it's neither tragedy nor comedy but its
own thing philosophy and I think we'll
just let the differences come out as we
read it. But one important difference is
that there is a focus on the arguments
and the ideas more so than on the plot.
And characters  there are characters so
this is does have a dramatic setting
we are to imagine people standing outside
of a gymnasium or outside of a public
building and having a conversation with
each other. These are named
characters. Probably all of them were
real people so Socrates was a real
person so was Gorgias and Polus and
Callicles were probably real people
too but it's a fictional dialogue in
that Plato has created all of this and
given all of these words to these people.
And this is a point I really need to
emphasize, that this is not an historical
document that is somebody writing down a
conversation that Socrates and Gorgias
had. Socrates wrote nothing, so we don't
have anything that he wrote. We only know
what we know about him is based on what
other people like Plato, Aristophanes and
Xenophon wrote about him. His
contemporaries, but this is a work of
Plato and in a way the Socrates here is
a fictional character. And although
Gorgias was a real person and I told
you a bit about some of his real
writings last week. This
dialogue that he engages in is made up.
And these responses that he gives are
supposed to represent the kinds of
things he would say but it's not
actually historically what he said. So
this is every bit a piece of fiction.
Jjust as our tragedies and comedies and
epic poetry was.
It's just that this is fiction that is
actually aimed at determining the truth
about something. About some problem, some
issue that exists in this society and
we're still talking about this
Democratic Society of Athens which is
the setting now. I'll give you an idea of
the overall structure of the work
because it's quite long you and may have
noticed in trying to read it and the
first point is that the the exact genre
of this work we call this a Socratic
dialogue. And that just means that it
consists of a series of speeches and
speech exchanges as in a
conversation between Socrates and a
couple of other characters. So for the
bit we're gonna discuss today, which is
merely the first fourteen pages, it's a
conversation largely between Socrates
and the title characters Gorgias. And
what we'll be discussing on Wednesday,
the next twenty pages or so, of the
dialogue represents conversation or
dialogue between Socrates and another
character named Polus. But over half of
the dialogue is a conversation between
Socrates and this character Callicles.
Notice for one thing that the
reading assignments are escalating
throughout the week and it will take
longer each time to read it. But another
question that arises from this structure,
and a question to think about is: why the
dialogue is entitled Gorgias if most of
the dialogue consists of a conversation
with Callicles and Polus. I think
there's a real answer to that and those
people who really grasp what this
dialogue is about should be able to
answer that question in the end but at
this point I leave it in an open-ended
question. Now a bit more about the
setting and
the title character. So the setting is
somewhere in Athens, perhaps a gymnasium,
we don't have much description of the
setting but this hotshot professor has
just showed up to give a public lecture
in a kind of display speech. The time
frame is a period of democracy in Athens
just like the Aristophanes works that we
read and I'll remind you that in this
Democratic setting. Decisions are made by
a vote of the citizens which is taken
after hearing speeches on both sides of
a certain issue.Thus those who could
speak better could persuade others about
what to do in legal contexts, in
political contexts, military contexts
and business contexts and so forth.
