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Abstract. The Noble Lie proposed by Plato for the Just City in Republic III has been much misunderstood. Its agenda is twofold: to get the citizens of the City to see their society as a natural entity, with themselves as all ‘family’ and akin; and to get the Guardians in particular to make class mobility, on which the justice of the City depends, a top priority. Since the second is taken to depend on the first, the Lie passage amounts to an argument (1) that the survival of a just community depends on the existence of social solidarity between elite and mass, which allows for full class mobility and genuine meritocracy; (2) that this solidarity in turn depends on an ideology of natural unity; and (3) that such ideologies are always false. So the Lie really is a lie, but a necessary one; as such it poses an awkward ethical problem for Plato and, if he is right, for our own societies as well.

Presented by SWIP-NYC

What makes right acts right? A Stoic answer to Ross’s question.

When W.D. Ross poses the question, “what makes right acts right?” (The Right and the Good ch. 2), he is asking a question that is prior to the deliberative question, “how do I determine the right thing to do?” The Stoics recognize this: in De Officiis 1.7, Cicero says that every inquiry about duty has two parts: (1) a theoretical part concerned with the end of goods and evils, which addresses such matters as whether all duties are perfect, whether some are more important than others, and what are the kinds of duties, and (2) a practical part which sets out rules (praecepta) by which our conduct can be made to conform with the end.  This paper focuses on (1) and in particular asks Ross’s question about Stoic right actions (kathêkonta).

The endpoint of Stoic deliberation is determining what token action is the right action.  The paper begins with the Stoic distinction between a thing’s choiceworthiness, its intrinsic disposition to elicit a choice response in a suitable subject, and its possession being to-be-chosen. The determination of what is to-be-done is made by weighing against each other all the values of the relevant action types specified by their content (the so-called ‘intermediate actions’) that are in accordance with nature, as Stoic value theory says that according with nature is an objective reason to do an action.  What constitutes the rightness of the token right action, and is given in its reasonable defense, is the same as what constitutes the rightness of a perfect (katorthôma) action.   The Stoic distinction between right and perfect action depends on the action’s moral goodness—not rightness—which is due to its causal origin.

Presented by Professor Rachana Kamtekar (Cornell University)

When W.D. Ross poses the question “what makes right acts right?” (The Right and the Good, ch. 2), he is asking a question that is prior to, and has a bearing on, the practical question “how do I determine the right thing to do?” The Stoics recognize this. Cicero (De Officio, where he is referring to Panaetius’ work Peri Kathêkontos) tells us that every inquiry about duty has two parts: (1) a theoretical part concerned with the end of good and evil deeds, which addresses such matters as whether all duties are perfect (omniane official perfecta sint), whether some are more important than others, and what the kinds of duties are, and (2) a practical part which sets out rules (praecepta) by which our conduct can be made to conform with the end (De Officiis, 1.7).  While Cicero himself focuses on the second, this paper seeks the answer to the first part.

Rachana Kamtekar is a Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Cornell University and has written on many topics in ancient philosophy and contemporary moral psychology. Her monograph, Plato’s Moral Psychology: Intellectualism, the Divided Soul and the Desire for Good, was published in 2017.  She is currently working on the relationship between action and character in ancient Greek ethics.

Analyzing the Mexican case of collectives of women currently looking for their disappeared relatives due to an escalation of violence related to the so-called War against Drugs that former president Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) started, this essay develops a new conception of politics grounded not only on rational thought but also on affect. These collectives put forward a materialistic, feminist, and performative mode of politics. Publicly lamenting their losses and literally digging bodies out of Mexican land, these women perform and recover the citizenship that the Mexican state has de facto disavowed of them. I propose conceptualizing them as “bad victims” since their taking action does not take away their pain; rather, the public exposure of their lament actually turns them into political agents.

Bio:

Rosaura Martínez Ruiz is Full Professor of Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a member of the National System of Researchers, level III. She was coordinator of the research projects “Philosophers after Freud” and “Philosophy and Psychoanalysis as Critical Borders of the Political.” She is the author of Freud y Derrida: escritura y psique (2013) and Eros: Más allá de la pulsión de muerte (2017). This last book has been translated into English and published by Fordham University Press (2021). She has coordinated several collective books and published articles on the intersection between psychoanalysis and philosophy and on the field of the psychopolitical. In 2017 she was awarded the Research Prize in Humanities by the Mexican Academy of Sciences; in 2019 she was a Fulbright Scholar; in 2021 she received the Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz UNAM recognition; and during the Fall 2023 she was the Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University. She is part of the advisory board of the “International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs” coordinated by Judith Butler.

Verity Harte is a specialist in ancient philosophy, with particular research interests in ancient metaphysics, epistemology and psychology, especially of Plato and Aristotle. She is the author of Plato on Parts and Wholes: The Metaphysics of Structure, and is the editor of several important books on ancient philosophy.