Harsanyi vs The World

Utilitarians and Egalitarians

One of the things impartial consequentialists get to argue with each other over is how much equality matters. If John has one util (utils are units of utility or wellbeing) and Harriet has four, is that better or worse than if they both have two? Or is it just that the first setup is better than the second for Harriet and the second is better than the first for John, and that's all there is to it? I'm inclined towards this last view, but impartial consequentialists - utilitarians and the like - tend to want to say that setups can be better or worse overall, because they want to go on to say that the overall goodness of the setup an action brings about, or will probably bring about, or something like that, determines whether the action was right or wrong. You can't very well say that your action was right for John and wrong for Harriet, and that's all there is to it. Goodness and badness may seem to be plausibly relative to individuals, but it's less plausible to say that about rightness and wrongness.

So, let's suppose you've decided you want to be an impartial consequentialist. You know how good a setup is for each person, and you want to work out how good it is overall. What are your options?

• You add up everyone's utility. That makes you an aggregating utilitarian.
• You can take the mean of everyone's utility. That makes you an averaging utilitarian.
• You can say that sometimes a setup with less total/average utility is better because it's more equal. That makes you an egailitarian.
• You can say that sometimes a setup with less total/average utility is better because it's less equal. That makes you an elitist, or something - it's not a very popular view and we'll ignore it in what follows.

For a fixed population, the average will be higher whenever the aggregate is higher and vice versa, so it doesn't matter which kind of utilitarian you are. The population is of course sometimes affected by our actions, but I won't have anything to say about that today. I'm thinking about the difference between being a utilitarian and being an egalitarian. Mostly I'd thought that both were pretty live options, and while there were considerations that might push you one way or the other, ultimately you would have to decide for yourself what kind of impartial consequentialist you were going to be, assuming you were going to be an impartial consequentialist at all. But a few days ago someone on Twitter (@genericfilter - thanks) drew my attention to a paper by John Harsanyi which threatens to settle the question for us, in favour of the utilitarian. That was disquieting for me, since my sympathies are on the other side. But Harsanyi's got a theorem. You can't argue with a theorem, can you? Well, of course you can argue with a theorem: you just argue with its premises. So I'm going to see how an egalitarian might go about arguing with Harsanyi's theorem.

Harsanyi's Theorem

I'm actually reliably informed that Harsanyi has two theorems that utilitarians use to support their case, but I'm only talking about one. It's his theorem that says, on a few assumptions that are plausible for people who think von Neumann-Morgenstern decision theory is the boss of them, that the only function of individual utilities that can give you the overall utility is a weighted sum (or average; we're taking the population to be fixed here). Since we're already impartial consequentialists, that leaves us with a straight sum (or average). So the egalitarians lose their debate with the utilitarians, unless they reject one or more of the assumptions.

Now, I think I understood the paper OK. Well enough to talk about it here, but not well enough to explain the details of the theorem to you. Hopefully this doesn't matter. Harsanyi's work may have been new to me but it isn't all that obscure, and you may already be familiar with it. In case you're not, I'll also try to tell you what's relevant to the argument when it comes up, but if you want a proper explanation of the details you'll really have to go elsewhere for them.

Harsanyi proves five theorems. The first three seem kind of like scene-setting, with the real action coming in theorems IV and V. Here they are (Harsanyi 1955: 313-4):

• Theorem IV: W [the social welfare function] is a homogeneous function of the first order of U₁, U₂... U_n [where these are the utilities of each of the n individuals in the setup].
• Theorem V: W is a weighted sum of the individual utilities, of the form W = ∑ a_i•U_i, where a_i stands for the value that W takes when U_i = 1 and U_j = 0 for all j ≠ i.

Some clarifications before we go on. A homogeneous function of the first order means that if you multiply all the U_is by a constant k then that multiplies W by k as well. The utility functions U_i and the social welfare function W aren't just functions on categorical states of the world; they're functions on probability distributions over such states. He shows in theorem III that you can treat W as a function of the individual utility functions, and you can also treat it as a function on probability distributions over distributions of utility.

Theorem V basically says that the utilitarians are right. Harsanyi doesn't seem to have assumed anything as radical as that, and yet that's what he's proved. It's as if he's pulled a rabbit out of a hat. So the question is: where does the rabbit go into the hat? As I say, theorems I-III seemed like scene-setting, so let's start by looking at theorem IV.

