CARPENTER, A. D. Hedonistic Persons. The Good

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Hedonistic Persons. The Good

Man Argument in Plato's
Philebus
a
Amber Danielle Carpenter
a
Franklin and Marshall College
Published online: 19 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Amber Danielle Carpenter (2006) Hedonistic Persons. The Good Man
Argument in Plato's Philebus , British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 14:1, 5-26,
DOI: 10.1080/09608780500449123
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British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14(1) 2006: 5 – 26
ARTICLE
HEDONISTIC PERSONS. THE GOOD MAN

ARGUMENT IN PLATO’S PHILEBUS
Amber Danielle Carpenter
It seems an odd claim that knowing could be itself of intrinsic worth.

Knowledge appears heavily, perhaps entirely reliant for its worth on the
value of the objects known and the value of the ends to which it is put.
Indeed, the more we focus on knowledge as object-related, the more
odd the claim appears. If, however, we shift our focus to the knowing –
or rather, to the knower, or knowing mind – the intrinsic worth of
knowing appears in an altogether different light. Knowing, the claim
becomes, is intrinsically (and perhaps supremely) valuable not because
of the value of its objects, but because of the value of a mind being
related in such a way to a world (not of its making). It is the state of
knowing, a mental state, which is of intrinsic worth.1 This will still be a
claim easier to maintain if reality happens to be rationally ordered
independently of our knowing it; and Plato, whose ethical rationalism,
I think, is of just this sort, did indeed believe that we dwelt, in some
way, in such a rationally ordered cosmos. However, Plato also
recognized – at least sometimes – that ethical rationalism, based on
the fundamental and intrinsic value of knowing, required also that we
human beings were beings of a certain kind. Thus, he is rightly
concerned with the metaphysics of persons required to ground a
rationalist ethics.
In what follows, I shall be looking primarily at the metaphysics of
persons offered in the late ethical dialogue, the Philebus, as part of a
rationalist refutation of hedonism. I shall not make it my project to offer
an irrefutable defence of the rationalist claim. I shall try instead to show
how Plato, by focusing on the position of the hedonist interlocutor,
brings out the heavy price paid in rejecting some versions of Platonic
rationalism.
1
Thus we focus more often on wisdom, when concerned with the value of our mental states.
Wisdom suggests, in a way knowledge does not, a certain state of mind rather than a grasp of
certain information.
British Journal for the History of Philosophy

ISSN 0960-8788 print/ISSN 1469-3526 online ª 2006 BSHP
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09608780500449123
6 AMBER DANIELLE CARPENTER
THE GOOD MAN ARGUMENT – PHILEBUS 39E–40C
Philebus’s enthusiasm for pleasure is so great that he can only assert, not
defend his position. With a defiant ‘To my mind pleasure wins and
always will win’ (12a7) early in the dialogue, Philebus (mostly) lives his
inarticulate attachment to pleasure and aversion to pain by making way
for Protarchus to take up the labour of defending hedonism. As
hedonism’s representative, Protarchus is certainly not as flamboyant as
Callicles or Thrasymachus; he is not even as striking as Philebus, of
whom we see so little. Still, Protarchus – the hedonist one can talk to – is
no pushover. He offers considerable resistance to Socrates’s arguments
for diversity in pleasure (12d–13c), and for falsity of pleasures (36c–38a),

and demands clarification when he thinks he needs it (e.g. 14c–e, 17a,
19a–20a, 23e7–8, 26c5–7, 28b), sometimes with gusto (especially 53e2–3).
It is, therefore, striking that just when he should be vehemently
protesting, Protarchus becomes disappointingly pliant. When Socrates
contrasts the pleasures of the good man, with those of the wicked (at
39e–40c), Protarchus blithely accepts the unlikely claim that the gods
reward good men with true pleasures – apparently by making their hopes
and dreams come true. The ‘Good Man Argument’, as I shall call it,
nestles between the first two kinds of false pleasure discussed in the
Philebus:
SOCRATES: Well, then, in addition to what has been said now, also answer this
question.
PROTARCHUS: Concerning what?
SOCRATES: Is not a man who is just, pious, and good in all respects, also loved
by the gods?
PROTARCHUS: How could that fail to be?
SOCRATES: But what about someone who is unjust and in all respects evil? Isn’t
he that man’s opposite?
PROTARCHUS: Of course.
SOCRATES: And is not everyone, as we just said, always full of many hopes?
PROTARCHUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: There are, then, assertions in each of us that we call hopes?
PROTARCHUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: But there are also those painted images. And someone
often envisages himself in the possession of an enormous amount of
gold and of a lot of pleasures as a consequence. And in addition, he
also sees, in this inner picture of himself, that he is beside himself with
delight.
PROTARCHUS: What else!
SOCRATES: Now, do we want to say that in the case of good people these
pictures are usually true, because they are dear to the gods, while quite the
opposite usually holds in the case of wicked ones, or is this not what we ought
to say?
PROTARCHUS: That is just what we ought to say.
THE GOOD MAN ARGUMENT IN PLATO’S PHILEBUS 7
SOCRATES: And wicked people nevertheless have pleasures painted on their

minds, even though they are somehow false?
PROTARCHUS: Right.
SOCRATES: So wicked people as a rule enjoy false pleasures, but the good among
mankind true ones?
PROTARCHUS: Quite necessarily so.
SOCRATES: From what has now been said, it follows that there are false
pleasures in human souls that are quite ridiculous imitations of true ones, and
also such pains.
PROTARCHUS: There certainly are.
(39e7–40c6)
Shortly following (at 40d7–10), Socrates concludes with a point Protarchus

had agreed to twice already (39c1–12 and 39d7–e2):
SOCRATES: Whoever has any pleasure at all, however ill-founded it may be,
really does have pleasure, even if sometimes it is not about anything that either
is the case or ever was the case, or often (or perhaps most of the time) refers to
anything that ever will be the case.
The blunt introduction of the Good Man Argument may be a clumsy

transition to a mere ‘afterthought’; or it may be the less benign insinuation
of an illicit moral tone into the otherwise value-neutral discussion.2 Even if
pleasure could be false, by what right is false pleasure bad? Even if we grant
that an example of a false pleasure might be necessary, or at least helpful, at
this point in the discussion, the appeal to a (contested) conventional belief in
divine rewards for good behaviour3 seems at best an odd and unnecessarily
vexed example to use.
There is indeed something shifty going on in the Good Man Argument,
for the argument shifts its meaning depending on who is meant to
endorse it. There are, I shall argue, at least three different interpretations
of this argument available. The first is the straightforward nod to
conventional piety: good things are bound to come to good people,
because the gods reward just behaviour by granting the good man his
heart’s desires. This is very simple divine dispensation, and it feeds on a
sort of transactional or bargaining view of our relationship to the divine:
if you do what God wants, God will give you what you want. In this
case, the claim that the ‘rewards’ come in the shape of true, rather than
false pleasures simply means that the good man’s hopes come true – and
they do so for no other reason than that the gods like to give such men
what they hope for, as a sort of reward for services rendered. The
2
‘Es scheint hier ein Nebengedanke mit ins Spiel zu kommen, der nicht nur für die
Beweisführung unnötig ist, sondern überdies einen moralisierenden Unterton in die Diskussion
bringt, von dem sie bisher weitgehend frei war’ (Frede, Philebos. Platon Werke: Übersetzung und
Kommentar, Band III 2. Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997) 256.
3
Cf. Frede, Philebos (ibid.) 258, esp. n. 59.
converse would then be true of the wicked man – his ‘false hopes’
are false for the plain reason that the gods will not gratify his
desires, howsoever benign or noble they may be, simply because they
do not like him. The main difficulty, however, with the conventional
view, ‘divine dispensation’, is that it is not really borne out by
experience. Good men (in the conventional sense) do suffer, they do
have their hopes and desires frustrated, and they do look on to see their
wicked counterparts thriving and attaining whatever they hope to attain.
If the gods intend to reward good behaviour by giving the good man
whatever he wants, they do not seem to be very good at achieving
this aim.
The ‘divine dispensation’ view, hard for anyone to swallow, seems

