The Virtue of Agency

In this erudite and stimulating book, Christopher Moore explores the history and meaning of the elusive—and virtually untranslatable—Greek ethical term sōphrosunē. The term is commonly rendered in English as ‘moderation’, ‘temperance’, ‘self-control’, or sometimes (and etymologically closest to the Greek) ‘sound-mindedness’, but none of these captures in a satisfactory way an idea that, as Moore shows, was itself hotly contested, in regard to both its meaning and value, in ancient Greek thought. In an epilogue Moore plumps for ‘discipline’ as his preferred English translation (339–40), and while I doubt that this achieves a felicitous correspondence, that is not for having a winning alternative up my sleeve.In any event, Moore confines himself to transliteration of the term throughout the main body of the book (as I shall do in this review). His aim is conceptual and historical. Historically, the sweep of the book is impressive. Arranged for the most part chronologically, it covers a vast range of ancient Greek writings, including Homer, the lyric poets, Aristophanes and tragedy, historians and sophists, early Greek philosophers, and—most extensively—what one might call the Socratic authors, in particular Plato; then Aristotle and his early successors and, in a final chapter on the postclassical period, a discussion of sōphrosunē as a gendered virtue based on texts by Phintys of Sparta and Iamblichus. In this review I focus on Moore’s coverage of the period up to Aristotle.Conceptually, Moore seeks to offer a more cohesive and, to modern sensibilities, more ethically intelligible account of sōphrosunē than previous treatments, which generally reflect a degree of despair at the prospect of capturing its sense in a unified way. While giving due weight to the variety and complexity of the ancient evidence, Moore nonetheless aims at bringing out two connected elements of what he sees as the basic conceptual unity of the term: first, sōphrosunē is a (indeed the) virtue of agency, in that, as Moore writes, it “is the capacity to act well in the face of a distinctive human challenge: the conflicting heterogeneity of our ends” (2). An important case of such heterogeneity would be the presence of a powerful immediate desire to do something, the doing of which would clash with one’s deeper commitments. Acting well requires the capacity to choose a course of action that aligns, rather than conflicts, with those commitments.The second key element of sōphrosunē on Moore’s account is its central role in (what he calls) our self-constitution. For Moore, “sōphrosunē is ... the virtue that makes each of us count as a ‘self,’ something or someone that has practical integrity through time.” This is because, according to Moore, only some of the desires and inclinations that arise within us do we identify with as ours, and in that sense take ownership of. “A self,” Moore continues, “originates actions for which it takes full responsibility.” To the extent, then, that we have the capacity to act just in accordance with those motivations that we fully acknowledge as ours—to the extent, that is, that we possess sōphrosunē—we demonstrate “the achievement of the agency that comes from self-constitution” (3).There is a further complication that Moore goes on to highlight. If sōphrosunē is, as the classical Greek tradition takes it to be, an ethical virtue, then it must be concerned not simply with doing what we most fully identify with, but with what it is right to do. And this begets a problem, since on the face of it the “objective” demands of morality need not obviously be exactly what we identify with as our own governing commitments: indeed “they might seem merely distant and alien authorities” (4). Engagement with this tension is, for Moore, one of the central axes of debate about sōphrosunē in the classical period.Much therefore will turn on how true Moore’s account of the basic conceptual makeup of sōphrosunē is to the ancient evidence. This is due in part to the relative paucity of the ancient evidence to this point and, in the case of Moore’s attempt in chapter 6 to construct a sōphrosunē attributable to the historical Socrates, the near impossibility of reliably delineating that figure. But these chapters also evince a sense that, perhaps not unrelatedly, Moore at times has to push his evidence rather harder than it can bear in order to bring it within the compass of his overall narrative.This comes out in a tendency, present in fact throughout the book, to read contemporary ethical terminology into the ancient Greek material without sufficient explanation of why just that terminology is the right fit. One small example from those earlier chapters. In discussing the Nurse’s urging of Phaedra, in Euripides’s Hippolytus, to act on her desire for Hippolytus, Moore glosses the nomoi that the Nurse bids Phaedra not to reject as “norms” (87). Standard renditions of the singular nomos include ‘law’, ‘custom’, and ‘convention’—Moore himself deploys the first of these renditions in other contexts (e.g., 161, 178). Treating nomoi as ‘norms’ is not necessarily a bad fit for the context at hand, and it certainly gels with the wider conceptual scheme that Moore deals in—for example, he relates sōphrosunē to the idea that “one’s actions flow from stable commitments to norms or principles that obtain beyond the immediate circumstance” (21). The problem is that Moore is supposed to be showing us that this is the right conceptual scheme for the ancient material; glossing a key term as ‘norm’ without further explication delivers the intended