Diminishing Returns

You might think, as I did, that egalitarians should be pretty unhappy with theorem IV. To get an idea of why, think about diminishing returns. If you give someone with no money a million pounds, that will make a big difference. Give them another million, and it makes less of a difference. The third million makes less difference again. Now, the utilitarians aren't saying that John having two million and Harriet having nothing is just as good as both having one million. You build that into the utility function, by saying money has a diminishing return of utility. But here's the thing: the returns of giving John or Harriet money should diminish faster from the point of view of the egalitarian social planner than they do from the point of view of the person getting the money. That's because boosting an individual's utility becomes less important to the planner as the person gets better off.

You can get a feel for why by thinking about different people's agendas. John's agenda remains John's agenda, however much of it he achieves. He achieves the first item, and moves down the list to the second. That's just what it is for it to be John's agenda. But the planner's agenda is different. If John's agenda is totally unmet, the planner might prioritize the first thing on John's list. But if John is getting on well with his agenda, the planner can ignore him a bit and start prioritizing the agendas of people who aren't doing so well. John's fine now. And however you take into account the diminishing returns of John's agenda for John, they should diminish faster for the planner.

For me, this idea had a lot of instinctive pull, and I expect it would for other egalitarians. And this idea is the very thing theorem IV contradicts. Theorem IV says that boosting U_John from 0 to 1 has just as much impact on W as boosting U_John from 10 to 11, when everyone else's utility is 0. You have to do a little more to generalize it to hold when other people's utilities aren't 0, which is what theorem V does, but this consequence of theorem IV is bad enough. The rabbit is already in the hat at this point. Or so it seems.

It turns out that denying theorem IV, or at least accepting the egalitarian principle that conflicts with it, gives a result which is even worse, or at least to me it seems even worse. It's well established that diminishing returns can manifest themselves as risk aversion. (Though it's possible not all risk aversion can be explained by diminishing returns.) A second million is worth less to you than a first, and this explains why you wouldn't risk the first for a 50% chance of winning a second. Maybe you're already risk-averse enough that you wouldn't do that anyway, but the point is that diminishing returns on a thing X generate risk-averse behaviour with respect to X. So if Harriet's utility has diminishing returns for the planner, this means that the planner will be more risk-averse with Harriet's utility than she is, other things being equal. That result is very odd. What it means is that in two situations where the only difference is whether Harriet takes a certain gamble or not, one will be better for Harriet but the other will be better overall, even though they're both equally good for everyone else. This is a weird result indeed, and Harsanyi makes sure his assumptions rule it out. It seems that it should be possible to be an egalitarian without accepting this weird result.

The Repugnant Conclusion

So if we're granting theorem IV, we could look for the rabbit going in somewhere in the proof of theorem V. I couldn't really see anything much to work with there, though, so I thought I'd try a different tack. To get an idea of the new strategy, think about Derek Parfit's (1984) repugnant conclusion argument against aggregate utilitarianism (and against lots of other positions). The idea of that argument is to show that aggregate utilitarians are committed to saying that for any setup with lots of people all of whom have great lives, there is a better setup in which everyone's life is only just worth living. (The second setup manages to be better because there are so many more people in it.)

Now, you could try setting up the objection by just taking some postulates that aggregate utilitarians are committed to and then formally proving the result. That's more or less how Harsanyi proceeds with his argument. But what Parfit does has a different flavour. He takes his opponent on a kind of forced march through a series of setups, and the opponent has to agree that each is no worse than the last, and this gets you from the nice world to the repugnant world. Here's a version of how it can go. Start with a world A with lots of happy people. Change it to world B by adding in some people whose lives aren't good but are still worth living. That can't make the world worse, because it's just as good for the initial people and the new people's lives are still better than nothing. Then take a third world C which has the same total utility as B but it's equally distributed. That shouldn't make the world worse either. C is like A but with more people who are less happy. Then you repeat the process until you get the repugnant world R. (If your opponent says R is just as good as A, you construct R' by making everyone a tiny bit better off. R' is still repugnant, and if it's not repugnant enough for you then just continue the process again from R' until you find a world that is.)

