J.S. Mill on Socrates, Pericles and the Fragility of truth

Abstract

This quotation from Martha Nussbaum reveals one reason for her study of Greek thought and, particularly, in The Fragility of Goodness for the exploration of several Platonic dialogues and Greek tragedies. Her investigation is also part of a larger philosophical enquiry, which she calls ‘Aristotelian’, and depicts in a somewhat complex way in terms of a ‘reflective dialogue between the intuitions and beliefs of the interlocutor, or reader, and a series of complex ethical conceptions, presented for exploration’. The outcome of this exploration is that the interlocutor or reader learns ‘what they really think’. Such learning seems important because, as she puts it, ‘most people . . . make claims that are false to the complexity and the content of their actual beliefs’. In this paper I hope to set out some reasons for believing that Nussbaum’s brief account of Anglo-American philosophy is false, particularly because that philosophy is based on a clear link between the ethical text and human emotions. At one level, as we shall see, the main tradition of British philosophy (the ‘Anglo’ of ‘Anglo-American’), including Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Smith, Bentham, and James and John Stuart Mill, is deeply rooted not only in psychology, but also in a moral psychology animated by hedonism (i.e. feelings of pleasure and pain and happiness) or sentimentalism (in the technical sense, moral sense theory). At another level with regard to the text itself, I hope to show in one example at least, that of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, that the conception of truth held by Mill does not make any sense unless it is seen as being deeply grounded in feelings and emotions. Hence, at the heart of the Anglo-American tradition, in Mill’s classic work, On Liberty, there is an argument regarding truth and its fragility that would suggest that