ABSTRACT
‘The beautifuls are beautiful by virtue of the beautiful’ (Phaedo 100d7–8). This, the ‘simple-minded answer’, suggests a realist view of such properties: that they are objective features of the world with an objective causal structure. Is it an analysis of causation to show what causes what when it comes to relations and values? Or should we see it rather as an explanatory account, ranging more widely than our expectations for causation, and focusing on the structures of explanatory reasoning, reasoning which may include something about causes but which may not itself do any causing? Or do we here have something far more complex: an account of the constraints on causal explanation (expressed by the odd simplicity of the simple-minded answer) and then a second account (‘cleverer’) of how this set of explanatory principles would generate particular causal claims? I shall not here seek to resolve these questions, but rather to consider why they are unresolved. Indeed, this chapter argues that the presentation of the distinct ‘answers’ of the Phaedo matches a complexity of the Republic’s account of goodness and helps to repudiate an apparently crass version of ‘the goods are good by virtue of the good’.
