NICHOLAS D.

SMITH

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS”

(Received 15 November 1999; accepted 18 September 2000)

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I argue that several of the main issues that became a focus for
classical Greek philosophy were initially framed by Homer. In particular, Homer identifies
a tension between justice and individual excellence, and problematizes the connection
between the heroic conception of excellence and “eudaimonia” (happiness). The later
philosophers address the problems raised in Homer by profoundly transforming the way
each of these terms was to be conceived.

KEY WORDS: “Aretê,” Aristotle, “eudaimonia,” excellence, Homer, justice, Plato,

Socrates, virtue

In this paper, I argue that much of what we find in the ethics of the ancient
Greek philosophers is conditioned upon certain problems that had first
been identified and emphasized by a much earlier generation of Greeks,
especially in the supposedly pre-philosophical works of ancient epic poetry
attributed to Homer.1 As interesting as it might be to undertake a compre-
hensive study to defend this claim, plainly I cannot do so in the space
of a single article. My goal in this paper, then, is only to make a few
suggestive remarks along these lines, paying attention in particular to two
of the ways in which Greek ethical thought seems very different from the
ethical thought of the later West.
It does not take serious study to discern that the Greek philosophers of
the classical period conceived of ethics very differently than we tend to do
now. For one thing, although our moral vocabulary continues to include
some reference to various virtues, it is generally recognized that most
1 I say “attributed to Homer,” to avoid the question – as essentially irrelevant to my
project in this paper – whether the two surviving “Homeric” epics, the Iliad and the
Odyssey, were written or composed by the same person. M. I. Finley thinks it is certain
that they were not (The World of Odysseus, Second Edition, New York: Penguin Books,
1979, p. 15). The opposite view is argued in Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 37–38. A detailed and very
balanced discussion of the question, which concludes that it was a single author, is given
by Maurice Bowra in “Composition,” Chapter 3 in A.J.B. Wace and F.H. Stubbings (eds.),
A Companion to Homer (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 38–74. By the time of the
classical Greeks, of course, the authorship of these works (and others, now lost, as well as
of the Homeric Hymns) was given to Homer, about whom virtually nothing was known,
and about whom only legends and hearsay were available.

The Journal of Ethics 5: 3–20, 2001.

© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
4 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

contemporary ethical thought – among philosophers and non-philosophers

alike – regards judgments of actions (or action-types) as primary or basic,
and judgments of individuals or moral character to be secondary and
derivative. The Greek philosophers, on the contrary, seemed more inter-
ested in discerning (and promulgating) what it was that would make a
human being a good or excellent human being, rather than what it was that
made an action a good or a bad one, and tended to view the latter sorts of
judgments as derivative from the former. Accordingly, the preoccupations
of ancient Greek ethics seem more focused on moral psychology than on
the social aspects of ethics, and even when the Greek philosophers did
attend to social and political issues, their tendency was to conceive of such
issues in a way that made them parasitic upon what they regarded as prior
questions of virtue and moral character. In this paper, my first task will
be to argue that from the very beginning of Greek thought, there was a
tension perceived between the evaluation of character and the evaluation
of actions, and in particular between what it was for a human being to be an
excellent human being, on the one hand, and what it was for a human being
to be just, on the other. Accordingly, the Greek moralists of the classical
period sought to resolve this tension. In doing so, I hope to show, both
conceptions – virtue and justice – are transformed radically from their
Homeric antecedents.
One of the other preoccupations of Greek ethics that seems strange to us
is their emphasis on the connection between being good and being happy.
In fact, some of the strangeness of the Greeks’ discussions of this issue is
only the product of a problem in translation: The Greeks connected being
good with eudaimonia, but as many scholars have complained, “happi-
ness” is not really adequate as a translation of this term. I will discuss
eudaimonia in more detail below, but even if we were able to find an
unproblematic translation of this important term, the main part of the
strangeness of its place in Greek ethics would remain: Whatever eudai-
monia means, exactly, it is that which assures its possessor, as long as it is
possessed, a good and enviable life – that is, not just a life that is morally
good, but the sort of life that everyone hopes for, including those who
are not especially dedicated to the project of being moral. Contemporary
moralists and ordinary people alike tend to be suspicious of the very idea
that there could be a single highest good for all human beings, and even
more suspicious of the idea that if there even is such a thing the best way to
procure it is through the purest of ethical living. Human life, we sometimes
think, is all too often a “vale of tears” even for the best of us, whereas
others, far less commendable in moral terms, live enviable lives. The Greek
philosophers would deny this, and I believe their commitment to denying
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS” 5

it derives, again, from problems first posed in Homer. But their denial also
reflects a dramatic change from the earliest conception of the good life as
it is portrayed in Homer. In both of these most basic elements of ancient
Greek ethics, then, we will find that the philosophers’ views reflect a kind
of “paradigm shift” from those we find expressed by – and embodied in –
the Homeric heroes.2
I will begin by surveying the Homeric antecedents to these two peculi-
arities of Greek ethical thought, and will then supply very brief summary
accounts of how the three main ethical philosophers of the classical period,
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, responded to the problems identified in
Homer. I conclude with a few brief remarks about what is common among
the philosophers’ responses, and how this reflects a common effort to solve
the most ancient ethical challenges of their culture.

