Ep. 376: Plato’s “Laws” (Part Two)

0:12 Mark: to the Partially Examined Life, Episode 376, Part 2 We've been discussing Plato's lengthy dialogue the Laws. We had discussed the earlier books. Let's jump to our selection from books four and five, where we set up what the laws should. Well, maybe, Seth, you should start us, because you were like, why are we reading before? At some point when you got into it, because it does eventually get around to, oh, there are preludes to the laws. That's the point. But there seems to be some things before that.

0:42 Seth: What I did finally, was just make a note and says, you can convince people to follow the laws either by persuasion or by compulsion. And that's the rest of it is kind of like window dressing around that. So essentially, the Athenian stranger introduces the idea that law should have these preludes. And the preludes are supposed to be persuasive. And persuasive going back to how, when we're talking about, you know, the regular doctor and the slave doctor or whatever, like it's treating your patient as if they're part of the process, or simply telling them what to do and punishing them if they don't. And so I think that to you,

1:25 Mark: your doctor punishes you. I think it's your body that punishes you.

1:28 Seth: Yeah. He yells at you, you're gonna die. You're gonna have a heart attack. Yeah. So, you know, I think the thinking in terms of the republic, the question would be, well, why do you have to persuade? You know, why would you want to persuade or have to persuade anybody anyway? Why not just put out the laws and say, this is what needs to be done, and the lawgiver does that, and then people. And it goes back to what we were talking about, the purpose of the state and creating a virtuous citizenry and a participatory citizenry, as opposed to one that's simply obedient. So I gather that there's a lot of interesting conversations to be had about how this contrasts to the republic, but that's kind of what it boiled down to for me. And I didn't feel like I had a huge need to delve too much more deeply into it. I'm happy to be scolded and upbraided, persuaded and compelled. Otherwise, shamed.

2:28 Wes: All right, so let's start with what a kind of an odd idea this is, right? When we look at our legal codes and you look at a legal statute, talking about murder and all the little caveats, it doesn't say, and here's why you should think murder is wrong. And there's no ethical theory there or psychological theory, because I presume that's what ultimately we have to do. In a way, that's what this dialogue does. In fact, at the end of this particular reading, he says, actually, the conversation we've been having is actually one macro prelude to the laws.

This is the big. The laws that, you know, as. As Plato has written it is A meta prelude that you could put before all the laws. And then the question is, okay, if we're gonna do this right, is it just philosophers, are they gonna, that are gonna do this amongst themselves? Are we really gonna, can we put this out in a form where it's actually gonna do justice to the complexities and also be persuasive to the masses? Right, because the whole analogy of the doctor that the whole point is that you want to do this scientifically. I don't want to just take the statin from my cholesterol.

I want to know how it works, what's the mechanism, what's the scientific data behind it. Although unfortunately all that is like a lot of it is correlational. I mean, I think we know how statins work, but a lot of the evidence of the benefits is these double blind studies, which is correlational in a way that I don't think Plato actually likes. But in any case, we want to do some kind of science here and we want to get at the mechanisms behind things. And I think that the best we can do is to do moral psychology is to do virtue ethics. And that's, that seems to be a lot of what, what he's doing.

In other words, we have to do philosophy. But that isn't really going to be most people's cup of tea. And I think what the, you know, what the upshot of the Republic seems to be is that most people aren't even capable of that. So that seems to me to be a real dilemma. How is persuasion supposed to be carried out without making people's eyes glaze over?

4:36 Dylan: Well, a big difference in this compared to the Republic is just even the admitting the possibility that only the gold souled people are capable of philosophy and the rest of the kinds of people just need to be told what to do. There's at least the notion that you can be educated into your freedom, even if it's, you know. I agree completely, it's not a liberal political philosophy.

5:02 Wes: There's a moment here we. He does this digression into marriage laws and that's where we get the stuff about between 30 and 35, which I find offensive and how you've deprived yourself if you didn't get married, you've intentionally deprived yourself. So actually what I thought was going to happen here, because right before that he's saying we need a double method. We need to persuade people, for example, let's look at marriage laws. And we don't get any of that. He just states the law, he states the penalty. The closest Thing he gives for a reason is that, well, we have a natural desire as human beings for immortality and the species itself is immortal and reproduction partakes of immortality.

And so you're depriving that natural human desire if you don't do it. But it seems a little weak. And he also never says, well, that's the persuasive. That's supposed to be the thing that's persuasive. And he talks about fines and all that. And then he gets back to. He leaves that. That little digression by saying something that makes me think, okay, well, he's going to have to do more work before he tells us about what is going to persuade us about the marriage laws. But we never, at least in our reading, come back to that. So it's really interesting.

All the persuasion we get in our reading is at this very high level about, right, the gods and virtues and things like that.