What I'm thinking is that if Harsanyi's proofs are valid, which they are, then you should be able to get a similar forced-march argument that embodies the proof, but where you move from a world where lots of people are happy to a repugnant world where one person has all the utility and everyone else has none. This argument should be more amenable to philosophical analysis, and once we've worked out what's wrong with it, we should be able to return to Harsanyi's proof and say where the rabbit goes into the hat. I'm not Parfit, and I haven't come up with anything as good as the repugnant conclusion argument. But I have come up with something.

Harsanyi Simplified

What we want to show, without loss of generality, is why one util for John and four for Harriet is better than two utils for each. One and four are placeholders here; what's important is that they'd each go for a 50-50 shot between one and four, rather than a guaranteed two. Here's the forced march:

• Independent 50-50 shots between one and four for each is better than a guaranteed two for each.
• A 50-50 shot between one for John and four for Harriet or four for John and one for Harriet is just as good as independent 50-50 shots between one and four for each.
• One for John and four for Harriet is as good as four for John and one for Harriet.
• Since these two outcomes are equally good, and a 50-50 shot between them is better than two for each, both are better than two for each.
• So one for John and four for Harriet is better than two for each.

This doesn't track his theorem exactly, I don't think, but as I understand the important moves, if the egalitarian can explain what's wrong with this argument, then they can explain what's wrong with Harsanyi's. And if they can't, they can't. A couple of things are worth pointing out, before we think about what might be wrong with it.

First, in a way it's more general than Harsanyi's. You don't have to assume that people should be expected utility maximizers. The point of the argument is that whatever risk profiles self-interested people should be most willing to accept for themselves, the corresponding distributions are the best ones for everyone overall.

Second, and very relatedly, it more or less shows that the best setup (at least for a fixed population) is the one that someone self-interested would choose behind the veil of ignorance to be in. Harsanyi was a fan of that idea, I'm told, but that idea drops out of the reasoning behind his theorem. You don't need that idea to prove the theorem.

So, where should the egalitarian resist the argument? To me, given what we saw earlier in the section on diminishing returns, it seems they would have to resist the idea that if a 50-50 shot at outcomes X or Y is better than outcome Z, then at least one of X and Y must be better than Z. (And if X and Y are equally good, both must be better than Z.) This idea is very intuitive, at least considered in the abstract, and if it's wrong then it seems a lot of decision theory won't really be applicable to impartial moral decision-making. It's not just expectation-maximizing that will have to go either, because the move in question is pretty much just dominance reasoning. (If Z is better than X and better than Y, then it's better than a 50-50 shot between X and Y.) When you give up dominance reasoning, I'm not sure how much of decision theory is left.

Longtime readers may remember that I once said I preferred versions of consequentialism that assessed actions by their actual consequences rather than by their expected consequences. Harsanyi does set things up in a way that's much more friendly to expected-consequences versions, but I don't hold out much hope for resisting Harsanyi's argument along these lines. One problem I have with expected consequences was that it's hard to find a specific probability distribution to use which doesn't undermine the motivation for using expected consequences in the first place. (People will be unsure of the probabilities and of their own credences, just as they're unsure of the consequences of their actions.) But Harsanyi doesn't exploit that at all. Another problem I had, and the one I talked more about in the post, was that expectation consequentialism gives a norm about the proper attitude towards risk, and I don't see that there is a plausible source for such a norm. It's just up to us to take the risks and put up with the consequences. Harsanyi does exploit expectation-maximizing to get the strong utilitarian result, but you just need simple dominance reasoning to get the weaker result that inequalities are justified in a setup if people would choose that setup behind a veil of ignorance (with an equal chance of occupying each position).

All of this, even the weaker result, seems to me to be huge if true. I've long been a fellow traveller of impartial consequentialism, and the main reason I keep using the term 'impartial consequentialism' rather than 'utilitarianism' is that I've got egalitarian sympathies. Readers of my recent posts on Hipparchia will have already noticed me losing my enthusiasm for the project. This Harsanyi stuff may force me to give up on it altogther.

