Explain how (1) Plato's Euthyphro and (2) Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" each make a case for the importance of self knowledge.
Explain how (1) Plato's Euthyphro and (2) Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" each make a case for the importance of self knowledge.
Plato presents the character Euthyphro as a person who lacks self-knowledge. In this dialogue Euthyphro has filed murder charges against his own father. In defense of his actions Euthyphro relates the following story to the philosopher Socrates: One of Euthyphro's dependent laborers got drunk and killed a domestic servant of the family. On discovering this, Euthyphro's father bound the laborer hand and foot and left him unfed and exposed to the elements. The father then sought the advice of religious authorities on how to deal with the murderer. During this period, the man died of exposure or starvation. Despite the outrage of his family and friends, Euthyphro feels confident that his father's neglect of the man constitutes murder. He claims that filing charges is the only pious (or holy) thing to do. Euthyphro presents himself as a deeply pious man who does not, like ordinary people, shirk his moral responsibilities simply because they run contrary to his own interests or feelings of loyalty to his family.
Socrates then engages Euthyphro in a dialogue to determine whether he really understands his own actions. Socrates does this by asking Euthyphro for the meaning of piety. Euthyphro initially responds by giving examples of what he regards as pious behavior. Socrates rejects this answer, explaining that a definition of piety must show what all examples of piety have in common. Euthyphro eventually offers the following definition: Piety is that which is dear to the gods. Socrates then proceeds to show that this definition is inadequate. He provides two important arguments.
Socrates' first argument stems from the well known fact that the gods do not always agree. If we accept the two following propositions
. Piety is what is dear to the gods.
2. What is dear to some gods is not necessarily dear to others.
then it follows that
3. Something may be both pious and impious at the same time.
This is a logical contradiction and sufficient grounds for rejecting Euthyphro's definition of piety.
Socrates' second argument consists in showing Euthyphro that in fact he ...
This is a preview of the whole essay
Socrates' first argument stems from the well known fact that the gods do not always agree. If we accept the two following propositions
. Piety is what is dear to the gods.
2. What is dear to some gods is not necessarily dear to others.
then it follows that
3. Something may be both pious and impious at the same time.
This is a logical contradiction and sufficient grounds for rejecting Euthyphro's definition of piety.
Socrates' second argument consists in showing Euthyphro that in fact he does not really even accept his own definition. Socrates does this by posing the following question: Is something pious or holy because it is dear to the gods, or, rather, is it dear to the gods because it is holy? Socrates explains that if something is holy just just in virtue of being dear to the gods, then it would lose its holiness if it ceased to be dear to the gods. But this contradicts the assumption that holiness is an eternal attribute; i.e., something that is holy now must be holy forever. This leaves the second option, viz., that something is dear to the gods because it is holy. This, according to Socrates, is the right answer. However, he explains that if holiness is to constitute a reason for a thing being dear to the gods, then holiness and being to be dear to the gods can not actually be the same thing. This is because something can not be a reason for itself.
Euthyphro demonstrates his lack of self knowledge by revealing that he does not actually understand the reasons he has given for prosecuting his father. Although he claims that his actions are pious, in fact he has no idea what piety is. Despite Socrates arguments, at the end of the dialogue Euthyphro is certain that he really does know what piety is, but that he just finds it difficult to explain. Plato makes his case for the importance of self-knowledge by showing how much harm can be done when a lack of self knowledge is combined with a smug certainty of ones moral superiority over others.
Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority is at attempt to determine whether and to what extent normal people will obey the instructions of an authority figure against their own moral convictions. Milgram designed an experiment in which two people are asked to participate in a study of learning and memory. One person is in the role of the "teacher" and the other is in the role of the "learner." The learner, in full view of the teacher, is strapped into a chair and fitted with electrodes, which will (supposedly) deliver a shock generated from a device in the adjoining room. The teacher is then led to the shock generator and shown how to operate it. The experiment begins, and the teacher is directed to administer shocks of increasing intensity whenever the learner provides incorrect answers to questions about a list of word pairs s/he has been directed to memorize. The teacher is told that that the highest intensity shocks are extremely painful and dangerous to the learner, and this is corroborated when the learner, on receiving such shocks, emits horrifying screams. In fact, there is no shock being delivered at all. The learner is an actor, and the teacher is the naive subject of study.
During the experiment, the teacher is instructed to increase the intensity of the shock to the highest level; however the teacher is never threatened physically, and nothing else prevents him or her from simply refusing to administer the shock or from leaving the experimental setting altogether. The entire point of the experiment is to determine how far the subject is willing to obey orders simply because they come from an authority figure.
The result of the study is that 2/3 of the subjects can be made to administer shocks of the highest intensity. In a variation of the experiment, in which the subject reads the word pairs while someone else administers the shock 37 out of 40 participated to the highest level. Milgram identifies a variety of "binding factors" and "social adjustments" that help to explain this behavior. Some of these are:
* Social awkwardness of withdrawing from the experiment.
* The desire to uphold the initial promise to an authority figure.
* Absorption in technical aspects of the experiment.
* Blaming the victim.
In this study self-knowledge may be understood as an individual knowing what s/he is capable of doing. The subjects lacked self-knowledge to the extent that they willingly acted against their stated moral convictions, voluntarily torturing others for no good reason. Milgram madkes his case for the importance of self-knowlege by demonstrating that without it, ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary evil, as well as rationalizing it afterwards. The Nazi holocaust was the inspiration for Milgram's study. It provides support for the Hannah Arendt's thesis of "the banality of evil," i.e., that the perpetrators of the holocaust were not unusually evil, but just ordinary people following orders.
Plato approaches self-knowledge in a more intellectual way than Milgram. For Plato, self-knowledge can be understood in terms of a grasp of the meaning of the concepts we use to justify our actions. Milgram's subjects are not represented as people who lack a grasp of concepts, but rather who fail to grasp their own human nature. So, whereas Plato's approach is to try to clarify concepts like piety, Milgram's approach is to inform us of what people are capable of doing in response to certain kids of social pressure. These are simply differences in emphasis. Presumably Milgram's methods could contribute something to our understanding of Euthyphro, and Plato's methods could reveal logical absurdities in the rationalizations offered by Milgram's subjects.