Thus being a good speaker was a means to
legal and political power. Which is why
there was a market for people willing to
pay to receive instruction. And remember
in Aristophanes there was this idea of
that you'd go down to the thinkurry
and pay these people to teach you how to
argue and that is exactly what Gorgias
actually offered.In fact Socrates did
not accept pay from people and as we'll
see in the dialogue he does not think
you should train people how to persuade
others without first teaching them how
to reason and how to be good people. But
this description of paid teachers of
persuasion of the worst argument or the
better argument is an accurate
description of what Gorgias offered to
do. Gorgias, himself real person from
Sicily, the presentation that he's
supposed to have just given. The dialogue
starts when his presentation has ended
and Socrates shows up shows up late on
the sort of fringes of the
lectures letting out. People are
filing out and Socrates shows up
at that point. We can imagine that he's
given some oratorical display, using his
considerable powers of speaking and
Composition. And remember that it's
always more impressive to be able to
defend a paradoxical or absurd or
counterintuitive claim than it is to
defend something obvious. So if I was to
sit here and I could I could easily give
you a speech to convince you that it's
Monday, that wouldn't be very
interesting and you wouldn't be awed by
my rhetorical prowess if I was able to
demonstrate that point. But if I was
able to demonstrate that Helen of Troy,
who you all think is this evil person
who was the ultimate cause of the entire
Trojan War, was actually a great
beautiful person that we should all be
celebrating as as being wonderful and a
savior of Greece then that would be an
impressive speech. Or if I was to sit
here and prove to you that you exist or
that this classroom exists actually
that's a lot more difficult than it
sounds. In fact it might be Paul
impossible to prove that. But that would
be easier to prove than what Gorgias
tries to prove in this work called "on
not being" where he tries to prove three
theses I told you about before. Let's
all wring them out in 
succession. The first one is that nothing
exists. The second proposition is; even if
something existed you couldn't know
anything about it, and even if something
existed and you could know something
about it you couldn't communicate
anything about it to anybody else.
Those paradoxical claims he wrote a
speech to defend and then gave the
speech as a display to people to show "I
can prove that nothing exists" or I can
prove that Helen of Troy was a great
person, therefore I can prove people to
make persuasive speeches about anything.
So you want to sign up for my school
because while Monte Johnson might be
able to prove to you that it's Monday, I
can prove to you that nothing exists and
so I can give you all the power to
persuade you to persuade people about
anything
whatsoever. So he teaches people how to
compose and deliver speeches and these
speeches are delivered at public
gatherings but the most important public
gatherings are, of course, court
procedures and deliberative bodies like
in making up legislative decisions or
decisions about whether to go to war or
not. And by the way, as usual, stop me
at any point in time if you want
clarification of anything I'm saying or
if you want to ask about a passage in
the text or a comment on it. Now I want
to say a little bit more. Our translation,
I think, uses the term oratory for the
Greek word rhetority which we also
have. Its just an English word that means
rhetoric. And that is ostensibly what the
entire dialogue is about. So in antiquity
the Gorgias was actually given the title
Gorgias or on rhetoric or on oratory
and indeed the question of what rhetoric
is and what it can do frames the entire
dialogue. Now we no longer have teachers
of rhetoric as such. We don't have a
department of rhetoric here that you can
go study rhetoric. There are some
rhetoric classes in the philosophy
department there are some rhetoric
classes in the Communication Studies
department but these don't 
teach you about rhetorical
criticism and criticizing other people's
rhetorical speeches like presidential
speeches or State of the Union speeches.
And does not necessarily teach you how to
compose rhetoric or oratory or so but
that doesn't mean that we're no longer
concerned with the subject matter of
this dialogue. In fact we now have many
more specialized disciplines that teach
you how to persuade other people and how
to give the equivalent of oratorical or
rhetorical display speeches. For example,
attorneys. It's a sad fact of the
matter that a certain number of you will
go on after
College to law school and become
attorneys or lawyers. There's no way to
avoid it, in fact I'll end up writing
letters of recommendation for some of
you to go on to law school but
let's just focus for a second on what
attorneys and lawyers actually do. Their
aim is to persuade juries and judges
about the guilt or innocence of their
clients or those accused of crime. And
what makes a good attorney is that that
attorney is capable of persuading those
people. OK, he may be the most brilliant
scientist in the world but if he can't
persuade people to either let his client
off or to prosecute this person then he
or she is not a good attorney and not a
good lawyer. You think of politicians the
same way maybe. I have a cynical view
about politicians despite all these
great ones that we have nowadays. It
seems that other people share that view