I. ARETÊ VERSUS J USTICE

Most scholars agree that the earliest of the surviving works of Greek litera-
ture is Homer’s Iliad, which can be dated to perhaps 750 or 700 BC, but
which relies on an oral tradition going back for centuries before it was
written. Homer’s epic poem tells of events occurring in the tenth and final
year of the Greek invasion of Troy, focusing in particular on a terrible
quarrel between Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest fighter, and Agamemnon,
the leader of the invasion. Achilles is known as “the best of the Achaians,”3
which is what the Greek invaders called themselves, and it is clear what it
is that qualifies Achilles as “the best” of them. Nothing in Homer’s poem
(or any later Greek literature, for that matter) suggests that Achilles was the
best from any point of view that we would normally consider to be moral.
Indeed, Achilles is portrayed as a man of excesses in every way. The first
2 I say “portrayed in Homer” and refer to “the Homeric heroes” because I am not at
all confident that Homer himself – whoever he was – shared the moral views we would
associate with his characters. Indeed, as I will try to show in this paper, I think that Homer
actually does much to show the failings of his characters’ views, thus pointing the way to
the later philosophers’ positions. My suspicion is that Homer’s own views would be much
closer to those of the philosophers than to those of the heroes his work immortalizes. But
that requires a different argument, which I must leave for another day. A view of the Iliad
that is similar in many ways to mine in this paper, and which almost certainly has colored
every aspect of my view of the Iliad is given in Simone Weil’s The Iliad of Poem of Force
(trans. Mary McCarthy) originally published in the November 1945 issue of Politics, and
reprinted in pamphlet form by Pendle Hill, Wallingford, Pennsylvania, 1956.
3 E.g. at Iliad 1.244, 1.412, 16.21, 16.271, 16.274, 19.216. For a careful discussion of
this description of Achilles, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, Second Edition
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Chapter 2, pp. 26–41.
6 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

line – indeed, the first word – of the poem sets the tone for the entire work:
Homer tells us that he will tell of Achilles’ mênis which is often translated
too mildly as “anger.”4 The word really means something more like “fury”
– it is the ancient Greek root for the English words “mania” and “maniac,”
both of which connote insanity. Book One of the Iliad explains the original
cause of Achilles’ insane fury: When Achilles helps to show how deadly
divine intervention requires Agamemnon to give back Chryseis, a woman
he had taken as a spoil of war, Agamemnon retaliates by taking Achilles’
woman, Briseis, as a replacement for Chryseis. Naïve readers might be
inclined to think that Achilles’ extreme reaction is a result of his love for
Briseis, but the remainder of the story shows very clearly that it is not
the anguish of lost love that leads Achilles into his madness, but the wild
rage of a man unjustly dishonored.5 Achilles nearly murders Agamemnon
on the spot, but he is restrained by the goddess Athena. Instead, Achilles
announces not only that he will refuse to fight with his allies any longer,
but also that he will remain in Troy to witness with malignant satisfaction
the terrible consequences his own allies will suffer when they attempt to
continue their fight without Achilles and his men. And suffer they do, with
“pains a thousandfold,” as Homer puts it, “hurled in their multitudes to the
house of Hades,” the place of the afterlife.
The story of the Iliad is a complicated one, because one betrayal of
trust and friendship –Agamemnon’s unjust affront to Achilles – leads to
an extraordinarily deadly retaliation, the ultimate outcome of which is
that Agamemnon is indeed forced to realize his terrible error, but the
cost of which is that “multitudes” of these men’s innocent allies are
killed unnecessarily. One is left with the strongest possible impression
that this is no way to settle a dispute, and that neither of these two so-
called “heroes” merits anything even close to our moral admiration. In
achieving his revenge against Agamemnon, Achilles reveals himself to be
like a madman, rejecting even the most earnest and impressive entreaties
Agamemnon offers, and increasingly making decisions which are ration-
ally indefensible, and which have deadly results to his friends. Only
when his dearest friend, Patroclus, dies quite unnecessarily, as a direct
consequence of Achilles’ recalcitrance, does Achilles come back to his
allies’ side in the fighting. And even then, when he slaughters Hector, the
greatest of the Trojan warriors, we are shown all too clearly that Achilles
continues to be a man with no sense of decency or moderation. Not only

4 Lattimore’s translation of Iliad I.1: “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achil-
leus”; Fagles’s translation does better, I think: “Rage-Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son
Achilles.”
5 For a particularly apt discussion of this point, see Finley, p. 117.
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS” 7

