One of the corner stones of ethics has been the idea of the “Good” as the basis of justification of human behaviour. In the Platonic dialogue “Gorgias” the central question is: What is the nature of the “Good”? The main protagonist of the dialogue, Socrates puts forward that all human action aims at the “Good”. Everything we do because of a “Good” that we believe would result from our doing. When we fail by doing something bad instead, it is not intentionally, but because we did not understand enough well what the real “Good” would be. In fact Socrates challenges the view of his opponent in the dialogue, the Athenian politician Kallicles, who suggests that the “Good” is pleasure.
Socrates believes that knowing the “Good” would also result in doing the “Good”. This statement has been often criticized as against experience. In fact many people seem to know what would be ethically good, yet do not follow its path. Does this disprove Socrates’ view? Taken from a neurobiological point of view, however, we may think that Socrates’ error is not so much his conviction that knowing the good would also mean doing it, but rather consists in his misconception of pleasure. According to modern neurobiology pleasure arises from activation of a neuronal reward system involved in evaluating any given behaviour for its success. Something that Aristotle may have anticipated when he said that every human being aims at understanding and the proof of it resides in the pleasure accompanied even by perception. Ultimately, as a colleague has pointed out to me, we judge even the correctness of our mathematical calculations based on the emotion that arises from finding the solution. Ironically spoken the strength of a proof is measured by the amount of pleasure generated by discovering it.
Now applying this concept of pleasure to behaviour, it seems no more legitimate to dissociate it from the idea of “Good” as Socrates suggested. If we intellectually judge something as “Good”, it is because of the activation of the internal reward system. The dilemma of ethical action does therefore not result from a decision between the “Good” on one hand and pleasure on the other, but between two actions that cause different degrees of pleasure in us. If an unethical action prevails, it is because the brains’ calculation of the anticipated effect results in a greater activation of the reward system. Following the same reasoning, when against the odds a person favours to decide for doing the “Good” it is because his reward system approves this more than a seemingly advantageous but unethical behaviour. Thus, Socrates’ error consists in his misunderstanding of the pivotal role of pleasure in finding the truth.
