I

As the first item in its March 1889 issue, The Classical Review published a short piece jointly authored by Henry Sidgwick and John Grote: a dialogue between Socrates and friends and John’s brother, George Grote.Footnote ¹ This brief but complex and playful dialogue is a microcosm of a broader discussion between a group of friends, colleagues, and relatives in the third quarter of the nineteenth century about individual happiness, justice, and the good of the community. That discussion can also be placed in the context of two important wider debates. The first is a debate about how to read and engage with Plato. On this matter, all three take seriously Plato’s decision to compose dialogues as a sign of his general approach to philosophical inquiry. George Grote set himself against accounts of a systematic and dogmatic Plato and, in choosing to construct their own Socrates prepared to rethink and respond to new ideas, John Grote and Henry Sidgwick were prepared to enter into discussion with George in a similar spirit.

The second is a debate about utilitarianism, the nature of happiness, and the correct end of human actions. All three of these writers – the brothers Grote and Sidgwick – had developed positions on those questions, in part through the examination of ancient Greek accounts of happiness, justice, and virtue. A note which introduces the article explains that it had been written in 1866, just before John Grote’s death that August, in response to some criticisms of Plato’s Republic in George Grote’s Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates ch. 34, vol. III, 122ff.Footnote ² And the title under which the piece was published, ‘A discussion between Professor Henry Sidgwick and the late Professor John Grote, on the utilitarian basis of Plato’s Republic’, points towards the principal controversies over which interpretations of the Republic differed. The utilitarian philosophy pioneered by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1632) and then expanded by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) prompted some to return to ancient political texts to search for signs of intimations of such thinking and others to defend Plato, in particular, against attempts to co-opt him as an ancestor of that radical philosophy.

II

The dialogue is surprising and peculiar in many ways. It is certainly an outlier among the other contents of these early editions of The Classical Review. For the most part, that journal’s pages are devoted to relatively short ‘Notes’, some of them pitched as responses to specific papers and publications elsewhere, brief critical reviews of recent publications, and summaries of the contents of other journals in the field.Footnote ³ Although advertised as a discussion between the two Cambridge professors,Footnote ⁴ in fact the article takes the form of a dialogue, composed in what seems intended to be a recognisably Platonic style, between the familiar participants in Plato’s Republic – Thrasymachus, Adeimantus, Glaucon (these latter two, of course, are brothers, and brothers of Plato), and Socrates – and a new interlocutor, Mr George Grote (1794–1871): John Grote’s older and much better-known brother.Footnote ⁵ Sidgwick and John Grote are in discussion only insofar as they are the authors of the whole conversation – as we shall see, the characters involved seem remarkably aware of being characters in a dialogue – and are mentioned in the sparse footnotes which detail who wrote which section. There is little explanation offered as to why the article was published twenty-three years after its composition, but perhaps the death of both of the brothers Grote in the intervening period afforded licence to disseminate a playful depiction of the older brother by his sibling. And since John Grote was notably reluctant to publish his work, Sidgwick may well have been unable to send it to any journal during Grote’s life. A letter of 2 February 1889 from J. (Joseph) B. Mayor to Sidgwick refers to a paper by John criticising his brother, together with a short piece ‘written in the name of Glaucon’, and asks that Sidgwick allow it to be printed in The Classical Review. Footnote ⁶ The eventual public appearance of this dialogue should therefore be taken as another example of the work by John’s friends and colleagues (Mayor especially) to make his philosophical thought and the general character of his writings better known after his death.

