[BLANK_AUDIO] Let's get technical. In response to Socrates's, gosh, I don't know what virtue is shtick, Meno is provoked to say what he thinks virtue is. His first attempt is to list a bunch of examples. There are all sorts of different sorts of virtues Socrates. There's a virtue for men, there's for, there's one for women, for old folks, for children, for a slave, and on and on. In Greek, by the way, it also makes sense to talk about a virtuous knife, a virtuous dog, just meaning an excellent one, one that serves its function well. So Meno should be able to rattle on for hours with examples of virtue. He says he has given many public speeches on the subject. But Socrates cuts all that speechifying short. It's his lucky day. He asked for one virtue and here Meno has provided him with a whole swarm of virtues. And speaking of swarms, Meno, the following would be a terrible way to define the word bee, or to delimit the concept bee. There's all kinds of bees, fat ones, skinny ones, dead ones, live ones, and on and on and on. And that's what a bee is. No. Plainly, you define bee not by saying what all bees do not have in common. You define bee by saying what they do have in common. So Meno, what do all your cases of virtue for a man, a woman, a child, so forth have in common? That's what we want to know. And Socrates does something else interesting with this little, what is the being of a bee gambit. He asks Meno whether he could say what a bee is, if asked. That is, could he pick out this quality that all and only bees posses, that makes them be bees and not another thing. Meno says he could. Well, what good student of Gorgias would say less? Even so, it seems kind of doubtful that Meno really could define bee. Just go read the Wikipedia entry for bee and consider whether it's likely that Meno knows half that stuff. There are, so Wikipedia tells me, approximately 20,000 known species of bee, that is 20,000 ways in which bees can differ from each other and still be bees. And even within the social species of bee, there are still queens and workers and drones to be distinguished. And to understand what that means, we need to study biology in general to understand even how these classification systems work. On the other hand, Meno might reply, I'm not kidding. I know a bee when I see one. That's sort of interesting, isn't it? Because he's right. He can tell a bee from a horse, or a dog, even from a wasp or an ant, probably. So doesn't he know what a bee is? Let me paraphrase a bit from the textbook, from page 193, if you want to read the full section. The case of bees illustrates the weakness of what we might call sample thinking, Meno style thinking, as opposed to system thinking, what Socrates is hinting we could use a little more of. If you understand what a thing is because you can provide or recognize a sample, you may still be highly confused. Because you cannot hold up any individual bee, say some worker, or a drone, or a queen, and say, behold, this is what a bee is. You certainly cannot say, judge the virtue, the excellence of any given bee, by the standard of this bee I have right here. You can't understand what a virtuous bee is, that is, a well-functioning bee, a healthy bee, without having a whole theory of what a healthy bee colony, a bee ecology is. What am I getting at? Virtue thinking tends to be sample thinking. If you want to say what a great man is or a great woman, you will probably offer someone samples, a hero, a heroin, celebrities, prominent politicians, great achievers, entrepreneurs. I mentioned in a few videos back that the self help section is pretty heavily tilted towards biography. If you want to be great, do you read biology or sociology? No, you read biography. Steve Jobs was great. Abe Lincoln, he was great. I'll read about them to understand greatness, but isn't this a little like trying to understand bees by reading the biography of a single bee? Isn't there a reason why bee scientists, I'm just guessing about this but I think I'm right, aren't big into individual bee biography as a genre. They study ecology, the general system. Also, isn't there a big difference between wanting to understand what makes for a healthy bee colony and wanting to know what it takes to be queen, as it were? Think about the difference between self help and sociology. Meno wants to be large and in charge. It doesn't follow that he knows what's good for society, or even that he's thinking about it. But surely, what it is to be a virtuous person is to be the sort of peson that is good for other people to have been in charge. We'll come back to this. Let's take a step back. In the first video, I said the Greek word arete, the word that gets translated virtue in effect, means success or excellence. In fact, the latter translation is better but the former does a better job of getting it what Meno is really getting at. Let me add a few notes to that thought before plowing on with the text of this dialogue. There really isn't any other English word that does the same job that virtue should do, yet virtue, the word, has come to have sort of an old-fashioned Victorian flavor to it. We associate virtue, the word, with ethical self-restraint, particularly by women. Calling a woman virtuous is in effect a polite way of saying, you think she isn't having sex with anyone she shouldn't be having sex with. Virtue lets you say that without actually saying the word, you know, sex. Like I said, it all