especially awkward to digest, both for the rationalist, represented by
Socrates, and for the hedonist position defended by Protarchus. The
rationalist-realist about the good does not think that it would be a good
thing for people to have whatever they incline towards just because they
happen to fancy it;4 and Adeimantus in the Republic sets up Socrates’s task
of defending justice precisely in terms of the inadequacy of this same
conventional view: in the first place, it would be shallow to suppose that
‘drunkenness was the finest wage for virtue’ (Republic II, 363d1–2); and in
any case the gods do not in fact give even these paltry rewards to the just
man (Republic II, 364bff.). Surely Socrates is cheating, to help himself to the
view now; and Protarchus, by letting it pass, is betraying the hedonist cause.
Hedonism as such has no vested interest in reproducing conventional
morality,5 particularly when ‘common views’ are used to undermine
hedonism.
However, there are two unconventional interpretations of the passage
available. According to the first, it could well make sense for Socrates to
endorse the opinion of the many, provided his – and not their – views of
god and good are at work.6 According to the second, there may be a
way in which a hedonist could or should endorse the same argument.
This second interpretation, however, does not work out as neatly as it
may at first appear – but the reasons it does not show up important
motivations why Protarchus ought perhaps to accept it anyway, even if it
means (as it does) letting go of strict hedonism.
4
Cf. the distinction in Gorgias 466dff. between ‘what one wants’ and ‘what one sees fit
to do’.
5
This will be true inasmuch as hedonism claims to offer a position from which to critique
conventional morality; but it will be especially true in this case, where the conventional wisdom
seems to point in both directions. Why should anyone who does not have to choose to endorse
an article of faith so out-of-keeping with experience?
6
I note that Sarah Broadie has recently made a similar move in addressing Aristotle’s treatment
of the same conventional belief at EN X (1179a22–32) in her ‘Aristotelian Piety’ (Phronesis 48
(2003): 54–70), esp. 64–5.
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GOOD MAN ARGUMENT – THE

RATIONALIST’S READING
Plato’s Socrates is no slave to accepted opinions. Even within the

Philebus he finally has his chance to dismiss their pretensions to
authority. Concluding his argument against hedonism, Socrates says
emphatically,
And not even if every cow and horse and the whole animal kingdom spoke
for it by their pursuit of enjoyment should [pleasure] be given first
place; although most people put in animals the trust prophets put in birds,
and so think pleasures are the most powerful factors in making a good life
for us.
(67b1–5)7
Other people believing it cannot make a view right. If we have reason to

think that Socrates would reject the view that has good folk being ‘seated on
couches’, either in this world or, as Adeimantus relates Musaeus’s depiction
(Republic 363c–d), in Hades, ‘crowned with wreaths, and made to spend all
their time drinking’, then we should be suspicious of his invocation of
conventional wisdom about the rewards of virtue. It may be that Socrates
intends the argument in the following, unconventional, way: the good man is
the knowledgeable man; and the good man’s hopes come true because, being
so knowledgeable, he can accurately predict the future. Stated this way, the
view sounds absurd – and in any case, the reference to the divine would still
be wanton, for ‘god’ as rewarder has now become superfluous. I shall argue,
however, that some version of this interpretation of the Good Man
Argument is indeed the one that Socrates intends to endorse, and that ‘god’
nevertheless plays a crucial role.
In defending reason and knowledge as more responsible for making a
human life good, Socrates in the Philebus commits himself to a sort of
rationalism not just in ethics, but also in theology. He most clearly
articulates his own alternative view when classifying ‘mind’ as belonging to
the genus ‘cause’ (28a–30b). According to this view of ‘god’, mind or
intellect is centrally responsible for the order of the cosmos – and since the
cosmos is essentially an ordered thing, this means that mind is responsible
for what there is, being as it is.8 As a rationalist about the divine,9 Socrates
7
He has already persuaded Protarchus to agree to the principle that they should not simply
accept even what the wise believe – they should investigate it for themselves, and discover for
themselves the consequences to which they are thereby committed. See Philebus 28c8–9 and 29a.
8
In the Philebus, this is brought out in the so-called ‘cosmological argument’ at 28–9. For
detailed discussion of how this conclusion comes out of the argument there offered, see Chapter
6, ‘Outwitting the Cunning Man’ of Mary Margaret McCabe’s book, Plato and His
Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
9
I discuss the rationalism about gods in the Philebus in my ‘Phileban Gods’ (Ancient Philosophy,
23 (2003): 93–112).
does not understand by ‘gods’ or ‘divine’ quite the same thing that the
conventional view presupposes – for god, on the view Socrates defends, is
simply intellect itself. Thus, an appeal to ‘god’ for Socrates amounts to an
appeal to reason, and to the good order of the universe, the intelligence at
work that makes the world a well-ordered place.
What could it be to be ‘beloved’ of this sort of god? What is virtue in
such a universe, and what are its rewards? If Socrates’s notion of the
divine is simply ‘reason itself’, then his claim is essentially that the good
man will be the favourite child of reason. Presumably this means having
largely true beliefs or even knowledge. The good man may not be
omniscient – but his goodness, his justice, his piety will consist in right
understanding, reasoning well, and as a second-best in knowing what he