6:22 Mark: So that's right near the end of book four. Do you want to just look back a little bit to the earlier in book four, which it sounds like, right, because they're starting to set up this new city. We're going to think about its constitution. And it's also like, well, what kind of geography is ideal for it? Like, oh, if it's too. If there are too many ports, then people are going to be materialistic. They're going to be, you know, there's too many outsiders coming in and out. How are we going to deal with immigration? Do we want everybody to come from the same other place? No, no, we want everybody to come from different places because then it'll be easier to sort of, you know, divide and conquer and give them this new constitution. Whereas if they all came over from Crete, then be like, oh, it's. We're going to start little Crete. We're going to. We're going to play identity politics.

7:05 Wes: Where are you looking Here?

7:06 Mark: This is page 93. Ish. I want to read a quote on page 94 here. No human being ever legislates anything but that chances and accidents of every sort occurring in all kinds of ways, legislate everything for us. Either it's some war that violently overturns regimes and transforms laws, where it's the baffling impasse of harsh poverty that does it. Diseases, too, make many innovations necessary. So he's saying that we're. It's like a pilot dealing with a storm God. And together with God, chance and opportunity pilots all the human things. One must indeed concede that these are accompanied by yet a third thing, a Gentler thing, art.

So this is unlike the Republic, where we're starting to just dream up our city. What would be ideal, the a priori city that's going to be. If we could do that, that would be the best kind of city for sure. But the second best, the most realistic kind of thing that we can come up with is going to have to respond to the contingencies of life. So I think this thing with that you just mentioned with the marriage laws, right. This is one of the first things that we have to legislate because this is what nature. Are we going to continue to exist on the earth if everybody's like, I don't want to get married until I'm 50?

Like, no, that is not okay. We cannot allow that. There's. Right now the Republicans want to get. I just saw a story of like, you know, an Oppenheimer project for new babies because they're so concerned that all the white babies are going to be outnumbered by the minority immigrants coming in.

8:39 Wes: Well, we are set to have a population decline for the first time, I think, in history, the United States. And that is a big problem. Right, because you have old people to take care of. And if the economy doesn't grow, the standard of living goes down. And why is it declining? Why is our population declining for the first time? Because of dramatically reduced immigration. We rely on immigration for that. The economy relies on it.

9:02 Dylan: It's not having more babies, it's importing more people.

9:05 Wes: Yeah, we could have more babies, but we're not going to. So we need to import people.

9:10 Mark: We have free child care and stuff such that you, you know, are encouraged to have five babies, maybe free child care.

9:16 Dylan: I. I don't think. Well, this is. For now, we're getting into it.

9:19 Wes: Let's import more people, but also put tariffs on them on the people. Now, this is a really interesting idea that if we don't legislate, then chance and accident legislates for us. It's just haphazard. That's not an idea I got from the other part of the dialogue.

9:34 Mark: This goes with the puppet idea that, you know, we have these chains on us. That's human nature. And there's this. Is this little silken cord that is virtue. And here it's art that, you know,

9:45 Wes: silken cord is calculation specific calculation.

9:48 Mark: Okay. But yes. So I just, I'm seeing a parallel here between this whole thing designing a state or trying to use art to come up with the best possible laws and not just get the laws that we historically stumbled into. We're trying to use rationality. And so that's going to be a very slender little human creation toward virtue. That is not what you're going to expect. Even though the state is a natural thing that grows out of the world. This is the way Aristotle puts it. But it's not that good states cry like they're pretty much determined by. By circumstance. People are doing what they need to survive.

10:24 Seth: Right.

10:24 Mark: So if you have a state that's attacked a lot like, yeah, that's why you're going to have what's described at the beginning as the laws of. Of Crete or Sparta, that they're all about self defense.

10:35 Wes: And maybe it's just a matter of the reading that we did. But did you find the marriage law prelude, if that's what it is? I don't really think it is. But that rationale persuasive or did we get any sort of specific type of prelude that we find convincing for a particular law? We did get into a lot of penalties, but I don't remember us getting into any really persuasive explanations of what particular laws are doing.

11:03 Dylan: Yeah, I think the closest thing is what you pointed to is a sort of weak pointing to immortality and saying, look, you know, children and property, I think, you know, you know, the things that we, you know, we build and leave for the world are part of our. Part of becoming immortal, maybe some of our deeds, but, you know, lumping in having children as being part of the way in which we attain immortality. And that would be persuasive because it is appealing to our natural instinct to want to be immortal.

11:43 Wes: And I bring this up because in many cases it would be kind of odd for us to try and give us a justification, right? So you say murder, make a law against murder. And then what sort of prelude am I going to give to convince people that murder is a bad thing as opposed to a good thing? Now, there are lots of things that we do with policy, right? Should I raise taxes or not, or do this or. But we generally agree on the overall ends we want a better economy, for instance, something like that. So when we get to the question of ends or very, very fundamental ethical intuitions, in a way one might say, well, is a prelude even possible?

12:24 Dylan: It makes me think of. So you might be right about the fundamental ethical intuitions, but it makes me think about the way in which the Federalist Papers act as a prelude for the Constitution.

12:36 Wes: Right.

12:37 Dylan: Let me persuade you that these laws are good because you're right. You know, the Constitution, for instance, or the Laws that we have, they don't have preludes. And I hadn't thought about it exactly the way you've. You framed it, Wes, but just that it's weird that you would have the persuasive action on a law as part of the law giving.

