PROFESSOR: So today's lecture
is about the question of the challenge that Glaucon
posed in the story of the ring of Gyges. The question is: what sort of
motivations do we have for acting morally, and what
expectations should we have with respect to those around us
about whether they act in that way, for reasons intrinsic
to moral motivation, or simply because they wish to
appear a particular way? So what I want to start by
doing, is tell you a little bit about the extraordinary
person whose dialogue, The Republic, we read excerpts
from today. It's hard to overestimate the
influence of Plato on the Western intellectual
tradition. There is no educated person in
the Western world in the last 2500 years who wasn't influenced
in some way or another by the thought and by
the framework of understanding that Plato provided for us
some 2500 years ago. Plato was an extremely
interesting figure. He was born into an aristocratic
family in Athens. Some think that he was descended
from one of the Athenian kings, but regardless,
it's clear that the family of which he was a
part were among the leaders of Athenian political society. Several of his uncles had been
part of a coup in the government that took place
several years before Plato came to maturity. And the expectation of people
like Plato was that they would go into civics or government. Public leadership. It was as if he were a Kennedy
or a Bush or a Clinton. He came from a family with a
long history of political engagement. And the assumption was that he
would become politically engaged, himself. But interestingly, for reasons
about there are great speculations, Plato came under
the influence of a man about thirty years his elder named
Socrates, who, in the portraits that we have
of him, looked remarkably like Plato himself. Socrates was a gadfly. He wandered around Athens and
asked people to reflect on their commitments. Asked people to think about what
the nature of fundamental things like justice, and
truth, and reality, and friendship, and love,
and honesty were. He asked people to reflect on
common opinion, and to ask themselves what, of the things
that they believed, were well-grounded, and what, of the
things that they believed, were simply matters of
received opinion. And in part because of his
provocation, Socrates was sentenced to death in 399,
before the Common Era. When Plato was roughly thirty
years old, Plato attended the death of his great teacher. And he describes the story of
the trial at which Socrates was accused of corrupting the
youth of Athens in an extraordinary dialogue
known as The Apology. And the legacy that The Apology
provides is something like the legacy that
the Gospel provides for the life of Jesus. It's a story of a person willing
to die for the sake of principle in a way that became
a trope for Western civilization. So in an extraordinary painting,
which you can see if you go to the Metropolitan
Museum in New York City, there is a depiction of the
death of Socrates. And here is Socrates, drinking
from the chalice of hemlock, which is to put him to death. Here are his disciples,
including Plato, calmly at the end of the bed, and Crito,
holding his leg. Up the stairs here, which you
can't see, are some other figures leaving. But what's extraordinary about
this picture is that it was painted in 1787 by one of the
artists involved in the French revolution. It was, in fact, displayed to
Thomas Jefferson, who admired it greatly. And one of the striking things
about its composition, is that in some ways, it echoes Leonardo
da Vinci's famous painting of The Last Supper,
where those of you who are familiar with the painting know,
Jesus sits at the center of the table, surrounded
by disciples. Whereas that is a story of death
for the sake of faith, Socrates's story is a story of
death for the sake of reason. And the idea that a life lived
on the basis of principle, recorded by disciples, who can
explain the motivation for that life, the idea that that
can influence thousands of years of history and can inspire
political change and principled commitment, is
one of the legacies that Plato left us. After Socrates's death, Plato
devoted himself to a life of learning, in 385 before the
Common Era, started what many call the first university, or
academy, in the Western world. At that academy, Plato trained
many of the thinkers of ancient Athens, including
Aristotle, whose work we'll be reading next week. While there, Plato composed
a number of works that have endured. Among them is The Republic,
which we read excerpts from for today. And here's a particularly
beautiful third century manuscript of The Republic, one
of the tens of thousands of documents discovered at
Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, roughly a century ago. And I've put the spelling up
there, so that those of you who are intrigued can go and
read about the story of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, which is
one of the most incredible detective stories of discovery
of a huge trove of documents. As I said again, only a century
ago, many of them retrieved only during and after
the First World War. So Plato's Republic, as I
mentioned, is one of roughly thirty dialogues that
Plato composed. You might have noticed in the
course of reading it, as the reading guide indicated,
that it's not written as a treatise. It's written in the form
of a conversation. And except for some letters that
we have of Plato, nearly all of the work of his
that we have comes in the form of dialogue. And they address almost every
philosophical topic imaginable. The nature of knowledge, the
nature of truth, the nature of love, the nature of friendship,
and so on. The Republic, in particular, is
focused on the question of how society ought to be
structured to allow human beings to flourish. And the work, as we've inherited
it, is structured into ten books, of which we
will read in this class excerpts from the second book
and most of the tenth. In the particular part that