result too cheaply.What is ideally needed is some analysis of the contemporary term, coupled with an argument that the term so understood makes the best sense of the text under consideration. Things are not really helped when, in the course of his discussion of Stobaeus’s Socratic maxims, Moore further states that there “norms are both hypothetical and categorical” (145). While this latter remark seems deliberately throwaway, it nonetheless illustrates a more general inclination toward casualness in the application of theoretically laden modern ethical vocabulary to the ancient scene.Chapter 7 offers an intricate discussion of sōphrosunē as found in Xenophon, where Moore deftly navigates the trio wisdom-sōphrosunē-enkrateia, the latter picking out something like the ability to resist troublesome bodily desires, while sōphrosunē, according to Moore, is for Xenophon “responsiveness to reasons, laws, or other wise judgments of action-guiding value. This is rational agency” (184). Moore has to contend with the peculiarity that Xenophon, especially in Memorabilia 3.9.4, attributes to Socrates the view that wisdom is not to be distinguished from sōphrosunē. [that] ... involves treating certain desires as decisive” (183).A simpler reading of the passage in question seems available. The reason that Socrates says that those who act incorrectly are neither wise nor possess sōphrosunē is his denial in the passage that there is anything more to one’s acting in a given way than thinking it beneficial for oneself so to act. On this reading, far from sōphrosunē having a significant independent role in achieving right action, it is nothing over and above wisdom, each construed (as the passage also says) as recognition of what it is fine and good to do. In not considering this option (there may be reasons to reject it) Moore is perhaps again rather too quick to press a reading of sōphrosunē that fits his broader thesis.Plato, with three chapters devoted to his work, represents the classical thinker who, according to Moore, “more than any other ... sees sōphrosunē as the virtue of agency” (185). Chapter 8, on the Protagoras and Gorgias (with a prelude on the Phaedo), offers plausible evidence that Plato’s thinking on sōphrosunē does have a focus on action; chapter 9, on the Republic and Charmides, has some insightful things to say about the relation, at first glance rather disconnected, between the treatments of sōphrosunē in those two dialogues.The chapter also tackles, without fully resolving, a question that seems to challenge Moore’s overall position and comes especially into focus in the Charmides, given Socrates’s epistemic modesty and the aporetic discussion of sōphrosunē therein as knowledge of knowledge: rather than being directed toward action, in Socratic terms isn’t sōphrosunē, as Moore puts it, “the capacity to forbear from acting on epistemically shaky grounds” (234)? There is correspondence here with a parallel question that surfaces earlier in the book as to whether sōphrosunē is about refraining from acting (for example on one’s immediate impulses), rather than acting. Moore suggests that in its epistemic guise, at any rate, sōphrosunē is for Socrates “a condition of agency” (234).Chapter 10 covers the Statesman and the Laws, the latter seen by Moore as a “bridge” (242) between Plato’s (earlier) accounts of sōphrosunē and that to be found in Aristotle’s ethical theory, where it is connected with mastery of certain bodily appetites. The chapter also raises the question, in its discussion of the Statesman, of the relation between sōphrosunē and courage. Rather surprisingly, given the book’s thesis that sōphrosunē is “the” virtue of agency, Moore seems content to concede that, at least from the perspective of the Eleatic Visitor (the protagonist of the Statesman), “sōphrosunē is not the unique virtue of agency ... it is one of two, courage being the other one” (240). In a parenthetical discussion of the Euthydemus later in the chapter, Moore also refers to “the notable thing, Socrates’ considering [in the Euthydemus] sōphrosunē to be as action-enabling as courage” (248). In both instances, Moore seems more eirenic about the apparently equal claim of courage in relation to agency than one would expect from his overall thesis. Further critical discussion of the relationship between the two virtues would have been welcome.Moore’s discussion in chapter 11 shows that Aristotle’s notably narrow vision of sōphrosunē is in fact quite idiosyncratic and does not reflect any discernible common view in the popular or intellectual milieu of Aristotle’s own day or in the tradition he inherited. A plausible case is made that Aristotle sacrifices that richer inheritance on the altar of his own ethical system-building. Moore had already previewed that, in his view, for Aristotle “sōphrosunē is no longer rational agency itself, as it was in both Xenophon and Plato” (184), and he confesses to being “disappointed” (272) at the thinness of Aristotle’s conception. Aristotelians: prepare your rebuttals!If Moore does not succeed in making a fully convincing case for the positive thesis that identifies sōphrosunē with rational agency even before Aristotle, his book nonetheless does a sterling job in marshaling the great sprawl of written material about sōphrosunē from classical Greece and imposing some sort of discipline upon it. Both philosophically and historically, Moore’s represents the richest and most informed treatment to date of sōphrosunē in that period; it will serve as a benchmark for future debate

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