Learning and inquiry › The Question About Virtue

Meno opens by asking whether virtue comes through teaching, practice, nature, or some other route. Socrates first wants to know what virtue is. Without that account, he says, he cannot determine how it is acquired. Read this opening in Meno 70a–71b. The distinction matters: a question about how to produce something can conceal uncertainty about what would count as producing it.

Meno supplies several role-specific answers. A man's virtue concerns managing the city; a woman's concerns managing the household. He also distinguishes virtue by age and by the position of a free or enslaved person. These are Meno's assumptions about social roles, not recommendations for the reader. Socrates asks for the common character that makes all the proposed cases instances of virtue. A collection of examples has not yet supplied that account (71e–73c).

Meno next proposes the ability to rule, which excludes the child and enslaved person whose virtue his earlier answer included. Ruling also needs a qualification: it must be just. Yet justice is itself a virtue whose relationship to virtue as a whole still needs explanation. Another proposal joins desiring good things with the ability to obtain them. Socrates argues that everyone desires what they take to be good, so desire cannot distinguish the virtuous. Acquisition must also be just, bringing the inquiry back to an unexplained part of virtue (73c–79e).

This is an objection to the explanatory work done by Meno's answers. Calling a decision virtuous because it is just might be reasonable in an ordinary conversation. Here it does not answer the particular request for what virtue as a whole is. We can question whether Socrates demands too much from a definition while still seeing why Meno has not satisfied that demand.

Meno compares Socrates to a torpedo fish that numbs anyone it touches. He had felt able to give speeches about virtue; now he cannot explain it. Socrates accepts the comparison only insofar as he is perplexed himself. Then Meno asks how they can search for something they do not know, and how they would recognize it if they encountered it. Socrates formulates the resulting dilemma in 80a–e.

That assumption deserves scrutiny. Knowing enough to ask a question need not amount to knowing its answer. You can identify a mathematical problem through its conditions while remaining unable to solve it. This is one way a modern reader can resist the dilemma; Socrates develops a different response through recollection.