Two Arguments Against Hedonism in Plato’s Gorgias

Abstract

This article examines some of the logical and conceptual problems, related to two formal antihedonist arguments, that are put forward by Plato's Socrates in his conversation with Callicles in “Gorgias”. According to the first argument (495е–497а) good and evil cannot be identical with pleasure and pain, because pleasure is compatible with pain at the same time and in the same place, but good and evil are incompatible with each other. However, the very incompatibility of good and evil is inferred by Socrates from the incompatibility of the contraries in general, among which he numbers also pleasure and pain, thus contradicting himself. The second argument (497е–499a) includes the claim, that, given the hedonist identification of good with pleasure and evil with pain, those who feel pleasure should be regarded as good and those who suffer as bad, because it is the presence of goods in a man that makes him good and the presence of evils that makes him bad. But these latter statements imply the perfectionist notion of good as something which “makes good” a certain being, and, though this notion is shared by Socrates himself (506c–507a), hedonists are not at all bound to share it too.