Good and evil in Plato's eyes: the problem of good and evil in moral philosophy began with Socrates. Before him, no western philosopher really talked about this problem.
Good and evil, in the context of western philosophy, refer to good and bad, or good and bad. Good is good; Evil is bad.
This is so-called moral philosophy. Regarding the meaning of moral philosophy, we might as well open a modern dictionary, which must describe the meaning of this concept in this way: moral philosophy, also known as ethics, is a branch of philosophy that studies the concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, authority and obligation.
Moral philosophy is knowledge that tries to understand good and evil. Apart from moral philosophy, no other discipline has the right or the ability to clarify this issue.
As the first person to explore the knowledge of good and evil, Socrates' understanding of good and evil is actually very simple: the so-called goodness is just to practice according to the nature of the soul.
But what is the essence of the soul? When we talked about Socrates and his teleology, we mentioned that Socrates put forward at least the following concepts: function, responsibility, goal, order and purpose.
Socrates realized that to study morality and kindness, we must study the soul. We must study our humanity. Plato fully agreed with Socrates' opposition to the school of the wise. The wise school does not recognize the existence of any unchanging and universal moral standards.
On the contrary, in the view of the wise, all moral standards are deliberately created by various communities, only for the residents of specific places and only effective for them. And people abide by these rules, not because of the fixed things in human nature, but because of the pressure of public opinion. Whether people abide by it or not is related to whether there will be public pressure.
The so-called good life is a happy life. In fact, this is relativism morality. But in Socrates and Plato's view, if morality exists relatively, then the concept of morality cannot exist.
Because morality originally refers to those absolute standards of good or bad. Just as knowledge is relative, if it is advocated by the wise, there will be no real knowledge.
Socrates said that true morality exists in the human soul, which is related to those eternal basic structures in the human soul. Does this structure exist or not? If it exists, what is it like?