Lesson 8, part 10, reforming our systems. It's going to be a long one. It's our last one, then we're done. Time to wrap everything up, bring us back where we began. Socrates and Euthyphro, are sitting on the steps of the Archon Basileus stoa, telling each other of their legal troubles. We know what happened to Socrates. That's right. Hemlock is poison. You remember Euthyphro's case? Dad threw an alleged murderer in a ditch and he died. What would have happened if Euthyphro's case had gone to trial? Well, did it? We don't know. Do we know enough about Athenian homicide law and court procedure and norms and so forth to predict what would have happened? Haha, no, really not at all. So you see why this thing I'm about to do is what you might call fresh research. Obviously everyone who's a real scholar of the subject can see what I apparently can not, that this question really has no answer. But I'm going to ask it anyway, what would have happened if Euthyphro's case had gone to trial? I think maybe we can actually answer an easier question, how would Plato's readers have reacted to Euthyphro's sketch of the case he means to bring? Eurthyphro's kind of a moral nut as I think we noticed before. Is this case legally nutty in Athenian terms? The Athenians were court watchers. There's a play on it, Aristophanes' the Wasps. Let me tell you about it. There's an old man, Philocleon, who's addicted to the law courts. Specifically, he's addicted to serving as a juror there. Lot's of cases in Athens, juries are large. They need lots of citizen bodies to fill the seats. Philocleon is paid a very small amount, but better than that. He feels flattered by the attention. All these fine and eloquent speeches, all aimed at swaying his opinion. His son, in desperation, tries to lock dad in the house. Eventually giving him a job judging cases like, which family dog stole the cheese? Inanimate objects are called in to testify as witnesses. It all goes downhill from there. S think of give me, in the first part of this video, as a modern day [UNKNOWN]. I'm going to pretend to be an expert about Athenian homicide law. I'll sort of conjure Socrates and Euthyphro as little action figures, and move them around. Imagine what they might have done. Even though they're inanimate at this point. I think they'll be a point to me doing this. What will the point be? Well, I think Euthyphro's case might be to showcase for how, Joshua Green's philosophy might make sense. In a practical sense it might be pragmatic. Anyway I think it's kind of interesting that so many philosophers teach the Euthyphro without having the slightest idea about how complicated this legal situation could be. Let me tell you all about it. The basileus, the archon basileus, you remember that. He's the official Socrates and Euthyphro are waiting to see, because he hears cases of religious crime. But he doesn't judge the case, he holds a preliminary hearing at which he will determine what the main issue is. Large juries, large bodies of judges can't debate what the case is about, they can only give a straight vote, up or down. So it's the Basileus' job to figure out what the issue is that will be voted up or down. Having figured that, the basileus extract oaths from both parties concerning this main issue. The trial will, in a sense, be about which party has sworn more righteously concerning the main issue. Oaths duly sworn, the basileus sends the case on to one of, possibly as many as five, count them, five. Different homicide courts, yes, that's right. In some way Athenian justice was simple by modern standards. No public prosecutor office, that's why Euthyphro had to prosecute that himself. But anyways, it was very complicated. Five different courts for different kinds of cases. But Basilius near as I can figure, can't just dismiss the case as frivolous. If someone is determined to bring it. So even if he thinks he throws a nut, which he probably would think, so as long as he's a nut that won't back down, we've got a case. Let me give you a quick spin through the Athenian court system. But first, consider this, it happened on Axis, that's where the guy died. So what? So this means Euthoronis's father. Were part of the Athenian clericy there. That is they were colonial occupiers back in the day when Athens still had an empire. They must have been part of a group of Athenian citizens sent to ensure that Naxians stayed within the sphere of Athenian naval hegemony. [UNKNOWN] But Athens lost the Peloponnesian war and its empire. Pirate for, for a PC. Cleruchy? Hegemony? Delian League? Peloponnesian War? Wikipedia people, if you don't know this stuff, start there. Keep readin until you're educated. Maybe read a book on the subject. Let me cut to the chase, our dialogue is set at 399 B.C. Has to be, because Socrates' case is coming to trial. This means the case Euthyphro means to bring against his father is at least 5 years old though, maybe older. It concerns events on an island over which Athens no longer legal jurisdiction. None of these facts is mentioned in the dialogue, but it would be obvious to the Greek reader that Euthyphro must be dredging up the past here. On the other hand, no statute of limitations on murder. On the Areopagus. Okay, time for a tour of the homicide courts. First stop, right at the top. Cases of alleged intentional homicide are handled, on the Areopagus. That. That