References

• Arrhenius, G., Ryberg, J. and Tännsjö, T. 2017: 'The Repugnant Conclusion', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
• Harsanyi, J. 1955: 'Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility', Journal of Political Economy 63(4): 309-321
• Parfit, D. 1984: Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press)

They Do Things Differently There

Between 1962 and 1981, a scholar at Cambridge University called WKC Guthrie published a six-volume History of Greek Philosophy running from the early Presocratics to Aristotle. He was, it seems, something of an expert.  In the preface to the first volume (1962: xi) he says he had plans to go further: “It is my intention, Deo volente, to continue this history to include the Hellenistic period, stopping short of the Neoplatonists and those of their predecessors who are best understood in conjunction with them.” Six volumes is still a lot, of course, but don’t worry: he also wrote a much shorter book in 1950 covering the same period, called The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle. It was based on a series of lectures aimed at undergraduates who weren’t taking classics and might not know any Greek. (His six-volume work was meant to be accessible for non-Greek-readers too.) I hardly know any Greek myself, and I’ve recently been taking an interest in Anaxagoras, so when I saw it in a second hand bookshop I thought I might like it. And I did! I’ve heard the basic story a few times before, but I’m always ready to read someone else’s take on these things, and there were a few things I found kind of interesting about Guthrie’s.

The first chapter is called “Greek Ways of Thinking”, and by page four he’s already got into a discussion about the meanings of words. He wants to stress that some of the key words ancient Greek philosophers used didn’t mean the same things to them as their usual English translations mean to us. He mentions the words translated as ‘justice’, ‘virtue’, and ‘god’ (or ‘God’), and the Greek word logos (λόγος). At the start of John’s Gospel, where it says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, the word translated as “Word” is logos. It’s also where the “-logy” in “biology” and “geology” comes from. It’s hard to translate into English, and it was already kind of slippery in Greek, which noted slippery character Heraclitus apparently took full advantage of.

Ostensibly Guthrie’s talking about this because he’s writing (and had been lecturing) for an audience of non-classicists, and he doesn’t want people who don’t read Greek to get misled by the translations. I suppose it’s quite likely that a modern reader would be liable to bring some conceptual baggage to the table even if they were able to read the original Greek, but the less Greek you’ve read the less likely you’ll be to have a feel for what they meant by these words. He wants you to understand the mindset of the Greek philosophers, and he does this, at least in part, by trying to explain what their words mean.

It’s possible I was reading too much into it, but I kind of got the impression that casting this in terms of words was a result of the author being surrounded by British philosophers in the 1930s and 1940s. If the hip new thing is to think that philosophy is ultimately a matter of attending carefully to the meanings of words, then this is probably a smart way to present things. And of course Guthrie may have subscribed to some of this linguistic turn stuff himself too. I can vaguely recall linguistic-turn philosophers saying that while Plato, Descartes and the rest thought they were dealing with substantive non-linguistic questions they were really talking about the meanings of words, and as a result their insights can still have relevance to philosophy conceived as linguistic analysis. I wish I had an example of someone saying this for you, but I do not. [UPDATE 19/12/18: I found the thing I was vaguely recalling; it's in chapter two of Ayer [1936].] Anyway, assuming they actually did say this, I kind of think they had a point except that it’s the other way round: linguistic-turn philosophers were still blundering around in much the same insight-space with much the same moves available to them as the people who came before and after, and casting their insights about causes and knowledge as insights about the words “cause” and “knowledge” doesn’t stop us using them. There’s probably a limit to how far you can take this kind of ecumenism, and some of the linguistic-turn stuff probably can trace its badness to its conception of what philosophy is. Some of it can probably trace its goodness to that too! But I think that a lot of the time it doesn’t really matter, and similarly it doesn’t really matter that Guthrie casts his discussion of the Greek philosophers’ ways of thinking in terms of the meanings of words. Just to be clear, he thinks those ways of thinking were pretty different from those of twentieth-century British people.

Another thing I thought was interesting was how he focused on the political environment. Here’s how he starts the first of two chapters on Plato:

We shall probably understand Plato’s philosophy best if we regard him as working in the first place under the influence of two related motives. He wished first of all to take up Socrates’s task at the point where Socrates had had to leave it, to consolidate his master’s teaching and defend it against inevitable questioning. But in this he was not acting solely from motives of personal affection or respect. It fitted in with his second motive, which was to defend, and to render worth defending, the idea of the city-state as an independent political, economic, and social unit. For it was by accepting and developing Socrates’s challenge to the Sophists that Plato thought this wider aim could be most successfully accomplished.