does he kill Hector, but he then attempts to mutilate the body, dragging
it around Troy again and again until at last the gods intervene and force
Achilles to cease and desist. As the god, Apollo, puts it so clearly, in
Book 24 of the Iliad, “this cursed Achilles, within whose breast there are
no feelings of justice . . . has destroyed pity, and there is not in him any
shame” (Iliad 24.39–45).
So Achilles is no hero from the moral point of view, but a man of
ghastly excesses. Yet Homer again and again calls Achilles “the best of
the Achaians.” What lies behind such a strange evaluation?
I think the Iliad makes it clear that the concept of aretê or virtue in the
earliest historical period of Greece made no specific contact with moral
considerations, but measured, instead, forms of excellence in non-moral
domains. The obvious – and very likely the only – way that Achilles stood
above other men was that he was the most effective warrior. However
valuable a trait this might be in war, it seems clear that Homer wanted
to call his readers’ attention to the limitations inherent in this notion of
aretê. If the only – or even the main – human excellence we recognize is
the excellence of a superior killer of other men, our evaluative discourse
will necessarily be appallingly impoverished. The Iliad, in my view, is a
work dedicated, at least in large part, to problematizing the most ancient
concept of aretê, the one that tells us that one man is better than another
just in case he is a more effective killer of other men. Surely, there has to
be more to human value than this!
Perhaps most importantly, one finds in the Iliad a sharp contrast, and
an incommensurability which Homer spotlights again and again in the
work, between the requirements of justice and this ancient configuration
of aretê. The ancient concept of the hero depends upon an assessment of
aretê, but the Iliad could hardly make clearer the fact that such aretê does
not guarantee that those possessing it will be just, or do what is best for
society.6 Quite the reverse, as the story of the Iliad and the insanity of the
“best of the Achaians” makes abundantly clear, the aretê of killers creates

6 So Finley, p. 117: “[N]ot once did Homer or Agamemnon or Odysseus charge Achilles
with anything so anachronistic as public responsibility.” A.W.H. Adkins, From the Many
to the One (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 30, speaking about “The
Homeric world,” puts it this way: “Other qualities, such as justice and self-control, are less
highly valued by this society. A wronged individual sets a high value on obtaining redress
for himself; but society in general sees so much more need for the success-producing
qualities of the agathos than for his justice and self-control that the latter are no part
of his aretê.” This, I claim, is one of the great “paradigm shifts” achieved by the Greek
philosophers. See Weil, p. 15, for a similar claim about responses in later Greek thought to
themes raised in Homer.
8 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

a normative basis for social chaos and an endless cycle of deadly human
conflicts.7
One of the central problems for ancient Greek value theory, then,
becomes how to align the concept of aretê with the requirements of justice
and social order. What we find in response to this problem is that philo-
sophers seek to adjust both of these competing norms in such a way as
to try to show them to be conceptually related and thus necessary to one
another. Classical Greek philosophical theories all converge on the assess-
ment that one cannot be just without having aretê, and one cannot have
aretê without being just. But in bringing the two concepts together in
this way, both undergo profound modification – aretê becomes moralized;
and justice is transformed from a social norm to being an aretê of human
character. Plainly, in this paper I can only barely sketch the outlines of this
transformation, but before I do that, I must identify what I regard as one of
the other main problems of Greek ethics – the connection between aretê
and human fulfillment.

II. ARETÊ AND H UMAN F ULFILLMENT

If one asked a hero of Homeric epic what he took the value of aretê
to consist in, one might reasonably expect to be told of the connections
between aretê and the outward signs of human success – the acquisition of
wealth, the esteem of other men, and the access to power and authority in
society. All of these are abundantly evident as the values to which Achilles’
friend, Odysseus, appeals in making his argument, in Book 9 of the Iliad,
as to why Achilles should accept Agamemnon’s appeasement, and come
back to the fighting. Agamemnon not only agrees to return Briseis to
Achilles, with the sworn oath that Agamemnon had never touched her –
which thus both restores “undamaged” what Achilles had lost and also
humiliates the virility of Agamemnon – but also offers an incredible abund-
ance of gold, land, and other valuable goods and properties. But Odysseus
does not limit his appeal to the material gains Achilles would enjoy;
he goes on to promise that Achilles’ allies will “honor you like a god”
and hints that the greatest possible glory may be won, if Achilles should
succeed in killing Hector.
Aretê wins the one who possesses and exercises it wealth, prestige, and
political power. And these, the Homeric hero seems to suppose, are the
7 See Finley, p. 118: “The Iliad in particular is saturated in blood, a fact which cannot
be hidden or argued away, twist the evidence as none may in a vain attempt to fit archaic
Greek values to a more gentle code of ethics.”
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS” 9

constituents of the good life for a human being. The afterlife holds little
promise, in this period at least (as the dismal picture of the land of the dead
in Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey makes plain), and so any value in a human
life must be gained during life itself.
Much later, the philosopher Aristotle makes a claim about the human
good that reveals what is, to modern readers, one of the most alien features
of Greek ethical thought: “To say that eudaimonia is the highest good for
human beings is a platitude.” No word in the English language, substituted
for “eudaimonia,” will render Aristotle’s claim true. Whatever we might
suppose the highest good for human beings is – if we even suppose that
there is such a thing – it will hardly count as a platitude, in English at least,
to say that it is the highest good. I think it is fair to say that in the modern
Western world, there are many competing conceptions of what the highest
good for human beings is – and there are, moreover, a sizable number of
philosophers and ordinary people who would simply deny that there is a
single highest good for human beings. For the ancient Greeks, it seems,
not only was there a single thing that would qualify as the highest good
for human beings, but there was such a uniformity of cultural agreement
in the perception of this matter that to identify what this highest good was
would be to utter a platitude, to say something that everyone else would
find boringly and unenlighteningly obvious. The only dispute, it seems,
would be over what exactly this obvious highest good consisted in. But at
least they had a word for it, and none doubted that this word picked out
whatever it was that all human beings wanted, and which identified the
ultimate intended object and aim of all human pursuits.
For the most ancient Greeks – the heroes in Homer’s epics – on the
other hand, the primary sources of value in a human life were wealth,
prestige, and power, and the way to obtain these the most effectively was
to be a superior human being, where the superiority was to be measured
strictly in terms applicable to the activities of war. We have already seen
how this conception of superiority became problematical, but a parallel
line of criticism can be found emerging which attacked the ancient heroic
conception of the human good. Even in Homer, we begin to find questions
raised about wealth, prestige, and power as constitutive of the human good.
Achilles himself, when offered all of these in staggering abundance by
Agamemnon and Odysseus, rejects them summarily, on the ground that
despite his having had much of each of these alleged valuables before
his fight with Agamemnon, none seem to have secured for Achilles any
security against Agamemnon’s wrong. Wealth, and prestige, and political
power are all given by other men – in Achilles’ case, most of what he has
already enjoyed and all that he has been promised by Odysseus will have
10 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

