The Unhappy Immoralist

When presenting his version of the ancient and well-known challenge that the Sophists long ago posed to Socrates, Steven Cahn seems, in his essay “The Happy Immoralist,” to be assuming at the outset—and asking us to grant—that the man he describes is happy. But such an assumption begs the whole question at issue here. In both Republic and Gorgias, Plato has Socrates argue that the immoral man—even a tyrant with great power—may of course be happy as the ignorant world understands happiness but will not be happy as this concept will be truly understood by the wise philosopher. Cahn dismisses this as verbal “sleight-of-hand,” but I think that such dismissal is hasty. Plato is trying to advance our philosophical understanding by making a conceptual or linguistic claim—no doubt a revisionary one—and surely not all such claims are merely useless verbal tricks. As I read Plato, he (like Philippa Foot) is suggesting that full human happiness is to be understood as the satisfaction one takes in having a personality wherein all elements required for a fully realized human life are harmoniously integrated. The immoralist lacks some of these attributes—integrity, moral emotions, and the capacity for true friendships, for example. Given what he lacks, it can be granted that he may indeed be happy in some limited way—for example, enjoying a great deal of pleasure—while insisting that he cannot be happy in the full sense. As a matter of common language, of course, many people do not use the word “happiness” in this rich sense but tend to mean by it something like “has a whole lot of fun.” Because of this, the Greek word eudaimonia, which in the past was generally translated as “happiness,” is now often rendered as “flourishing” to avoid confusion. But some are not so quick to give up the older and deeper usage: