ABSTRACT
The attempt to argue that Plato was a utilitarian may be challenged at the outset on the grounds that Plato himself effectively denies that he is one and that, in any case, the only reason for even supposing that he might be one is his reference to eudaimonia as an objective, which, although it is conventionally translated as 'happiness', does not in fact mean 'happiness' . Neither of these points, however, are sufficient to discredit the notion that he was in some sense a utilitarian (although, of course, they may have some bearing on the precise nature of his utilitarianism). The view that Plato explicitly denies that he is a utilitarian seems to rest on his assertion that 'the Good is not, as most people think, Pleasure' (505 B). This assertion cannot be ignored: 'good' and 'pleasurable' therefore cannot be identified as far as Plato is concerned. But nor in fact can they be regarded as synonymous even for a relatively uncompromising utilitarian such as Bentham. For even if it is taken as true that 'quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry', once one has introduced some distributive principle, which all utilitarians do, and indeed once one is prepared to differentiate between pleasures, even if only by reference to quantity, it ceases to be true that anything that gives pleasure is ipso facto good in the sense of morally desirable. What we may say at this stage is that it is quite coherent for someone to argue that pleasure and good are not synonymous, but that nonetheless what is morally good has to be decided essentially by reference to considerations of pleasure and pain. The Good is therefore not identical with that which gives pleasure, but nonetheless the Good may have to be determined by reference to what maximises pleasure, or, if pleasure and happiness are seen to be intimately related, to what maximises happiness. With regard to the second point, it is probably most convenient at this point to concede that the Greek term eudaimonia is complex and should not casually be identified with a loose ordinary usage conception of happiness. But, of course, one cannot reasonably divorce the two terms except as a result of analysis of both of them. Whether Plato did or did not mean 'happiness' when he wrote of eudaimonia depends partially on what we mean by 'happiness'. It therefore does not seem to me, at this stage of the argument, to be necessarily destructive of the thesis that Plato was a utilitarian to insist that eudaimonia does not simply mean 'happiness'. What I shall attempt to do in the next two chapters is explicate a conception of happiness to which Plato is clearly committed and which he picks out by use of the term eudaimonia.