is they heard by the Aeropagite council composed of ex-archons, ex-magistrates. It's an open air court, high on a rock. They do not hear cases in which the victims are slaves or non-citizens. The dead servant was a non-citizen. This will not be the court for this case. Then again, it is possible that he was an Athenian. Just maybe none of his relatives stepped forward on account of him being a murderer and all, allegedly. Let's suppose he was a citizen. Did Euthyphro's dad intend to kill the guy? Let me tell you what I think. What dad did made no sense. It makes no sense to throw a guy in a ditch and send for help about what to do with him if there's no way help is going to get back before the guy is dead. If you want him dead, kill him. If you don't want him dead, do something that's not going to kill him. Is it surprising if dad did something that makes no sense? Hm, not really. People freak out about blood. It really sets their alarm bells ringing, and gets their wires crossed. People do stuff that makes no sense when there's a dead body involved. All right, let's move on. If the the Areophaus is not the proper court, maybe the Palladion Is more appropriate. The ephetai, jury of 51. Very respectable old men. Hear charges of unintentional, accidental homicide, and planning. There are a number of way of being charged with a lesser crime than intentional killing. You can be involved, or conspire, without actually being the guy who stuck the knife in. Charging you the first father with manslaughter and negligent death in effect, makes intuitive sense. Is there any absurdity in, trying the case in this court? Two I think. First perb of, the case concerns events that happened before the restoration of the democracy. And four or three be. There's been an amnesty, that would cover Euthyphro's father, except that the amnesty specifically includes cases of homicide with one's own hand. If dad is guilty of that, he can still be tried for it. Suppose, as is plausible, Euthyphro's dad is only guilty of planning. And as he ordered the servant retired and ditched. He is old as Euthyphro says. Will the trial hinge on whether the father himself laid physical hands on the accused in a forceful way and if so are they causing death by throwing someone into a ditch. Constitutes not just causing death by letting die, but causing death letting die with ones own hands. Is there even such a thing as the crime of letting someone die with one's own hands? I put my footbridge up here because shades of footbridge, the application of personal force although very doubtfully of any real moral relevance maybe important for deciding our venue for our court case. Second, we are still considering ways in which the second court might go wrong as the jurisdiction, the punishment for unintentional homicide is exile. When the victim is a non resident, non citizen, which may be the case, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Since the whole point of exile is to get you away from the victim's family lest you pollute them by your unwelcome presence. I will take this opportunity to hustle by the new court, the Phreattro. Exiles wishing to plead to return home may do so in Phereattro. From a ship drawn near the shore. Should Euthyphro's father be convicted, and later plead to come home? He may have to take elaborate pointless precautions to avoid stepping on Athenian's soul. Pointless because probably the dead guy's family is in Naxos after all. The Delphinium, our next stop, is also presided over by the ephiti, here admitted killings alleged by the defense to be legal are judged. Cases would include accidental killings of a fellow soldier in battle, accidental death in sporting events, doctor's whose patients died. It might seem dad would be on fairly solid ground here. He feels he acted justly, binding the murderer and throwing him a ditch, but of course on can not argue both. That a killing was unintended and that it was intended to be just was a bit like that old lawyer joke, do you know it? The lawyer borrows something from you, you ask for it back, he says I never borrowed it, and anyway it was broken, furthermore I returned it in perfect condition. Euthyphro might have to be careful, too. Even if his father killed justly, there could still be a trial. That's the point of having this court, a delphinium. But it'd be pretty weird for Euthyphro to argue, that he is falsely accusing his own dad of unjust killing, just so dad can get purified for a just. To killing. Who is more righteous would you say? The father who swears up and down he killed justly yet illegally or the son who swears he's prosecuting legally yet unjustly. And now, things get really weird. The Prytaneion. The Athenians had a court for trying unknown killers. Inanimate objects and animals. This one is presided over by the basileus himself and an assistant. A stone is thrown, and it kills a man. The doer may be convicted even if unknown. A tree falls and kills a man. The tree may be convicted. It will be carried ceremoniously and cast beyond the border. By modern standards, holding a trial for an inanimate object is kind of strange. It's probably best to think of the function of this court as located at the crossroads of ritual, contagious magic, criminal forensics and public health and sanitation. I talked about this before, remember? Murder is terrible for