The doom of the free city-state was sealed by the conquests of Philip and Alexander. It was these which assured that that compact unit of classical Greek life should be swamped by the growth of huge kingdoms on a semi-Oriental model. But they did no more than complete in drastic fashion a process of decline which had been going on for some time. (p.81)

I was quite taken aback by this. Obviously Plato’s most famous work is called The Republic, and in it he lays out a way for a city state to be organized, and my understanding is that you’re supposed to think some of these ideas are pretty good. (I’m told it’s a sort of centrally planned natural aristocracy with philosophers running the show and a covert eugenics programme for good measure, although I blush to confess I haven’t actually read much of it.) But Plato also talks about a bunch of other things, even in The Republic itself, and I’d always been given the impression that his political ideas were a bit of an eccentric sideline, and largely independent of his much more important stuff about forms, knowledge, truth, the soul, the Euthyphro problem and so on. I was already aware that Plato’s interest in politics wasn’t entirely theoretical, and that he’d been very disappointed by the Athenian democracy that killed Socrates, and also affected by the situation with the Thirty Tyrants, about which I don’t know very much. But a person can be interested in more than one thing. Guthrie seems to think that Plato’s more purely philosophical stuff is largely in the service of his politics, and Guthrie wasn’t some kind of oddball as far as I can tell, so it’s interesting to see him saying something like that. But perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

The connection between politics and Plato’s less obviously political stuff is, according to Guthrie, related to the connection between religion and the state. They were, he says, closely bound together and in some ways identified. By Plato’s time the anthropomorphic paganism of Homer and Hesiod was getting challenged a lot, and the political order was getting challenged with it. The Sophists, who Plato wasn’t a fan of, were part of this. Plato wanted to find an alternative foundation for the political order, according to Guthrie, and that involved defending the idea of eternal principles of justice and a conception of the good life that would be best facilitated by city states, as long as they had plenty of central planning and a eugenics programme instead of this democracy nonsense that killed his buddy Socrates. Something like that, anyway. It makes a kind of sense, although I can't say I agree with Plato here.

A related issue is something Guthrie says about the relationship between virtue and self-interest in ancient Greek philosophy. These days we draw a pretty sharp distinction between the two. People disagree about the extent of our moral obligations to go out of our way to help others, about how much someone’s being a bad person is an intrinsic harm to them, and about the extent to which virtue and vice are rewarded and punished after death. But we’ve still got two pretty separate concepts of doing what’s right and doing what’s best for yourself, even if we might think they line up pretty closely in practice.

Now, utilitarians these days often say that for well-off people in well-off countries morality is very demanding indeed, and that the moral life involves a level of self-sacrifice that most people don’t come anywhere near, even people we ordinarily think of as moral exemplars. Basically the idea is that people should give away practically all their disposable income to charities. Utilitarians disagree over which charities, but the consensus among them is that the charities will spend it better than you will, and that means you should hand it over. This may not have always been the case. When utilitarianism was invented there was a lot of poverty about, but there may well not have been as much an individual could achieve by throwing money at the problem, because there wasn’t the same charity infrastructure in place. The situation where the more money you give the fewer people will get malaria is new, and Peter Singer’s [1972] problem is a New Moral Problem. You could probably make a case that it existed before to an extent, but it probably wasn’t as pressing before.

With this in mind, let’s look at what Guthrie says about the new socioeconomic realities of being an individual in a Greek city state:

In early societies, where communities are small and cultural conditions simple, no conflict is observed between moral duty and self-interest. As Ritter [1933: 67 or 57?] remarks: ‘He who in his relationship to his fellow men and the gods observes the existing customs is praised, respected and considered good; whereas he who breaks them is despised, disciplined and considered bad. In these conditions obedience to law brings gain to the individual, whereas transgression brings him harm. The individual who obeys customs and law is happy and contented.’

Unfortunately this simple state of affairs cannot last. The Greeks had reached the more complex state of civilization where it was forced on their attention that acts of banditry, especially on a large scale - the banditry of the conquering hero - which successfully defied law and custom, also brought gain, and that the law-abiding might be compelled to live in very modest cicumstances or even under oppression and persecution. Out of this arose the sophistic opposition of ‘nature’ to ‘law’, and the conception of ‘nature’s justice’ as not only different from man’s but something greater and finer. [pp101-2]

Now, I don’t want to get into debating the anthropology here, and Guthrie doesn’t really defend it. But the idea that there being any tension between morality and self-interest was once a New Moral Problem is interesting. Huge if true, I guess.