come from Agamemnon, his enemy. But his quarrel with Agamemnon has
shown all too clearly that whatever Achilles gets from other men can also
be taken away from him by other men, and Achilles’ misery underscores
how precarious a life is whose value is measured by these sorts of things.
The psychology of the Iliad calls our attention to the fact that, for all of his
wealth, and for all of the prestige he has among his fellow men, and for
all of the power that he exercises, Achilles remains all too vulnerable to
the most exquisite suffering.8 If wealth, prestige, and power do not afford
him better security against suffering than this, surely these must not be
the most basic constituents of the good life. What Homer shows us is that
we must seek for a good that is less precarious, and which offers more
security than all that Achilles possessed. We must look for what Achilles
lacked, which lies at the heart of his wretchedness. And since he enjoyed
in abundance all that can be won from other men, what we seek and he
lacked must be something more truly one’s own than wealth, prestige, and
political power.9 What might this be?
The Iliad gives us a glimpse of what this might be. At the heart of
Achilles’ suffering is his extremism, and his complete lack of control over
his emotions. When dishonored, he goes wild in his fury, which takes
possession of him and his actions until the gods intervene and bring him
to his senses. Only then, when he has accepted his place in the human
condition, and brought his emotions under control, does he seem to gain
some relief from his terrible suffering.
Later Greek writings confirm and add shape to this outline: archaic lyric
poetry, early tragedy, and later, the philosophers, all agree that the best life

8 And not just Achilles. As the author of the Odyssey explains it, the same is true of all
of the heroes of the Iliad: “You remind me of the sorrow we, the irresistible sons of the
Achaeans, endured in that country, all we suffered in our ships wandering over the murky
sea in search of plunder wherever Achilles led us, and all the fighting round the city of
Priam; there, in time, all our best men were killed. There lies warlike Ajax, there Achilles,
there Patroclus, peerless counsellor, and there my own dear son, strong and noble, Antilo-
chus, a swify runner and a brave fighter. And many other troubles we endured besides: what
mortal man could tell them all?” (Odyssey 3: 103–114, trans. Colin Macleod). Macleod
comments, “And where there is most glory, doom is most present: the greatest victors of
the poem – Patroclus, Hector, and Achilles – all not only take precious lives, but are fated
to lose their own soon afterwards, as Homer reminds us in their moments of triumph. In
short, as the scholion on the first line of the poem succinctly puts it: ‘he invented a tragic
proem for a series of tragedies’ ” (p. 8 of “Homer on Poetry and the Poetry of Homer,” in
Colin Macleod, The Collected Essays of Colin Macleod (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983),
pp. 1–15.
9 A cogent account of how Achilles’ story in the Iliad calls “heroic values” into question
may be found in C. R. Beye, Ancient Greek Literature and Society (Garden City, New York:
Anchor Books, 1975), pp. 72–74.
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS” 11

for a human being must come not from wealth, prestige, or political power,
but from the formation of one’s own character in a way that can success-
fully cope with all of the ups and downs of human life – in other words,
from a different kind of aretê – one which that Achilles, the so-called “best
of the Achaians,” lacked. Achilles’ pride in his own powers and posses-
sions left him absolutely defenseless against disappointment and setback,
and often we find him depicted by Homer as if he were a helpless child,
emotionally, without even the most basic strategies we all develop to cope
with hardship. For all his powers and awesome superiority as a fighting
man, Achilles had no strength within himself to call upon when things
turned against him. Strong in body, Achilles was sickeningly weak in soul.
His character was so weak that a single setback to his system of values sent
him reeling out of control into madness and extremity. The human good,
then, must be found within our own characters, and not within the external
goods that come from, and can be taken away, by others.
What is severed, in later Greek writings, is not the connection between
aretê and the human good, but the connection between the conception of
the human good and what I have called the “external goods” of wealth,
prestige, and power. The significance of these goods increasingly erodes, to
the point that they are wholly dismissed as having any value at all by many
Greek and Roman philosophers after Aristotle. And virtue or excellence,
aretê, becomes more and more associated not with those human potentials
that can win wealth, prestige, and power, but with the human character-
istics that make one better able to cope with the full range of human
experience. These closer connections between aretê and both justice and
the human good appear most clearly for the first time in the philosophy of
Socrates.

