Darren Cheng

The Lesser Hippias ends up in an incredible place: it turns out the good soul is the one that voluntarily does what is bad. I will attempt to show in what follows that a fairly conventional Platonic point lurks within this incredible claim, which is that there is something that is unconditionally good, perhaps the good itself, and that it is a fundamentally different kind of thing than what is studied and dealt with by all other crafts and sciences. If this is true, then it will turn out that saying the truth is one of those things that is only conditionally good. The dialogue thus suggests a more sophisticated attitude towards lying than any straightforward notion of lying being always bad and telling the truth being always good. Perhaps saying the truth must also come under the aegis of what is unconditionally good or the good itself. I also attempt to show that the characters of Hippias and Socrates can be seen as models for when lying is bad and when lying might be good or serve good purposes.

Realist thinkers in political philosophy often criticize ideal theorists for neglecting or eliminating the fact of politics in their work. This is supposed to be problematic because we should never expect to overcome politics. Any theory that attempts to do so is said to be unrealistic, naïve, and impractical. Although much has been said in the dispute between realists and ideal theorists in recent years, this particular line of criticism, which should be distinguished from other criticisms of ideal theory, has not been clearly or explicitly addressed by ideal theorists in the literature. I deal with this issue by examining the ideal theory of John Rawls, which has been a prominent target of realist criticisms. My aim is to see where politics exists, or might exist, in Rawls’s theory, and whether this politics satisfactorily answers to the various aspects of the realist’s critique. My analysis suggests that there may be no inherent or necessary conflict between ideal theory and real politics, after all.