Caroline Machado Ethical Dimensions 31/8/2015 Ancient Greece: Socrates and Plato Socrates was a Greek philosopher born in Athens in the year 469 B.C who did not know how to read or write himself. So, all we know about him comes from Plato. Socrates was known as the wisest men in Athens, but he wanted to find someone as smart as him. He wanted to define the meaning of good, beauty and virtue.…
ETHICAL DILEMMA IN PLATOON In the movie Platoon directed by Oliver Stone, Charlie Sheen portrays an idealistic young infantryman named Chris Taylor serving his first tour in Vietnam. When on patrol one day, Taylor’s platoon commits a series of war crimes against Vietnamese civilians, including rape and brutal murders (Stone, 1986). Taylor is then faced with a moral problem -- whether to stay loyal to his fellow soldiers despite their crimes or report them so they may face justice. The question is not solely based in loyalty, as reporting his peers also poses a risk to his own safety.…
1. Plato believed that justice is good in itself, or “an intrinsic good”. He showed this by arguing in the Republic that justice is an essential part of living a happy life. In the Republic, Plato separates the soul into three parts he calls reason, spirit, and appetite. A moral or just person would be a person whose soul is functioning in equilibrium.…
A Socratic dialogue reveals how tenable and untenable philosophy can be. Throughout Plato’s, Republic, this can be seen to be the undeniable truth, whereby the main character Socrates reveals the truth behind being just, and the qualities of a just soul through constant debate style conversations. The idea of self-control is a constant issue of discussion as he determines how complex the soul can be. Socrates argument on the soul determining the necessity of having a superior and inferior part to the soul, in order to become an overly righteous and just person.…
but after reading Plato's words, I realized that there is much more to justice. The portrait of justice I had in mind was what Glaucon identifies as the third kind of good: "burdensome but beneficial to us", the kind of acts that "we would not choose them for their own sake, but for the sake of their rewards and other consequences" (Plato 357c7-d1).…
One's soul is made up of three parts: the rational, the spirited and the appetitive/passionate. Justice is formed when the rational rules, the spirit serves reason, and temptation and appetite exist in moderation, guided by reason. A man is therefore just to himself when he allows his rational part to make decisions and for his spirit to fight for and give courage to such decisions. Injustice, according to Socrates, is a kind of civil war between the three parts of the soul. Justice within a man forms just actions, whereas injustice produces unjust…
Just or unjust, good or bad, virtuous or vicious- Pablo López Yagüe The writings of Plato, Sandel, and Straus bridge centuries but all highlight the importance of political theory as the basis in providing a discourse for the reflection of life. Plato’s Crito focuses on reason by adapting the moral point of view on the affairs of justice and virtue, through the analysis of the human natural and the social contract. Sandel’s Doing the Right Thing deliberation on problems helps assess the difficulty of morality over individuals, society and the law in determining what is just and virtuous. However, Straus’ What is Political Philosophy considers the Socratic political philosophy thesis in an effort to restore rationalism, by criticizing positivism…
While we have seen that Socrates is good at rejecting incorrect arguments, it is equally important to be able to identify correct ones. The Meno begins with Meno, a friend of Scorates, asking Socrates if virtue can be taught or is it an inborn quality that some posses from birth and others never will. Socrates and his friend then begin to perform an investigation into the nature and form of virtue. When they arrive at the question of how one may know and recognize virtue when it is found, despite not having knowledge of what it is beforehand Meno’s Paradox arises. While both Meno and Scorates agree that virtue is something beneficial within the soul, they struggle to answer how it is one comes to acquire virtue in the first place, whether…
In the Republic, Plato introduces many of his viewpoints and ideals through arguments. Some examples of what he introduces are what defines a city, principles of specialization, the tripartite soul and the sun, the line and the cave. In this paper, we are going to focus on the tripartite soul argument and the nature of justice. The tripartite soul argument states that a human soul is divided into three distinct parts that all want to achieve different goals. The soul, according to Plato, is composed of a rational, a spirited, and an appetitive factor.…
Plato also gives his own idea of justice, which individually, is a human virtue that makes a person…
Plato felt being moral was having a well-ordered, balanced, harmonious soul that possessed a certain inner balance allowing people to avoid becoming a victim to selfish desires (Williams & Arrigo, 2012). Plato felt that when we fail to embrace having a good moral character, our choices and actions would cause us to be driven by greed, pride, selfishness, and callousness (Williams & Arrigo, 2012). You can see that Plato’s thoughts about the soul were that when the human soul such as the official, failed to embrace having good moral character, malfeasance, nonfeasance, and misfeasance would follow. Plato felt that a person is not ruled by any of the elements or parts of them. Man’s soul is temporarily ruled by a succession of desires of different kids.…
One of the main arguments Plato makes is that the soul has the function of “caring for things, ruling and deliberating (Republic, 353d).” He goes on to add that living is also an essential part of the soul. We can conclude from this that a good soul cares, rules, deliberates, and lives well, while a bad soul does none of these…
Plato cites that acting justly would provide benefits that Machiavelli overlooks. Plato argues that justice provides external benefits and internal individual benefits that make it absolute and worthwhile. The external benefits include those of appearances that Machiavelli would anticipate. The internal benefits include creating a more balanced, just soul. Plato believes the human soul is divided into three parts; appetitive, spirited, and rational.…
Plato had many ideas about human nature, but his stemmed from a route that many Philoshipers failed to examine. Plato believed that Human nature had much more to do with our souls then our bodies. Plato states that the principal task of the soul is to pursue knowledge this we can decipher from the Allegory of the cave. Although Plato believed that the soul has three parts the Logical part, the Spirited and the Appetitive. The Logical part of the soul is responsible for the search for knowledge and truth, while the spirited part Plato identified with anger and temper, lastly the appetitive part of the soul Is responsible for love, sex, hunger and thirst; Plato theorised that the appetitive is generally opposed to the logical side of the soul.…
We have also seen that in the Republic, Plato divides the soul…