we're reading, we overhear a conversation among
three characters. One of them is Plato's teacher
Socrates, the fellow with the snub nose that I showed you
the slide of earlier. And the other two are Plato's
brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus. And the conversation that we
hear takes place first between Socrates and Glaucon, and then
between Socrates and Adeimantus. But we're, of course,
not reading off the Oxyrhynchus papyrus. We're not even reading, as some
students at Yale are this semester, the text in
the original Greek. There's a seminar being offered
in my department on Plato's Republic, a whole
semester, during which they are reading the text
in ancient Greek. And there's an extraordinary
Yale-London collaboration of a decade during which one week
each year, professors from Yale and professors from London
get together and read one book of Plato's Republic. So this is a book that is
read seriously here. We, however, are fortunate
enough to be reading an edition, which I've asked all
of you to purchase, which looks like this. And I want to explain to you
why I've asked you to buy a book given that, as many of you
might have noticed, the translation of the Republic,
a late nineteenth century translation by Benjamin
Jowett, is available, on the internet. And I just want to say a few
words about what value there is in getting editions of books
which are designed to help students engage seriously
with the material. So in the copy of The Republic
that I've asked you to purchase, there are extensive
introductory materials. There are extraordinarily
helpful footnotes. There's an annotated
bibliography in the preparatory material that tells
you what books to look at if you're interested
in Plato. There's an incredibly
valuable index. And in the margins are what
I've told you are called Stephanus numbers, which allow
you to make reference to any other translation. So let's now move to the
substance of the material that we read for today. What is it that Glaucon, Plato's
brother, is seeking to do in the course of his
conversation with Socrates? There are three questions that
Glaucon wants to answer. The first is that he wants to
say something about the nature and origin of justice. How is it that people come to
behave in cooperative ways, and what is it that we speak
of when we talk about the norms of justice? This is a topic that we'll
discuss when we get to Hobbes, and so I'm not going to say
more today about the particular argument that
Glaucon offers there. What I want to focus on,
instead, are two things: Glaucon's second and
third question. The first is Glaucon's claim
that people act justly unwillingly. That the only reason people act
and conform with the laws of morality is because
they will gain good reputation thereby. And the second is Glaucon's
claim that they are right to do so. So the text begins with a
fundamental contrast. One that is useful, not only in the
context of Glaucon's discussion of justice, but one
that is fundamental throughout Plato's work. And that's the contrast between
the way things seem and the way things are. And it's a crucial insight to
recognize that seeming and being can come apart, and that
in some cases, our concern is with the way things appear,
and in other cases, our concern is with the
way things are. So the text actually begins with
a challenge that Glaucon raises to Socrates. He says: do you want to seem to
have persuaded us that it is better to be just than
unjust, or do you want truly to have persuaded us? And clearly, Socrates's
goal is the latter. He wants to engage in
true persuasion. This theme of seeming versus
being is then taken up by Glaucon, who asks Socrates the
question, whether there's value in being just or whether
the value of justice comes merely from appearing
to be that way. So we find a contrast in the
opening pages between three kinds of values that things
can have. Things can be intrinsically valuable,
valuable as ends in themselves, valuable
for what they are. Socrates gives the example here
of things like joy, and harmless pleasure. These are things we value not
because of what they provide in addition, but things that
we value as ends in themselves. There are, by contrast,
things that are merely instrumentally valuable. Things that are valuable
as means. Things that are valuable in
enabling us to do something else, or in seeming to
be a particular way. And into this category fall
things like money, which is valuable, let me remind you, not
as an end in itself, but as a means to other ends. And, for example, things
like seeming dangerous. It's what you're trying to do
in an evolutionary sense, or as a nation, is to prevent
others from attacking you, it doesn't matter whether
you are dangerous. What matters is that
you seem dangerous. And there are, of course, things
that are valuable for both of these. Things like, Socrates says,
sight, which we value both because it enables us to do
things, and because it brings pleasure in itself. Or health. Or learning. Or knowledge. And the question which Glaucon
and Socrates are disputing is, into which category
justice falls. Now, if we had our clickers,
this would be a chance for me to reengage all of you by asking
you into which category Glaucon thinks justice falls,
and into which category Socrates thinks justice falls. But in our last low-tech day,
I will instead ask you to raise your hands. Into which of the categories,
intrinsically valuable, instrumentally valuable, or
both, does Glaucon think justice falls? How many think he thinks
justice is merely intrinsically valuable? How many think he thinks
it's merely instrumentally valuable? And how many think he
thinks it's both? By contrast, Socrates. Intrinsically valuable. Instrumentally valuable. Both. So it's a dispute
between them. Both of them expect that there
is value to seeming just, but the dispute between them is
about whether, in addition, there is value to being just.