property value. And the first three values of Greek religion are location, location, location. It would be bold that Eufer's father could make a case that the elements killed the man in the ditch. Error go, the case should be tried in the pertanium, and they have the wrong defendant. The nexium weather is guilty or maybe the ditch did it. This sounds silly, but seriously. Part of the appeal of the whole ditch option from the start was the dad wants the guy dead, but he doesn't want to have killed him. How did the ancient Greeks dispose of unwanted infant? They exposed them of the nexium are in the woods. That way you can kind of feel that you didn't do it, kill a human child. You just let it happen which somehow feels psychologically easier. That's it for the courts, our tour is done. I hope you feel half educated. So what's the answer to our question? It seems to me it's this, case is a mess, system isn't really prepared to process this kind of case. Having given you the educational tour, I'm not now going to do the same thing for a famous literary trilogy. But I'm going to mention it and you can read about it in my book. Page 130 to 135. The Oresteia by Aeschylus. What's that? A dramatic trilogy. Three plays by Aeschylus, it's about a guy named Orestes. Orestes kills his mom for killing dad. And the case is so complicated and fra that even the gods get involved and even the gods can't decide what to do about it. Because the gods, as you know, have their own inter-generational issues about parent killing, after all, prosecuting parents. It's kind of an issue. It turns out, the only entity wise enough to decide It's not a person, not even a god. But a well designed institution. The Athenian homicide court, the presided over by Athena. But mostly a human arrangement. Yep, the Athenians were pretty proud of their homicide courts. Boding, pretty awesome. The Orestia is a play about how awesome the Greek homicide court system is. Meanwhile, back the real world, it doesn't look to me like the Athenian court. Court system actually is prepared to handle and arrest these type case, a Euthyphro type case that is. So, now I'm getting to the point, I promised there would be one. What's Plato's point? Well, I don't know. But it might be in part that even though Euthyphro is a bit of a fool, this mess is not entirely his fault. What is he supposed to do about that? There's no good solution within the Athenian institutional context. The Athenian courts system is not a divine system, as Aeschylus would have yo you believe, but a mess of old and new. I haven;t even gone into the history of it, but just thinking about it in heightened green terms, I think you can see how issues of pollution and tribal affiliation, us verses them and whether the killer used force to do the deeds. There are an awful lot of emotional dogs barking in the jury box. Quite frankly the system could do with the spot of a rationalizing I think. How is this for a bright idea, if the killer acted justly let him go otherwise prosecute him. Come up with some model utilitarian penal code for the city. Cut through all the stuff about pollution and whether someone applied personal force. Pay no attention to clearly morally irrelevant considerations. Pay only attention to the morally relevant ones, the whole system would work a lot better. Really, Euthyphro wouldn't be in the fix he's in right now if the system were better designed. But let me turn around now and, inflict a little bit of embarrassment. Utilitarianism, is sometimes faulted with being inhumanly demanding, and sometimes with being not demanding enough. It's too demanding in so far as it seems like it requires us all to run out and send our money to Oxfam, or nearly all our money. It's not demanding enough and so far is it is tolerant of ingeniously unjust ways of maximizing utility, Joshua Green tries to push back by saying Utilitarianism is fundamentally about maximizes the good. So any plan that is going to backfire horrible because it's too demanding, is by definition not something Utilitarianism is committed to. That backfiring horribly never maximizes the good. And in practice, ingenious plans for maximizing utility by enslaving and torturing people, etcetera, etcetera, just aren't very practical. Have 100 slaves may make you very wealthy, but realistically, a slave master. There isn't 100 times happier than his wretched slaves are retchet. Don't mistake money for utility. This is incidentally why Josh LaGrange doesn't like the term utilitarianism. He thinks that causes people to think only in money term, which is wrong. Let's be a little analytic about it, these objections to utility. There're basically two styles of cases intended to. To embarrass the utilitarian. There's an Omelas-type case, which I name after a short story by Ursula K Le Guin. The ones who walk away from Omelas. In which the supreme suffering of one innocent child is, for reasons that are never explained, the necessary precondition for a utopia, in which everyone else gets to be thoroughly happy and fulfilled. So Omelas-type cases are for some weird reason, someone's suffering produces a lot of good for others. Then there's utility monster-type cases. A utility monster is some sort of beast, capable of feeling tremendous pleasure or happiness. So much more than we can, that happiness for all is maximized by us constantly