In 1866, when the dialogue was composed, John Grote and Henry Sidgwick were both Fellows of Trinity College: John was the Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy and Henry was a lecturer in Classics. In 1867 Henry exchanged his lectureship in Classics for one in Moral Sciences; this article was therefore composed on the cusp of his formal move from one discipline to another. By 1889, Sidgwick had returned to Trinity as a Fellow, having resigned in 1869 after deciding he could no longer call himself a member of the Church of England. It is possible, in that case, that the dialogue was composed or inspired by the kinds of discussions that took place at the ‘Grote Club’ (the name probably arose after Grote’s death), hosted first by John and other members – including J. B. Mayor and William Aldis Wright – in their college rooms and then at Grote’s vicarage in Trumpington.Footnote ⁷

We learn from the footnotes that John Grote composed the major portion of the dialogue and that Sidgwick was responsible for only a short section on pages 99–100 (see pp. 97, n.1 and 99, n. 2). This may be the reason why, in his letter to Sidgwick, Mayor refers to two pieces: a criticism of George Grote by his brother and something written under the pseudonym ‘Glaucon’ which Mayor has guessed was by Sidgwick himself. No explanation is offered for this uneven distribution of authorship, but the two sections are carefully intertwined and connected by the interlocutors themselves. So there is little reason to imagine that Sidgwick’s section was added after Grote’s death or that we should think of the article as a later synthesis created by Sidgwick in response to Mayor’s request. It very much looks to be a piece conceived by them as a pair.

The character ‘George Grote’ says very little in the dialogue. He intervenes after an opening exchange between Thrasymachus and Adeimantus to offer an account of why one should practise justice, which he introduces as in agreement with ‘our friend Socrates’. His account is broadly contractualist in nature: in order to satisfy human needs we need to engage in mutual service with others from which duties and obligations arise. If an agent’s rights are to be honoured then they must engage in appropriate duties to others: ‘if you act justly to others, they will act justly to you: you will be done by as you do: and this is the reason why you should practise justice’ (p. 97). This brief speech is supported by a footnote pointing to George Grote’s own words on the subject in chapter 34 of Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates to make clear that this view is fairly ascribed.Footnote ⁸ Other footnotes to comments by the other interlocutors refer the reader to Grote’s paraphrase and exposition of the Republic in chapter 33 and make it clear that this Thrasymachus and this Adeimantus are saying what Grote’s version of the Republic has it that they say. As the dialogue proceeds, other characters, including Socrates himself, make additional claims about George Grote’s presentation and criticism of the positions adopted in the Republic. It is made evident that the purpose of the dialogue is to set out and interrogate George Grote’s own account of the nature of justice, presented as a matter of disagreement between him and Socrates. This is an exercise in philosophy in the sense that it is a discussion between George Grote and the others on the nature and value of justice; it is not a scholarly exposition of different interpretations of Socrates’ or Plato’s position.

It may also be intended as an implicit endorsement of an aspect of George Grote’s approach to reading Plato as it is elaborated in Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates: an approach that we know John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick both commended. In a review published in 1871 of Thomas Maguire’s Essays on the Platonic Ethics, Sidgwick notes that Maguire is an opponent of George Grote’s approach but declares that he himself prefers it. The final paragraph shows something of the ways in which Sidgwick thought it interesting to engage with ancient philosophical texts:

Sidgwick and John Grote have placed in their dialogue the ‘English Benthamite’, here John’s brother (a characterisation he would perhaps have refused, in preference for Mill’s revised utilitarianism), ‘in the market with Socrates’ at least in the sense that they have presented them in direct and critical discussion with one another. We are encouraged to engage with Socrates sympathetically but critically; the dialogue enacts a way of doing ancient philosophy which we might still recognise. At the time, it set itself apart from alternative approaches of a more systematic kind that read Plato as a dogmatic thinker with a set of core doctrines that the dialogues as a corpus seek to promote. In the part of his review of Maguire just cited, Sidgwick describes the difference between the approaches of the ‘adversary’ and the ‘apologist’. Earlier, he had labelled Maguire ‘a disciple’ who was bent on demonstrating the perfection of Plato’s system in the face of George Grote’s criticisms. Sidgwick was strongly committed to the virtues of genuine discussion and of progress through careful engagement with one’s partners. He may well have been impressed by those virtues at meetings of the Apostles or of the Grote Club, and perhaps he saw antecedents of these ideals in the conversations Plato creates between Socrates and his interlocutors.Footnote ¹⁰

We know that John Grote also had strong views about how Plato should be read and presented. In a fiercely critical notice of the second volume of William Whewell’s The Platonic Dialogues for English Readers (1860), an anonymous reviewer not only takes aim at the author’s scholarship and command of Greek (e.g. ‘Adverbs of place are clearly not Dr Whewell’s strong point’), but also offers an illuminating comment that shows his own approach to Plato.