does not know, having the kind of self-knowledge necessary for knowing
one’s own limits.10 Protarchus refers earlier in the dialogue to this kind of
self-knowledge as a second-best to actually being wise (19c1–2), and
lacking this sort of self-knowledge is what rightly makes men ridiculous
(48c). On the rationalist account of ethics, the good man will value truth
as a way of life – that will be wherein his goodness consists. Even where
he does not have knowledge, so far as he is indeed good, just and so
forth, he will not entertain false beliefs – not, in particular, about what is
most important: that is, what is good, what is to be wished for, what may
or may not be considered valuable and worthwhile in life. He should
understand, so far as he can, why this or that is just, as well as
understanding why and how justice is good, and how it relates to the
other virtues. Thus the good man’s being loved by the goddess Reason
does not result (as a reward) in true hopes, but rather consists in his
having knowledge, and particularly self-knowledge, while the evil man will
not be loved by reason because being vicious consists precisely in
reasoning badly, and having largely mistaken views, especially about what
is most important. Being a favourite child of reason just means valuing
and using one’s own intellect to understand oneself and one’s world as
rightly as possible. On this understanding of virtue, to claim that the
good man is rewarded by the goddess Reason with true, rather than false
expectations is merely descriptive of his goodness. Thus, by relying on the
idiosyncratic notion of the divine articulated in the ‘cosmological
argument’ – and, more importantly, on the view of the world as
rationally ordered, which grounds it – the rationalist can endorse what
Protarchus would recognize as a pious truism – the gods love and reward
good people – while at the same time reasserting a cornerstone of
rationalist ethics.
10
One may argue that this claim is far too weak. The completely good man (and true goodness is
by definition something complete, or perfected (Philebus 20d)) will have to be omniscient.
However, this means, what is no bizarre claim, that moral perfection is just as unknown in this
human life as epistemic perfection.
On this view, the truth of the good man’s pleasures rests on his ability to
anticipate accurately what the future will be. There is another, still more
strongly rationalist interpretation to which I suppose Socrates need not be
committed. According to this view, Platonic ethics requires that any truly
good man know and love only eternal forms.11 It will be for this very simple
reason that the wicked man’s hopes are ‘false’: they involve valuing
something that ought not be valued, delighting in something worthless; and
it will be for a similarly simple reason that the ‘good man’, as opposed to the
wicked man delighted with himself at his treasure, will have true pleasures –
for the good man simply will not want the gold, nor imagine it to himself as
pleasant to have. While this may, at the end of the day, be one of the ways in
which hopes can be true or false, this moralistic falsifying of hope need not
be the only or primary sort of difference between the hopes of the good
man, and the hopes of the wicked. In fact, it would be odd if this were the
point Socrates was trying to make with this example, the Good Man
Argument, at all.
In the example as Socrates gives it, the good man and the bad man are
supposed to be having, more or less, the ‘same’ hope, which they cannot be
doing on the moralizing view. Socrates explicitly begins his thought
experiment with the hypothesis that the good man and the bad man both
envisage themselves ‘in the possession of an enormous amount of gold’.
‘In the case of good people,’ Socrates says, ‘these pictures are usually true’.
There is no suggestion that the good man is not picturing himself with a
great deal of money, after all; and it is not clear that there is something
necessarily morally wrong, in Plato’s view, with wealth or with enjoying the
prospect of it.12 Socrates could have given a far more perspicuous example if
he wanted to criticize delighting in things intrinsically undelightful. In fact,
the mistake involved in either having or, therefore, anticipating the so-called
pleasures of debauchery will not be on the table until mixed pleasures come
into the discussion at 44eff; for now, as far as Socrates is concerned, the
truth and falsity highlighted in the Good Man Argument is confined, in spite
of the moralizing of ‘good man’ and ‘bad man’, primarily to three sorts of
mistake – pipe dreams, half-thoughts and misapprehensions.
11
See, for example, Cynthia Hampton’s discussion in Pleasure, Knowledge and Being
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), esp. 59–60, where she remarks that
the ‘example of wealth in the present passage is, I believe, a case of something which does not
cause true pleasure’. Also in ‘Pleasure, Truth and Being in Plato’s Philebus: A Reply to
Professor Frede’ (Phronesis, 32 (1987): 253–62), Hampton argues that on the Platonic view
‘what makes [Snow White’s] step-mother’s pleasure evil is not that she is enjoying as fact
something that is not . . .[but rather that] she is enjoying something that is evil’ (255), and we
should understand the example of the man anticipating coming into a fortune in the same way.
12
Socrates has no objection to enjoying the benefits of public funds as a ‘punishment’ for the
good his philosophizing brings to Athens (Apology 36d5–6). Earlier in the Apology, he claims
that ‘from virtue come wealth and all other good things for human beings’ (Apology 30b3–4).
The good man in the sense Socrates could endorse, loving and being
loved by reason and so having a firm grip on reality, will indeed, I have
said, have a more apt assessment of whether something is realistically to
be hoped for than his wicked or even mediocre counterpart. This realistic
assessment might be expressed in three different ways. First, part of the
wicked man’s having a distorted perception of the world will include an
inappropriate estimation of, or utter disregard for, how things really are.
This is wickedness for the ethical rationalist. The wicked man will be
prone to pipe dreams,13 because he has not valued truth sufficiently to
put himself in a position to estimate the likeliness of, or the reliable
means of attaining, his heart’s desire.14 The good man has better
judgement about whether it is likely to rain on the day of the picnic

