Plato on Virtue and the Law

by Berges, Sandrine

• ISBN13: 9781847065926
• ISBN10: 1847065929
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-07
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

This important monograph examines Plato's contribution to virtue ethics and shows how his dialogues contain interesting and plausible insights into current philosophical concerns.

Author Biography

Sandrine Berges is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bilkent University, Turkey.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Chapters overview	p. 6
Some Key Concepts in Ancient Virtue Ethics	p. 9
Plato and Aristotle's virtue ethics	p. 10
Agent-focused and agent-based virtue ethics	p. 22
What is virtue jurisprudence?	p. 27
Obedience and Persuading the Laws in the Crito	p. 30
Introduction	p. 30
The incompatibility problem introduced	p. 32
Unconditional obedience	p. 35
Agreement	p. 38
The role of the Laws: the parent analogy	p. 41
The Crito, the Apology, and civil disobedience	p. 48
Promoting and Preserving Virtue in the Menexenus	p. 52
Introduction	p. 52
The relevance of Plato's proposal to contemporary debates	p. 53
Alternative accounts: Slote and the Republic	p. 58
The argument in the Menexenus	p. 60
Why the virtue politics account is not overly paternalistic	p. 63
Virtue as Mental Health in the Gorgias and Other Dialogues	p. 69
The model of psychic health in Plato	p. 70
How the model works: elenchos as therapy	p. 73
Virtue and the situationists	p. 77
Community service for offenders as elenctic therapy: a case study	p. 89
Paternalism in the Republic	p. 92
A problem and a solution?	p. 92
Paternalism in the Republic	p. 96
Educating the philosopher kings and the rest	p. 100
Paternalism in education	p. 104
Conclusion	p. 106
The Statesman and Equity	p. 107
Introduction	p. 107
Two attitudes to the laws in the Statesman	p. 108
The anti-democratic reading of the second claim	p. 111
Equity	p. 116
An objection	p. 121
Making way for the Laws	p. 122
The Laws: Persuading the Citizens	p. 124
Introduction	p. 124
Preambles	p. 126
The two audiences for the preambles	p. 132
Are the preambles paternalistic?	p. 136
Persuading the laws	p. 138
Towards Virtue-promoting Democratic Institutions	p. 142
A flourishing environment: from laws to institutions	p. 142
Can democratic institutions be wisdom-promoting?	p. 144
Can wisdom-promoting laws be produced democratically?	p. 146
Two examples: racism and sexism	p. 148
Notes	p. 151
Bibliography	p. 169
Index	p. 175
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