John Grote was moved to write a response to this review, partly as a defence of the volume in question but more in frustration with what he saw as the unnecessarily nasty tone, which was characteristic of this publication, and the emphasis on judging the book and its author on the minutiae of linguistic expertise rather than the interest of the interpretative insights.Footnote ¹² (He may also have been moved by personal connections: William Whewell was Master of Trinity College 1841–66; the preface to the second volume of Whewell’s Platonic Dialogues includes a number of complimentary remarks about George Grote’s History of Greece, as does John’s response to the anonymous reviewer.)Footnote ¹³ John complains that the anonymity of the reviewers prevents any further discussion or engagement with their criticisms and allows their comments to be motivated by personal jealousies and animosities rather than careful and measured discussion of the merits of the ideas under review. What John takes to be the virtues and the purpose of a good review will also hold for the virtues of a good reader and interlocutor more generally. It is therefore not hard to imagine that John, too, thought that the dialogues of Plato were a good example, for the most part, of correct and careful philosophical conversation conducted in an appropriate fashion and not through anonymous vitriol as in the pages of The Saturday Review.Footnote ¹⁴

John Grote and Sidgwick’s new ‘Platonic’ dialogue therefore offers an example of the engagement with Greek philosophical texts with which Sidgwick associates George Grote and which he himself found most congenial; it is therefore a compliment to that ‘manner of direct and simple controversy’ to make George into a character in direct dialogue with the ancient Greeks. George Grote comments on Plato’s choice to write dialogues without himself being a participant that ‘the borrowed names under which he wrote, and the veil of dramatic fiction, gave him greater freedom as to the thought enunciated, and were adopted for the express purpose of acquiring greater freedom’.Footnote ¹⁵ John, in that same response to the notice of Whewell in The Saturday Review, sounds a more cautious note about the inclusion of known historical characters in a fictional dialogue. The immediate context is the question whether it is appropriate to draw inferences about the moral character of people depicted in dialogues as well as the author of those dialogues. But we might also wonder in what way John considered similar questions when putting his brother in conversation with Socrates.

Within the limits of what could plausibly be ascribed to George and the others, Sidgwick and John Grote are putting to use the freedom afforded by the dialogue form which they thought Plato also enjoyed. They are granted a degree of distance from the substance of the discussion between their interlocutors, and perhaps that is a significant benefit when approaching the critical evaluation of a close family member’s views. The implicit approval of George Grote’s more ‘modern’ way of engaging with Socrates does not itself require the approval of George’s criticisms and concerns. In fact, the dialogue again pays George the compliment of imagining how Socrates would respond to him if given the opportunity. In that way, we are encouraged to see how agreement on matters of methodology and approach, indeed tacit agreement over the power and interest of the dialogue as a mode of doing philosophy, does not have to go hand in hand with agreement over the details of interpretation and evaluation.Footnote ¹⁷

This overarching methodological debate is connected with a third important characteristic I want to emphasise before turning to the philosophical content of the discussion. In placing George Grote in the market with Socrates, Henry and John have made no effort to write the dialogue as if it were composed by Plato. In fact, the dialogue is overtly playful and delights in its own anachronisms and artificiality. The ancient interlocutors are presented not as if they had encountered George Grote in the market in Athens but rather as if they were all sitting at a meeting of the Grote Club in Cambridge in 1866. There is no effort expended in making what any of the characters says remotely appropriate to anything but a late nineteenth-century context. Furthermore, the Greek characters are made to include references that would be outrageously anachronistic in an ancient setting. For example, in Adeimantus’ first intervention he describes Thrasymachus’ position as holding that acting with a view to acquiring a good reputation is the reason why most people engage in just behaviour. Of course, adds Adeimantus, Thrasymachus also thinks that anyone sufficiently bold and powerful, ‘an Archelaus, a Henry VIII, a Danton’ will be above such concerns and will do as they please with no regard for mere reputation (p. 97). Later, Socrates complains that George Grote has unfairly claimed that he is unconcerned by thoughts of justice being of value because it is for the sake of others: ‘Mr. Grote accuses me of putting by this, and leaving it for Christian times…’ (p. 98). Socrates and friends discuss their ideas in the light of intervening developments in ethical and political thinking. The artifice of the situation is always made clear. In other words, it is shown that the method of critical engagement presented here is a choice and can be contrasted with various alternatives, including Maguire’s ‘apologist’ approach. Socrates is transported into Sidgwick and Grote’s present and allowed to express and answer for himself with the benefit of that perspective.

