When Zopyrus the physiognomist examined Socrates, he discerned a host of vices in his face. Socrates was a blocked soul, he said, stuffed with raging appetites. Socrates’s companions all laughed at Zopyrus’s diagnosis: what a ridiculous thing to say about harmless old Socrates! But when Socrates spoke, he silenced their laughter. That is me, he said, Zopyrus sees me clearly. Yet he added a qualification: he was indeed naturally prone to these vices, but he had overcome them by the aid of reason.
Karen Nielsen does not tell this familiar story in her Vice in Ancient Philosophy, but it serves as a fitting companion to her book. At its most straightforward, Nielsen’s book defends a version of the outlook attributed to Socrates in the story: vice has powerful natural roots in our disorderly appetites, but it can be overcome through a form of rational self-transformation. At its most disturbing, Nielsen’s book echoes the Zopyrus story in a different way: she invites us to take Zopyrus’s original diagnosis seriously, and to doubt Socrates’s qualification, by wondering how much progress the philosopher has really made in overcoming his natural vices.
To understand Nielsen’s work, it helps to begin, not in antiquity, but in the recent history of virtue ethics. Since the mid-twentieth century, the Anglophone philosophical world has come to include a variety of projects bearing the label “virtue ethics”; many of these draw inspiration from ancient treatments of virtue, above all in Plato and Aristotle. Yet modern virtue ethics has often been quite unlike what we find in Plato and Aristotle in one particular respect: its interest in virtue has often not brought with it a serious interest in vice. An important exception is found in what we might call a Nietzschean branch of virtue ethics, represented in different ways by Philippa Foot and Bernard Williams. This branch has always insisted that a deep consideration of the advantages of vice needs to accompany any purported defense of virtue. For these thinkers, ancient thought serves modern virtue ethics as a model not least when it stages a forthright confrontation between, for example, justice and injustice, as in Socrates’s encounters with Callicles and Thrasymachus.
This branch of virtue ethics regards vice as posing a profound challenge to virtue, and it invites us to see ancient sources as models of engagement with that challenge. During the past two decades, that invitation has been heartily taken up by readers of the relevant ancient texts. In particular, readers of Aristotle have engaged in an extensive debate about the place of vice in his ethical thinking. The primary focus of this debate has been an apparent inconsistency in Aristotle’s descriptions of vice: in Nichomachean Ethics VII, he appears to hold that the vicious agent is “principled,” i.e., lives by a stable and erroneous outlook, according to which indulging one’s bodily appetites, for example, is unqualifiedly good. In NE IX, however, he appears to describe the vicious agent as “conflicted,” i.e., as seeing the error of his ways, even as he is unable to improve his behavior. In the face of this apparent inconsistency, philosophers have proposed a variety of responses, some dismissing Aristotle’s view as incoherent, others holding that the evidence can all be read as consistent with a “principled” view, or with a “conflicted” view. At stake in this debate is the question of how deep a challenge vice poses to virtue: if the vicious agent is conflicted and is essentially a failed version of the virtuous person, then the challenge is not all that deep; but if he is principled and has his own story to tell about the value of living the way he does, then the challenge may be more unsettling.
Nielsen’s work in this book began with an article she published in 2017 intervening in this debate. In that article, she aimed to resolve the debate by locating a truth in both views. To effect that resolution, she argued that we need to take two main steps: first, to see that the conflict described in NE IX is not a conflict in the vicious agent between a true moral view and his bad behavior. Insofar as the vicious agent regrets his vicious ways, it is not because he sees what is truly wrong with them, but rather because they fail to satisfy, even by his own lights. In this way, we can reconceive the conflict within the vicious agent, not as a conflict between a true moral view and his behavior, but rather between his false moral view and his behavior. Nielsen’s second step is to argue that this is precisely what we should expect to happen, if a person devotes himself to vice as a “principled” project. In her view, the human appetite has an inherent tendency toward what the ancient philosophers called pleonexia, a complex notion that includes simultaneously insatiability and envy. The characteristic act of the pleonectic is to want what other people have because they have it, and to want more than they have, however much they have. Nielsen puts this notion at the center of her project, arguing that it holds the key to understanding why the life of intemperance does not merely happen to sometimes not work out, but must inevitably prove unsatisfying.
Nielsen revisits, without substantially revising, this argument about Aristotle from her 2017 article. What, then, does the book add? In terms of new material, not much. This is a slim volume of about 25,000 words, of which about one third is taken up with the already published argument about Aristotle. Moreover, another third is an abridged version of an already published article from 2019 on Plato’s Republic. The only wholly new undertaking in this book is a brief account of some related themes in Plato’s Gorgias, which is well done, but relatively uncontroversial. In the context of the book, these readings of Plato serve the function of supporting her argument about Aristotle, for instance by filling in aspects of the conception of pleonexia that are less explicit in Aristotle but more fully described in Plato, and which she thinks shed helpful light on Aristotle’s arguments. Scholars who have followed Nielsen’s recent work and now come to this book looking for a reconsideration of her previous positions or for engagement with figures she has not already tackled will come away disappointed.
