19
the learner) who are engaged in the activity, and it seems strange to speak of a spectator
to this activity.
Because of this equivocation of perspective, a number of commentators on this
refutation have challenged the logical validity of this argument. According to E.R.
Dodds, Gerasimos Santas, Gregory Vlastos and Charles Kahn, Socrates claims to have
proven that ‘doing injustice is worse for the agent than suffering injustice is for the
victim’, but he ends up only proving that ‘doing injustice is worse for X than suffering
injustice is for X’, where X might be the agent performing the acts of injustice, but it
might also be the community beholding his acts of injustice.
16
Socrates has not proven
the stronger conclusion that doing injustice is worse for the agent because his definitions
of the beautiful and shameful are indeterminate about whether it is the participants (the
agent or victim) or the spectator (the community) who is judging the act or thing to be
useful or pleasant, harmful or painful. In order to be logically valid the perspective
would have to be fixed throughout the argument. And when it is consistently fixed, it
becomes clear that Socrates’ inference (see 3 and 4 above) is not logically entailed by the
premises he gets Polus to accept.
17
16
Dodds (1959), 249; Vlastos, Gregory, “Does Socrates Cheat?” in Socrates, Ironist and Moral
Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 144; Santas, Gerasimos, Socrates’ Philosophy in
Plato’s Early Dialogues (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 239; Kahn (1983): 91-92.
17
Vlastos tries to show this by consistently making the spectator the judge of whether something
is painful or pleasant to behold. See Vlastos (1991): 142-143. (This is an updated version of his earlier
article, “Was Polus Refuted”.) This demonstration is less successful than the ones by Dodds and Santas
that rely on consistently making the community the judge of the usefulness or harmfulness of beautiful acts.
See Dodds (1959), 249; Santas (1979), 239.
Convention