Lloyd Gerson on Plato's Moral Realism

 

Dr. Lloyd Gerson is a Canadian. He teaches at the University of Toronto. In this YouTube video he defends Plato's moral realism and ground of truth against revisionist readings of Plato.

Gerson speaks about his book Plato's Moral Realism in which he argues that Plato's ethical philosophy is inseparable from his systematic metaphysics.

Plato's moral realism rests on the Idea of the Good, the unhypothetical first principle of all. It is this, as Plato says, that makes just things useful and beneficial. That Plato makes the first principle of all the Idea of the Good sets his approach apart from that of virtually every other philosopher. This fact has been occluded by later Christian Platonists who tried to identify the Good with the God of scripture. But for Plato, theology, though important, is subordinate to metaphysics. For this reason, ethics is independent of theology and attached to metaphysics. 

This book challenges contemporary accounts of Plato's ethics that start with the so-called Socratic paradoxes and attempt to construct a psychology of action or moral psychology that makes these paradoxes defensible. Rather, Lloyd Gerson argues that Plato at least never thought that moral realism was defensible outside of a metaphysical framework.


Related reading: Philosophers' Corner: Thumbnail Sketch of Phillipa Foot; Moral realism - Wikipedia