ABSTRACT
We therefore need to make something of an effort to see why Aristotle, like Socrates and Plato before him, thought there was something deeply puzzling about moral failure – what he called akrasia, a word which suggests a lack of self-control.1 The problem that has most interested commentators is one which Aristotle inherited from Plato, and ultimately from Socrates almost a century earlier. Socrates maintained that nobody knowingly does wrong.2 And his reason was that to do wrong is to harm oneself, and nobody would knowingly wish to harm themselves. So people who apparently do wrong do so because they have misunderstood, or miscalculated the import of their action. Virtue is knowledge, and vice is ignorance. Plato was in fundamental agreement with this line of argument. But it may be that he was prepared to make some concessions; people could act against their moral beliefs, since these are unstable and easily undermined; but he still wished to maintain that people could not act against what they know to be right. Plato argued that the ultimate basis of ethics was the Form of Goodness itself, a transcendent immaterial entity whose supreme goodness was reflected in any goodness possessed by thisworldly virtues and persons and actions. The process of moral education consisted in using instances of good things to remind us of the Form of Goodness, with which our souls have been familiar before birth. Ideally, we gradually ascend to what is presented almost as a vision of Goodness itself. This knowledge of Goodness, once obtained, serves as a standard for assessing all our actions and traits
of character, and hence as a touchstone for all our moral judgements. The suggestion is that, once the soul has been captivated by this vision, and hence been filled with true moral knowledge, it will then have no reason or motive whatever to pursue anything else in life except what is good. Socrates was right, moral failures are ultimately failures in knowledge.3 Plato himself made more of the power of emotion and passion to influence our decisions, and to fight against our reason. But even he was unwilling to concede that knowledge in the full sense of the term could be overcome by passion, even if beliefs could be. It was still a commonplace of Plato’s Academy that moral failure is less a matter of weakness than an instance of ignorance. After all, how could anyone knowingly choose less than the best for themselves?