The studied and deliberate artifice of the occasion is also emphasised in other ways. Most strikingly of all, immediately after the section that we are told was written by Sidgwick, Socrates reprimands Glaucon as follows:

The conceit continues. Socrates explains that they had briefly slipped into ‘talking as we used to talk’, which seems to mean talking as they were portrayed in Plato’s own works. In the 2,000 years since that time, it seems he has rethought how they ought to proceed: ‘I now do not admire our old way of talking as much as I did: for though beautiful in art, I think it has sometimes misled us in argument.’ The two professors are enjoying the artifice of presenting Socrates and friends intervening in a second-order discussion about the interpretation of their own philosophical views as presented by Plato. They, in turn, are happy to have the opportunity to engage with George Grote and to present their reactions to his recent work, by looking back at what was said ‘in our old dialogue’ (p. 100).

More playful still is the fact that the characters are aware of the very textual nature of the dialogue in which they are speaking. Having just explained that he has reconsidered the way in which he set out his ideas in the Republic, Socrates suggests to Glaucon that they should scroll back through the script, as it were, and delete some of what was previously said.

The footnote in the first sentence, marked here as [2] reads: ‘See asterisks above’. The asterisks appear in the previous column of p. 100, in the section we are told was written by Sidgwick. The first of them is preceded by a reference to footnote [1], which reads: ‘The asterisks here and below are explained further on.’ As it happens, the mise en page of the journal, with its pair of columns on each page, has printed the two notes next to one another on p. 100. The overall effect is pleasingly comical and contributes further to the general atmosphere of knowing playfulness; the characters look back over the transcription of their discussion so far and mark out the text to be cut out and replaced. The complexity increases when we recall that, according to the explicitly marked ascriptions of authorship, we have here John Grote’s characters looking back over a section that Sidgwick had composed for them and deciding to insist on some emendations to his co-author’s contribution.

III

We should now spend a little time setting out the outlines of the more general ethical views of our three protagonists: George, John, and Henry. All three took distinctive positions on perhaps the central pressing ethical topic of the day – utilitarianism – and all three approached their readings of Plato’s Republic through the prism of the relationship between the self-interested pursuit of happiness and obligations to others.

George Grote presented himself as a utilitarian, much influenced by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and he remained close to John Stuart Mill.Footnote ¹⁸ His philosophical writing in ethics (he counts his work on Plato as a continuation of his historical research) presents humans as possessing a form of moral or ethical sentiment that is essentially social; we act and evaluate others on the basis both of our own self-interest and also our sympathy with others.Footnote ¹⁹ His general attitude to ancient Greek and Roman ethical thinking is perhaps best expressed in one of his posthumously published essays, ‘Ancient systems of moral philosophy’.Footnote ²⁰ There, he argues that all the various ethical systems share an exclusive focus on the happiness of the individual, though they differ in various ways in what they take individual happiness to be. To be sure, this does not exclude other-regarding actions and virtuous conduct, but the happiness of the individual is always the guiding principle. He complains that they often pass without comment or warning from talking about the good – the interests and happiness – of an individual to talking about the good of a society. His own view is that there are two ends of action or beginnings of ethical reasoning: the happiness of others and the happiness of the individual agent. These must be recognised as distinct and independent principles which can on occasion be in conflict with one another. When they do conflict, Grote insists that an ethical philosopher must make it clear that the interests of the community are paramount and that the individual agent must be made to act accordingly by means of a moral imperative: ‘a voice representing the entire community, and addressed to an agent who is one of its members’ (1876, 61). In some of his other writings, he praised Plato and Aristotle for their approach to education in so far as they both were determined to instil in all citizens a powerful commitment to one another and to the city as a whole. He thought that Athens and Sparta, in different ways, also showed a similar concern for cultivating a sense of civic identity through festivals and other activities.Footnote ²¹