But those scholars are not the primary audience for this book. The goals of the Cambridge Elements series are basically pedagogical: these little books are aimed at undergraduates or others who are new to a given field, and they aim in the first instance to orient them within it. Like all pedagogical projects, they also mean to shape the field’s future. From that perspective, we can say that Nielsen’s book does a great deal more than her previously published articles. As articles in scholarly journals, Nielsen’s arguments functioned as contributions to debates about particular texts. As a book, they function in a different way, as a manifesto for the project of attending to vice as part of virtue ethics, and for the central place that these texts by Plato and Aristotle should have in that project.
What might that project look like going forward? Nielsen’s book suggests some intriguing possibilities. I’ll focus on just one: that virtue ethics might more consistently position itself as a critique of liberalism. There has always been a reactionary anti-liberal strain in virtue ethics, represented most notably by Alasdair MacIntyre. That strain takes the shortcomings of modern moral philosophy to reflect the broader failure of the Enlightenment aspiration toward a universalist humanism, and sees in the turn to virtue ethics an embrace of local and contingent tradition as the proper context for moral thinking. But that strain has always been complemented by a progressive strain, one that sees more continuity between ancient philosophy and modern humanism. This strain has often been in an awkward relationship with liberalism, however, given liberalism’s hostility toward all forms of ethical naturalism.
Nielsen’s book suggests that thinkers with this progressive orientation may finally be prepared to frame their project as a critique of liberalism. For Nielsen, pleonexia is on flagrant display in vice, but vice also reveals it to be a universal condition, the default shape of human appetite. Theories of virtue that fail to fully reckon with this aspect of our nature, therefore, will fall short. On these grounds, she fruitfully contrasts Plato’s political thought with one version of the liberal tradition, represented by Hobbes. Hobbes assumes that human beings are fundamentally self-interested and take an instrumental attitude toward power. By contrast, Nielsen’s Plato, following his conception of human appetite as naturally pleonectic, thinks of human beings as deeply invested in interpersonal comparison and drawn to power for its own sake. From this point of view, the essential problems of politics require more than balancing competing interests: they require creating virtuous pathways for our natural sociability, by cultivating lawfulness in the soul and a relish for the common good.
Similarly, Nielsen deploys the figure of Plato’s tyrant as a warning about the inefficacy of liberal appeals to norms in response to strongman politics. In a vivid passage that speaks to the political experience of many post-liberal societies in recent decades, she writes that it would “be a mistake to attempt to shame the tyrant by exposing his behaviour for what it is. The tyrant asserts his dominance precisely by acting in defiance of moral and legal norms, and when he is called out for his bad behaviour, he simply bares his teeth. He dominates the weak through lawbreaking that acts as a kind of ‘vice-signalling’. If justice is ‘high-minded simplicity’, as Thrasymachus says, and injustice more masterly than justice, then breaking the law is nothing to be ashamed of – provided that you can get away with it. On the contrary, violating norms is valuable along multiple dimensions: in addition to instrumental value, flagrant lawbreaking deters those who consider opposing you and signals to the weak that you are above the law.” (pp. 33-4) We have all seen the power of this sort of “vice-signaling” in recent years, as well as the inefficacy of liberal appeals to norms in the face of it. Nielsen diagnoses this inefficacy as a failure to take seriously the desire for power at the heart of pleonexia, and she makes the case for ancient theories of vice as an essential reminder of that desire.
With this critique of liberalism in place, we can revisit the challenge that vice poses to virtue. Nielsen insists that vicious agents will inevitably be unsatisfied; but she also insists that our theories of virtue will present an inadequate alternative if they do not reckon with the degree to which vice can be principled. If human beings were essentially materialistic creatures with a merely instrumental relationship to power, then an appeal to human weakness – the fact that none of us is strong enough to always get what we want – would be enough to defend virtue. In Gorgias and Republic, we find precisely this defense put forward. But the voice of vice that speaks in those dialogues exposes this defense as feeble. If Socrates overcame his natural pleonexia by reason, as the Zopyrus story tells us, then how did he do it? If it was by reminding himself that vice does not always pay, or that there are norms and laws against it, then he did not do enough. For in that case his virtue is really nothing but weakness, perhaps rationalized so as to disguise it from himself. If that is all there is to virtue, then the virtuous agent will look like the most pitiful thing of all, a failed vicious person.