Does it matter that you actually act in a just way, or
does it matter only that you seem to act in a just way? Now, in order to answer this
question, Glaucon, as a character in Plato's Republic,
makes use of a technique that is and has become one of the
fundamental techniques in philosophical thought. It's basically an application
of scientific method to our idea. If you're trying to figure out
what makes a seed grow, does it require soil, does it require
water, does it require light, does it require air, does
it require you to sing sweetly as you walk past it? What you do is, you conduct a
controlled experiment, and you look and see: If you have the
seed with water but no soil, does it grow? If you have a seed with air but
no singing, does it grow? In this way, Glaucon engages
in a number of imaginative exercises to ask what people
would do if just behavior were divorced from its typical
consequences. So he asks us to imagine
somebody who acts either in a just or an unjust way. And to think about what their
motivations would be if the consequences were one
of a certain kind. So in ordinary cases, if you act
morally, you are perceived as acting morally, and if you
act immorally, you are perceived as acting immorally. The question that he asks us
to consider in the story of the ring of Gyges, which I
related last lecture, is how people would act if they were
perceived identically, regardless of how it is that
they genuinely behave. If your act of immorality were invisible
to the world, if you could behave immorally and
nobody would see you, so that your reputation remained
unscathed, how is it that you would behave? Glaucon's suggestion with the
story of the ring of Gyges is that under those circumstances,
you would behave as the unjust one does. But in case you aren't convinced
by that story, he tells a second story after
the ring of Gyges. It's the story of the inversion,
and he says this. Suppose the person who acts
justly is perceived by everyone as acting unjustly,
and the person who acts unjustly is perceived
as acting justly. Would you continue to behave in
accord with the standards of morality if the opposite
reputation attached to you? Now, we can contrast this
question about morality with two cases where it seems clear
in the first that we value something merely instrumentally,
and where it seems clear in the second that
we value something both intrinsically and
instrumentally. So if the act that you are
engaged in is one of taking a repulsive medicine, and if under
normal circumstances when you take the medicine, you
get better, and when you don't take the medicine, you
stay ill, then you will presumably, if you want to get
better, take the medicine. In a Gyges scenario, where
regardless of whether you take the medicine, you get better,
you won't be inclined to take the medicine. And certainly in an inverted
scenario, where if you take the medicine, you'd stay ill,
and if you don't take it, you get better, you won't be
inclined to take the medicine. When things are of merely
instrumental value, we can read the motivation off
the consequences. The question is this. Is justice just like taking a
medicine, something that we value because of an end that it
produces, but not because of the medicine itself, or
is it more like sight? Suppose that, as is the case in
normal circumstances, when you see, you have visual
experience of the world, and when you engage in motor
activity, you don't bump into things. Because I can see this podium,
I'm able to regulate my body in such a way that I don't
bump into it In a ring of Gyges scenario, I wouldn't
need to see to be able to avoid bumping into the podium. It seems to me clear that in
that case, I would nonetheless prefer to have vision, even if
I could get the consequences of seeing without
having vision. And the question of what I would
do in the inverted case, where I could have either sight
and the ability to avoid objects, or the ability to avoid
objects and not sight, is one where I don't
know how to answer. So the challenge that Glaucon
poses to you is the following. Is morality, for you, something merely like taking medicine? Do you behave morally so that
you have the reputation of behaving morally, or do you
behave morally because morality, like being able to
see, is something that's valuable in itself to you, and
valuable to you because of the consequences that it produces? That's the challenge of
Plato's Republic. And in next week's class, and
the week after that, we'll hear some of answers
that are offered to Glaucon's challenge. What I want to move to now is
the second text that we read for today, a text by the
contemporary psychologist Daniel Batson, which addresses
the question of moral integrity and moral hypocrisy
from an empirical psychological perspective. Batson's question is this. Is it the aim of people to be
moral, or is it the aim of people merely to appear
to be so? Baston looks somewhat unlike
Plato and Socrates. He's a living man. Teaches at the University
of Kansas. He even has a computer
printer. And in the work that we read
for today, we get a description of empirical studies
that Batson did on the question of how people behave
when they think they are not being observed. How do they think through their
actions to themselves, and what factors, if any,
lead them to behave in more honest ways? So Batson presents subjects
with a very simple experimental scenario. People who participate in his
experiment come into his laboratory, and they're told
that their job is to decide which of two tasks they are
assigned to, and which of two tasks a second person, whom they