and public opinion approval ratings are
very low not just for the president but
for Congress and everybody else. And you
might just think that the point of
politicians is to persuade the public to
vote them into office. Now not even
persuede the public but to persuade corporations
to fund them so that they can buy TV
commercials that can that can entice the
public into voting for them or
supporting their policies. They probably
really don't care about the truth, they
probably just care about getting elected
and getting their own policy things
persuaded. Even if they didn't care about
the truth they'd have to be more
concerned with how to persuade people to
go along with what they're saying than
telling them what the truth is. Otherwise
they won't get elected, they won't get
their legislative priorities passed. This
is all pretty obvious for advertisers,
marketers and business people. Their
goal is to persuade us to buy
products or to buy, more specifically, to
buy specific brands of products. They
don't care about the truth at all of any
of these claims except insofar as laws
make them have to tell the truth to some
extent. But if you're
wondering how much truth-telling and how
much science and so forth there is an
advertising, just watch
a car advertisement or
something where cars drive straight up
cliffs and so forth and are able to fly
and that you'll have a
beautiful girlfriend if you drive this
kind of car and so forth. Nothing to do
with the truth of any of that but it is
effective at persuading you to buy the
car so it's a kind of rhetoric or
oratory. Finally, public relations which
is an industry that was invented in the
mid twentieth century. Prior to that it
was just called propaganda but then that
got a bad name from the Nazis and
various things that happened during
World War II so that we changed the
name of it to public relations. Again,
the point of public relations is to
persuade us about political, economic,
lifestyle choices things like that. No
concern whatsoever for the truth so I
think it's clear that persuasion
rhetoric and oratory exists in our
society at least as much as they did in
Greek society at the time. And in fact
since they now have access to mass media
like radio, television, the internet
and so forth. Newspapers, printing (if
those still exist) but mass public
demonstrations and so forth then the
role of persuasion by languages if
anything massively increased in our
society in fact we're saturated with
attempts to persuade us and this is the
whole crisis over fake news and the
legitimacy of journalists and
everybody setting up their own echo
chambers on Facebook in these other
places that just just keep telling them
things to persuade them of their own
beliefs and not really challenge them
and certainly not seek out the truth. So
I think that the basic problem that
the dialogue is talking about is much
worse for us than it was at that time. The
fundamental moral issue here is about
whether you should teach people to be
able to persuade others whether they
have good or bad motives in persuading
is still a big deal and so now we teach
this art in the context of specialized
fields like law business,
marketing, communications journalism,
political science and so forth and so
this these arguments apply to all of
those fields where these kinds of skills
are taught. But fundamentally there's an
ethical issue it's not the dialogue
isn't about how to do this persuasion
it's about whether teaching people how
to do this persuasion is a good idea or
not. And so the ancients realized already
that the subject matter of this is much
broader than just rhetoric or oratory.
According to Olympiadorus, it's quote to
discuss the ethical postulates required
for social well-being. So what are the
moral requirements for the society to be
doing well and living well and in
general what is the moral basis for
political action? And notice how the
dialogue ends. The very ending of the
dialogue - here's  a translation
from 5:27 II - Socrates says "let's use the
account that has just been disclosed to
us as our guide one that indicates to us
that this way of life is the best to
practice justice and the rest of virtue
both in life and in death let us follow
it then and call on others to do so that
is to practice justice and the rest of
virtue both in life and in death and
let's not follow the one that you
believe in". And here he's talking to
Gorgias,  Callicles and Polus. The way
of life you believe in which is just
persuading people however by whatever
means you want and let's not follow that
and don't call on me to follow that
because that way of life is worthless. So
it ends by making an extremely strong
moral point and a strong moral
condemnation of the kind of activity
Gorgias is involved in. So it ends up
that teaching itself, teaching rhetoric,
which is what the book is about but
teaching itself becomes morally
problematic and there's a question
whether teaching people is a morally
neutral enterprise. Suppose I teach
you a skill like how to use a firearm or
some kind of martial arts like, I teach
you boxing but I don't give you any
moral instruction about who you should
shoot or who you should clobber with
this martial arts ability that I've
taught you. Well then you could use that
skill, use those weapons either for good
or for ill but if you use them more for
ill then you do worse both for yourself
and for other people in the society than
if I had not taught you those skills. So
therefore there is a moral problem with
teaching people skills like that.
