Plato 8.6.2 What Is the Role of Justice in a Technological World?
The sophists could pride themselves on offering knowledge to a relatively large audience — not free of charge, to be sure, but to anyone with the means to pay. The philosophers down to the time of Socrates shared their thoughts freely, but to a presumably small coterie of learned and leisured men. Most of the natural philosophers wrote one book, a papyrus roll that might hold thirty pages of modern text, summarizing their findings. These books seem to have traveled the length and breadth of the Greek world, so that intellectuals from one end of the Mediterranean to the other could read each other’s writings. Books could be bought in the marketplace, but they were still scarce and public libraries remained nonexistent in the fifth century.
Yet the later fifth century saw thinkers who were beginning to produce multi-volume records of their work, such as Democritus the atomist. And now sophists were publishing series of orations and sometimes treatises, while specialists such as Hippocratic physicians were writing scientific treatises and case studies. The written word could now collect and preserve scientific observations and discoveries, the scripts of staged dramas, and the eloquence of golden-tongued orators. For the first time in living memory, wisdom consisted not in memorizing and being able to recite the hexameters of Homer but in applying new theories to old problems — putting new wine in new bottles. And the sophists were creators par excellence and purveyors of wisdom, brought to your doorstep from the ends of the earth.
Like the sophists, Socrates and his followers were players in the Greek Enlightenment. But unlike the sophists, Socrates did not see the explosion of knowledge as an unqualified blessing. He recognized that significant progress had been made, especially in the arts and crafts, by those who applied science to technology. The doctor, the architect, the ship captain, the general, could apply principles of their expertise to heal the sick, build temples and palaces, navigate the seas, and win battles.
But when it came to the most pressing of human concerns, the behavior of people, their moral choices and actions, there was no progress. The good people of Athens lied, cheated, and betrayed each other. In war they committed atrocities and attacked their own leaders, as in the trial of the generals. While the sophists offered tools to win every argument and succeed in every endeavor, they gave no thought to the justice of the goal. The realm of right and wrong, good and evil remained unexplored territory. Should we not, before we undertake to win a contest or succeed in a project, consider whether the goal will make the world a better place?
In truth, that question had not really concerned the philosophers before Socrates. Only Democritus, among Socrates’ contemporaries, had spent much time on questions of ethics and morality, and his concerns seemed secondary to questions of cosmology and psychology. If the sophists promised to make the new knowledge practical for getting ahead, Socrates demanded that people think first of what was right and proper to do, not what was popular and advantageous. Could people build a new world, not on technology and social science, but on principles of right and wrong? It was a new demand, and a revolutionary thought. To evaluate every action and every project by its moral value.
And Plato was on board, reviving the conversations of his master, planting profound questions about virtue, knowledge, and morality; and never quite answering them.