12:58 Wes: And they're left purposefully vague. But I mean the Constitution in the Federalist Papers. That's a great example, Dylan. Yeah. Because the Federalist Papers are the prelude. And lots of persuasion I think is not necessarily required, but optimal for people to read them.

13:12 Seth: So I get your point about how this would be odd because we don't say. But if we consider policy as prelude and if we consider. We look at the laws, is there not some way in which there's. It may not be written, but isn't there an implication? Like if they say, like, okay, the law is. I'm not even sure what a good example would be, but something like, you

13:38 Dylan: know, you shouldn't drink until you're 30.

13:40 Seth: You shouldn't drink until you're. Until you're 30.

13:43 Wes: Okay, well, let's say the president can't unilaterally impose taxes because we had a very bad experience with that with the English king. It's very bad for some tyrant just to be able to say, hey, I'm going to put tariffs.

13:54 Seth: Okay, so when the law was created, there was reasoning behind. Which is presumably documented somewhere.

14:00 Dylan: No, there isn't reasoning. That's documented. I think that's the whole point. The closest thing for the document of reasoning on laws would be something like the Congressional Record.

14:11 Wes: It's not documented in the law itself.

14:14 Dylan: That's right.

14:15 Wes: But also just sets you to the point of policy. Right. That's all hypothetical. That's all means end reasoning. And we have a certain general goal in mind. And then, okay, what policies are going to accomplish that? And there's lots of intervening.

14:29 Seth: So let me ask you a question.

14:30 Wes: Yeah. Okay.

14:31 Seth: Maybe I was thinking about this the wrong way, which would not be the first, which is there seems to there's good or bad, coherent or not, there's a rationale for a law. There's a reason that some. That there are laws and they are the way they are. Right. And if somebody said, well, it doesn't say in here that somebody. I guess it's part of the education of the citizenry that it's like, okay, you're going to read the statute, you're going to read the law and you're going to read the prelude and then we hope you will be persuaded. But if Not. It's kind of a moot point because even if you're not persuaded, you're still going to obey or you'll be compelled to obey.

Right? But it feels to me like any system of law has at least an implied set of reasons which presumably are intended to be persuasive. But the question becomes like, who's asking the question? In our society, we don't teach this, right? It's who's asking the question? Like, well, why should I follow this? Or, you know, who are we trying to persuade? It's not part of the way that we do. Education and civic virtue is to persuade people that this law is the right. We try to persuade them that our way of life is better and that our values, our commitment to freedom is better.

But we don't necessarily say, well, you know, the reason why we have a marginal tax rate of 21% or 31% or 35% or whatever it is is blah, blah, blah. Anyway, people.

15:56 Wes: I mean, lots of people are doing that. They're just policy experts and they're having that conversation.

16:01 Seth: But citizens, yeah.

16:02 Wes: And ideally would happen on news shows and in public discourse. And sometimes it happens a little bit, but yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't happen very well in general. But the reason, I think the other important reason to bring this up is like, look at the mechanism of enforcement. And enforcement here thinks means two things. One is before the fact, one is after the fact. After the fact, you have to punish people. And some of those punishments, right, Are by honor or dishonor. Some of them are fines or death or whatever. Before the fact is all about education, okay?

And education should be the domain of reason and prelude in the sense of reasons. But education as he and the example he gives and what we do in early education with children, which seems to be the critical thing here, we use honor and dishonor. Honor and dishonor are not reasons per se. In fact, it's. Honor and dishonor are meant to sort of assist the rational part of the soul. The rational part of the soul can't do anything by itself. According to Plato, in the Republic and in this dialogue, it's not enough. We need more than reasons. We need honor and dishonor.

So there is this tension between saying, oh, we need these big preludes which are going to explain things scientifically in the way that medicine does, and saying, well, actually, we're going to have to resort to honor and dishonor, which is much more akin to ethical what we say when we mean when we Say, an ethical intuition. Right. And a lot of the prelude that he. He does in this dialogue is about, well, you got to believe in the gods. You got to believe that the soul comes first so that you can say that the virtues are more honorable than the worldly goods.

That's like, that's where kind of reason and honor lines up. Right. How do I say why the virtues are more honorable than making money? How do I do that? Well, I just, I have to give this very abstract, like, religious argument. And is that persuasive? I mean, it's interesting. It's philosophically interesting. Fascinating, I think. But is it a tool for general persuasion? It's only a tool if you, if people are born into the habit of going to church and having that particular religious belief.

18:07 Seth: Well, and in this particular society they are, since you have to. Part of the. One of the very first thing from like book one, right. Is you have to believe in the gods and you have to believe that law is. The law is divinely inspired if not given.

18:27 Wes: Right. But there's all these pre Socratic materialists talking about the elements, all these sophists and rhetoricians and poets corrupting society. Yeah. So. But materialism is apparently a big threat at this time. And a lot of Plato's work is. Is kind of a fight, it seems to me, against what he sees as the perniciousness of the rising, you know, intellectual consensus, which is materialistic and atheistic.