There might be a moral
problem with teaching people nuclear
physics because after all they could use
nuclear physics to create a nuclear
weapon and that could be a big problem
for them and for other people. And if
rhetoric really is the most powerful
skill around as Gorgias and his
students claim then it can bring about
the greatest ills and injustice if it's
misused. And it seems to follow that I
should not give any instruction in the
skill without also giving instruction
in morality and justice. So the
notion of morally neutral skills of
rhetoric or oratory or in general skills,
including martial arts or any
other skill or technique that can
possibly be abused in any way is highly
problematic. And I think it applies to
this very class to what extent should
teachers of skills, like interpreting
texts, like writing about text, speaking
about texts and discussing them
shouldn't we have to make sure that your
moral people before we teach you to do
that?
Because otherwise some of you will go
out, you'll take these skills and
then you'll even develop them and say
law school and then go use them to
defend corporations doing evil things
like polluting the earth and you'll use
these linguistic and skills for speaking,
reading, interpreting arguing  - you'll use
those to do harmful bad things. Or some
of you will go to work for marketing or
advertising firms and convince people to
buy things that are bad for them and so
forth. So what are we doing here? We're
just teaching you how to have
these skills, without even making sure
that you're good people. Isn't that kind
of a problematic thing for us to be
doing? We don't know how you're gonna go
on to use these skills and we can almost
be sure that many of you will go on to
use them for ways that will be harmful
both to yourself and to society in
general. So that is the problem that this
dialogue deals with. Should we be
doing that now? Here are some paradoxical
claims that Socrates makes in the
dialogue. So believe it or not he defends
all of these arguments. Number one it is
actually better to lose an argument than
it is to win one. Now I'd say
that's a paradox because that sounds
very counterintuitive. You always want to
win an argument, right? None of you set
out to lose arguments. I mean just
arguments at cocktail parties or in
run-ins. You always want to win those
arguments, right? Why would you want to
lose them?
Another paradoxical claim: it is better
to have someone commit a crime against
you to be unjust and do something wrong
to you than it is for you to do
something wrong to them. And when I say
it's better I don't just mean in an
abstract sense, I mean for you so it is
better for
if i wronged him and hurt him and commit
a crime against him, that is better for
him than it would be for him to have wronged
me and hurt me and do something wrong.
And I really want him to believe that,
but of course, it's a universal statement
that applies to me too. It would be
better for me to be harmed by him than
it would for me to harm him. Mark
that in your text - better for me so it's more in my self-interest to be
wrong than to do wrong. Somehow Socrates
argues that point and finally he argues
that it is worse not to be punished if
you do something wrong.
It's actually worse not to be punished 
than it is to be punished for it. It
would be better to be punished than to
somehow do something wrong and have
people not notice or have you get off
because you have a good attorney or
something like that. So all of those
paradoxical claims are defended. Now let
me just give you a sampling of the way
that Socrates argues. Here's a
passage in which part of the argument in
defense of this first paradoxical claim
is made but it goes like this: how could
it be in my self-interest to lose an
argument? So think about it like this if
we get in an argument, for example, about
whether the earth is flat or whether
it's spherical. I think it's flat and
you're able to defeat me in that
argument and prove that it's spherical,
then I've actually benefited because
I've learned the proof and the
explanation and the argument for how the
 earth really is Whereas if
I if I win that argument and I defeat
you, not only does the false view purvey
happen but you don't benefit from it. So
if you convince me that the earth really
is spherical that doesn't benefit you,
you knew that all along, you're just
dealing with some idiot that the
the earth is flat . But I've been
improved because I've now learned how
things really are.