feeding the beast with whatever makes it happy. I don't know what a utility monster looks like. Maybe we can imagine that the titan Cronus really, really, really liked sitting his kids, to a titanic degree. Even more than his kids like to not be eaten, even so, maybe it increases utility for him to eat his children. Joshua Green's response is basically, don't give me this science fiction and fantasy stuff. I can barely wrap my head around it. It never happens in real life. In real life, we can say things like slavery is ruled out in principle. Even though, technically, this isn't true. It's a noble lie, if you like. It's true, but we're simplifying the truth a little. So people don't stay up late, losing sleep, worrying that the utility monsters are going to get them. Thus, in the real world, there is no fundamental tension between happiness and justice. Thus, screen ads. If someone sends him an email with the subject header. Why slavery might be justified in some cases. He's going to hit delete with a clean conscience. [BLANK_AUDIO] Certainly is a nice thought. Let me work backwards to happiness and justice from Green's delete button option. Remember that question I asked way back when, when we were reading Mino? What do we think about the fact that here is Socrates, and here's Meno, and here's this nice boy, whose soul, as Socrates keeps emphasizing, is as fine as any soul you might find. It can learn geometry and everything. And he's a slave. Isn't that obviously wrong, obviously unjust? All this wisdom. And yet, you don't really get an argument against slavery until, like, 400 AD. 800 years after Plato wrote Meno. Seriously, it took that long to figure out slavery was wrong. And another 1500 years almost, to abolish it throughout most the west. In short, there's been a considerable shift from what people find obvious from Plato's day to today. It's a little bit unclear what took us so long to get there. Is it just that we're so much smarter today? That's the question I asked back in week four. I rather doubt the answer is that we're just much better at moral math than say Aristotle was back in the day. Let me give you a quote from Bernard Knox, a classicist. I got it from a pretty good history of slavery, in human bondage. The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. By David Brion Davis. The Greeks could imagine no alternative to slave labor. The lives of citizens in the polis, the only form of civilized organization they new or could imagine, would of been impossible without that leisure they prized so highly. Leisure to haunt the gymnasium, the roofed porches where men congregated for conversation and dispute, the theater, the assembly, the courts, and all the varied time-consuming duties and pleasures of the free male citizen. Maybe after this video, you can appreciate even more how true this is. Those five homicide courts aren't going to jury themselves. Court addicted citizens. Good wasps true, can't be doing the manual labor around the place. If your self respect as a citizen depends on their being slaves. For sure, you are not going to consider that it is fundamentally unjust to own slaves. That's confabulation 101. You weren't going to think anything that implies you're a bad person. No one ever does. I think we who love the golden age of ancient Athens, Plato, Escales, drama philosophy. I speak for myself. We would like to think at least the ancient Athenians weren't any worse than the agent neighbors. They were just normal for the time, in owning slaves. Unfortunately, I think may not really be true. Ancient democracy and ancient slavery really did advance together as new institutions. There had always been slaves but ancient Athens was a true slave society society. Something like 30% of the population were slaves? That hadn't been true 200 years earlier, it went together with cosmopolitanism and trade, increased division of labor and increased wealth and leisure without slavery no democracy that might be true. Was ancient Athens an Omelas-type case? Did the suffering of those slaves pay for civilization, in a utilitarian sense, to some extent? If it turns out that Plato has done enough good for people over the centuries, does that pay for some poor guy who died in the silver mines? Just so Plato could sit around thinking all day? It's kind of a crude way to put the calculus. I don't mean to just put Plato on the moral hot seat either. Let's think more generally. Here's a quote from David Brion Davis, his book, Inhuman Bondage, which I mentioned just now. As the demand for slaves grew, merchants increasingly purchased slaves as part of long-distance seaborne commerce. In other words, the trade in such commodities as ceramics and olive oil opened up distant markets for human labor. From the sixth cents, century B.C.E. onward, merchants followed armies in the field and bought up prisoners of war who were then transported with other goods to such commercial centers. Athens, Corinth, Aegina, Chios. As in the later Roman world, this linkage of slavery with long-distance commerce by sea served to separate the urban centers of culture and learning from the violent origins of enslavement. A respected urban master might have little mental picture of the bloody battlefields or terrifying raids of a pirate ship that had furnished him with servants. Moreover, from the sixth century on, the gulf