because his goodness consists in valuing, and so taking care to improve,
his rational judgement.
This is just part of what the good man’s good judgement will consist in.
It will also consist in estimating rightly just what such an event will
involve, should it come about. This is the second difference in veracity
between the good man’s hoping and the bad man’s. Pre-moralizing about
whether gold is categorically a ‘good thing’ to hope for, it is already better
to be right, rather than wrong, about what is actually involved in being
suddenly wealthy. There may be some things about which the good man
would be pleased, in the prospect of sudden wealth; but he would not, I
assume, thus be pleased without also taking stock of the real complications
and dangers of such sudden fortune. The vicious man by contrast,
incautious and filled with false and distorting beliefs about the world
generally, may expect the pleasures of winning the lottery to be
unequivocal, or of quite a different sort than they actually turn out to
be. Should both men’s hopes for riches be magically fulfilled, the good
man would in fact attain what he had delighted in anticipating, while the
bad man would be surprised and disappointed that being wealthy was not
how he had imagined it to himself.15
Third, the two men will differ in their ability to anticipate what attaining
the same thing will be like, phenomenologically. Part of the good man’s
wisdom consists in self-knowledge – where this will not be simply ‘knowing
13
Where I take this to be not idle dreaming, but utterly groundless hopes taken as foregone
conclusions (cf. Dorothea Frede’s distinction between ‘mere’ and ‘clear’ hopes in ‘Rumpelstilt-
skin’s Pleasures: True and False Pleasures in Plato’s Philebus’ (Phronesis, 30 (1985): 151–80) 171).
14
In a way, this is the straightforward delighting in something which is not in fact the case. This
is the sort of falsity on which ‘Rumpelstiltskin’s Pleasures’ (ibid.) concentrates, and the sort of
case on which Bernard Williams focuses in ‘Pleasure and Belief’ (Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 33 (1959): 57–72). While Rumpelstiltskin’s false belief is about the future,
Williams includes examples of false beliefs about what lies before my eyes right now. I hope to
have added some sense to Socrates’s claim that wickedness and mistake coincide, as do
goodness and correctness, even in this sort of case.
15
This is the ‘be careful what you wish for; it might come true’ sort of mistake.
what one knows not’, but also knowing the sort of person one is (in the way
manifested by Socrates when he explains to the jury why he will not beg for
clemency, and that his life would make no sense if he were expelled from
Athens16). Being unable to judge consistently either about himself or the
world, the wicked man is liable to mistake how it will feel suddenly to have a
great deal of money.17
Thus, apart from the sort of mistake that the moralizing rationalist
requires, we have three ways that the bad man’s pleasures might differ from
the good man’s, on the rationalist view. He might delight in the prospect of
something happening, although it never comes about (case 1). He might
have an ardent hope which is fulfilled, only to find its fulfilment involved all
sorts of things he had not counted upon (case 2);18 or he might have his
hopes realized, but discover that the feeling of satisfaction he had expected
does not emerge (case 3).
While it may be tempting to suppose that Socrates has only the first case
in view, it is the other two that are more interesting and relevant to the
argument against the hedonist. Both the good man and the wicked man are
hoping to win the lottery, and both are enjoying the prospect, imagining it
will bring great pleasures with it; but the good man has a much more
realistic idea of the chances of winning. He can also anticipate well what it
would really be like to win the lottery – what it would actually involve
(case 2), and in what ways, and to what degree it will in fact be pleasant
(case 3). These pleasures, expressions of the man’s goodness (well-exercised
reason and sound judgement), will thus on the Socratic account be at once
pleasant, true and good.19
16
Apology 34c–35b and 37d–38a. See also, similar considerations when explaining to Crito why
he will not escape from prison (46b, 47e5–9, 53a8–54b1).
17
Apparently, we are, in general, shockingly bad at judging exactly this. See research by
D. Gilman, T. Wilson and others, reviewed in the New York Times Magazine, 7 September 2003
by Jon Gertner, ‘The Futile Pursuit of Happiness’.
18
Verity Harte argues in ‘The Philebus on Pleasure: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’
(Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104 (2003–4)) that this second case, for the purposes of
the argument at hand, amounts to much the same as the first sort of case (10). Both involve
pleasure in something that does not obtain. (Cf. Bernard Williams’s ‘Pleasure and Belief’ which
uses the example of being ‘pleased by this supposed Giorgione as being a Giorgione’, when the
picture is not a Giorgione at all (66)). While I agree that the third case is best suited to wring
from Protarchus the concession that pleasures might be false, each of these separate
understandings of the truth of the good man’s pleasures illustrates a distinct aspect of what
it means to value truth – and conversely, three distinct ways that badness and falsehood are
linked.
19
It should be noted that in none of these cases is either the good or the bad man simply
entertaining himself with pretty pictures; in each case what is enjoyed is that these pleasures will
be (or are, or were); or as Harte puts it, the pleasure now is ‘an advance instalment of’ the
pleasure to come. (op.cit., p. 14; or see also, Sylvain Delcomminette: ‘we take pleasure in
advance in a future pleasure’ (228 of ‘Appearance and Imagination in the Philebus’, Phronesis,
28 (2003): 215–37)). These ways of conceptualizing it should avoid Gosling’s objection that
This, at least, is a version of the Good Man Argument that Socrates might
have in mind, if he is to endorse it. It is a version of the claim, ‘God rewards
good men with true hopes and pleasures, and wicked men with false ones’ that
is consistent with the ethical rationalism Socrates is defending in the Philebus,
as well as with the theological rationalism that he uses to support it.
But Protarchus is neither an advocate of conventional morality, nor is he
supposed to be a rationalist. His primary commitment is to hedonism – to
the thesis that pleasure, and not reason, is the ultimate good. A hedonist, we
would think, values the pleasantness, not the veracity, of his pleasures – and
Socrates has explicitly granted that the false pleasures are still pleasant
(39c1–12, 39d7–e2 and 40d7–10).
If Protarchus does not here willingly, if implicitly, agree that truth

matters (independently of pleasantness), then this is very bad indeed for
Socrates’s overall argument against hedonism; for although Socrates does
not need the Good Man Argument in order to win the concession that
pleasures might be false,20 he does very much need the correlation the
argument establishes between falsity and badness, between truth and
goodness. This is the fundamental point Socrates is arguing for, all along,
and the point that is particularly in dispute between himself and the
hedonist. If Plato simply slips it in surreptitiously, and has the defender of
hedonism just accept it without objection, then he has not after all dealt
any very serious blow to hedonism, nor therefore has he offered a
satisfying defence of the rationalist alternative. If, on the other hand, there
are reasonable grounds for the hedonist (at least, any hedonist who is not
Philebus) to be committed to the Good Man Argument, and so to the
correlation between falsity and badness, Socrates’s critique of hedonism
becomes one to be taken seriously.
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GOOD MAN ARGUMENT – THE

HEDONIST’S READING
There is, at least at first blush, a reading of the Good Man Argument
available to the hedonist that he might willingly endorse. Just as Socrates
could be inventive in his conceptions of human goodness and of the divine,
in order to allow that ‘the gods reward good people’, so too might the
hedonist be equally inventive on just these points, in an appropriately
self-serving way.
Plato elides delighting in a picture with a picture of delight (see, e.g., J. C. B. Gosling, ‘False
Pleasures: Philebus 35c–41b’ in Phronesis, 4 (1959): 44–54).
20
Although Socrates postpones drawing the point explicitly until 40c4–5, the argument for false
pleasures is complete before the Good Man enters the scene, when Protarchus agrees that ‘the
pictures corresponding to the true judgements or statements are true, while those corresponding
to false ones are false’ (39c4–5), and that the pictures and logoi in our souls might refer to any
time – past, present or future (39e4–7).
Concerning human goodness, the hedonist may, and perhaps must,

understand by ‘just’ and ‘good’ simply different ways of being particularly
efficient at promoting pleasure. John Stuart Mill, for example, adopts this
gloss on the virtues quite unabashedly.21 Because pleasure is the only final
good – capable, that is, of being responsible for, or explaining, the
goodness of anything else good in human life – our conventional words of
commendation, ‘just’, ‘pious’, ‘generous’, are just so many praises for the
different ways a person may be good at increasing pleasure.22 Concerning
the hedonist’s conception of god, we learn early on in the Philebus that the
hedonist’s patron deity is Hedone, or Pleasure herself (12b7–9); so we
might represent the same Good Man Argument in hedonistic language: for
being good at promoting pleasure the good man is rewarded by the