18:55 Mark: I feel like we've. We've drifted into book 10 here. And so maybe we should say what we want to say about that and then get back to, like, the actual laws, because this is given the euthyphro.

19:05 Dylan: Right.

19:05 Mark: We gods love. Love the good because it's good. It's not just that the gods say so, and that's what makes it good. But yet, as a matter of education, he's claiming here that it's really important for all of our citizens to believe in the gods and believe that the gods are good and, you know, to have our. Again, this is part of aligning customs with justice, aligning all the incentives in the same direction. But he thinks it's really easy to believe in God because that's the way these people in this society were all raised. And so it's only because you've gotten a little too into yourself, a little too pseudo clever, that you've drifted away.

He's like, nobody ever makes a positive grows into wisdom and becomes an atheist. Like, no, they all, when they're young and foolish, they're like, well, I don't have to accept what society tells me. I don't have to accept these gods. There's just, you know, and then they play with the thrasymachus or other sort of atheistic takes on not only the metaphysics, but ethics. They play around with. Maybe I'm above the law, the Leopold and Loeb kind of immature Nietzsche. But then if they get wise as they grow older, then they will return to the things that, you know, they were encouraged to irrationally believed as a child by all of their nursemaids.

20:26 Wes: I mean, yeah, but the very beginning of book 10, he says, well, how did all this impiety come about and lack of belief in the gods? He says, on the one hand, something to do with lack of self restraint, which is really interesting because that's not how I would normally explain atheism. You know, that's kind of impulsivity. But the other one sounds more spot on, which is basically he's saying it's cynicism and scientism, it's materialism that's the problem. And it's a materialism that gives us a sense that we. Nothing is mysterious, we know everything there is to know about the world and it's a false, it's not real knowledge.

So we're ignorant and we think we know at the, at the same time, which is the worst sort of thing. So I think that's, you know, more than just. Yeah, just people being young and growing out of it. That's what we tell, right? That's what we tell. And that's part of the persuasion is to say, oh, you'll grow out of this. But there's a real social force that threatens to take us away from belief in the gods and therefore belief in virtue.

21:29 Seth: So I find this really interesting. Wes, can you take us to a place in the text where it's just

21:34 Wes: the beginning of book 10? It's 282 from 886A, which is 282 in the text. So he'll say, so this is, I'm using this word cynicism, I'm translating it into my own language. But he says the Athenian will say, what is this you're now explaining? Okay, so actually just go up a little farther. Kleinias says all the Greeks and barbarians believe the gods exist and the Athenians like don't. Not so fast. There are some people who, because of lack of restraint in the face of pleasures and desires that are basically urged on to an impious life. And okay, what else is responsible this seems a little bit of a far fetched explanation that the atheism is about lack of self restraint.

22:20 Seth: Right.

22:20 Wes: So Kleinias is going to egg him on to say something more about that. And he'll say a certain very harsh lack of learning that seems to be the greatest prudence. Right. Where prudence is like hypothetical reasoning. Right. Prudential, I'm clever. Lack of learning, ignorance. Right. So this is cynicism. And he's going to get the, you know, we'll get from the context as he goes on. He's talking about, I think the pre Socratics and people who are materialistic and have this sort of proto scientific view of the world which because it's materialist is very much like our view. Things are governed by natural laws, come together by necessity and chance. It doesn't require soul or intelligence. There's no intelligent design. That's the sort of view that he thinks is causing the problem.

23:05 Mark: And then so he's like, we can give right now in this discussion a knockdown definitive argument for the existence of God that we can then deliver to all these people and cure them of their materialism, which is basically, you know, the what's going to. It's one of the forms of the cosmological argument in Aristotle, the one from motion specifically that there must have been. If there's a chain of motion, there must be somewhere in the chain, not necessarily just one at the beginning, but there must be some kind of things that move themselves. And that is just what we call soul.

So is that's which again think of, I'm thinking of Aristotle's De Anima and his definition of soul. It's like, well that's the cause of motion, of telos, of some, you know, within a thing. That means it's alive, it has soul in it. So therefore, since things are moving, something must have started them moving. Or what if they all stopped, would they just stay stopped? Or it would be like, you know, Lucretius talked about the swerve. So this, the swerve, the self moving thing has to be. Life has to be soul. So this just shows that mind, a soul is ontologically prior to bodies.

You might have thought, oh consciousness, life. This is just a late development in biology that you know, you have the cold dead earth and then you, you have life somehow puts itself together. Maybe chance gets the first cells going and then, you know, it arises and we eventually get minds that are creating things. And no, this clearly he thinks just from this very simple argument. Mind must be first form, must be first and impose itself on the dead matter. Right. Or else the matter would not have form, it would not move around, it would not do anything.

The world would not exist were mind not prior.

24:52 Wes: Right. This is a variation on the argument that form must be prior to matter, which is also one that Aristotle makes. So.