And so when you win arguments it's
actually really lame because you're just
left in the same condition that you were
in before but when you lose arguments
and somebody refutes you then you
actually gain somehow. Again notice
that is talking about my self-interest
not that it's just better because it's
right in some abstract sense that the
truth should win out or something. It's
more in my self-interest to get refuted
because then I'm improved and benefited. Whereas if I'm refuting you I
don't get any better. you get better if I
defeat you in those arguments. We will
examine, in due course, more arguments in
support of that paradoxical conclusion
and these other ones. But you should be
thinking as you read it - how is he going
to prove these points prima facie? These
seem like ridiculous claims, but he does
argue them and arguably he does
prove them. Now let's just go to the very
beginning. In the first question he asks
so Gorgias says, look I'm a master of
rhetoric and persuasion. I can answer. I
can give a speech on any topic and it
can be a long or a short speech and I
can take a question, any sort of question
from any comer and I can give in
response to that either a short answer
or a long answer. So you pick. Give me any
question and tell me how long you want
the answer to be and I can deliver it
because I'm an absolute master of
persuasive technique. So Socrates has the
young student Teraphon who's
very enthusiastic about signing up with
Gorgias. Wow, I get this. This is like going to Harvard Law School. I'm
gonna be able to crush people in
arguments if I learn from this guy.
So I really want to do it Socrates. And
Socrates says: we'll go ask him what
skill he actually teaches
And so he does and it seems like a
very simple question because if you made
shoes and I said what skill do you teach,
you'd say cobbler. If you were a
painter and I asked what skill you're
able to teach, you'd say painting and so
the question here is what skill do you
teach? And you say it's rhetoric. So we've 
got to figure out why. In what sense that
is a skill. That's not as clear as making
shoes or paintings or houses or cars or
whatever and in Greek the question is
what is your technique?
Technique means skill, art or craft. We
can translate it in any of these ways.
It's the root of a bunch of important
English words like technology, which
means the science of mechanical or
artistic production. The word technique
which means a mode of production and art.
The idea of somebody being technical
which means they're an expert or
technocracy, government by experts.
So the fundamental issue is: do we have
here a skill, art or craft, a genuine
technique? And if so, what is it able to
do. So here's how Gorgias replies.
Somebody asks him what skill do
you teach? What technique do you teach?
And he says I teach the one that pertakes
of the most admirable skills and then he
says that's Speechmaking,
which is the most admirable of
all. So then the questions asked: will
speechmaking about what? And he says well
about the greatest of all human concerns
so Gorgias replies that he teaches a
skill of composing speeches about the
greatest human concerns. And Socrates
points out that his answer is not as
good as he thinks it is. First of all he
merely gives a quality of the skill he
doesn't say what the skill is so if I
ask you what's your major and you say oh
it's the best one it's the most powerful
one.
I'm probably talking to a
business major right? Whereas if
you ask a physicist they say something
very humble like I'm trying to find out
more about nature or something like that.
Okay, but you know political scientists?
Yes I'm studying politics, the greatest.
I'm doing the most important thing.
It doesn't tell me what it actually is also
everyone thinks that what they're doing
is the best. So a doctor can say they're
doing the best, they have
the best skill because they save lives.
And the banker can say I have the best
skill because I make wealth and you know
the teacher could say they're the best
because I actually provide knowledge
or something like that. So everybody
thinks what they do is the best and it
doesn't answer the question. So Gorgias
answers both of those criticisms: the
first point that you merely told me a
quality of the skill but not what it is.
By being more specific he says: I teach
the ability to persuade by speeches and
he also says in the following context-
especially judges and juries in law
courts, counselors in meetings like
bureaucrats or executives and
politicians and assemblies legislatures
and Parliament's so that's his paradigm.
I teach people how to persuade others by
speech in those contexts. And he responds
to the second point that hey everybody
thinks what they do is best so you
haven't really said anything thereby
arguing that in fact the general ability
to persuade people allows his students
to subdue or even subjugate all other
skilled professions. For this reason,
rhetoric is superior to all of their
skills. It's superior to doctors because
if you have rhetoric then you can
convince people that you're better and
have a better idea about what's healthy
than doctors do.