goddess Pleasure with pleasures. Provided it is always also his own
pleasure that he promotes, this might make goodness and its fruits as
tightly correlated for the hedonist as they were for the rationalist. Indeed,
this construal of the argument may well be the one the hedonist would
have to understand.
For we are looking, in the Philebus, for what by its presence makes a
human life good – we are interested in good lives, not maximizing pleasing
sensations, impersonally considered.23 Since the goodness of the virtues,
on this instrumental view, is dependent upon the goodness of pleasure
itself, the hedonist ought to be committed to the view that the life where
the agent procures herself some pleasure is better than the life in which she
merely increases other people’s pleasures. The pleased and pleasing life –
using one’s skill at obtaining pleasure always also for oneself – will always
be better than the merely virtuous life. Seeking to live the best life,
therefore, the hedonist should always look at least also to her own
pleasure. Whether she should never forego any amount of her own
pleasure in order to give more pleasure to others depends on whether the
hedonist is a maximizer, committed to the principle that ‘more is always
better’. Philebus has already revealed himself as just this sort of hedonist
(27e7–9). In either case, however, it should be true that the one skilled at
obtaining pleasure (that is, the good person) is also thereby actually living
a life of enjoyment.
While this conception of virtue and human goodness may be a necessary
part of the hedonist view, it cannot excuse Protarchus for a significant
oversight in allowing the Good Man Argument. The conclusion of
Socrates’s argument need not, and perhaps ought not, be embraced by
any hedonist. There are at least three objections the hedonist ought to be
21
Cf. Mill’s Utilitarianism, Section II.
22
The implications of this conception of good and virtue, I argue below, will return to haunt the
hedonist in the argument from absurdity (55b).
23
In this respect, Protarchus may well not be defending the same sort of position that On
Utilitarianism defends.
making. First, he should protest that the Goddess Hedone hands out
pleasant pleasures, not true or false pleasures, according to merit. Second, he
ought perhaps to insist that pleasures cannot be false anyway, and so wicked
men cannot have false pleasures. Third and most urgently, the hedonist
ought to hold that there is nothing wrong even with false pleasures, so long
as they are pleasant.
Only the first two of these objections are addressed by the argument that
‘hopes’ are ‘assertions’ coloured in a certain way. Even if we accept the view
that such misjudgements cannot only infect pleasure with their falsity, but
can even be the pleasure so infected, none of this will address the third
objection. Protarchus’s telling silence on this issue indicates that, by this
point in the dialogue, he is not in a position to raise this objection; for, as I

shall try to show, he has conceded the point already by letting go of
inarticulate ‘Phileban’ hedonism in favour of a more savoury and plausible
‘enlightened’ hedonism.
MAKING PLEASURES YOUR OWN
How did Protarchus commit himself to truth globally, rather than merely
instrumentally? To put it another way, how has truth become, for the
hedonist, always or necessarily good, rather than merely dependently
good?24 It happened, I suggest, when he went in for moral theory and
explanation, instead of gesturing, rhetoric and sulking. This is so for two
reasons. First, the activity of explaining and justifying requires responsive-
ness to argument and examples and facts; an explanation that refuses to be
responsive to reality is limited and unsatisfactory. The reality to which an
explanation must respond is not given in advance of the explanation – that is
to say, there may always be something more that is relevant to the
explanation offered, and for this reason, the activity of explaining cannot
close itself off to potential challenges arising from unexpected quarters. If
one pretends to be offering an explanation, one must at the same time take
seriously the claims of other related facts with a bearing on the quality of the
explanation.
Second, more specifically, the Good Man Argument is an example of just
such a ‘further observation’ which justified claims about the good in human
life must take into account, one way or another. The Good Man Argument
demands, in its appeal to common practice, an explanation for a standard
aspect of everyday moral life. Embedded in the correlation of good men and
24
For this use of ‘dependent’, contrasted with ‘independent’ goods, see Brickhouse and Smith’s
Plato’s Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 103. Christopher Bobonich’s use of
this distinction in ‘Plato’s Theory of Goods in the Laws and Philebus’ (Proceedings of the Boston
Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 11 (1995): 101–53) 104, is rather different, and not one
that I intend to rely on here.
their hopes, even on the ‘divine dispensation’ view, is the more general
presumption that the pleasures a person might have depend upon the character
of the person in question. This is the sort of insight we rely on in our everyday
ethical reasoning, when we ask ‘What sort of person would laugh at that?’ or
‘What kind of person enjoys torturing small animals?’ In fact, we know very
well what kind of person takes pleasure in ‘things like that’ – and this is the
force of the question. Implicit in such judgements is the view that there is a
meaningful connection between the sort of person one is (one’s character,
say, or virtues), and the kinds of thing one finds pleasant. The task for both
the hedonist and the rationalist is to either explain or explain away this
presumed connection.
Thus, the Good Man Argument captures something familiar to us, in the
talk of the ‘pleasures of the good man’ being different in kind from the
pleasures of the wicked man. The argument does not yet show we are right
or justified in drawing such links between persons and their pleasures, nor
does it indicate when, and what kinds of link, we may be justified in
drawing.25 Moreover, this common practice itself does not support the
striking use of truth and falsity that Socrates believes to capture the general
difference between the pleasures of the good man and those of the wicked
man. Rather, Socrates, in the process of presenting and defending a view
according to which truth is the good in human life, presents a view of the
human mind (or soul) which – as one of its additional virtues – can justify in
principle the drawing of such inferences between types of pleasure and
personal character. It is left to the hedonist to show that his own theory has
equal explanatory power.
Due to constraints of space, and in order to keep the main argument
more clearly in focus, I shall only summarize the supporting views
presented in the Philebus which I take to provide Socrates with the tools
required to link persons meaningfully to their pleasures. In essence, then,
Socrates argues for a kind of mental holism.26 The kind of whole that the
mind is, however, is of a very particular sort. On the one hand, the
human mind is one of the ‘things existing now in the universe’ and so is
subject to all the constraints in its constitution that constrain the nature
of ‘all existing things’ in the metaphysics of Philebus 23cff. It must be a
25
In fact, the legitimacy of laying weight on these kinds of judgement have been challenged
recently by Daniel Jacobson and Justin d’Armes in their paper, ‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On
the ‘‘Appropriateness’’ of Emotions’ (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61 (2000):
65–90).
26
The mental holism is part of a general metaphysical picture that places normative weight
on unity. Not only in mind, as we shall see below, but quite generally parts are referred to
the unity they comprise in determining what they are, in a full sense, and how they ought to
be; see 16c10–d4. Thus, ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ which have a different sense in the context of
climate (26a7–b3, where they qualify temperature) than they have in the context of music
(26a1–6 and 17c–e, where they qualify pitch); and further, higher and lower (pitch) again
have a different sense within the domain of music than they do in the field of phonetics
(17a–c).
unity of different ‘stuffs’ related to each other in certain measures, a