24:59 Seth: And it's teleological and not teleological. I mean, it is, yeah, but it's teleological, right. So it's not that the atheism doesn't consist in them thinking stars are actually made up of fire and air, earth and water, and aren't celestial beings or something. It's that. Because I don't think Plato would have been down on the proto scientific or what we would consider the proto scientific inquiries of his peers. It's that if you believe that things are not. If, if there's no order or it's randomness or chance, or if there's no design or method or ends in the universe, that's where the danger comes in.

Right? Because how could you have an ordered society if you have a disordered universe? That makes sense. But to say that it's. You know, what I was kind of getting lost in when you were talking, Wes, was the idea that there's a movement towards materialism which is sort of, let's just call it proto scientific. And ration would be rational, like people doing empirical inquiry into how the world actually is composed and how things actually work. You know, you're. And even medicine for that reason. Right? Your Galens and your Thales and all those kinds of guys, those aren't the ones he's worried about here.

26:19 Wes: So he gives this, you know, he articulates this naturalistic framework on pages 285 to 86. And the position he's objecting to is this idea that everything comes about through chance or necessity. Those are the words that he uses. So for instance, there's things fall together or get mixed together according to chance or arises out of necessity. He's thinking of scientific determinism here. So they don't come about through intelligence or God or because the kind of the art that the God does, some kind of demiurgic activity, but by nature or by chance. That's the view that he actually objects to. I think he really is arguing for a kind of intelligent design as the only feasible explanation and the only one that we can, you know, and if we don't accept it, we can't be virtuous because we can't put the divine things ahead of the material human things in the end.

27:24 Dylan: There's an intentionality to the whole structure of the universe and what it means for the universe to flourish. That each human being is part of and part of their flourishing is aligning themselves with the flourishing of the universe.

27:42 Wes: Yeah, I mean, one of the byproducts is that. Right, he'll say the soul comes before body, and therefore mental properties. And thought comes before material properties. So he'll say opinion, intelligence, art, law, all these things come before heavy light, right. On any kind of material property you can think of. And, you know, because it becomes before, it's in a way supposed to be more honorable. And again, this is the kind of prelude, leverage we're supposed to get out of this. If we're going to use honor as the mechanism to kind of shame people into doing the right thing, we've got to convince them at some theological level that the honored thing is to be honored because it's divine. Because we don't have a better explanation than that. It's not just utilitarian.

28:39 Dylan: Does this persuasion end up taking the place of something like the noble lie that you get in the Republic, where you still have. He's trying to solve the problem of how do you convince somebody that there is such a thing as you're flourishing and there are things to do and not do, that there's better and worse ways to live, and there's such a thing as flourishing at all, and what that looks like and how you get to it. And I guess I've always thought of the noble lie that you get in the Republic as being one way of making that persuasion and that certain. The Guardians didn't even necessarily wholly buy into the noble lie, but they promulgated it because they might be in a position where they understood it or whatever, and that he's trying to solve a similar problem here, but through a different means.

29:39 Wes: Yeah, One wonders, like, to the extent to which he believes this, or at least in this form. You know, especially since he's into mythology. Right. And we might not take it literally. I mean, just to emphasize the oddness of this. The things that he says that come into existence before matter. Temperaments, temperaments, dispositions, wishes, calculations, true opinions, supervisions, memories, all come into being before length, width, depth, anything material. It's a pretty radical and weird thing to say. So we have character, right? This is all in the domain of character and therefore in the domain of virtue. The domain of virtue exists even before human bodies that could have or not have virtues.

30:25 Dylan: But that's consistent in his origin story because you have two forms of motion. The motions that come from the outside that cause you to move and the motions that are self moving motions, motions that come from the inside. And from the argument that we just described earlier, there has to be a first motion that is a self moving motion. And so all the things you just described, Wes, are all self moving motions. Right. Character, temperament, all those things are motions from the inside, they're not motions from the outside.

31:01 Wes: He does say, right in the prelude, we're going to tell people they're going to be happier if they're virtuous. But he, as far as what we read, and I think that the encyclopedia article kind of confirms this, doesn't try to give us an argument about why we would be happier for being virtuous.

31:21 Mark: Yeah, well, that's why I was saying that it's because we're going to set up the incentives to reward you. It's that yes, Plato thinks that there is a natural happiness and that even if you, per the Republic were disgraced and everybody thought you were terrible and you had no honors and whatever, you would actually still, because of the harmony of your soul, you would feel better about yourself. You would be thriving more than somebody who has. And.

31:47 Seth: Right.

31:47 Mark: This is something that Aristotle then at least wanted to moderate. Like, well, you, you know, it really helps to have enough food and to have your family not be dead and have a good reputation, all this kind of stuff.

31:57 Wes: Right. This is the Hume's argument against the sensible knave. Right?

32:00 Mark: Yeah.

32:01 Wes: What if this is the scope problem? What if someone is so constituted that they're just happier being bad? Right. Or at least being bad sometimes. And then you say, well, no one wants to be dishonored, no one wants to be disliked. That honor comes to save the day for you there, just like it does for Plato.