I should probably clarify something here. Sometimes I’ve heard people saying that the ancient Greeks didn’t really distinguish virtue and self-interest, and they kind of rolled it all into one when they asked what the good life is, or how people should live. That’s not really what Guthrie’s saying. He’s not exactly saying the opposite either; it’s more that they were just beginning to develop concepts that could handle the distinction because political circumstances had only recently forced them to. Although Guthrie (and as far as I can tell, Ritter) also seem to say that Socrates and Plato argued that the divergence between virtue and self-interest was an illusion, that it was still in one’s interests to be virtuous, and that the illusion was created by the divergence of virtue (and thus self-interest) from doing what was immediately pleasant, and that where the Sophists had gone wrong was in identifying self-interest with immediate pleasure. They say Plato and Socrates say that when broadly enough conceived even pleasure can line up with virtue and self-interest, which I guess puts them in the same camp as the Epicureans, but not the Cyrenaics, who were more along the instant-gratification lines of Plato’s Socrates’s Sophist opponents.

But the big take-away here is that the apparent divergence of virtue and self-interest may once have been a New Moral Problem.

Close to the end of the book, Guthrie says that “Aristotle’s philosophy represents the final flowering of Greek thought in its natural setting, the city-state” (p.160). The idea is that once the political organization changed the philosophy changed with it, and so it makes sense to end the book there. I suppose this doesn’t completely square with the idea that his six-volume magnum opus ended in the same place because its author didn’t live long enough to end it later, and maybe Guthrie was making a virtue out of necessity in the face of space constraints. But given the other stuff he’s said about the interaction between Greek philosophy and its political environment, it hasn’t just come out of nowhere. He does think that Greek city states produced a distinctive kind of philosophy. (In the preface to the sixth volume, when he knew that his health wouldn’t allow him to write any more of them, he describes finishing with Aristotle as a pity but doesn’t seem to think it a catastrophe, because there were plenty of books on the subsequent period anyway, that period’s philosophy wasn’t as good as Aristotle’s, and Aristotle was ‘both the last of the ancient and the first of the modern philosophers’ [1981: ix].)

The other thing that leapt out at me was how Guthrie emphasized the continuity between Plato and Aristotle. According to the School of Athens Caricature, Plato is interested in transcendent, celestial stuff apprehended by reason, while Aristotle is interested in everyday, terrestrial stuff apprehended by the senses. There’s a temptation to take them as exemplars of the two sides of whatever debate we’re most interested in: empiricism vs rationalism, pluralism vs monism, steady-state vs big-bang, materialism vs dualism, nominalism vs, er, Platonism. But this is usually kind of anachronistic, and it doesn’t do justice to the amount Plato and Aristotle had in common.

Some people have gone the other way, and tried to make out that Plato and Aristotle were in agreement about everything important. This reached a bit of a highpoint with Iamblichus (c.245-c.325 CE), who apparently tried to make out that both of them were essentially just writing footnotes to Pythagoras. In the late second century, when Marcus Aurelius was establishing four chairs of philosophy in Athens, the chairs represented the four main schools: Stoic, Epicurean, Platonist and Aristotelian, which I guess means Platonism and Aristotelianism were still seen as separate then. But by somewhere in the third century, Aristotelians weren’t making an effort to distinguish themselves anymore:

Alexander [of Aphrodisias] was not the first but rather the last authentic interpreter of Aristotle. Although subsequent generations of commentators were profoundly influenced by Alexander, they were motivated by a very different exegetical ideal. Their primary aim was no longer to recover and preserve Aristotle’s thought for its own sake, but for the sake of finding agreement between Aristotle and Plato and presenting them as part of one and the same philosophical outlook. [Falcon 2017]