In his comments on the Republic in his Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, he asserts that Plato’s conception of justice ‘is self-regarding and prudential’; justice blesses a person twice: ‘first and chiefly, as bringing to him happiness in itself – next also, as it leads to ulterior happy results’.Footnote ²² It is clear that Grote considers the first of these to be false; for him, justice is indeed a duty that is potentially onerous and certainly not in itself a source of happiness. But the reciprocity of obligations and duties between people can produce happiness by being advantageous to all. Grote notes that Socrates seems initially to present just such a picture in book 2 of the Republic but in the end contradicts himself ‘when he maintains that [the doing of justice] is in itself happiness-giving to the just agent, whether other men account him just and do justice to him in return – or not’.Footnote ²³ Grote then returns to the figure of Archelaus, the tyrant who is the subject of some of the discussion in the Gorgias and also invoked by the character Adeimantus in John Grote and Sidgwick’s dialogue. It may well be, George accepts, that Socrates would feel terrible living the life of a tyrant. ‘But it does not represent the feeling of Archelaus himself, nor that of the large majority of bystanders: both to these latter, and to himself, Archelaus appears an object of envy and admiration.’Footnote ²⁴ In effect, Plato’s argument fails in various ways, perhaps as a result of what Grote takes to be a faulty application of the loose analogy between an individual and a community. Plato is wrong, first of all, to think that justice is in itself beneficial to the agent. And he is also wrong to think that the just person, as he describes him, will always benefit in indirect ways from his justice. Perhaps in the ideal city things will work out in that fashion, but if we place that same person in any other city then things will be very different.Footnote ²⁵ It is therefore wrong for Plato to claim that a just person will always benefit from the favour and good treatment of society. Grote’s sympathies lie firmly with the concerns raised by Adeimantus and Glaucon which, he concludes, are not successfully answered. Plato would have fared better if he had stuck more closely to the approach begun in book 2 of the Republic and its recommendation of justice based on reciprocal relationships of obligation and duty; he should have accepted that acting justly is often burdensome but can nevertheless be promoted as a means of obtaining benefits for each agent and the community as a whole.

John was not committed to utilitarianism and found a great deal to disagree with in J. S. Mill’s version of that philosophy. But he, too, in setting out those concerns, finds reason to object to Plato’s proposal in the Republic. His An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy of 1870 is largely taken up with a careful account of the ways in which Mill’s modifications to the view set out by Bentham result in internal inconsistencies and problems that are absent from the original.Footnote ²⁶ But John also has a general objection to the utilitarians’ idea that human nature should aim exclusively at its own happiness. Over nearly 350 pages, he carefully dissects the utilitarian proposal and ultimately rejects it because it appears to him to be too simplistic; he is generally sceptical of simple systems of moral philosophy.Footnote ²⁷ When it comes to the question of the general or common good, John thinks that Mill makes an error similar to one he finds in Plato’s Republic. Mill thinks that since each individual agent aims naturally at their own happiness, then it somehow follows that the aggregate happiness of the whole society is also an end for each individual in that aggregate. John comments:

Plato fares better than Mill, John claims, in being explicit about the reliance on the analogy of individual and societal happiness (‘the city-soul analogy’) even if they are both mistaken in thinking that it can be applied as they hope. John goes on to insist that there is no direct connection to be made between the pursuit of individual happiness and justice: ‘The more a man’s particular happiness appears a good to him, the more it is likely to engross his action, and the less he is likely to think of the happiness of the aggregate.’Footnote ²⁹

