The Apology
The Charges against Socrates
The Athenians, like other Greeks, believed that people could offend the gods in various ways, and that when they did, the gods might well condemn the entire city to terrible evils. To discourage what might anger the gods, the city passed a law forbidding impiety, and it was this law that Meletus charged Socrates with violating. Socrates says that Meletus charged him with being impious in three ways: Socrates does not believe in the gods of the city, he introduced new divinities, and he corrupted the youth ( and 2004, ).
How does Socrates Defend Himself?
The apology comes from the Greek word for defense-speech. The Apology provides Plato’s version of three speeches Socrates makes before his jurors at the trial: his defense, a counter-penalty proposal following his conviction, and some final words after he has been sentenced to execution.
At the end of Socrates’ defence speech, he announces that he will not beg for mercy nor will he allow his children and relatives to appear before the court in the hope that it will arouse pity for what will be their plight if Socrates is convicted. Socrates gives two reasons why he will not engage in such a manipulative tactics, he believes that he has a reputation for being superior to the run of people and that anyone who also thinks he is superior whether in wisdom, or courage, or in any virtue and yet who engages in such a shameless tactics brings disgrace to Athens. The second reason why Socrates refuses to appeal to the jury’s sense of pity concerns his commitment to justice and piety. Socrates believes that it is never right to undermine the legal institutions in Athens. He believes that it is fundamentally unfair for any citizen, even one who is convinced of his innocence, as he is, to try to thwart the outcome of a duly constituted legal process ( and 2004, ).
Socrates’ defense shocked and even angered the jury. He always tried to “make the worse seem the better cause”. He believed that it was the gods’ judgment to make him the wisest man. He tried to tell the jury that he is a god and therefore telling a lie would be a violation of his nature. The philosopher made it known to the jury that in his quest to find the wisest man, he met many people who were proud but ignorant. He concluded that no man is wiser than he is because he acknowledges the fact that he knows little. The jury was shocked by his defence and was greatly offended.
Should Socrates’ be considered a Martyr?
No. Socrates had different motivations why he chose to die. At the conclusion of the trial, Socrates sees that his life – if he were to continue it – would be so plagued by troubles that it is no longer worth living. He also plainly believes himself to be a good man, whose goodness is undiminished by the fact that he has been convicted and condemned to death. He regards his life as no longer worth living ( and 1995, ).
Descartes’ Radical Doubt
Descartes’ project of radical doubt starts with a rejection of sensuous apprehension of the world and then retreats into the “minds eye” of subjective rationalism (, 2003).
In the First Meditation reasons are provided which give us possible grounds for doubt about all things, especially material things, so long as we have no foundations for the sciences other than those which we have had up till now. Although the usefulness of such extensive doubt is not apparent at first sight, its greatest benefit lies in freeing us from all our preconceived opinions, and providing the easiest route by which the mind may be led away from the senses ( cited in 2002, ).
On Descartes’ own view of human life, our beliefs about our selves and the world around us are pervasively distorted by a tendency, acquired in our earliest years, to surrender too much authority to our senses. We assume that the things we see and touch are the basic sorts of things that there are, and we assume that they are much as we perceive them to be. Descartes thought these assumptions were false. Conscious things are basics sorts of things, but we cannot possibly see or feel them. Moreover, the basic components of physical things are bodies that are too small to see or feel them ( 2002, ).
Descartes thinks that it will help us to inquire into the truth by starting with radical skepticism because this will loosen the grip of the senses upon our minds. If I am suspending judgment about whether anything I sense even exists, then I am, at least temporarily, freeing my thoughts from the distorting assumptions I have grown up with. This may subsequently allow me to discern and embrace principles that can replace the bad assumptions that have taken root in my mind ( 2002, ). In the first meditation, Descartes spelled out radical grounds for doubt, grounds that are attenuated but whose scope universal. For complex motives, the meditator resolved to suspend judgment about everything that falls within the scope of these reasons for doubt, even though the reasons are slight and exaggerated. He took this bold step both because he thought that to establish something lasting in the sciences, he must first demolish all his opinions, and because he thought that using this maxim would enable him to execute a strategy with the power to go up against the authority of common sense. Such a method would greatly widen the scope of doubt from its everyday limits, and it would require us to suspend judgment about everything that falls within that widened scope (, 2002, ). Descartes’ aim was to establish the absolute certainty of his beliefs by showing that their truth is a condition of his using the method of doubt. Among these are the beliefs that he exists and that he has an idea of God. Descartes thought he could show that those absolutely certain beliefs together entail that he is created by a non-deceiving God, and from that, he claimed, it follows that all of his clear and distinct ideas are true. So ultimately, the existence of God and the truth of clear and distinct ideas are conditions of his use of the method of doubt. Some of Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas concern mathematics, and from others he draws the further conclusion that some of his sense-based beliefs are true, including the general belief that material things exist. Overall, then by uncovering the conditions of his doubt, he thinks he can establish truths about his own existence and existence of God, the truth of his clear and distinct ideas, and then also the truth of his mathematical judgments and of his judgment that the material world exists ( 2002, ).
