The foundations of Socratic ethics

Although generally regarded as the founder of Western moral philosophy, Socrates himself wrote nothing. We know about his life and his thought only through the writings of others, notably Plato, who made Socrates the central character in many of his most important dialogues. However, Plato's portrait of Socrates (and the philosophical views he presents) changed appreciably during Plato's development as a writer. In this provocative new work, Alfonso Gomez-Lobo proposes that the earliest Platonic writings, in particular Apology, Crito, and sections of Gorgias, contain an underlying moral philosophy that can be attributed to Socrates with some degree of assurance. His aim is to show that Socratic moral philosophy is a reasonably systematic construction generated by a small number of principles or axioms. He argues that some well known Socratic maxims, such as "it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong," can be rationally justified by appeal to those principles. Finally, Gomez-Lobo raises the question of the justification of moral principles themselves, distinguishing between the Socratic attempt to justify them by means of the elenchus, and the Platonic endeavor to derive the crucial axiom - that the good life is the just life - from a higher metaphysical principle about the good in general.