In sum, the Grote brothers share similar concerns about Plato’s conclusion in the Republic that justice is itself good for the just person. For George, this is implausible because it ignores the obvious ways in which just actions can be onerous but nevertheless beneficial in their results, especially when they are done in the context of reciprocal relationships of duty and obligation. For John, Plato makes a mistake similar to Mill in thinking that there is a simple connection to be made between each individual’s pursuit of their own happiness and the pursuit on the part of all the individuals in a community of the good of that community as a whole. While George, perhaps because of his continuing defence of Mill’s consequentialism, is inclined to think that justice as an arrangement of reciprocal duties can indeed produce beneficial results for individual happiness, John is more persuaded that there is a distinct and independent value in other-regarding actions that should not be justified either as intrinsically happiness-producing or as conducive to individual happiness through its results.

To these concerns we can add Henry Sidgwick’s voice.Footnote ³⁰ He, too, thinks that Plato fails to show that it is always in the interests of the agent to act virtuously.

He goes on to argue that we have little reason to agree with Plato that any agent who is devoted to self-interest must necessarily be internally disordered and fail to act in accordance with reason. The objection is similar to George Grote’s proposal for a rehabilitation of Archelaus: there is no reason to think that someone who exclusively pursues their own self-interest must compromise their self-regulation.

IV

We are now in a position to return to the dialogue and see how these various positions are played out. In the initial interchanges, a consensus emerges between Thrasymachus, Adeimantus, and George Grote. They all find Socrates’ proposal implausible. Thrasymachus takes the more extreme view that justice is always for the sake of someone else and that therefore only fools practise it. Adeimantus softens this to the claim that justice is surely good for the agent only insofar as the resulting good reputation in beneficial. George Grote adds to this the perspective of the businessman, perhaps naturally enough given his experience as a banker and a Member of Parliament: justice is to be considered a beneficial form of action based on mutual needs and obligations. Here, Thrasymachus objects and again presses the idea that anyone known to be of a just disposition is liable to be exploited. Adeimantus comes to George’s aid; he explains that Thrasymachus has failed to see the real point of George’s analogy with business. Rather than a ‘sort of ready-money justice’, George also wants to invoke the role of mutual trust in the conduct of business. In commerce, people will act on the basis of their estimation of their partner’s character with an informed eye to mutual benefit. They are unlikely, therefore, to be caught out by Thrasymachus’ unscrupulous exploiter.

The topic of the discussion is now set. Are Adeimantus and George right to think that the value of justice lies principally in its beneficial consequences or can Socrates maintain that justice is always of value in itself, regardless of the consequences? We know that not only George but also John Grote and Henry Sidgwick have a great deal of sympathy with this criticism of Socrates’ position in the Republic and so we might already expect that their Socrates will find it difficult to win round his interlocutors. But Socrates is allowed to develop a lengthy and subtle defence of his position. He notes that he does not deny that justice may generate beneficial consequences but is most insistent that he should not be interpreted as holding that justice is to be sought solely for self-interested reasons. That is to say, although he is convinced that being just is itself good for the just agent, this should not be taken to mean that justice is not at all other-regarding. He clarifies his position at some length; indeed, his response is long enough that Glaucon, at the beginning of the section marked as Sidgwick’s contribution, thanks Socrates for setting aside his usual preference for short interventions. Socrates explains:

The ‘main reason’ to practise justice, he explains, is that we come to live according to our better or higher selves. Socrates sets out the difference between these two according to a distinction between the body and its appetites on the one hand and reason on the other. Here he offers an important criticism of George and, in doing so, shows a central difficulty for the overall discussion of his view conducted in a context preoccupied with utilitarianism. ‘Happiness’, he explains, is a slippery term. In another studied anachronism, Socrates points to a distinction that can be made in Latin (we can perhaps assume that he has been reading Cicero) between an agent being beatus and being in voluptate. He insists that insofar as he is interested in justice being a cause of happiness then he is interested in the former rather than the latter of these. Of course, in the Republic Socrates also argues that the life of virtue is by far the most pleasant life, but that is not the main foundation for its being choiceworthy or good for the just person. What is more, adds Socrates, George is mistaken in suspecting that the case for the goodness of being just is simply a form of ‘preaching’ so as to persuade others of something on grounds that he, Socrates, does not sincerely believe. Thrasymachus, too, is of the view that much of the praise of virtue is no more than ‘humbug’ and perhaps is a deliberate attempt to deceive. Socrates insists that he is perfectly sincere.