(I was a bit puzzled by this, but it seems what happened was that in the third century a bunch of charismatic Platonists, especially Plotinus and Porphyry, convinced everyone that Platonism was the bee’s knees. They still wanted to use Aristotle though, because he’s so useful. (They didn’t call his logical works “The Tool” for nothing. [Update 20/9/17: I recently read [Smith 2017: §2] that while they didn’t call it “The Tool” (Organon) for nothing, they also didn’t call it that because it was useful. They called it that to stick it to the Stoics. (Those aren’t Smith’s exact words.) The Stoics thought logic (which at the time included a lot of epistemology) was one of the three branches of philosophy (which at the time included a lot of stuff now counted as science), and the Aristotelians disagreed and thought logic (including epistemology) was just a tool used by philosophy (including a lot of science). Nowadays we tend to agree with the Stoics, but it’s still called the Organon. Oh well.]) Eventually Platonists solved the problem by writing a bunch of commentaries on Aristotle explaining how they were both basically on the same page, although this meant reading Aristotelian ideas into Plato as much as reading Platonist ideas into Aristotle. (Or in Iamblichus’ case, reading both into Pythagoras.) The resultant synthesis dominated philosophy in the West until the Renaissance, and had a pretty impressive run in the Middle East too. I was already kind of aware that something like this had happened, but I didn’t realize it had happened so quickly.)

Anyway, Guthrie doesn’t go to either of these extremes. He’s not interested in claiming that Plato had already anticipated all of Aristotle’s contributions; it seems that this kind of tosh had already gone out of fashion among serious scholars by Guthrie’s time. But he also isn’t interested in setting them up as two giants staking out the two main sides in a debate that the rest of us have been having ever since. And I think that’s kind of important. Even if you’re not going full bore with the School of Athens Caricature, you might think that the outlines of the big philosophical debates got laid out early on and the rest is just filling in the details. It’s refreshing to see that rejected, and a little challenging.

He starts off the discussion of Aristotle by talking about his life, and he emphasizes how Aristotle spent twenty years at Plato’s Academy, that he studied Plato’s work a lot, and that when Plato died and Aristotle left Athens he took the hardcore Platonist Xenocrates with him. Moving from the circumstantial to the more substantive, he says:

Fundamentally he remained on the side of Plato and Socrates. As Cornford put it: ‘For all this reaction towards the standpoint of common sense and empirical fact, Aristotle could never cease to be a Platonist. His thought, no less than Plato’s, is governed by the idea of aspiration, inherited by his master from Socrates - the idea that the true cause or explanation of things is to be sought, not in the beginning, but in the end’ [Cornford 1932: 89-90].

In other words, the question that both can and must be answered by philosophy is the question ‘Why?’ To answer the question ‘How?’ is not enough. To speak more strictly, we may say that the permanent legacy of Platonism to Aristotle was two-fold, though its two sides were intimately connected. What he took over and retained was:

(i) the teleological point of view;

(ii) the conviction that reality lies in form.

He could not give up his sense of the supreme importance of form, with which, as we have now seen, it was natural for the Greeks to include function. To know the matter out of which a thing had come to be was only a secondary consideration… The definition then must describe the form into which it had grown. [p.126-7, his emphasis]

It’s probably fair to say this is quite different from how a lot of metaphysics is done nowadays. Teleology is unfashionable except as metaphor surrounded by disclaimers. We love poking around in the fundamental constituents of reality out of which middle-sized things arise, and the forms of the middle-sized things themselves are often a bit of an afterthought if we talk about them at all. We’ll happily try to explain how intrinsic change is possible, but to try to explain what intrinsic change is for would seem decidedly weird to a lot of us. Guthrie’s take on Aristotle’s relationship with Plato reminded me of something Jonathan Schaffer said about the Quine-Carnap debate in meta-metaphysics:

Indeed, though the textbooks cast Quine and Carnap as opponents, Quine is better understood as an antimetaphysical ally of his mentor (c.f. Price 1997). The Quine-Carnap debate is an internecine debate between anti-metaphysical pragmatists (concerning the analytic/synthetic distinction, with implication for whether the locus of pragmatic evaluation is molecular or holistic). As Quine himself says:

Carnap maintains that ontological questions, ... are questions not of fact but of choosing a convenient conceptual scheme or framework for science; and with this I agree only if the same be conceded for every scientific hypothesis. [Quine 1966: 211]

The Quinean view of the task and method of metaphysics remains dominant. Indeed, the contemporary landscape in meta-metaphysics may be described as featuring a central Quinean majority, amid a scattering of Carnapian dissidents. Few other positions are even on the map. [Schaffer 2009: 349-50, his emphasis]

