Chapter 3 - Socratic Motivational Intellectualism

Summary

Socrates was a motivational intellectualist, which means that he believed that all actions follow the agent’s belief about what is best at the time of acting. This intellectualism entails that all human ethical error involves cognitive error. How do people come to have false ethical beliefs, and how can the processes of evaluative belief-formation be made more reliable? Explores the Socratic account of different etiologies of evaluative belief-formation in such a way as to explain human error but also to indicate ways to improve one’s ability to make appropriate ethical judgments. Discusses the role of punishment in improving one’s ethical condition, not just by causing suffering, but by changing the ways in which a wrongdoer generates and sustains evaluative beliefs.