INTRODUCTION: CONTESTING SOCRATIC EGOISM

There is a widespread understanding among historians of philosophy that ancient Greek ethics is largely or even entirely eudaimonist in structure. And yet, there are some deeply counter-intuitive consequences of a eudaimonist ethics. Ordinarily, we think that it is possible for us to benefit others for their own sake, a possibility that does not depend upon its being a condition of our own happiness. Egoism, the position attributed to Socrates by, e.g., Terence Irwin and Gregory Vlastos, claims that such independently arising, other-directed concern is irrational. Indeed, it seems that a growing consensus among scholars of Socratic ethics attributes to Socrates the thesis of eudaimonism, the view that an agent exclusively pursues her own wellbeing, as well as that of psychological egoism (i.e., that an agent acts in her own self-interest). According to the latter thesis, it is impossible for agents to be motivated to do anything other than what is in their own interest.

Can it really be that Socrates is to be credited with the discovery of egoistic eudaimonism? Well aware that this association looms strongly in the mind of most informed readers, in what follows I attempt to show that there is a great deal of assumption and not much by way of strong evidence to support the attribution.