Schaffer is actually suggesting that we get a bit more Aristotelian (and not because we had previously been overly Platonist), but that’s not why I was reminded of it. It’s more just the structural point: what might seem like the two main contenders in a grand debate over an eternal cosmic question may really be two versions of a view that historically has been fairly niche. Framed in this way, perhaps it’s no wonder the late ancient Platonists were able to find so much common ground between Plato and Aristotle. (If you’re interested in when the grand synthesis of Quinean and Carnapian meta-metaphysics is coming, Carrie Jenkins is in the vanguard, responding especially to work by Amie Thomasson [2007, 2010]. Jenkins calls the resultant view Quinapianism. It involves the notion of a serious verbal dispute [Jenkins 2014]. The basic idea, as I understand it, is that it’s OK to justify metaphysical claims (such as if there are simples arranged baseballwise then there are baseballs) as being entailed by the way our concepts work, like Carnapians do, but that our concepts, and thus these entailments, are still subject to revision in the light of empirical investigation, as Quineans think everything is.)

In summary, there were three categories of thing that struck me about Guthrie’s book. First, he’s keen to emphasise that the ancient Greeks had different ways of thinking about things than we do, and he discusses this in terms of the meanings of their words. Second, he plays up the influence of the city-state political structure on ancient Greek thought up to and including Aristotle. Third, he thinks it’s reasonable to describe Aristotle as a bit of a Platonist.

There’s a unifying theme here: the ancient Greeks were a distinctive lot who were not like us, and this comes out in their philosophy. Now, often when we’re learning about a philosophical tradition we’re used to the people not being like us. When Westerners are taught about ancient Indian or Chinese philosophy, they expect to be presented with ideas that arise out of an unfamiliar mindset, and they expect to have to learn about the mindset to understand the ideas. We’re ready to find the similarities surprising and the differences exciting. I don’t think we tend to approach the Greeks the same way. We (by which I mean Westerners; I live in the UK) see ourselves as the Greeks’ intellectual heirs. Other influences on us are tributaries; ancient Greece is the source. We expect learning what Plato and Aristotle cared about to explain what we care about, not to challenge it. We think we’re coming from basically the same place, and this affects how we interpret them. We’re more prepared to find their ideas coming naturally to us, and we’re less curious and less charitable when they don’t. To an extent this attitude probably makes sense. There really is more Plato than Confucius in Western philosophy as it’s done today. But if you’re serious about engaging with ancient Greek philosophy, you should still expect a culture shock.

References

• Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. London: V. Gollancz.
• Cornford, Frances Macdonald (1932). Before and After Socrates. Cambridge University Press.
• Falcon, Andrea, "Commentators on Aristotle", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/aristotle-commentators/>.
• Guthrie, W. K. C. (1950). The Greek Philosophers From Thales to Aristotle. Routledge. (Page references to 1962 Methuen reprint.)
• Guthrie, W. K. C. (1962-1981). A History of Greek Philosophy. Six vols. Cambridge University Press.
• Guthrie, W. K. C. (1962). A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 1, the Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans. Cambridge University Press.
• Guthrie, W. K. C. (1981). A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 6, Aristotle: An Encounter. Cambridge University Press.
• Jenkins, C. S. I. (2014). Serious Verbal Disputes: Ontology, Metaontology, and Analyticity. Journal of Philosophy 111 (9/10):454-469.
• Price, Huw (1997). Carnap, Quine, and the Fate of Metaphysics. Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 5 (1).
• Quine, W. V. O. (1966). ‘‘On Carnap’s Views on Ontology’’, in The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays: Harvard University Press. pp. 203–11.
• Ritter, Constantin (1933). The Essence of Plato's Philosophy, Trans. R. A. Alles. London: Allen and Unwin.
• Schaffer, Jonathan (2009). On what grounds what. In David Manley, David J. Chalmers & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press. pp. 347-383.
• Singer, Peter (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (3):229-243
• Smith, Robin, "Aristotle's Logic", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/aristotle-logic/>.
• Thomasson, Amie L. (2007). Ordinary Objects. Oxford University Press.
• Thomasson, Amie L. (2010). The controversy over the existence of ordinary objects. Philosophy Compass 5 (7):591-601.