structured unity of mutually explanatory parts.27 Human minds, for all
that they are one of the objects in the universe, are also a special kind of
object, for it is the sort of thing suitable for being responsible for the
unity and the identity of objects.28 Mind in general has this role as
‘cause of unity’; human minds in particular are the cause of the unity of
the human soul first and foremost.29 A mind working well grants good
order to a person, and creates the life characteristic of a flourishing, well-
off or successful human being. The activity of mind might be thought to
accomplish this in two different ways: it might take the study of the
human being as its object, and explicitly try to discover what would
make for a unified whole in just this case; or mind might focus instead
on understanding well-related wholes independent of individual human
persons, an activity which in itself demands and cultivates in the person a
certain unity of soul.
Thus, on the Socratic view, at least, there is some content to the claim that
the pleasures available to a person are a function of his or her character.
Seeing this should also shed light on what Socrates is trying to get at with his
talk of true and false pleasures, and the significance of insisting upon just
this point of contrast. Because cognitions, judgements, pleasures and desires
are not each separately contained modes of experience, the character of each
will infect the other. This ‘infection’ is no mere ‘guilt by association’,
pleasures and beliefs ‘staining’ each other with their various properties by
rubbing up against one another in the same psyche. Ultimately, it is
intelligence that causes the unity of consciousness, and intelligence is
essentially truth-seeking and truth-valuing. It is, therefore, by striving to
understand reality – whether the eternal world of transcendent forms, or the
everyday world of ship captains, cobblers and ‘finding one’s way home’
(62b8–9)–that the unity appropriate to a human soul can be established and
maintained. Even to be a cobbler, one must be constrained by reality to unite
past and future in intelligible ways; after all, how else will the cobbler know that
this sort of material can be worked with that sort of tool, or that this piece of
material is likely to fall apart before too long? Uniting memory, foresight,
universal and particular in a single judgement happens all the time, and it is in
27
For example, it is because each letter can only be understood together with all the others as a
system of phonetics that Theuth knows he has done his job well, and established a well-founded
analysis of spoken sound.
And as he realised that none of us could gain any knowledge of a single one of them, taken by itself
without understanding them all, he considered that the one link that somehow unifies them all, and
called it the art of literacy.
(18c7–d2)
28
There is ‘a certain cause, of no small significance, that orders and coordinates the years, seasons,
and months, and which has every right to the title of wisdom and reason’ (30c5–7).
29
Philebus 30a9–b5.
virtue of it happening – and happening well – that our own souls, and our lives
can become the intelligible, well-integrated unities they ought to be.
In this way, Socrates grounds the link between persons and their pleasures:
since the soul, and the human being and her life, are each composed of
interconnected and mutually defining parts, even when badly connected, the
expression of any one part of the soul will reflect the state of the whole soul.
Thus, Socratic rationalism is well-equipped to explain the common intuition
that ‘there must be something wrong with someone who enjoys that kind of
thing’. At the same time, the nature of his explanation of this phenomenon
implies a link between persons being good, and their pleasures being mostly
true. The good man will have to be, among other things, the man who is good
at being a human being; and because human beings only become the well-related
wholes they are supposed to be when they are exercising their own reason well,
the man good at being human will have to be consistent in orienting himself
towards truth. The character and coherence of his pleasures, desires and so on
will depend upon his attachment to truth, intelligibility, sound judgement,
memory, foresight and so on.
The Good Man Argument implicitly requires a meaningful connection
between one’s character and the kinds of thing in which one takes pleasure.
This connection is assumed in much moral reasoning, and must therefore be
either explained or explained away. While Socrates’s rationalism can explain
the connection, the hedonist cannot. On the Socratic view, the good man –
the one successful in creating unity within his psyche – will be the one
oriented towards truth generally; the pleasures arising in such a context, in
such a consciousness, will be expressions of this overall orientation.
Thus, the value of reason and of knowing is not only, perhaps not even
primarily, the fact that its objects are good, or genuine goods, or The Good.
We might contrast, for example, Bobonich30 whose view of the value of
reason for Plato I take to be, ultimately, fairly representative of the
prevailing view: Reason is especially valuable because ‘only reason allows us
to recognize the objectively good-making features which things have apart
from our interests or desires, that is, only reason allows us to appreciate the
genuine value that anything has’. On my reading of the Good Man
Argument, the passage illustrates the value of valuing and pursuing truth, as
a fundamental orientation or way of relating to the world. Even attaining
knowledge is not good just because it informs us infallibly of good and bad
(an authoritative manual could do that). More importantly, striving to
know allows reality to discipline our thought. Truth is linked to goodness
not (or not just) because it is the truth about goodness that reason aims at;
truth is essentially linked to goodness for us because aiming at truth, as an
overall disposition, fosters an overall state of soul which is good.
If this is what is required for Socratic endorsement of the Good Man
Argument, the question remains: could Protarchus reject these claims?
30
Op. cit., 128–9, 137.
THE HEDONIST’S ABSURD PREDICAMENT
The hedonist, we had supposed, ought to say, ‘let the wicked man (in the
conventional sense) have as many false pleasures as he likes; so long as
they are pleasant, he is faring well’. That is, he ought to reject the
correlation between truth and goodness, between falsity and badness. It is
on this point, and not on the mere possibility of false pleasures, that the
hedonist cause hangs. Protarchus, however, does not attempt this move;
and he may, after all, have good reason for his silence. For the trouble
with rejecting the force of the Good Man Argument on the rationalist
interpretation is not that the hedonist would then have to defy
conventional wisdom. The trouble is that the Good Man Argument relies
on an account of what human beings are, and what it is for someone to be
a good human being. Even if the hedonist rejects the Good Man
Argument, he still owes some account – an alternative, non-rationalist
account – of what a person is, and what therefore the difference is between
good and bad persons.
Could Protarchus offer such an account? Could any hedonist who
wanted to be ‘enlightened’ – that is, non-Phileban – about his pleasures?
Socrates’s final comments on pleasure suggest this is a very difficult,
perhaps impossible, task; yet it is a task that the hedonist must be able to
achieve, if his view is to be a compelling one. There must be some hedonist
account or other of good persons, bad persons and the difference between
them. When considering what a hedonist interpretation of the Good Man
Argument might look like, we already explored this question. Virtues, on
the hedonist account, were just so many different capacities for promoting
pleasure, or promoting pleasure over pain. To be a good person is to have
the virtues – that is, to be good at promoting pleasure. I have argued
already that any hedonist, no matter how enlightened, will need also to be
concerned with his own pleasure; for the question at hand is how to make
our lives good, and if pleasure is the only intrinsic good, a life without
pleasure – even if it is full of pleasure-promoting – cannot be a good one
to have.
According to conventional practice, there is an observed link between
the kinds of thing that please one, and the sort of person one is. It looks
at first as if the hedonist’s account of virtue – of good- and badness in a
human soul – might link pleasures to the character of a person very well:
good men have them and bring them about, bad men do not. There are
people good at promoting (their own) pleasure, and they are thereby
good and wise. People bad at promoting pleasure are correspondingly
wicked and foolish. If pleasure is the only independent good, there is
nothing more to goodness or wisdom than being efficient at promoting
pleasure.
Yet, it is impossible to deny that some people have foolish hopes, and
some people hope in vain. We do consider the hopes foolish, and foolish in
31
virtue of something about the hoper, as well as about the world. In as
much as hope is presently delighting in the prospect of some future
pleasure, the hedonist ought not have any objection to foolish hoping, nor
preference for well-grounded hopes. Presumably, the current pleasure at
the prospect of some future pleasure (39dff.) is just as delightful now,
whether or not the future pleasure does, in the end, arise. Socrates even
insists upon this point (40d7–10). The question is, then, what makes these
hopes foolish? If they are as pleasant as any other hopes – perhaps even
more pleasant, as the imagination runs riot envisaging all manner of
fantastical pleasures – then they are as good and wise as (that is, as
hedonistically sensible to hold), or better than any other hopes. Moreover,
the very foolish man, totally out of touch with reality, may be among the
best at promoting pleasure – if he has completely lost touch with the
world, he might never experience the pain of realising that his wild
fantasies were vain.32 The hedonist cannot explain this qualitative
difference between the wise man and the fool. They are simply two
different ways of promoting pleasure, and are as such – in hedonistic
terms – equally wise.
The two ‘arguments from absurdity’, with which Plato has Socrates
conclude the discussion of pleasure, are echoes of more elaborate arguments
in the Gorgias, and return to this intransigent problem facing hedonism. The
first argument, reminiscent of Gorgias 493dff., reminds us that the hedonist
has got to offer us a theory, and not simply rest on reiterating that pleasure is
good and more of it better. Such an undiscriminating hedonist ends up the
advocate of the painful life as much as of the pleasant one; and so we should
laugh at those who
delight in generation as a pleasure and proclaim that they would not want to
live if they were not subject to hunger and thirst and if they could not
experience all the other things one might want to mention in connection with
such conditions.
(54e6–8)
If we are interested only in the quantity and intensity of our pleasures – and
not in their quality, their purity or genuineness – then we will be interested in
pursuing only large and intense pleasures. Because of misjudgement, as
much as because of the ‘size of the lack to be filled’ (or the greatness of the
desire preceding it), pleasures are greater when the painful lack of the
desired object is more acute. In order, therefore, to derive these enormous
31
Gandhi, for instance, was not a foolish hoper, even though what he hoped for was incredibly
unlikely to come about.
32
Further, he would be an endless source of amusement for anyone who does not think
pleasures need be moralized, and thus a positive good on an impersonal pleasure-maximizing
scheme.
pleasures, we shall have to seek out equivalently acute pains. Although

