The Debate Between Socrates and Protagoras

In causing diseases, they cause pain. In causing poverty, they cause pain

They are evil as they end in pain and rob us of other pleasures

When you speak of goods being painful, you mean remedial goods, such as gymnastic exercises, and military service, and the physician’s use of burning, cutting, drugging, and starving. These are good but are painful.

We call them good because they bring health and improvement of the bodily condition and the salvation of states and power over others and wealth.

These things are good because they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain. Pain and pleasure are the standard of being good or evil.

We should pursue after pleasure as a good, and avoid pain as an evil.

Pain is an evil and pleasure is a good. Pleasure is also an evil, when it robs you of greater pleasures than it gives, or causes pains greater than the pleasure.

If, however, you call pleasure an evil in relation to some other end or standard, you will be able to show us that standard. But you have none to show.'

Have you not a similar way of speaking about pain?

You call pain a good when it takes away greater pains than those which it has, or gives pleasures greater than the pains: then if you have some standard other than pleasure and pain to which you refer when you call actual pain a good, you can show what that is.

But you cannot.

Suppose that the world says to me: ‘Why do you spend many words and speak in many ways on this subject?’

Excuse me, friends, I should reply; but in the first place there is a difficulty in explaining the meaning of the expression ‘overcome by pleasure’.

The whole argument turns upon this.

Even now, if you see any possible way in which evil can be explained as other than pain, or good as other than pleasure, you may still retract. Are you satisfied, then, at having a life of pleasure which is without pain?

If you are, and if you are unable to show any good or evil which does not end in pleasure and pain, hear the consequences:—If what you say is true, then the argument is absurd which affirms that a man often does evil knowingly, when he might abstain, because he is seduced and overpowered by pleasure; or again, when you say that a man knowingly refuses to do what is good because he is overcome at the moment by pleasure.

That this is ridiculous will be evident if only we give up the use of various names, such as pleasant and painful, and good and evil.

There are 2 things: good and evil, and then pleasant and painful.

Assuming this, let us go on to say that a man does evil knowing that he does evil.

But some one will ask, Why? Because he is overcome, is the first answer. And by what is he overcome? the enquirer will proceed to ask.

We shall not be able to reply ‘By pleasure,’ for the name of pleasure has been exchanged for that of good. In our answer, then, we shall only say that he is overcome. ‘By what?’ he will reiterate.

By the good, we shall have to reply; indeed we shall. Nay, but our questioner will rejoin with a laugh, if he be one of the swaggering sort, ‘That is too ridiculous, that a man should do what he knows to be evil when he ought not, because he is overcome by good.

Is that, he will ask, because the good was worthy or not worthy of conquering the evil’? And in answer to that we shall clearly reply, Because it was not worthy; for if it had been worthy, then he who, as we say, was overcome by pleasure, would not have been wrong.

‘But how,’ he will reply, ‘can the good be unworthy of the evil, or the evil of the good’? Is not the real explanation that they are out of proportion to one another, either as greater and smaller, or more and fewer? This we cannot deny. And when you speak of being overcome—‘what do you mean,’ he will say, ‘but that you choose the greater evil in exchange for the lesser good?’

And now substitute the names of pleasure and pain for good and evil, and say, not as before, that a man does what is evil knowingly, but that he does what is painful knowingly, and because he is overcome by pleasure, which is unworthy to overcome. What measure is there of the relations of pleasure to pain other than excess and defect, which means that they become greater and smaller, and more and fewer, and differ in degree?

For if any one says: ‘Yes, Socrates, but immediate pleasure differs widely from future pleasure and pain’—To that I should reply: And do they differ in anything but in pleasure and pain? There can be no other measure of them.

Do you, like a skilful weigher, put into the balance the pleasures and the pains, and their nearness and distance, and weigh them, and then say which outweighs the other. If you weigh pleasures against pleasures, you of course take the more and greater; or if you weigh pains against pains, you take the fewer and the less; or if pleasures against pains, then you choose that course of action in which the painful is exceeded by the pleasant, whether the distant by the near or the near by the distant; and you avoid that course of action in which the pleasant is exceeded by the painful. Would you not admit, my friends, that this is true? I am confident that they cannot deny this.

Well then, I shall say, if you agree so far, be so good as to answer me a question: Do not the same magnitudes appear larger to your sight when near, and smaller when at a distance? They will acknowledge that. And the same holds of thickness and number; also sounds, which are in themselves equal, are greater when near, and lesser when at a distance. They will grant that also.

Now suppose happiness to consist in doing or choosing the greater, and in not doing or in avoiding the less, what would be the saving principle of human life? Would not the art of measuring be the saving principle; or would the power of appearance?

Is not the latter that deceiving art which makes us wander up and down and take the things at one time of which we repent at another, both in our actions and in our choice of things great and small? But the art of measurement would do away with the effect of appearances, and, showing the truth, would fain teach the soul at last to find rest in the truth, and would thus save our life. Would not mankind generally acknowledge that the art which accomplishes this result is the art of measurement?

Suppose the salvation of human life to depend on the choice of odd and even, and on the knowledge of when a man ought to choose the greater or less, either in reference to themselves or to each other, and whether near or at a distance; what would be the saving principle of our lives?

Would not knowledge?—a knowledge of measuring, when the question is one of excess and defect, and a knowledge of number, when the question is of odd and even? The world will assent, will they not?