32:17 Mark: For Plato there are people like that and they are unfixable. So yeah, let's get back to the law and the punishments because those are the people, they are better off dead. So we should just kill. It's okay for us to kill them.

32:34 Wes: I always know what all Mark's favorite parts of the dialogue are before we even have the discussion completely. Wait, so Mark, you want to bring us back to.

32:43 Mark: Well, you already took us back to sort of the end of the for and talking about the. I guess one more thing I thought about. So of course we have post hoc interpretations. We have our judges come in and they essentially try to write, they try to figure out what the intention was. And of course the different judicial philosophies in doing that, we got into, I think maybe the Talmud is a more accurate right. That it's not just do not, thou shall not kill. Like if there had been a prelude to that, to saying. Because it would just make it clear, by the way, the prelude is said that, well, what we mean is like citizens within the state, you know, Jews should not kill other Jews unless, you know, somebody has done something to forfeit their rights.

Right. They've murdered first. So self defense is okay. Killing in a just war is okay. All these things. A prelude should make, you know, the judges work a lot easier. So, yeah, it would be nice if, when Congress was doing a law, if they actually put in something to help the judges out so that, you know, maybe they would include word like bear arms in a militia. You know, maybe they'd include that and then the judges would say, oh, you're not talking about a militia. So we're not going to say you just have to bear arms to individuals in our system.

34:03 Wes: It's post lewd.

34:05 Mark: Yeah.

34:05 Wes: Yes. It's all case press. It's all case law and precedent. That's where all that is done. And, and so, yeah, in a given court case, they can't just rely on the laws written. They rely on everything that's happened deliberatively in previous cases for their interpretation. So that's all like prelude. It just happens after the fact.

34:25 Dylan: Which is Talmud.

34:28 Mark: Yes, but the Talmud is referring to the theological principles. Right. That's what Plato is comfortable with as well. That to some degree. But that's the sort of activist judge thing that we're not supposed to do is like just say, well, the laws are for fairness and equity and everything, and therefore we're going to interpret them along those lines. No, no, you have to interpret them along the lines of, you know, the intent of the writers or that's at least what the conservative legal.

34:57 Seth: Yeah, this is actually more Talmudic than you've even mentioned because, you know, Talmud is just commentary and it's commentary by rabbis. What does rabbi mean? Teacher, what are rabbis? Educated? Virtuous. Right. Community leaders. And that's what Plato's talking about is having a group of, you know, virtuous, educated community leaders who are constantly debating and reviewing the laws and saying, like, is this the right thing? Is this not the right thing? He doesn't talk about how they come to consensus or how they come to decision when there are conflicts which is addressed. But yes, this is very descriptively what you're talking about, Mark.

35:43 Mark: Yes. So you brought up the Nocturnal Council. That's that section from book 12. Just that. It's the 10 guardians of the laws who are the eldest at any time, and those who have won prizes for virtue. Each of those people is to select one young man of not less than 30 years of age, who's more out in the society and can kind of be their spy and observer. And the young people and the old people will get together in the early morning when people are free, when you'd be just working out or something. But before you're doing your job, young

36:12 Wes: people bring the elder people their coffees.

36:17 Mark: Yeah.

36:18 Wes: Bagels. And take notes at the meetings. Yeah, yeah.

36:22 Mark: And then they do their evaluation.

36:25 Wes: Re.

36:25 Mark: Evaluation. Constant tweaking of things. Yeah. What other. I had a bunch of notes in this section, but I'm not sure how important.

36:32 Wes: Well, he compares the. He starts out talking about the soul and the head as the what saves the animal. Because the soul, with the soul we get intelligence and with the head we get the senses. And he's going to compare the elder guardians to the intelligence. And then the younger ones are the senses mark, as you pointed out. Right. They can go out. And therefore, you know, if we were to think of this whole body as like a actual animal's body, then it has these two faculties that help it stay alive, help it continue to persist, which is to say they have to be able to keep revising what they're doing.

I don't know. I thought at a certain point, I thought, is this like a Supreme Court or something? Or it's a combination of a certain Supreme Court and a legislature. But the implication seems to be you can't just write the laws and then that's it. You have to be responsive to, like an animal. Right. To circumstances. You're living in a certain environment and there's a kind of metabolic process that's going on with the outside world, and it is preservation in a way. The city has to persist and the guardians have to, as an institution, have to persist.

But there's some accommodation of change going on. There's a continued deliberation.

37:52 Seth: Yeah. You can certainly imagine, Right. That technological change, or let's say one of the things about magnesia, which has great milk, I've heard.

38:08 Wes: I was waiting for it.

38:09 Seth: I wanted to pull it out first episode. But it's eight or ten miles inland. Right. Which is great because, you know, it's a little more sheltered from other societies, so we can let the ideas take root and all that. Well, it's going to grow. It may end up engaging In a war or a battle, it may end up taking over land which has a port. Right, okay. And you are going to have to reinterpret. There are going to be new laws, but you're going to want to reinterpret the old laws as well. And I think we can say this, particularly with respect to the youth, that we don't stay static like, as kids are exposed to more and more and more the rules and the methods for parenting and for, you know, raising them in a society change.