That's what advertisers that tell you
that you know eating Froot Loops is
good for you and contains nine essential
vitamins and so forth. Totally
false. It'll wreck your health if you
do that but they're better at persuading
people on that than doctors are and
that's why half the country's
obese and so forth. Because advertisers
and people who don't care about the
truth of this are a lot more persuasive
than doctors who actually know what we
should be eating and the same thing in any
of these other domains. So a rhetorician,
if they're really good, sounds a lot
better than a banker and convinced you
to invest in some harebrained scheme it
would have been better to put your money
in a money market or whatever but they
convinced you to buy this real
estate at the top of the market or
whatever if they're persuasive they can
do that and the mere banker who says
no you ought to be conservative with
your money doesn't sound as persuasive.
So in that sense it is the best because
it can crush all of the other ones and
and make them look bad so then rhetoric
gets defined as as a producer of
persuasion.
Socrates offers that definition at 4:53
a and notice that this definition,
producer of persuasion, works perfectly
for all of our contemporary fields of
rhetoric like advertising public
relations, marketing, lawyers -  all of those
people are producers of persuasion.
That's exactly what they do and so
Gorgias agrees with this definition but
he adds that the kind of persuasion he's
most interested in is dealing with
matters that are just and unjust so
Gorgias himself says that he doesn't
want to make it seem like "oh I'm able to
fleece people out of their money or I'm
able to convince people to eat fatty
foods when that's really a bad thing for
them to do". No, I deal with these
important things like law and order and
justice and injustice that's what my
speech making power is about. Now
persuasion, Socrates points out, aims at
creating conviction among audiences and
listeners that is convincing audiences
and again it does not aim to create
knowledge it doesn't aim to teach
students things, it aims
to give them an ability to persuade. Now
there is a slight tangle here
and that one could teach students how to
persuade. In which case I might be giving
them a certain knowledge but that
knowledge - what they would know - is
not how to teach something or about some
fact of the matter but how to create
conviction in others so again a lawyer
doesn't aim to teach the jury something.
She aims to convince a jury about the
guilt or innocence of a client and an
advertiser doesn't aim to teach you
about a product but aims to convince you
to buy the product. Now contrast this
with learning in fields like engineering,
architecture, physics, chemistry,
mathematics etc. In those fields one
doesn't learn how to persuade other
people that one knows a lot about
mathematics or chemistry rather you
actually want to know and learn the
truth about that subject area insofar as
it is known. If you have a really
good teacher they also explain to you
what isn't known in the field and what
needs further research. But there
 is no rhetoric classes that go
along with your chemistry classes I mean
there might be a general education
requirement but you don't have to take
rhetoric for that. Why don't we teach
people how to persuade when we're turning them into chemists or physicists
or mathematicians? Because it's
irrelevant. The point of the field is not
to persuade people that you know what
you're talking about, but to actually
know what you're talking about and
that's a big difference.
Now Gorgias holds that rhetoric will be
useful in any meeting in which people
have to make a decision but Socrates
presses him on what kinds of meetings
should actually need people that are
trained in rhetoric. So if we're meeting
to decide whether we should build a
bridge or a house or an army then we
consult engineers architects and
generals since those people presumably
knows something about
bridges houses and armies. We don't go
out and consult advertisers and public
relations specialists and attorneys and
so forth and that's because possession
of those kinds of skills like how to
build a bridge how to make a house how
to outfit an army actually involves
knowledge about these subjects and not
mere persuasion. Gorgias responds that
politicians, at least persuasive ones, are
really the ones that call the shots and
in fact they do decide what public works
get built whether housing developments
go through or not whether the military
is funded and to what extent they
actually do decide, it's politicians that
decide whether we're supporting the f18
or not deciding it. We may take advice
from generals but it ultimately comes
down to persuading some Democratic body
about whether they're voting for it or
not. So the person who is skilled in
persuasion can persuade audiences to
follow his or her instructions rather
than those of experts in a specific
skill like doctors, architects, engineers
and so on. But in response to this
Gorgias says: look one shouldn't abuse
rhetoric like that and he has
this very almost naive approach to it.