seems very straight laced. If that's how virtue sounds to your ears, forget about it. Meno doesn't mean anything like that. Specifically, set aside any connotation of self-restraint. Meno definitely has more of an unrestrained, men should be men, just do it, be excellent, seize the brass ring, assert yourself, sense of what virtue is all about. I encourage you to do a quick Google of virtue definition. Check out what various dictionaries have to say about this word. But let me try to simplify the complications that I'm reasonably certain you will find, which correspond to the ones we find in our dialogue. Virtue is both a genus and various species. It means moral excellence in a generic, covers everything way. It also refers to various specific sorts of excellence. Patience is a virtue, courage is a virtue, moderation is a virtue, wisdom is a virtue. It makes sense to think that packing in lots of virtues, being moderate and wise and courageous and patient and all that, is what makes you virtuous, period, in general. That is, having virtues is the means to the end of being virtuous. But then again, that's not obviously self-evidently true. Maybe you don't need them all. Maybe you can't even have them all. Maybe some virtuous people need to have qualities, like ruthlessness or obsessiveness, that we wouldn't normally say are virtues. Things that we wouldn't normally say are good things to have, unless combined with other things in surprising ways. Virtue also just means, here we're coming to a different sense, effectiveness. A virtue is a power, the dictionary will tell you this is somewhat an obsolete use. This is really a nonmoral sense. In virtue of an effective marketing campaign, sales are up. That doesn't mean that what we're selling isn't good. Aspirin has the virtue of curing headaches. That's good. But arsenic has the virtue of poisoning people. That is, it has that effect, whether it's good or not. Morality and power. We'd like them to go together. Meno would, but it's just not clear they automatically do. Virtue, the word, sort of skates over the possible inconvenience of them coming apart. To repeat, there's a genus, species confusion. Virtue is general versus individual virtues. Let me give you a quote to go with that. Socrates, quote, tell me the nature of virtue as a whole and stop making many things out of one, as jokers say to people who have shattered something, unquote. Maybe it's funnier in the Greek. But I take it the picture, the joke is supposed to be this. See the picture? You get it? Virtue seems like a beautiful, unified thing, but it's made of pieces that don't obviously fit together, not neatly anyway. And to repeat, there's a moral, non-moral confusion. Virtue as morality versus virtue as power. Meno wants to get his hands on the goods. He wants to be rich and powerful and have status, and all that good stuff. On the other hand, when asked, he didn't think it's right to steal, you shouldn't steal stuff. Well, this is pretty basic stuff. Stealing is wrong, having money is good. But why is it wrong? Especially if you really want the money. According to Meno's account of virtue, how do you explain why it's wrong to steal if you really want the money? Last but not least, there's a means, ends confusion. Virtue is a means to an end, virtue is an end in itself. Now that I've told you what to look for, I want you to go off and do your reading if you haven't already. Read from 71e, that is from page 220 in our edition, to 80a, that is through page 237. I could talk to you all, through all the little twists and turns. It's not that hard. Then again, it's not that easy. It's certainly interesting enough to get into all the little details, but I think it's a tangle that's most educational for you to do the disentangling of. Let me just say it again so you'll keep it in mind. Look for genus species confusion, look for moral, non-moral confusion or equivocation, look for means, ends confusion. What's harder to see in where Meno is going wrong is, I think, while all this going wrong, all this sloping around is interesting. Yeah, Meno is very bad at defining virtue. We get it. Wouldn't it have been a more interesting dialogue if Plato would had Socrates argue with, oh say, someone who's a bit less bad at defining virtue? At 80A, after he's tired of being made to look like a fool, Meno accuses Socrates of being like a stingray and paralyzing his tongue. In the past, he's given lots of public speeches about virtue. Very good speeches, he thinks. Very well-received. And yet, he can't even say what it was he was talking about now. What's interesting here, I think, is precisely this odd disjunction of capacity and incapacity. How is it even possible that Meno could give persuasive speeches about virtue, and then not be able to define it, at all, in a remotely rationally satisfactory way. Well, you do it all the time. How do you do it? Riddle me that. Not giving persuasive speeches about virtue to large audiences. Maybe you day job isn't motivational speaker, but you talk to your fellow human beings in a very opinionated way about who you think is a good person and a bad person. I bet you do, anyway. How do you do it? How do you know how to do that? I'll bet, if Socrates were around and asked you a lot of pesky, tricky definition questions, you'd kind of flop around helplessly. How is it, that you are so good at talking about this stuff without being better at thinking about this stuff.