Callicles wantonly embraces this conclusion (Gorgias 494b), it does seem to
make a nonsense of the idea that the hedonist is particularly interested in
pleasure: ‘Whoever makes this choice would choose generation and
destruction’. It is not possible to value generation for its own sake without
also ‘willing the means’. This ‘great absurdity’ (55a9) arises only for
Philebus, for the simple hedonist who does not try to be enlightened about
his pleasures.
The enlightened hedonist supposes he is not committed to this absurdity,
for he embraces calculation, and advocates calculating overall pleasure
against overall pain. Failing to take note of the source of the qualitative
differences in pleasures, rather than merely the quantitative ones, he faces a

further absurdity. Is it not absurd, Socrates asks,
that there should be nothing good or noble in bodies or anywhere else except
in the soul, but in the soul pleasure should be the only good thing, so that
courage or moderation or reason or any of the other goods belonging to the
soul would be neither good nor noble? In addition, we would have to call the
person who experiences not pleasure but pain bad while he is in pain, even if he
were the best of all men. By contrast, we would have to say of whoever is
pleased that the greater his pleasure whenever his is pleased, the more he excels
in virtue!
(55b1–c1)
Clearly, the idea that people are bad whenever, and only when, they are in
pain, is absurd. At the very least, in Protarchus we have a hedonist who is
not willing to bite that bullet, and in this respect he is likely to be an able
representative of any hedonist who takes himself to be engaged in the
business of offering a moral theory. However, it may be less clear that this
conclusion must actually follow for the hedonist.
It follows, I suggest, for the very same reason that Protarchus let the
Good Man Argument pass in silence. He could not object to that
argument without offering his own account of what a human being is and
what makes for a good human being; and this account is, for the hedonist,
no easy one to give. Here, the same inability leaves the hedonist saddled
with the absurdity. The problem with hedonism, as Socrates says more or
less explicitly, is that it can find nothing to be good about persons except
the fact that they experience pleasure; and this is a fact that comes and
goes with the pleasant experiences; for in potentia, human beings are as
liable to pain as to pleasure; and so their standing capacity for being
pleased cannot suffice to make a human being good. The hedonist might
want to argue that the virtues, and so virtuous human beings, consist in
being good at bringing pleasure about; but as I argued earlier, this should
commit the hedonist to the same absurd conclusion – for even enlightened
pleasure maximizers will be interested in their own pleasures; if they are
not on balance pleased, it will be because they are not very good at
achieving their aim.
This complaint rests with the inadequacy of the hedonist’s account
of virtue, or ‘goodness in a human being’. The inadequacy of the hedonistic
view of virtues as ‘useful tools in creating pleasure’ stems in part from its
indifference to the context in which virtues arise. That is to say, this account
of virtues could apply equally to man or (pleasure) machine. It neither
implies, rests on, nor offers, any account of the distinctive kind of thing a
person is; and without some view on what a human being is, an argument
about what makes him a good ‘thing of that kind’ must be unfounded.
Without this connection between what a human being is, and what human
being is a good one, any account of ‘virtue’ will remain, quite literally,
impersonal.33 Without an independent account of what a person is, then, the
hedonist cannot find any way for one to be good except for one to be
pleased. If, however, he did embrace an independent account of what a
human being is, and so ought to be – one that could make sense of a man
being good but in pain, and pleased but foolish – then he will have allowed
something else to be good independently of its relation to pleasure. If
goodness stays when pleasure goes, then something else besides pleasure
must be making the man a good one.
CONCLUSION
This is not an irrefutable defence of the rationalist view of ethics, nor a

conclusive proof that we must all become rationalists (or were so all along,
unbeknownst to ourselves). In the first place, I have not considered
alternatives to pleasure and reason that someone might put forward as the
guide to, and source, of goodness. There may not be alternatives that do not
fall into one of these two broad categories, but to show that would demand
arguments, arguments I have not tried to bring forward here.
It does not pretend to be a conclusive proof in a second way. Even Plato
acknowledges, in the Philebus, that Socrates has not managed to convert the
hedonist Philebus, just as he was unable to convert Thrasymachus (in the
Republic) or Callicles before him (in the Gorgias). That is no surprise – you
cannot win over by argument and reason someone who does not
value reason at all, no matter how good and valid the arguments.
Acknowledging this helps to highlight the strategy, and so the force, of
the considerations that Plato has Socrates bring forward here. Protarchus
33
Bernard Williams, for example, has raised an objection, by now familiar, to both utilitarian
and deontological accounts of ethics, on the grounds that each of them becomes so caught up
in counting overall usefulness or else in universalizing maxims that the person – with whom, or
on whose behalf ethical thinking ever begins – is lost. (See ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’
in Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981.))
would like to occupy the middle ground – he does not want to disavow
reason altogether, but to take up that more sanitary position of ‘enlightened
hedonism’, now most famously articulated for the modern reader by J. S.
Mill. Socrates’s strategy is to force the enlightened hedonist to choose:
reason cannot be subordinated to the interest of pleasure and still provide
the good that its presence is capable of granting to a human life. The
apparent middle ground, he argues, is illusory, as can be seen when we
examine what the exercise of judgement involves (even for the hedonist).
The point is forced when theory is confronted with conventional morality.
It looks as if Socrates’s arguments rely on us taking seriously the everyday
phenomenon within moral activity, within which ‘Who could enjoy
something like that?’ is voicing a moral objection (and not making an

