations, and actions? What are the specifics of the normative "grammar" of a particular time and place? How do individual human beings acquire the moral competence that guides the moral perceptions and choices he or she is inclined to make in particular human circumstances? And how do these embodied complexes of moral competence change over time?

Two questions are evident when we reach this point. First, how is the moral psychology of a particular epoch created? What features of history, circumstance, and culture led to "village mentality" of medieval France? For example, what are the important influences that lead individuals in a time and place to pity animals, favor telling the truth, and want to take care of their children? And how much variation is there within a given cultural community, at a given time, in both the content and intensity of these features of moral psychology?

The second question is even more important. Are there processes through which the moral psychology of a time, the moral consensus, changes and -- perhaps -- improves? Is there a moment between generations when "sympathy for one's kin" becomes more generalized and becomes "sympathy for one's neighbors", and eventually "sympathy for distant human beings"? Is it possible for a human population to "bootstrap" its way to a more benevolent and just way of living, through gradual change in the moral attitudes of individuals?

As a thought experiment, we might imagine a survey of practical moral questions that could be used to map the moral consciousness of human populations at various times and places -- a survey of all of humanity, extending from Homeric peasants to men and women in India, China, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, over a 3,000-year period of time. (Think of it as an episode of The Good Place, but drawn from a long historical stretch of time. Lots of funding will be needed for the time-travel part of the research.) Here is a sample set of questions that might serve as a diagnostic tool for probing a moral worldview in a historical setting:

1. Is it permissible to torment animals for entertainment?
2. Is it permissible to enslave prisoners of war?
3. Is it right to kill prisoners of war?
4. Is it permissible to beat one's children?
5. Is it permissible to beat one's spouse?
6. Is it permissible to beat one's neighbor when one is annoyed by his behavior?
7. Do I have a reason to pay attention to the wellbeing of my neighbor's children?
8. Do I have a reason to pay attention to the wellbeing of distant and unknown children?
9. Is it permissible to send one's parents away to deprivation when they become old?
10. Is it permissible to lie to one's siblings about their inheritance?
11. Is it permissible to lie to an unknown customer about the defects in a used car (or old horse)?
12. Is it permissible to steal one's neighbors' sheep?
13. Is it permissible to steal the sheep of people from a distant village?
14. Is it permissible to tell lies about the practices of people from other groups?
15. Do I have a duty to intervene when another person is behaving violently and immorally?
16. Is it permissible and respectable to behave entirely self-interestedly?
17. Do the powerful have a right of sexual coercion over less powerful individuals in their domain?
18. Should one be generous to the poor?
19. Should one be kind to strangers?
20. Should one tolerate the non-conformity of one's fellow villagers?
21. Is it important to act rightly, even when no one is in a position to observe?
22. Is it permissible to make fun of the gods in the privacy of one's home?
23. Is it permissible for an official to accept remunerations in order to provide a service?
24. Is it permissible for landlords to collect rents from tenants during a time of severe consumption crisis?
25. Is it permissible for the priests to live in luxury while ordinary people struggle for existence?

Of course this is just a thought experiment, though historians and anthropologists may be able to make some provisional guesses about how different social groups would have answered these questions. And even in the narrow cross-section of cultures that are alive and well in different places in the world today, it would seem likely that there are important differences across communities in the answers that are given to these questions.

Another way of probing the moral worlds of people in other cultures and times is through literature. Literature almost always revolves around the actions and motives of individuals in social groups -- friendships, families, villages, armies, social classes, or nations. And often the drama of a novel or play derives from the author's efforts at probing the reasoning and motivations of the various protagonists. So we might speculate that it is possible to triangulate to a "Shakespearean" ethical code, a "Tolstoyan" ethical code, or a "Flaubertian" ethical code -- working backwards from the bad behavior of some of the actors and the admired behavior of others. Martha Nussbaum often emphasizes the moral insights made possible through literature (e.g., Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature). This too would be a very interesting exercise: what is the ordinary, day-to-day code of moral behavior that is presupposed in War and Peace?

All of this suggests a fairly high degree of plasticity in the moral frameworks and mentalities of people in different traditions and cultures.

But now, the crucial question: what kinds of effort and what kinds of lived experience might have the effect of improving the moral culture of a civilization in the making? Is it possible for humanity to become morally better over time? Can human communities learn from their mistakes?

There seem to be at least two levers that might allow for moral learning. The first is an extension of empathy and compassion beyond its current borders. The moral intuitions of a community may change when individuals are brought to recognize in greater fullness the lived experience and capacities for happiness and suffering in other human beings; individuals may broaden their compassion for more distant strangers. And the second is the moral experience of fairness and cooperation as a crucial element of social life. No one wants to be treated unfairly; everyone wants a level of reciprocity from others. And social relations work best when there is a reasonably high level of confidence in the fairness of the institutions and behavior that prevails. Is slavery morally unacceptable? We might hope that a culture comes to see the misery and pain of the enslaved, and the fundamental unfairness of the master-slave relationship. "If our positions were reversed, I would fundamentally reject being enslaved; this gives me a reason to reject this system even when it advantages me." This is the perspective of reciprocity (link).

This is the conclusion I wanted to reach in connection with the atrocities of the twentieth century: the possibility that a deepening of our culture's understanding of the wrongs that occurred, the human suffering that was created, and the steps of social and political change that led to these outcomes, can lead as well to a meaningful change in our moral culture and behavior. By recognizing more fully the horror of the shooting pits, perhaps our political morality will change for the better, and we will have a heightened practical and moral resistance to the politicians and movements that led to murderous totalitarian dictatorships.

(Moral Psychology, The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness, Vol. 1, edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, provides extensive and stimulating discussions of naturalism as a setting for understanding human moral reasoning and action. Richmond Campbell's article on Moral Epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an excellent review of the question of the status of moral beliefs; link.)