“The unexamining life is not a life for humans” -- Socrates (Plato's reconstruction)
Consider the following argument for one interpretation of Socrates' proposition:
1) Due primarily to our intellectual abilities, humans as a species are capable of doing great harm to each other, other sentient animals, and the surrounding environment.
2) Humans (with normal cognitive function) are capable in principle of deliberating, individually and in groups, about their actions and the consequences of their actions, and choosing a course of action on the basis of such deliberation.
3) When humans act without careful deliberation and cooperation, the consequences of their actions are often very harmful.
4) When humans act cooperatively but without systematic examination of the value and disvalue of motives and consequences, the harm is often multiplied.
5) Everyone always ought to avoid doing harm if it is avoidable.
Therefore
6) Humans (with normal cognitive funtion) ought to engage in a shared process of self-examination, including examination of their behavior and its consequences -- and thereby seek to discover and follow the least harmful courses of action.
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4) When humans act cooperatively but without systematic examination of the value and disvalue of motives and consequences, the harm is often multiplied.
Does the Republican Party know this?
PN
I like it, especially since you avoid committing the naturalistic fallacy by including premise #5.
Premise 5 makes it overt, but it seems to me that the concept of harm in the earlier premises already establishes the normative content necessary for a normative conclusion.
I'm more familiar with another phrasing of this claim, something along the lines of: "The unexamined life is not worth living." Are these both translations from the same source?
Here's another short argument supporting his claim:
1) Life is valuable (worth living).
2) A living human must both exist and be cognisant.
3) Mere existence is not valuable by itself (or valuable in a different sense than what Socrates means).
4) Both value and cognisance come in degrees.
Therefore
The degree of cognisance determines the degree of life value.
Hey Kyle, nice to hear from you. You are correct that these are alternate translations from the same source. In Apology Plato's Socrates observes, in defense of his own way of life, that (my translation) "the unexamining life is not [appropriate] for humans." It is a critical-thinking manifesto, and the gerund emphasizes process rather than achievement, consistent with Socratic aporia.
I am not quite convinced by your very interesting argument, though, as it seems to beg the unstated premise "more cognizance is always better." There seems likely to be a degree of cognizance that is just the right amount for a given type of being...
Maybe we're thinking of „cognizance“ in different ways (or just spelling it differently *joke*). In the argument, I'm not equivocating „cognizance“ with „intelligence.“ Instead, I'm conflating Socrates' „process of examination“ with the notion of „general human awareness“ under the term „cognizance.“ Simply put, my conclusion should read „The more examination the better.“
Of course some people examine the world less than others, for lack of interest, lack of time, or lack of proper motivation. But I'd argue that for every individual, the more examination the better. I think your argument directly supports this claim. Your argument sheds light on the specific reasons why examination is valuable, while mine simply suggests that examination adds value to our lives. The slight difference may come from the translations we were working from.
By the way, I'm fairly sure these are both deductive arguments. Or am I mistaken?
Perhaps we are not so far apart after all.
I would call these both quite strong inductive arguments. I suppose we might reframe them as deductive if we took the analytic implications of the notion of harm as entailing the conclusions necessarily. But like Aristotle's practical syllogisms, the conclusion here is not so much a proposition as an action...
“Premise 5 makes it overt, but it seems to me that the concept of harm in the earlier premises already establishes the normative content necessary for a normative conclusion.”
Only if “x is harmful” is shorthand in this context for “it is wrong to do x.”
I take it that competent speakers of English do use the term 'harm' in just that way most of the time. I suppose we could stipulatively mean something else by it if we chose, so there's no harm(!) in making the matter explicit with a premise such as (5). But the argument would not be a naturalistic fallacy without it, given any plausible analysis of 'harm.'
As you are aware, my insistence on this is part of a long campaign (so far unsuccessful) to convince you that the fear of naturalistic fallacies and is-ought problems is formalistic and overblown.
"But the argument would not be a naturalistic fallacy without it, given any plausible analysis of 'harm.'"
Yes, so long as harm is code for "bad" or "improper," no fallacy occurs. But Hume's insistence on the impossibility of deriving ought from is -- which I support -- most convincingly involves arguments with no such code words.
We agree completely about the formal insight. I just think that normative content (whether "coded" or not) is considerably more pervasive in our natural-language utterances than Hume acknowledges.
It would seem that we no longer disagree!
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