Deontological and Utilitarian Ethics
Deontological Ethics
Deontological ethics, according to and (1990), are sometimes associated with divine command theories of morality (what is right or wrong is a matter of what God commands) and with the moral theories of the philosopher (). As argued, people should be treated as members of the kingdom of ends. People are objects of moral worth and should be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as a mean to some other end. We often treat each other as means to an end – for instance, a student may treat a teacher as a means to gaining knowledge – but we ought not to treat people merely as means. Such treatment dehumanizes persons by treating them as things. Persons are not bundles of pleasant and unpleasant mental states, nor are they merely valuable because of their social utility. A human being is a person with intrinsic value simply because that person is a member of the natural class “human being” ( and 1990, ).
Utilitarian Ethics
Utilitarians view moral life in terms of means-to-ends reasoning. They are agreed that the rightness/wrongness of an act or moral rule is solely a matter of the non-moral good produced directly or indirectly in the consequences of that act or rule ( and 1990, ). Utilitarianism is an approach to morality that treats pleasure or desire-satisfaction as the sole element in human good and that regards the morality of actions as entirely dependent on consequences or results for human well being ( 1995, ).
Types of Utilitarianism
1. Act Utilitarianism – an act is right if and only if no other act available to the agent maximizes utility more than the act in question.
2. Rule Utilitarianism – an act is right if and only if it falls under a correct moral value which covers that generic type of act. And a rule is a correct rule if and only if everyone’s acting on this rule would maximize utility compared to everyone’s acting on this rule would maximize utility compared to everyone’s acting on alternative rule.
For ulilitarians the rightness of an action is determined by the goodness of its consequences. Deontologists on the other hand believes that one ought to engage in certain actions because to do so as a matter of principle.
The Death of God
The idea of God according to was the supreme achievement of resentiment and reactive values: the invention of a higher form of life in order to judge and condemn human will and earthly experience. Humankind clings to faith because it no longer feels able to create new values and style of living. Faith is coveted most where will is lacking ‘giving rise to a demand that has become utterly desperate for some “thou shalt” ( 2003, ).
’s famous declaration in The Gay Science, first published in German in 1882, of the ‘death of God’ was intended to alert humanity to this ‘twilight of the Idols’ and to underline the necessity of producing an interpretation of life unconstrained by the Christian inheritance. What distinguishes from other nineteenth-century critics of religion, morality and nineteenth-century life is that he does not search for a more effective moral life; he attempts to save life from morality itself. He argues that nineteenth-century culture experiences life as a form of nihilism because it has invented a series of moral concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘selflessness’ and ‘equality’ that have been raised above life in order to regulate and judge life. Not only do these moral values repress what took to be the most profound instinctual forces of life; they also encourage us to live reactively according to an inflexible and timeless moral law instead of creating our values actively for ourselves ( 2003, ).
Death of God: Freedom and Responsibility
’s declaration of the death of God was his way of saying that the idea of God in no longer capable of acting as a source of any moral code. It meant that we can no longer use the idea of God to
It was his way of reminding us that we must now take responsibility for what we say about the world rather than trying as we have in the past to impose such responsibility onto a fantasy of the way the world is in itself. We have seen how that fantasy distorts our conception of the nature of the responsibility believes we can be said to bear for the sense we make. As he says in The Gay Science, the death of God is something that we ourselves have brought about, something we have done. He was convinced that, as we stand, we fail to take responsibility for our commitment to truthfulness--we are not properly responsive to it. We fail, in short, to understand the death of God as an event. Our will to truth, he says, is not self-conscious. It remains moral or pious in character, and is, to that extent, life denying ( 1995, ).
believed that surrendering the belief in God gives humans freedom to develop and enhance their creative abilities. The Christian God will no longer impose laws and commands on people making humans to acknowledge the world’s value. The acceptance of the idea that God is dead will give humans freedom to become something new, different creative. The death of God comes with freedom and responsibility. Giving up the Christian faith may mean to pull out moral values attached to this belief and hence the emergence of the need for the new ones. The idea of God according to prevented variety of things, people’s trust in science and scientific explanations.
The Nature of Human Self
The Five Aggregates
1. Material Form – concerns our physical nature. It refers to our entire body and in particular those aspects of it that make possible the five senses.
2. Feelings – have to do with our sensations, whether originating from the mind or the body, and their quality as pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent.
3. Perceptions – go beyond sensations and involve judgments about the world.
4. Formations – refer to anything that moves us to act –desires, wishes, volitions, and so on. They are classified as being ethically good, bad, or neutral.
5. Consciousness – concerns the general fact that we are aware, either of the world, or of ‘ourselves as having the other aggregates.
The doctrine of aggregates is an attempt to classify the various undergoings and doings of the self. It refers to familiar features of persons. According to the , every aspect of what we ordinarily regard as a person is encompassed by one or more of the five aggregates, and each of these aggregates in impermanent. Whether we consider the body or aspects of the mind such as feelings, perceptions, volitions and the like, all we ever find is something that changes - this sensation, that desire, this judgment, that feeling, and so on ( 2003, ). According to the if we carefully observe what we call ‘ourselves’, we will realize that all we ever actually observe are particularly impermanent aggregates.
Dennet
Dennet is an advocate of science-based materialism. Dennet believes that self is an abstract entity of some sort. Dennet’s theory of mind is rooted in the empiricism of science. Dennet states that the self, as an abstract object is a ‘fiction’.
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