III. S OCRATES 10

Our knowledge of the philosopher Socrates, the first of the three great
philosophers of the classical period, is unfortunately based wholly on testi-
monial evidence. As far as we know, Socrates left no writings, or if he did,
they have been lost. On the other hand, there is general scholarly consensus
that the philosophy of the historical Socrates is probably preserved in a
more or less reliable way in the writings of Plato’s earliest period, and in
what I say in this paper, I shall assume that this is true.
10 My own interpretation of Socrates’ view of the unity of the virtues may be found in
Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Socrates and the Unity of the Virtues,”
The Journal of Ethics 1 (1997), pp. 311–324.
12 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

Socrates’ answer to the ancient problem of the potential for conflict

between aretê and justice was to redefine justice in such a way as to make
it one of the several virtues or excellences. We find Socrates making this
claim in several of Plato’s early works. In the first book of Plato’s Republic,
we find Socrates proclaiming that justice is that excellence of the soul by
which we live well and prosper. And in Plato’s Gorgias, we learn that
Socrates argued that those who are unjust and socially destructive actually
act in opposition to their own best interest. Both claims are represented in
the dialogues as highly controversial ones.
In the Book I of the Republic, Plato depicts Socrates in a debate with a
series of other men, the last and most extreme of whom is Thrasymachus,
who argues that justice is not any form of human excellence, but is actually
instead the product of human weakness, useless to and shunned by those
of power and influence. The best life for human beings, Thrasymachus
proclaims, is a life of unbridled excesses and injustices, which one is
powerful or clever enough to engage in without fear of punishment. The
man of natural aretê, for Thrasymachus, is much like the hero of Homeric
epic – he is either too clever to be detected in his injustices, or simply too
strong to be opposed in them. At the heart of Thrasymachus’s conception
of justice is his assumption that injustice is more likely than justice to win
those clever or powerful enough to escape punishment, the greatest share
of what I have called the external goods of wealth, prestige, and power. In
this, too, Thrasymachus accepts the most ancient view of value we found
in Homer.
Against these ancient conceptions of the incompatibility of justice and
aretê, and of the nature of the human good, Socrates offers very different
conceptions. Rather than conceiving of justice as a set of social conven-
tions which are articulated and enforced by and for the sake of society
as a whole, Socrates counts justice as that excellence or aretê by which
any human being will lead the sort of life that will maximize his or her
own greatest good. This internalization of justice has extremely important
consequences on all later conceptions until after the Christianization of
the West. The inclusion of justice within the human virtues requires that
we reconfigure our analysis of the concept of justice from one focused
on fundamental rules or codes of behavior, requiring or proscribing certain
sorts of actions, to understanding justice as that feature of human character
that would naturally produce or yield certain actions, and would prevent
others. The social aspect of justice thus became not the central feature
of the analysis, but rather only a symptom of the aretê possessed by the
individual, such that just action was now to be understood only as the sort
of action a just person might perform in the relevant circumstances.
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS” 13

Socrates advertises this new conception of justice by showing the

inherent weaknesses in the more traditional conceptions, which Plato
puts in the mouths of Socrates’ opponents in the discussion. Rule-based
conceptions, for example, that justice consists in such actions as telling the
truth and paying back debts, as Socrates’ first interlocutor in the Republic,
Cephalus, puts it, are defective because in certain circumstances justice
will require violating any such rules – for example, when one refuses to
tell the truth to a madman, or to return a debt to one who would use what
is returned in socially unacceptable ways. Reconceiving justice as an aretê
of character allows Socrates to explain what is common between the cases
when one should and when one should not tell the truth or return a debt.
But perhaps the greatest strength of this new account of justice as an
aretê of character is that it allows Socrates to secure the connection that
even Thrasymachus never doubted, between human excellence and the
human good. But Socrates also plainly has a radically different conception
of the human good than Thrasymachus does. Wealth, prestige, and power
all count for little, to Socrates. His disparagement of these as the constitu-
ents of human value is nowhere clearer than in Plato’s Gorgias, where
we find Socrates stunning his interlocutor, a young man named Polus, by
claiming that even a complete dictator, who can enact his every whim, will
be wretched and, in reality, powerless – when measured by his own ability
to achieve what he most desires – unless he is just. Polus finds Socrates’
claims astonishing because, like Thrasymachus, he is convinced by the
ancient view that the human good consists in wealth, prestige, and political
power – all of which the dictator would have in unexceeded abundance. But
Socrates confounds Polus by first getting him to admit that we all desire
only one thing, and do all else we do with an eye to this one thing, namely,
our own benefit. The powers of a dictator, Socrates says, do not necessarily
bring him any important advantage, because all they do is enable him to
gain what he thinks is best for him – but, of course, if what he thinks is best
for him is not really what is best for him, then all of his alleged advantages
only make it easier for him to do what will actually frustrate his real desire
for benefit. Insofar as the dictator errs in his conception of what benefit
truly consists in, he will be the most wretched and least benefitted of all
people, since others with similarly mistaken values will be less able to
act on them and so less able to pursue their own (unwitting) detriment,
and those with more intelligent values will automatically pursue the right
things, even if they have fewer powers to employ.
According to Socrates, the intelligent person would conceive of himself
or herself as a combination of body and soul. As health is the main good
of the body, so there must be some main good of the soul. And since, for
14 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