In both Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates and also in ‘Ancient systems of moral philosophy’, George Grote makes no effort to scrutinise just what might be meant by ‘happiness’ in a eudaimonistic system. The closest he comes to a definition is that it is a ‘particular state of mind and circumstances, as constituting the maximum of individual happiness, or the only thing which they were willing to call happiness’,Footnote ³⁴ and that each sect or philosopher gave a different account according to their own preferences. However, what Socrates here calls the ‘ambiguity’ of happiness is something John Grote and Sidgwick both note. In Outlines of the History of Ethics, Sidgwick notes that Socrates is in fact promoting what might better be understood as eudaimonia and, while he does regularly insist that the philosophic best life is the pleasantest, nevertheless ‘though Plato holds this inseparable connection of “best” and “pleasantest” to be true and important, it is only for the sake of the vulgar that he lays this stress on Pleasure’.Footnote ³⁵ He then notes that this ‘complicated’ picture was not maintained in the Academy and that with Speusippus it became a simple anti-hedonism. The case of John Grote is more complicated. In A Treatise of Moral Ideals, published posthumously in 1876, he draws a distinction between what he calls ‘Eudaimonics’, which in essence deals with the natural avoidance of personal pain, and ‘Aretaics’, which deals with what he calls ‘moral thoughts’ and the prevention of pain to others. ‘Happiness’, in this account, should be understood as something ‘more general and deeper’ than pleasure; it is characterised in terms broadly inspired by Aristotle as ‘firstly, living, feeling, thinking as it is the nature of man to live, feel, and think, especially as it is the best or ideal nature of man to live, feel, and think; secondly in the pursuit of purposes worth pursuing’.Footnote ³⁶ John also distinguishes what he calls ‘Hedonics’, which is the ‘philosophy of pleasure and pain’. Although the treatise is suffused with ideas from ancient philosophy, particularly from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics but also with occasional reference to the Epicureans, it is clear that John is carving out a set of new distinctions by coining terms on the basis of Greek words without any pretence that they are distinctions that are made in ancient works. Like Sidgwick, however, he points out emphatically both that Plato and the others were not concerned solely with the promotion of the agent’s pleasure and also that we would do better ourselves not to understand ‘happiness’ in that way.

John and Henry have appreciated something that George has not, namely that not every reference to ‘happiness’ is a reference to pleasure, and therefore there is no simple equivalence to be drawn between the concern in the Republic for the value of justice for the agent and for the city and utilitarian ideas of the happiness (i.e. pleasure) of the individual and the happiness (i.e. pleasure) of the whole. Although he does not mention his brother, John is critical of complaints against the value of virtue that hold that its only benefit is in its results:

In their 1889 dialogue, then, we can see that John and Henry are repeating points they make elsewhere. (Given the complex chronology of these various works, many of which are published posthumously, it is not possible to determine the order of composition with any certainty.) What Socrates set out in his first long intervention shares three important characteristics with their other writings: (1) the interest in teasing apart the connotations of the word ‘happiness’, (2) the relationship between current understanding of ‘happiness’ and ancient ideas of the good life, and (3) the inadequacy of utilitarian thinking for an account of human happiness and for understanding ancient Greek ethical thinking.