They should use rhetoric like any other
competitive skill he says and not to
just defeat anyone and everyone and then
he makes an analogy to boxing. If I teach
someone how to box and they ought to use
this skill against other skilled boxers
or those who are training to be boxers
maybe they should also use it in
self-defense but they shouldn't just use
it against friends and family or
innocent by standers. They shouldn't use
this skill, right? So there is a moral
 fact of the matter
about who it should be used against and
the teacher of that skill wouldn't seem
to be responsible for making sure that
the person actually is moral.
But the fact of the matter is that
pupils do pervert the strength and
skills of the things we teach them and
they misuse those skills. So some of
those people who are instructed to how
to fire a gun for example use it to rob
banks or to commit murder and that's a
problem. The question is whether the
instructor is actually responsible for
that misuse. We can all agree the student
should use the skill to do good things
but what happens if the student uses it
instead for a bad purpose? Is the teacher
to blame? Now to look very carefully at
the response Gorgias gives to this 457b,
to see if an order goes on with this
ability in this craft to commit
wrongdoing we shouldn't hate the teacher.
For while the teacher imparted the
knowledge to be used justly, the pupil is
making the opposite use of it so it's
the misuser who it's just to hate not
the teacher. So if I was a
self-interested person I would just end the
lecture there. Don't blame teachers it's
students that are bad people it's not
our fault if they misuse it but
Gorgias claims that he can make a
rhetorician out of anyone who wants to
study with him meaning that he can make
anybody capable of persuasion on any
topic. Not by teaching them
how to teach people on a
topic like we do in engineering and
physics and mathematics but by teaching
them how to persuade people and the
rhetorician will be more persuasive in a
gathering even than a doctor. Remember
this is crucial to Gorgias's argument
that this is the superior art because
you can make other skills look like
idiots if you're really good at oratory
and persuasion. Now buy 'in a gathering'
Gorgias clarifies that he means among
those who don't know. Because if the
audience consisted of doctors then they
could immediately detect that this guy's
a quack who's just bullshitting.
Whereas this other doctor is not as good
of a speaker actually knows what he's
talking about or engineering if
the audience was full of engineers. Then
the rhetorician would get nowhere
because people could tell he doesn't
know what he's talking about. Whereas
this other engineer who's not as good at
rhetoric can't. But if the audience is a
bunch of people who aren't skilled up in
that training, and this is exactly the
situation of a democratic decision
making or being on a jury,
you just have random people from every
walk of life. They don't necessarily have
skills in that. Then in those situations
the rhetorician can persuade the people
to whatever view he has regardless of
the truth. So to put it abstractly when a
rhetorician is more persuasive than some
other skill X like medicine or
architecture then a non knower will be
more persuasive than a practitioner of
that skill among non knowers. So rhetoric
doesn't need to have any knowledge of
the state of their subject matter it
only  needs to have
discovered some device to produce
persuasion in order to make itself
appear to those who don't have knowledge
that it knows more than those who
actually do know it. That is the purpose
of rhetoric and advertising, being a
lawyer and being a public relations
specialist and all of those fields is if
you are in a situation where you do not
have skilled people who can detect that
you don't actually know the truth of
what you're talking about,
how do you persuade them to support your
view? Now since Rhetoricians don't need
to know about justice and injustice for
example they only need to appear to.
Those who also don't know anything about
justice or injustice, they need to appear
that they know more about justice than
those who in fact know more about
justice.