Socrates, the good of the soul is far more important to the overall well-
being of the person than the good of the body, whatever the main good of
the soul might be, it is to be valued over and above even health – a good
that no one would risk, even for wealth, prestige, and political power. This
special good of the soul, he argues, turns out to be none other than justice.
Accordingly, the unjust dictator, when measured by his own acquisition of
the benefit he really desires, turns out paradoxically to be the least powerful
and most miserable of all human beings. So it is that Socrates turns the
ancient conceptions of aretê and the human good on their heads.
But exactly how does Socrates argue for the connection between justice,
the excellence of the soul, and the human good? Surprisingly, he does it
by appealing to a feature inherent in the ancient conceptions. Justice, it
had always been thought, was to be understood as a kind of ordering and
harmonizing force. It is easy enough to see how this applies within the
social conception of justice. But Socrates argues that there can be no more
important ordering and harmonizing that what we do within ourselves, as
we seek to eliminate conflicts within our beliefs, motivations, and values.
Justice, he suggests, must necessarily then be what it is that accomplishes
this ordering and harmonizing of the self, before all else. All of one’s
external actions – insofar as they are just – must be just precisely as a
reflection and extension of this inner harmony and order. Justice, then, is
essentially this harmonizing and ordering of the self, and the one who is
so harmonized and ordered will be the one who has achieved this most
important aretê. And because the condition of lacking inner harmony and
order is even worse than the disharmony and disorder of the body – disease
– those who lack the aretê of justice will be the most miserable of human
beings, no matter how great their wealth, their prestige, or their political
power.
For Socrates, the way to obtain this harmony and order of the self was
to engage in a relentless and lifelong intellectual undertaking. He thought
the undertaking must be intellectual, because he believed that we would
always pursue only what we believed was best for us. Hence, when we
err in our pursuit of the good life, our error must somehow be the result
of some one or more faulty cognitions – the error must lie in some false
belief or beliefs we held about what actual things or actions in the world
would best bring us the benefit we sought. One result of Socrates’ intel-
lectualist conception of the pursuit of the good life that later philosophers
found unacceptable was that it forced Socrates to deny the reality of the
phenomenon of moral weakness where one pursues something that one
recognizes is not actually good for one. The error in such cases seems
not to lie in a cognitive failure, as Socrates claimed, since one does not
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS” 15

fail to recognize that what one does or pursues is bad for one. The Socratic
conception of motivation, hence, was complicated by later writers, in order
to account for the phenomenon of weakness.
One other problem in Socrates’ account is that it made it difficult for
Socrates to distinguish the various virtues from one another. In his view,
they were all essentially the same, to be understood in intellectualist terms
as a kind of knowledge – the knowledge that would allow us always to form
and maintain the right cognitions in each case, and, hence, never to err in
pursuing benefit. But Socrates also seemed to realize that although there
were close conceptual relationships between the virtues, it is implausible to
suppose that a given moral action could indifferently be identified as pious
or courageous, for example. So there must also be some way to distinguish
the several virtues from one another, and he sometimes seems to have
argued that some virtues were only proper parts of the whole of virtue, or
even parts of other virtues, whereas in other places, he seems to argue that
nothing distinguishes any one virtue from any of the others. Some scholars
have gone so far as to argue that Socrates simply never managed to come
to a coherent decision on this issue, and whether or not this is true, it is
quite obvious that later Greek philosophers disavowed Socrates’ radically
intellectualistic conception of virtue and these consequences of it.

IV. P LATO

For the most part, Plato accepted the Socratic innovations, including, most
of all, Socrates’ conception of justice as an aretê of character and his idea
that only justice could secure the human good. If anything, Plato takes the
Socratic disdain for wealth, prestige, and power to even further extremes.
These Socratic tendencies are plainest in the way Plato develops his
ideal state in the Republic. Plato’s ideal political rulers will be philo-
sophers, and will be unconcerned with wealth and prestige, which will
be primarily allocated to the lower classes of artisans and warriors,
respectively. But not only will wealth and prestige not concern Plato’s
philosopher-rulers, they will also paradoxically disdain political power,
even though this will be wielded in the state by none but them. No other
life, Plato proclaims, “looks with scorn on political office except the life
of true philosophers” (521b). Political power, then, will be wielded only
as a duty owed to the state, and only because a failure to do so would be
unjust, and hence unacceptable to those who would recognize that injustice
is something even more intolerable than the political offices they scorn, but
must grudgingly provide.
16 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