V

The second part of the dialogue turns from this critical approach to misinterpretations of the project of the Republic to set a new problem for this revived Socrates. This is the point at which ‘Glaucon’ intervenes – the section written by Sidgwick – to clarify the situation by setting the terms of the challenge in much the same way as Plato’s Glaucon does in book 2 of the Republic (360d–361d). We should set aside, he says, any consequential benefits that might come to those who are just. And this will include any ‘satisfaction arising from the harmony of the soul, so that he cannot feel it even for a moment’.Footnote ³⁹ In this respect, Sidgwick’s Glaucon goes even further than Plato’s: we should imagine, he says, a just person afflicted with a permanent melancholy and a permanent inclination to suicide, held back only by the thought that killing himself would be ‘an offence against Zeus’. Socrates recognises that this is a sterner challenge than he faced in Plato’s dialogue and this is where we find the playful, self-referential comments as they recognise they are now characters is a new dialogue, which we noted above. After a while, Socrates summarises what Glaucon’s new challenge amounts to.

This procedure of stripping away all of the various layers in which justice is dressed is perhaps meant to put us in mind of the story attributed to Prodicus in Xenophon Memorabilia 2.1 where Heracles is offered a choice between Eudamonia and Aretē. There it is ‘Eudaimonia’ who initially seems to be the most enticing and promises the most pleasant and easiest road but whose appearance is said to be deceitful; she admits herself that others call her ‘Kakia’. Here, Socrates pauses their undressing of justice and asks whether this ‘third coat’ of self-approbation is indeed removable. He decides that although we can strip away ‘circumstantial’ self-approbation from the just agent, nevertheless there is something that cannot be removed: a kind of satisfaction attendant on the performance of a just action which is part of the action itself. If we concede that the agent performs the action thinking it just, then this ‘intimate’ satisfaction cannot be separated from the action itself. Glaucon is inclined to agree but notes that they have now revisited an argument – which he says ‘we formerly used in the Republic’ – and wonders about their overall method. In Plato’s dialogue they imagined a circumstance for the just person in which they took away the extrinsic advantages of justice but left a situation that was not meant to be exceptional or extreme. Now, however, they have gone further and – here the metaphor becomes strained – left justice completely naked, while in most circumstances she would always remain dressed in the natural satisfaction that comes to the agent from being just.

This finally allows Socrates to reflect on his initial disagreement with Mr Grote. It is now clear that they agree that just action will bring to the agent a sense of self-approbation and, in most circumstances, various other beneficial consequences. George complains that Socrates sets too little store by those consequences and rests too much on the feeling of self-approbation that he wants to make inseparable from just actions. And Socrates is prepared to admit that the truth of the matter might lie somewhere between their respective initial positions but thinks it will be closer to his view than to George’s. While this might seem like an eirenic end to the proceedings, Glaucon adds a final twist. For George, the value of justice lies in consequences which seem to be provided only in societies that are made up of people who are already tolerably well disposed to one another. And since, Glaucon notes, George does not have a positive view of contemporary (that is, nineteenth-century) society, then he will find himself struggling to locate any value in acting justly.

VI

We can now draw the threads together. This pseudo-Platonic dialogue, published after the death of both John and George Grote and the product of a certain social and intellectual circle in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, is certainly a piece of intellectual fun. But it also exemplifies some important underlying philosophical currents of the time and illuminates the philosophical tastes and methodological preferences of its writers. It shows the ways in which these two Knightbridge Professors of Philosophy engaged with the most general ethical questions of the day, particularly with reference to utilitarianism and the relationship between self- and other-regarding actions. It also exemplifies some general characteristics of the way in which John Grote and Henry Sidgwick themselves conducted their philosophical inquiries and therefore, perhaps, shows something of the influence of Grote on Sidgwick, particularly if this dialogue is indeed a product of the discussions that took place in the ‘Grote Club’. Above all, in the figure of Socrates and in the way in which he and his interlocutors engage with one another, the dialogue shows a commitment to careful and nuanced thinking, the aim of making good sense of competing intuitions, an interest in attempting to reconcile as far as possible different positions, and a refusal to settle for simple dogmatic views. All these virtues are to be found in the philosophical works of John Grote and Henry Sidgwick and they also saw those virtues in the Platonic works that inspired their own dialogue.Footnote ⁴⁰