So remember Gorgias said: well you know,
really what my speech is about
these very important things about
justice and injustice but now given the
structure of this field that he's
claiming to be able to teach we know
that what he actually wants to be able
to do is teach somebody how to persuade
people that they know about justice and
injustice more than some other person
who might actually know more about it. In
the case that they're in front of a
forum where people do not know about
that area, i.e. a courtroom or a
deliberative body like Congress. So
Socrates again ask Gorgias 'would you
teach a student about justice and
injustice if this student doesn't know
about these things before he comes to
you'? And gorgeous replies, and it's
important that it's a grudging reply, so
look at this passage carefully - at 460 he
says 'yeah I guess I would teach them
about justice as well'. Okay, so this is
like if you ask Monte Johnson: are you
gonna make sure that all your students
know about justice and injustice before
you teach them how to speak and write?
And if I said 'well yeah I guess I would.
I don't want to say that I would teach a
bunch of immoral bastards who are gonna
go on to do evil things how to do those.
So yeah, all right I guess I'd make sure
that they knew about justice and
injustice too. I also don't want to admit
to Socrates that I don't know as much as
everybody else does about justice and
injustice. But we'll see that this
concession is a fatal mistake that the
that the rest of the dialogue hangs on
him making this concession because it
means that he essentially ends up
contradicting himself. And I can 
show this contradiction by putting into
kind of propositional forms various
arguments that he is consented to. One, if
a student doesn't know anything about
justice then Gorgias says I'll teach it
to him, I'll make sure he knows about
justice before I teach him how to
persuade. Second, a person who has learned
about justice will
be just, just as a person who is learned
about music will be a musician and a
person who's learned about carpentry
will be a carpenter and a person who's
learned about engineering will know
about engineering etc. So a person who
learns about justice will be a just
person. Thus if teaching does imply
learning, and I think it does, just
flapping your lips in front of a
classroom isn't teaching if the students.
aren't actually learning anything. That
no teaching is going on. If that's true
then any student of Gorgias will be
just since he will teach them about
justice and the person who learns about
something will be a person of that kind.
But earlier Gorgias said that a teacher
is not responsible if his or her student
uses rhetoric unjustly ,right? Just as a
teacher of medicine isn't responsible if
the student uses the knowledge not in
order to cure diseases but create them.
Like the student uses what they learned
in biology to create bio weapons or
poisons to use on people because they
have that knowledge and we think
that the biologist that taught them how
to do these things isn't responsible.
It's the student themselves but any
student who uses knowledge unjustly will
ipso facto or for that very reason be
unjust. Anybody doing anything unjustly
is by that definition unjust. So
Gorgias's the students are both just and
unjust at the same time. They're just
because they must have learned about
justice from him but they're unjust
because they go on to do abusive things.
So Gorgias's position is incoherent. He
produces both just and unjust people and
the important thing is that he teaches
them how to persuade others that they
know more about justice than people that
actually do know something about justice
and so that is the problem.
Now which argument should Gorgias - 
where did he go wrong in his reasoning?
How did he get led down this annoying
path where  Socrates shows up,
a master of argument and persuasion and
I can answer any question that you put
to me, how did Socrates trip him up and
make him contradict himself and come up
with an incoherent position. What should
he have said or done differently? Or
does he just have the wrong
position? Does what he's
saying not make any sense? Is there  anything he could have said
differently in defense of teaching
people how to make persuasive speeches?
Anybody have any thoughts on this? yeah
So Socrates, if I could just
repeat your answer, I think you're saying
that Socrates treats justice like it's
an absolute thing. There's just
and there's unjust and there are 
clearly different things. But you say
Gorgias was answering as if it's more
fluid and there's not as much
of a distinction between just and unjust.
He thinks it's subjective 
as opposed to being objective? There's a
fact of the matter about what's just and
unjust Gorgias thinks that what I think
is just is just because I think of it
that way. So actually you're giving
away that he could have
 made that argument.
Now that's a smart kind of
philosophy argument. Say I don't
believe there is any such thing as as
justice and injustice. I mean this is
what people that go on to do advertising
believe I don't know, I don't actually
believe in any of that ethic stuff I
just believe in making money or whatever.
Okay that's not the course it's very
important that that is not what Gorgias
said. Gorgias did play along with
Socrates.