Plato’s special innovation, where he breaks company from his master,

Socrates, comes in his more complicated conception of the human psyche,
and thus of human motivation. Plato thinks that there are three distinct
psychological elements, each with a distinct sort of motivation. Benefit
– the only object desired in Socratic philosophy – is in Plato’s view the
desired object of reason, which Plato locates in a part of the soul he calls
the rational part. Honor and prestige and such goals are independently
desired by a part of the soul Plato identifies as the emotional, passionate,
or spirited part. Finally, our desires for food, drink, sex, and pleasure in
general, Plato recognizes as the objectives of what he calls the appetitive
part of the soul. Our incommensurable interests in all of these things,
for example, benefit, honor, and pleasure, can create psychic conflicts,
according to Plato, and different people will be found to have different
tendencies to prioritize such interests.
Justice, in Plato’s view, will be what orders and harmonizes the soul
in such a way as to insure that all of our interests can be pursued in
the right measure, so that none of our distinct desires will frustrate the
others. In the just person, according to Plato, the rational part of the soul
will always predominate, so that every decision will be made with an eye
to benefit, even as it also acknowledges and indulges other desires. But
Plato’s account of psychic harmony and order implicitly recognizes the
possibility of moral weakness – for the lower parts of the soul can over-
whelm one’s reason and compel one to pursuits that are against one’s better
(rational) judgment. In this, Plato preserves the innovations of the Socratic
account of virtue, but rejects what he regards as the too-simplistic Socratic
account of motivation.
Plato’s conception of social justice is modeled explicitly after his
conception of justice as an aretê of character. As justice in the indi-
vidual character is a balancing of the potentially conflicting interests of the
different parts of the soul, so justice in the state is a balancing of the poten-
tially conflicting interests of different parts of the state – parts which are
also characterized in direct association to the different motivations of the
parts of the soul. Plato argues that there are three different sorts of people,
whose motivational tendencies tend to follow those of the different parts of
the soul. Those who are likely to have their appetitive desires predominate,
Plato assigns in his ideal state to the class of artisans, whose principal aretê
will be temperance precisely because appetitive drives are the ones most
likely to drive us into intemperate activities. Their special virtue will be
assured by controlling their access to the excesses to which they might
tend. Their lust for wealth will drive them to work, but the economy will
be controlled to prevent them from amassing more than is good for them.
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS” 17

Most of all, they will be wholly disenfranchised from political activities

in the city. Those whose motivations will tend to favor the drive for honor
and prestige, Plato assigns to the warrior class, which will be empowered
to defend the city and thus win glory and fame among its citizens much
as the Homeric heroes did. And those whose interest tends most of all to
benefit will be assigned the role of ruling the state, since they can be the
most trusted to follow their reason and to pursue what is best for the state.
The special aretê of each class, and of the city as a whole, will conform
exactly to the distinct virtues of the citizens and those of the various parts
of the soul – temperance, among the appetitive artisans, a virtue pertinent
to one’s control over one’s appetites; courage, among the warriors, a virtue
pertinent to one’s emotions and passions; wisdom, among the rulers, a
virtue of reason and deliberation about benefit; and justice, as the ordering
principle of the entire state and its distinct parts, as well as of the soul and
its distinct parts.
In Plato’s account, we also see more clearly how the various virtues
are related, not just to justice, but also to one another. Plato agrees with
Socrates that one who has wisdom – the special virtue of the rational part
of the soul – will have all of the virtues, precisely because when the rational
part of the soul functions virtuously, it will impose on the rest of the soul
the harmony and order that constitutes justice in the soul, and thus will
ensure that the soul is also courageous and temperate. But the unity of
the virtues one finds in Plato is a causal effect of the rational virtue rather
than the logical consequence of the identity of the several virtues. The
virtues remain conceptually distinct, and are accounted for in connection
with distinct features of the human psyche. In Socrates, recall, all virtue
was intellectual virtue. For Plato, intellectual virtue is central, but not all
virtue is intellectual: some virtue is appetitive, and some emotional.
Plato goes considerably beyond Socrates, however, in associating virtue
with the pursuit of the good life. Socrates seemed to allow that even virtue
might not be sufficient absolutely to secure a good life for a human being
– although a virtuous character would indemnify the one having it against
moral error, Socrates apparently recognized that the human condition was
still precarious, and circumstances out of one’s control could make one
miserable even if one was morally blameless. In Plato’s account, however,
this changed. The argument of the Republic has the consequence that the
virtuous will always be happy, no matter what ill fortune may otherwise
befall them. This result flows from Plato’s exclusive emphasis on the soul,
and his highly ascetic disregard for the body. As long as one is just, Plato
proclaims, one will have a good and happy life.
18 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

V. A RISTOTLE

Like Socrates and Plato, Aristotle conceives justice to be a kind of virtue;