And that's just the nature of things. And so I think it's actually quite good that again, this is just so much for whatever criticism it takes. It's so much. It's very sophisticated from an practical or applied perspective versus the Republic, the idea that laws are not static, the ruling council isn't static. It's not as elitist. It's, you know, you want to cultivate virtue because you don't know which of the 10 citizens are going to become the nocturnal council. You don't know which of the youth are going to be selected. And also there's thousand different offices and civic functions.

And so there's a participatory aspect to this where it would almost be impossible to. Well, it would be impossible to be a member of the society and not be engaged in some civic function. Even if you were the tax collector or, you know, your job was to mark out how many paces, you know, acres of land were something. You're going to have to be involved somehow. And that was also, obviously, I think, an Athenian virtue. Maybe it's not quite the same. I don't know, you know, the Spartan or Cretan way of doing things. But right, you. Part of the Athenian democracy was you couldn't opt out of civic participation.

You couldn't be a citizen and not be at the, you know, in the, in the debates. You can't not vote. Like, you just can't do these things. And so there was. There's a responsibility. And this thing is very, very, very heavily structured, not just for kind of a participatory democratic aspect, although there is it. It's for a lifelong investment in the health and virtue of the city, in virtue of you cultivating your own excellence.

40:50 Wes: What do we make of this stuff about focusing on one aim, which is virtue, but then the virtues turn out to be four.

40:59 Mark: Yeah, I mean, this sounds very familiar, Plato, that, like, how could it be that all these things are virtue? Well, only, you know, if you have. Are wise enough and can connect them with the form, can you see why these very different seeming courage and prudence, for instance, how those are actually feeding the same purpose, that they are the same in some reason, which, you know. So it's this question about what the word is is, what the word is means. How can they. They both be virtue, but yet they're clearly distinct conceptually from each other, even though they both are virtue, that they're both in the category of virtue. So just understanding how, why they are virtues.

41:38 Wes: Yeah, but to do that we can go very deep and we can do a deep moral psychology. I mean, as, as he points out these, the Athenian points out courage and prudence, I think is the example he uses, are actually really different. One requires intelligence and the other animals can have. So, and we call them virtues. Now of course, we can give a kind of definition and say, you know, be very Aristotelian about it. There's these stable dispositions to feel and act and believe in certain ways and that's what makes it a virtue as opposed to just a passing disposition, the stability, all that.

But I think the question is how all these different virtues could be linked psychologically to one another. Right. What's the relationship between courage and prudence? Do we need courage for prudence or prudence for courage in the fullest sense? And if so, how all that stuff so we could get as detailed as we liked about them.

42:32 Dylan: I'm trying to remember exactly where the, you know, in the discussion of courage it seemed. My recollection is that there was a kind of hierarchy even amongst these virtues and that courage was the lowest.

42:46 Seth: Well, that's only because that was what his two interlocutors proposed first.

42:53 Wes: Right. Courage.

42:53 Seth: Yeah, it's a dig at Sparta by the Athenian.

42:56 Dylan: Sure. But I think it's related to what Wes was saying, is that courage of those virtues is the one least associated with reason, you know, or you do need.

43:09 Wes: I mean, I'm saying that we do for the wine. The point of the wine drinking examples. He wants to take the idea of courage and say it's not just about confronting pain and fear, it's about confronting desire as well. Which is really interesting. Right. Because yeah, we need to say something other than that, you know, other than calculation. Reason are going to help us overcome our passions. Actually we need some kind of other something based in sentiment, as Hume would say, something about our sentimental constitution that can come up in opposition to desire, which again, turns out they have something to do with thumos and honor and all that. But. Yeah.

43:46 Mark: So a complete picture of virtue requires that we Resist pleasure as well as pain. But I don't recall him saying, you should expand your notion of what courage is. That courage also includes.

43:58 Wes: It's not in the part that you. That you guys read.

44:01 Mark: Okay.

44:01 Seth: I feel like I read somewhere else in Plato also that courage without prudence is foolhardiness.

44:10 Wes: Sure.

44:11 Dylan: That.

44:11 Seth: So in a sense, courageous is a dependent virtue.

44:14 Mark: That's an Aristotle, but it's probably stolen from Plato somewhere.

44:18 Dylan: Probably stolen. Plato. Yeah.

44:20 Mark: It sure looks like in the spirit

44:22 Seth: of what we read here, Plato, Aristotle.

44:24 Wes: But this is, you know what he says the guardians need in the end is a pretty abstract philosophical ability. Right. It's not just about policy. This is all about. They need to really understand virtue and how the four are one, which I just take to be another way of saying they have to be deep moral psychologists and moral philosophers. And yeah, we might be in trouble if that's really what a state requires.

44:46 Seth: Might.