won't be meeting, will be assigned to. One of the tasks is fun and
interesting, and each correct answer that you give provides
you with a lottery ticket for a lottery in which you'll win
a certain amount of money. And the other task is described
as kind of dull, and each correct answer that you
give will not result in your being entered in the lottery. So people are told, you can
decide to assign yourself to the fun, interesting
lottery-chance task and the other person to the boring, no
lottery task, or you can decide to assign the other
person to the fun, interesting task, and yourself to the
boring, no lottery task. Now, what psychologists call the
DV, or dependent variable, the thing with respect to which
Batson is looking for differences, is the percentage
of times people assign themselves to the positive task,
and the other person to the neutral task. So if we were just doing it by
chance, if you were literally just flipping a coin, what
percent of the time would the self-positive task
be assigned? What percent of the time would
the person assign themselves to the positive task? Hold up the number of fingers
times 10, such that it would be that percent of the time. You've got them on
one hand: 50%. So if you were just merely
flipping a coin, 50% of the time you would end up with the
positive task, 50% of the time, the other person would end
up with the positive task. So that's one of the things
that Batson is measuring in his study. And the other thing that Batson
is measuring is in his study is the point value that
people assign to themselves with respect to how moral
their action was. If they think their action was
perfectly moral in making the assignment, then they give
themselves a nine. If they think the action was
perfectly immoral in making the assignments, they give
themselves a one. So those are the things that
Batson is measuring. So that's psychology
term number one. Dependent variable. That at which you're looking
to see differences among in your study. Now, those of you who have taken
psychology courses, who have had roommates who have
taken psychology courses, know that when psychology studies
are conducted, subjects are presented with what are
called conditions. That is, when they come in, one
thing happens to them or another thing happens to them. The bean that I described in the
science study might be in the condition where it has soil
plus water and no air, or it might be in the condition
where it has soil plus singing and no water. Likewise, subjects in Batson's
experiment might be in a case where they just have come in,
and they're told there are these two possibilities. You can assign yourself positive
or this other person negative, or they're told that
they're in some sort of scenario where they can use
chance to make the decision. Now, I asked you in the reading
guide to try to understand the chart in which
Batson presents his results. And what I want to do in the
next few minutes of lecture, is to explain to you what the
extraordinarily interesting results that he came up mean. So in the first condition, when
subjects just come in, and are told they can make the
assignment however they want, 80% of subjects, 8 out of 10,
assign themselves to the positive condition and assign
the other character to the negative condition. Right? So 80% of people do the selfish
thing, but they don't consider themselves to
have done something particularly generous. They rate themselves at four
on a scale of one to nine, with respect to morality. And those who assign the other
person to the positive condition rate themselves
extraordinarily highly. They think they have done
the right thing. Now, if you bring subjects
into a room, and you tell them, they can flip a coin,
but they don't have to, roughly half of them don't
flip the coin. And among those half, 90% of
them still assign themselves to the positive condition. No surprise there. The next number is the
one that gives us the surprising results. What happens when subjects come
into the room, are told that they can flip a coin, flip
a coin, and on the basis of that coin flip, assign
themselves to one condition, and the other person
to the other? What happens is that upon
flipping the coin, 90% of them assign themselves to the
positive condition. Now, we all just held up five
fingers of one hand. So what's going on here? Well, why don't you think about
what would happen if you flipped the coin, and
it he came up heads? What does heads mean? Ah, heads! Heads must mean I assign
myself to the positive condition, and I assign
my opponent to the negative condition. Comes up tails. Tails. Hah. Tails! That means I assign myself to
the positive condition, I assign my opponent to the
negative condition. But here's what's striking. 90% of the people flipped the
coin, assigned themselves to the positive condition, and
rate themselves as having acted in an extraordinarily
moral way. Seven on a scale of nine, with
respect to how morally they behave. And the one guy who
actually did follow the coin flip, gives himself a nine. All right. So Batson's worried about this,
and so he says, OK. Let me see whether I can control
for that by actually not making the coins
say heads or tails. I'll make the coins say, on one
side, self to positive, and I'll make it say
on the other side, opponent to negative. What happens in that case? What happens in that case is
that 86% of the people who flip up the coin when it says,
opponent to negative, do what? What would you do? You flip it again, until it
comes up--"That's not the one that counts! The one that counts is--oh, oh,
it must be the fourteenth flip that actually determines."