enquiry for further empirical information). I had said that Socrates was no
slave to conventional morality, and certainly the hedonist is not compelled
to accept it;34 so why should such considerations figure into the con-
versation at all? Why bring gods into it?
What I am calling conventional morality is, in a way, shallow – not
necessarily wrong. The rationalist position does not dispute the maxims that
people follow, or the values to which they aspire; but it complains that they
do this unreflectively, without an understanding of what morality is, and so
are likely to make mistaken judgements in particular instances (because they
do not really understand what they are doing). Offering a moral theory is
not necessarily a project of undermining morality; instead, it attempts to tell
us what morality actually is, what goodness is, and what makes something
good, or justifies the value we place on it. Both the rationalist and the
hedonist purport to be putting forward a moral theory. The rationalist
explains the reality of value in human life by virtue of the reasoning
capacities within us; the hedonist says that, ultimately, the only thing that
makes life good is pleasure. Each offers his favoured candidate as a
justification and explanation of value in human life. Thus far, it is not
necessary that any part of everyday moral activity be rejected or accepted;
but it must be explained.
Whether justified or not, we do correlate our evaluations of persons’
characters to our evaluations of the kinds of thing in which they take
pleasure. We do, as a matter of fact, use a man’s pleasure as insight into
his character. We might be grossly mistaken in so doing – we certainly
do make mistakes; but any moral theorist, rationalist or hedonist, must
give some account of this phenomenon – explaining either why it is
justified (and when it is justified), or else why there is the perception of it
as a moral judgement, while in fact it is not so. The hedonist, confronted
34
As Bernard Williams points out in Morality (Canto edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), this if anything is one of the strengths of utilitarianism – that it might provide a
point of view from which to (legitimately) reject as mere sentiment or prejudice any intuition
that is not in accord with its findings (83, 94–5).
with this project, is once again without resources. No wonder Protarchus

does not protest to the Good Man Argument; what will he say? What
reasons could he give, either to explain or explain away the perceived
connection between persons and their pleasures – without inadvertently
availing himself of the value of truth and reason over pleasure? He could,
of course, reject both the validity of the phenomenon and the explanation
offered by the rationalist, lapsing into the very-pleased-with-himself
silence of the extreme hedonist; but then he is simply no longer offering a
moral theory.
Unfortunately for the hedonist, if he rejects unreflective conventional
morality, and the rationalist alternative offered to him, he does not have
many other resources for developing an account of what it is to be a person,

and so to be a good man or a wicked one. Conventional morality, of course,
does not so much explain as assume that there are persons, that they are
important, that they can be good and bad and live good and bad lives.
Plato’s rationalism offers one account of how this could be possible. Any
hedonist will be hard pressed to offer an adequate alternative. Protarchus,
having given up already on simple hedonism, and the idea that sheer
sensations of pleasure are sufficient to constitute and explain goodness in a
human life, should be at a loss. Either he accepts the conventional view,
together with the rationalist interpretation that underwrites it, or else he
offers his own explanation of how people relate to, or ‘own’, their
experiences, what a person is, what makes a man good. It is not just
Protarchus’s youth or inexperience that renders him ‘spineless’ in the face of
the Good Man Argument. The philosophical labour required to engage with
and replace the rationalist reading is enormous, and for any hedonist
perhaps insurmountable. But if he accepts some competing account of virtue
and persons, the hedonist is no longer a hedonist.35
Franklin and Marshall College
REFERENCES
d’Armes and Jacobson, ‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘‘Appropriateness’’

of Emotions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61 (2000):
65–90.
Bobonich, Christopher, ‘Plato’s Theory of Goods in the Laws and Philebus’,
Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 11
(1995): 101–53.
35
I would like to thank the philosophers at Robindra Bharati University (Calcutta), whose
invitation to speak first prompted me to put these thoughts together, although in a somewhat
different form. I owe thanks also to Jonardon Ganeri and Verity Harte for valuable discussion
and comments on earlier drafts.
Brickhouse and Smith, Plato’s Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1994).
Broadie, Sarah, ‘Aristotelian Piety’, Phronesis, 48 (2003) No. 1: 54–70.
Carpenter, Amber, ‘Phileban Gods’, Ancient Philosophy, 23 (2003): 93–112.
Delcomminette, Sylvain, ‘Appearance and Imagination in the Philebus’,
Phronesis, 28 (2003): 215–37.
Frede, Dorothea, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’s Pleasures: True and False Pleasures in
Plato’s Philebus’, Phronesis, 30 (1985): 151–80.
——— Philebos. Platon Werke: Übersetzung und Kommentar, Band III 2
(Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997).
Gertner, Jon, ‘The Futile Pursuit of Happiness’, New York Times Magazine,
7 September 2003.
Gosling, J. C. B., ‘False Pleasures: Philebus 35c–41b’ in Phronesis, 4 (1959):

44–54.
Hampton, Cynthia, ‘Pleasure, Truth and Being in Plato’s Philebus: A Reply
to Professor Frede’, Phronesis, 32 (1987): 253–62.
——— Pleasure, Knowledge and Being (New York, State University of New
York Press, 1990).
Harte, Verity, ‘The Philebus on Pleasure: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’,
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104 (2003–4).
McCabe, Mary Margaret, Plato and His Predecessors (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism, edited by Roger Crisp (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998) (first published 1861; 4th and final edn published 1871).
Williams, Bernard, ‘Pleasure and Belief’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl Vol. 33 (1959): 57–72.
——— ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’ in Moral Luck: Philosophical
Papers 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
——— Morality, Canto edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993).

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British Journal for the History of

Hedonistic Persons. The Good

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HEDONISTIC PERSONS. THE GOOD MAN

It seems an odd claim that knowing could be itself of intrinsic worth.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

THE GOOD MAN ARGUMENT – PHILEBUS 39E–40C

for diversity in pleasure (12d–13c), and for falsity of pleasures (36c–38a),

SOCRATES: And wicked people nevertheless have pleasures painted on their

Shortly following (at 40d7–10), Socrates concludes with a point Protarchus

The blunt introduction of the Good Man Argument may be a clumsy

The ‘divine dispensation’ view, hard for anyone to swallow, seems

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GOOD MAN ARGUMENT – THE

Plato’s Socrates is no slave to accepted opinions. Even within the

Other people believing it cannot make a view right. If we have reason to

understanding, reasoning well, and as a second-best in knowing what he

judgement about whether it is likely to rain on the day of the picnic

If Protarchus does not here willingly, if implicitly, agree that truth

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GOOD MAN ARGUMENT – THE

Concerning human goodness, the hedonist may, and perhaps must,

being good at promoting pleasure the good man is rewarded by the

point in the dialogue, he is not in a position to raise this objection; for, as I

MAKING PLEASURES YOUR OWN

unity of diﬀerent ‘stuﬀs’ related to each other in certain measures, a

THE HEDONIST’S ABSURD PREDICAMENT

pleasures, we shall have to seek out equivalently acute pains. Although

diﬀerences in pleasures, rather than merely the quantitative ones, he faces a

This is not an irrefutable defence of the rationalist view of ethics, nor a

something like that?’ is voicing a moral objection (and not making an

with this project, is once again without resources. No wonder Protarchus

many other resources for developing an account of what it is to be a person,

Franklin and Marshall College

d’Armes and Jacobson, ‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘‘Appropriateness’’

Brickhouse and Smith, Plato’s Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

Gosling, J. C. B., ‘False Pleasures: Philebus 35c–41b’ in Phronesis, 4 (1959):

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