Socrates Source Of Evil

Kathy Gallardo
Professor Marfori
PHI 101
13 March 2017
The Source of Evil Doesn’t Lower the Harm Socrates says no man voluntarily commits error or evil. When he says this what he means is that when men commit an action seen as evil or erroneous by outsiders, they themselves cannot see that their action was wrong. Due to their inability to see this, ignorance is known as the source of evil. The person does not know where their “true interest” lies, and because they are ignorant of that they can’t know any errors or evil doings they did wasn’t in their best interest. If they fully understood their true interest then they wouldn’t have been able to commit any evil actions. According to Socrates, our true interest lies in living the most virtuous

Every action we do is motivated by self-interest. Whether the reward be given before, during, immediately after or long after the action itself, self-interest is still rewarded somewhere in the transaction and without it there wouldn’t be any transaction at all. Even selfless actions like community service or donations are in self-interest because they make you feel good. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be done. To be done every action must somehow satisfy you, either by being what you perceive as a great option or by simply being better than the other choices you have. Since all of our actions are motivated by self-interest then naturally we are actually incapable of willingly harming ourselves. The reason why we do sometimes cause ourselves harm is because of ignorance. When we make our choice we make it because we think it meets our self-interest, if we are too ignorant to know that our best self-interest is in a virtuous life then all of our choices may suffer at levels varying on just what we perceive our self-interest to be. So the source of our wrong doings is ignorance because due to our human nature we can never willingly cause ourselves harm, and harming our environment or the people around us of course causes us harm. We may do it because in the moment we may think it is right or satisfactory but there are consequences to the soul that we later have to deal with. From these negative consequences we can later see that our motivations were misguided because of our lack of understanding of our “true interest”. And although ignorance can be from being simply unaware, it can also come about in cognitive dissonance. When one deals with the consequences of their wrongful choice they go through cognitive dissonance, because it’s against our nature to go against our best interest. At this point, one has to decide whether they need to change their course of path or whether the consequences of their wrongful choice aren’t as bad