And those people, again, rate themselves as having
acted in an incredibly morally appropriate way. Even when Batson labels it with
colors, so that he can see through the window who is
doing what, he gets the same extraordinary, astounding
pattern of results. In eight out of ten, nine out
of ten cases, people, given the chance to represent to
themselves that they have behaved morally, will do that
even if what they've really done is taking advantage of
an ambiguous situation. It appears, says Batson on the
basis of this, that what people care about is seeming
moral to themselves, and not, in fact, about acting in
a way that's fair. But what can one do to
induce in people prosocial moral behaviors? Here's the extraordinary next
study that Batson did. He put the subjects, who
are engaged in the same experimental design, in
a room with a mirror. Now, if the mirror is facing
away from the subject so that there's no reflection of them
in it, you get exactly the same results as last time. Roughly 85% of people
assign themselves to the positive condition. But if the mirror is facing
towards them, so that the subject is facing the mirror and
flips the coin, only 62% of them assign themselves to
the positive condition. And so if the mirror's facing
them, even when they don't flip the coin, 62% of them
assign themselves to the positive condition, that is,
that they're behaving almost completely fairly. And if they are facing the
mirror and flipping the coin, they behave 50% exactly as
chance would predict. What's going on here? It looks like the simple act
of feeling as if one is observed, even when one is
observed by oneself, is sufficient to provoke
prosocial behavior. And an extraordinary study,
carried out about five years ago in England, bears
that out. So in this study, there was an
honor system about putting money into a cup if you drank
coffee in the department. And some weeks, taped above the
cup of the coffee machine were pictures of flowers. There's the flowers,
there's the flowers, there's the flowers. And those weeks, almost nobody
put money into the pot. The other half of the week
taped above the pot were pairs of eyes. And those weeks, subject donated
large amounts of money into the pot. There is something about us as
social beings that encourages us to behave in moral ways
when activated within us, consciously or unconsciously,
is the scent of being observed. If you want to complete your
assignment without procrastinating, put a pair of
eyes on your computer and a mirror behind your desk. I kid you not. The profound and shocking
insight of Glaucon's story of Gyges in Plato's Republic is, in
light of this contemporary research, almost chilling. That he would tell the story
of how it is that we can expect somebody to behave if
he conceives of himself as unobserved--the story of our
shepherd, who finds the ring of invisibility, and when he
gets it takes over the kingdom--is the story that
Batson's research tells us about an inclination on the
part of human beings. There is a worrisome tendency on
the part of at least those about whom these stories
are told. That is, ancient Greek
civilization seemed to feel that this rings true. Contemporary American college
students in Kansas seem to bear that out. When we think of ourselves as
unobserved, it is difficult to act in conformity with
moral codes. And the question which will
reoccur throughout this semester--both in the unit on
morality and in the unit on political philosophy--is the
question of how society can be structured in such a way that
there are the equivalent of eyes above our computers and
mirrors in our room so that we can act in keeping with rules
that allow societies to provide the kind of stability
that allows human beings to flourish. So we have a couple of minutes
left, and let me just ask what questions you have about
today's lecture. Questions? STUDENT: Would you talk about
the consequences of [INAUDIBLE] morality,
you [INAUDIBLE] PROFESSOR: Good. So the question is, when I talk
about the consequences of morality, I've restricted
discussion's consequences for you, things like your
reputation. And the question is, what
about other sorts of consequences? What about when acting
in immoral ways brings harm to others? One of the things that we'll
talk about next week, and again is the section on justice,
is human beings' capacity for empathy and
sympathy, and the ways in which those features might be
leveraged to help do some of the prosocial work that
mirrors and eyes do. So excellent question. STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE] when
Glaucon is talking about it, [INAUDIBLE] PROFESSOR: So the question is,
when Glaucon is talking about it, is he only talking about
issues of reputation? So there's a very interesting
thing going on in Book 2 of The Republic. Glaucon and Adeimantus are
taking on a conversation that Socrates has been having with
Thrasymachus in book one about recitation. So that's part of why that's
being invoked as a reason. But there are also, you'll hear,
when Socrates gives his answer, it's about the integrity
of the person who acts in moral or immoral ways. And what Socrates is basically
going to go on to say is, it may seem to you like all you
care about is what you appear to be to others. But as a matter of fact, when
you let your soul get out of order, when you behave in ways
that are impulsive, that are insensitive to the needs of
others, you, yourself will be unable to flourish. And that's the answer we're
going to be exploring Glaucon hasn't raised that as
a question yet. Socrates is going to introduce
it into the conversation. Good. It is 11:20. I hope that the density of
today's lecture doesn't scare off too many of you. It gets more more
fun after this. And I look forward to seeing
many of you next week.