continued to widen between slaves and free citizens, in contrast to much earlier Homeric slaves, who ate, drank, and worked side by side with their non wealthy masters. Let me just say this again in my own words. New and often more complex forms of social order generate Much utility, wealth yes, but utility, generally, particularly in the long term. Civilization, technology, trade, the stuff of progress. But these disruptive developments tend to induce tragedies of moral common sense. In Green's sense, perhaps particularly in the short term, you enter into economic relations with lots of people you don't care about. People who live far away, say. You weren't built for this morally. Your emotional dog isn't up to processing the scope of this sort of thing. Even so, it could be true that in the long run, everyone will be better off is civilization advances. Eventually we are going to get sanitation and anti-biotics and the Internet and a bunch of other good stuff too. But surely that doesn't make it just some poor guy had to die down a sliver mine just so we can have the Internet. 2,000 years later, utility is one thing. Justice is another. I think that the utilitarian has some pretty good responses to this. I'm not going to offer them, time is short. I just want to make this point. Joshua Green wants to emphasis that utilitarianism is a practical philosophy. It must be. It's not about escape from our cave into some mind bending other world of moral truth, it's about focusing the thoughts we've got, reforming the court system, for example. Add a public prosecutor's office. We don't have to bend our brains with utility monsters or any of that crazy stuff to see why Euthyphro might have benefited from a sea in our court system. But we do need to bend our brains, because Utilitarianism is about everyone. Everyone is just brain-bending, it's history. It's everyone alive today, it's too much for our monkey minds. That's okay, we'll just build better institutions then. So we'll do the right thing without our monkey minds having to grasp the vast truth of it all. We'll build societies in which we don't go so badly wrong. Even though it's too much for our monkey minds, being a good person is. Speaking of mind-bending, let me tell you one last platonic myth, and we're done for the course. First, a bit of background. While we were puzzling over Mino and the ethics of slavery, I asked you whether you thought that living in a society in which slavery is illegal amounted to having a moral trust fund of sorts. That is, you're automatically morally richer than the ancient Greeks in at least one way, because you don't own slaves. Even though it's basically just luck that you don't. And now I am going to tell you what Plato's answer to the question is. Can you have a moral trust friend like that? Yes and no. In book 10 of republic, Secrets tells us the myth of Er who or what is Er? He's a guy who died, and got to see the setup in the afterlife. And came back to tell all about it. Here's what happens. You die. You stand before a pair of judges. Above them are two entrances into the heavens, all bright. Below, two entrances into the Earth, all dark and forbidding. Souls are coming up on the right. And that is, going up into heaven, and climbing up out of the underworld. On the left, they're descending from heaven, and descending into the underworld. Underworld. As you reasonably suspected, heaven is a reward and the underworld is punishment. But there is also a cycle of reincarnation. Those coming down from heaven and coming up through the underworld are preparing for another round of life in the mortal world. And at this point, try to imagine something kind of funny. And he literally describes it as such. Er does. He says it's funny. Everyone gets to choose their next life. There are all these lives just lying around in a field. And you pick one. You examine it. And it's yours. Your lot in life. The only thing you can't see is what the effect of your type of soul combined with that life. Will be. The funny thing is this. A lot of souls that just got out of the underworld pick very well. Paying for their crimes was highly educational for them, but that's not the funny part. A lot of the souls that came down from heaven chose badly. They only got into heaven the first time out of moral luck, not any real virtue in their souls. They happened to have lived relatively blameless lives, but only because, due to lucky social circumstance, they somehow weren't somehow too tempted to slip up. They never found an invisibility ring, they never told the king. I like this picture of heaven itself has sort of moral hazard. Going to haven only reinforces an unwarranted sense of moral entitlement in some people, since you are being a good person. So of course a lot of these souls make bad choices as folks are feeling entitled to. Plato's message only philosophy can really teach you right [UNKNOWN] and how to lead the good lfe. That's the only real moral trust fund. Just being in a happy situation. In a well designed institution. That keeps you from making to many mistakes. That doesn't cut it. I think I'm with hidding Green against Plato. When I say if that's the way of it. Then no one knows right from wrong. No one really knows how to lead the good life. I think that's enough for this video, this lesson ends this course. I hope you learned something.