44:47 Mark: So just looking over my notes for book five here, which is where he actually before was the preludes. We actually are getting to the laws and it's all at least the, the, the characterization we have the end of law is virtue, which we've said again and again. And it does seem to make the whole thing a simpler matter that there's not all these different. Well, we want to have greater wealth. We want to have stability. We want to have. No, it's just all making the citizens and thus the edifice that is the state, virtuous. So it's. Again, we're back to that.

We're not about a pluralist conception of virtue that lets you discover your own virtues. It is. We know what virtue is. We are the wise. I mean, we might be wrong. We'll keep reevaluating. Maybe we've lost touch with the forms. Maybe we've lost in touch with the will of the gods. But let's, you know, we're going to use our best people, our nocturnal council, to keep us just straight and narrow on that track so that head, those senses, can save the life of this body politic.

45:47 Wes: He does give, at the end of the reading for book five, just to kind of correct myself, he does give a justification of virtue in the sense that he says the virtuous life has more pleasure. Yep.

45:58 Mark: The courageous man defeats the coward. The prudent man defeats the imprudent. So their lives are more pleasant than the lives of the others.

46:04 Wes: I was a little confused by the argument because it involves, I mean, I do get that people who are moderate. He seems to say that their pains are Going to be less intense and their pleasures are going to be less intense. And the same thing for their desire and their erotic dispositions. But I don't know how he gets to that from. Well, their overall quantity of pleasure comes out better than the one with bigger swings.

46:30 Dylan: Yeah. So the question is, how do you persuade the live fast, die young or the big swings or the going for the greatest pleasure, greatest pleasures despite the risks? He's sort of making an argument that the integral over all of it, the sum of it all ends up being a greater pleasure, but seems denying that the intensity of the pleasure might be its own pleasure, that what is going to persuade you that the most intense pleasure is not the best one, even if it's for a short amount of time.

47:07 Wes: You could be having lots of sex or you could just be having really great toast every day. Great sex once a week, great toast every day. Which one? Which one do you choose? I know which one I choose. Daily toast.

47:23 Dylan: Yeah.

47:24 Mark: So this no butter.

47:25 Wes: This part with definitely butter. Well, no, you have this good point though, about margarine. Just spray it. I can't believe it's not butter healthy.

47:37 Mark: This part of book five and the part of book nine on Crime and Punishment that we didn't talk about, you know, they're all about incentives, all about this fundamental. Nobody chooses what they could perceive to be the worst and that, you know, so if we just have enough knowledge to bring in our Peter Railton thing that Wes and I talked about. The you have your own state of ignorance, but at the version of you, the wiser version of you, that house all the relevant knowledge, will choose the virtuous thing. And every time, because the virtuous thing is actually, that's the way it's designed, it is our excellence as human beings.

We will have maybe not the most orgasms, but that's not what, you know, how. We should examine what eudaimonia is, what the flourishing life is the most pleasure in the broadest sense, which includes lessening pain, lessening risk. All these things, if we properly understand things, are going to push us toward virtue. And again, all law is just about sculpting our environment, sculpting punishments, sculpting mores to push everybody in the right direction

48:40 Seth: and being around longer to do all of it. Moderate people burn out. They don't fade away.

48:46 Wes: You know, speaking of book nine, the thing that we're not going to get to is this famous point where he does mens rea. Right. So intention counts whether or not the crime is voluntary. Or involuntary counts when you're determining a penalty. So involuntary manslaughter, I think he would say you don't have a punishment, but you do compensation or something like that versus voluntary murder, you do a little bit differently. And then he tries to reconcile that with his theory. But no injustice is voluntary. And so he says, well, we can do injuries to people that are voluntary in the obvious legal sense versus involuntary manslaughter, for instance. But still at a deeper psychological level, everything that we do that's an injustice is involuntary because we do it. Because we think it's the good. Because we think it's good.

49:35 Mark: Yeah. So it's a problem he brings on himself by his own theory.

49:39 Seth: Yeah, it's worth the IEP entry for this is quite good. The Internet encyclopedia philosophy entry for the whole thing is good. But they give a very cogent and succinct kind of like, here's what he says and here's how people have argued it on this particular thing. That's very helpful.

49:56 Mark: I know we're not going to do a part three of this because we're going to record a nightcap pretty soon, but maybe we'll in the course of that get back to any outstanding issues in this or at least relate it to the modern day in the way that I have been resisting for the most part. Okay, I'll stop myself right there. Thanks so much for listening. Next time. We've long had Emil Cioran has been requested from us, so I was resuggesting that we look at his book called A Short History of Decay. So we're going to read the first essay in that. If you would like to suggest some things for us to read, please reach out to us.

Pl partiallyexaminedlife.com you can comment on the blog post associated with this. If you're wondering, wait, which, which sections did you read? Yeah, we're going to put them exactly in that lengthy blog post that I tend to write accompanying these. So make sure you are looking looking at partiallyexaminedlife. Com we have a nice newsletter that will send you when there are new blog posts, new episodes from any of our network podcasts that come in. Stay in touch. Thanks everybody. Good night.

50:58 Seth: Good night.

50:59 Wes: Good night.

50:59 Dylan: Good night.