also like Socrates and Plato, Aristotle regards virtue – and therefore justice
– to be the best way to pursue the human good. But Aristotle rejects the
Platonic confidence that justice is sufficient for a good and happy life,
and also seems less certain that the virtues can be supposed all to flow
from a single source, either conceptually, as Socrates supposed, or caus-
ally, as Plato claimed. Moreover, Aristotle argues that neither Socrates nor
Plato account adequately for the variety of virtues. Socrates seems to have
recognized no more than five virtues; Plato, only four. In Aristotle, we
find dozens of virtues, each with a distinct analysis, and we find different
virtues appropriate to different sorts of people. For Aristotle, there is no
unity of the virtues; indeed, wholly different virtues apply, in his view, to
men and women – a claim expressly denied by both Socrates and Plato.
By far the most numerous virtues are those that Aristotle calls “ethical,”
that is, those that have to do with actions or emotions. These virtues, Aris-
totle admits, would seem all to fall under the general category of justice,
and so – as Plato had also done – Aristotle regards justice not only as a
virtue, but as a kind of generic form of all of the ethical virtues. However,
Aristotle distinguished ethical from intellectual virtue, and did not put
intellectual virtue under the genus of justice, but rather under wisdom, as
a separate genus. I will say more about this distinction momently.
In Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean Ethics, virtue is to be under-
stood as the mean between the extremes of two distinct vices: one of
deficiency, and one of excess. Hence, courage is the mean between the
deficiency of cowardice and the excess of bravado; wittiness is the mean
between the deficiency of boorishness and the excess of buffoonery, and so
on. Only in a few cases do we find that vices are simple opposites to their
virtues, as for example with shamelessness, spite, and envy (in emotions),
and theft, murder, and adultery (in actions). All other cases of virtue and
vice position the virtue at the mean between two extreme vices.
Human virtue, for Aristotle, is the product of a fulfillment of what is the
distinct function of human beings. According to his biological account,
human beings are within the genus, animal, and are differentiated from
other animals into a distinct species by their possession of rationality. So,
as Socrates and Plato had before him, Aristotle finds an essential role, in
his account of virtue, for rationality. Virtue is a form of rationality, since
it is only by reason that we can locate the proper mean. Moreover, as
Socrates and Plato also had agreed, virtue is connected to the human good
as the best – indeed, the only – way to secure what we most desire. It is in
 SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF “GREEK ETHICS” 19

this connection that he claims that it is a platitude to identify eudaimonia

as the highest good for human beings. But what precisely, he asks, does
eudaimonia consist in? To find the answer, he insists that the highest good
must be final, such that we seek other things for the sake of it, but do not
seek it for the sake of any further good; it must be distinctly human, so that
it is a highest good for human beings only, and no other species of animal;
and it must be self-sufficient, that is, the sort of thing that, once possessed
by a human being, it can only be lost through the most extreme of disasters,
and not by any of the normal upsets or losses which are common to human
life.
The first of these conditions, Aristotle’s insistence that the good must
be final, rules out one of the goods regarded as primary in the most ancient
accounts, namely, wealth. Wealth, claims Aristotle, is not a final good, and
is not desired strictly for its own sake, but only for its uses. Hence, we use
wealth to pursue further, more final goods. The second condition, that the
good must be distinctly human, rules out pleasure, which is a final good,
but one that we share with animals. The best life will be one that is indeed
a pleasant one (since we are animals, pleasure must be included in the best
life), but pleasure cannot be the distinctly human good we mean to identify
by talking about “happiness.” The third condition, self-sufficiency, rules
out the other goods so treasured by Homer’s heroes – prestige and power
– since these are only given in relation to and by other human beings, who
can take them away just as easily as they bestow them – recall Achilles’
complaint about such things in the Iliad. It should now be clear, as well,
why “happiness” is such a bad translation for what Aristotle takes to meet
all three conditions: Happiness may be a final end, but it seems unlikely
that it is something unique to human beings, and it seems too fleeting and
unstable to be self-sufficient. In the end, Aristotle conceives of the highest
human good as being activity in conformity with the rational principle that
is virtue, or the several virtues. And the best such activity, he claims, tran-
scends the merely ethical virtues, though it has such virtues as necessary
conditions; for a human being, the most complete rational activity, and
hence the most complete human good, can be achieved only by living in
such a way as to realize in the fullest way the virtues of the rational intellect
itself, by engaging in theoretical activity and achieving wisdom.

VI. C ONCLUSION

I have tried in this sketch to show how the Greek philosophers responded to
certain of the ethical problems first articulated in pre-philosophical works.
Two problems in particular presented themselves: human excellence or
20 NICHOLAS D. SMITH

virtue, as it was conceived in the earliest Greek literature, seemed poten-

tially to conflict with the requirements of justice, which was conceived
as wholly behavioral and social in nature, and what was conceived as
the human good to be won by virtue appeared to be too insecure and
unreliable to provide an adequate account of what could make a human
life maximally worthy. These problems were solved in Greek philosophy
by converting justice into a quality of individual human character, rather
than embodied simply in terms of social behaviors, and by exchanging
the ancient conception of the human good into a predominantly psycholo-
gical characteristic, where human reason was to be regarded as a primary
constituent. The philosophers themselves disagreed about many other
issues – about moral weakness, about the number and variety of the virtues,
and about the relationships between the virtues – but their answers to
what I have called the ancient problems were all essentially the same.
Given their unanimity on these issues, it is interesting to note that their
agreements were not preserved after the Christianizing of the West. In
the Christian West, perhaps relying on the Judaic tradition of rules and
commandments and the models provided by the Christian martyrs, ethical
thought has returned to conceptions of justice in terms of behavioral rules,
and Western philosophy has become suspicious of claims that connect
proper conduct to any benefits that might be enjoyed by good people. It
is not clear to me, at least, that the West’s abandonment of Greek philo-
sophical ethics – or our separation of morality from the goal of living well
– has yielded a richer or more adequate moral life. Even less clear to me is
how our later moral views could answer the problems identified so vividly
in Homer.

Department of Philosophy
Lewis & Clark College
Portland, OR 97219-7899
USA