This is an interview with Rachana Kamtekar, a philosopher specializing in ancient ethics, focusing on Plato’s theory of virtue and how it compares to Stoicism, Aristotelian ethics, Indian philosophy, and modern virtue ethics. The central thread is what virtue is, how it relates to happiness and external goods, and whether it can be reduced to a single foundational moral concept.
Virtue and External Goods in Plato
Virtue, following Aristotle’s definition, is a disposition that inclines one to make good decisions, involving both reason and inclination, expressed in actions.
On a spectrum of how much external goods matter for happiness, the Stoics hold that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness and everything else is indifferent; Aristotle holds that external goods genuinely contribute to happiness in addition to virtue; Plato falls closer to Aristotle but still regards virtue as supremely good.
Plato does not think non-virtue goods are indifferent: it is better to be virtuous and healthy than virtuous and sick, because external goods increase the scope of virtue, allowing a virtuous person to do more and express virtue more impactfully.
The Stoics deny degrees of happiness or virtue, whereas Plato and Aristotle allow that one can be happier or less happy depending on how much one can express virtue.
Plato’s argument for virtue’s supreme status (from the Meno and Euthydemus) is the misuse argument: any external good, or even natural qualities of soul like courage or moderation, can be misused without virtue; only virtue guarantees correct use. Virtue is the only monotonic good, the only thing that necessarily makes one’s life better.
Against the objection that most people simply need more goods (air, food, money) rather than more virtue, Plato would respond that such goods secure mere survival, not a good life; living well requires virtue.
When it comes to tradeoffs between virtue and external goods, Plato says in the Phaedo that wisdom is the only currency with which we should exchange all other things. One should evaluate pleasures, pains, fears, and choices by how much wisdom they afford.
Theoretically, one might trade a small amount of virtue now for conditions that enable far more virtue later, but Plato’s repeated emphasis on how wrongdoing scars the soul suggests he would be deeply uncomfortable with this, since wrongdoing makes one more likely to repeat wrong actions and reshapes the soul’s constitution.
Virtue is a precondition for external goods to contribute to happiness at all; without virtue, external goods may even make life worse. But given virtue, external goods positively impact happiness by magnifying the expression of virtue, not by directly producing happiness on their own.
Suffering Injustice vs. Committing Injustice
In the Gorgias, Plato argues that suffering injustice is better than doing injustice, because doing injustice damages the soul of the perpetrator far more than suffering injustice damages the victim.
Plato does not deny that victims can be damaged; he discusses reparations for victims in the Laws. But the claim is comparative: vice is the worst condition one can be in, and being a wicked person is far worse than being a victim of wickedness.
The perpetrator has the power to correct their wrong, but it is not likely they will; research by psychologist Roy Baumeister shows perpetrators tend to forget the harms they cause while victims remember and suffer more, and perpetrators who minimize their harm are more likely to repeat it.
For Plato, the soul is immortal, and a bad soul comes back worse (a karmic-like reincarnation), while a good soul comes back better. Reincarnation is determined by choices and beliefs, not by experiences, which further explains why doing wrong is worse than suffering it.
What Counts as Virtue and the Role of Wisdom
Plato distinguishes between skills/technai and virtues. Each craft (medicine, navigation) has its proper end, but whether that end should be pursued is determined by a higher wisdom, ultimately the kingly or political wisdom that concerns the good for human beings as a whole.
Virtue is not simply the right response to any circumstance; it is the right response conducive to living well.
The Socratic dialogues of definition are aporetic, ending without satisfactory definitions of the virtues. The tradition inherits this problem: we can identify the domain of each virtue but struggle to give its precise content.
John Stuart Mill complained that Plato never specifies the content of the good we should pursue. Plato’s answer is that the good is contact with the truth, sometimes expressed as knowledge of the Forms, the real springs and causes of everything. The moral virtues enable us to reach this intellectual condition, and that condition in turn informs the virtues.
Courage, for instance, is defined in the Republic not in terms of battlefield action but in terms of sticking with one’s beliefs in argument and owning up to being refuted, which is essential to the pursuit of truth.
The good for Plato is not philosophia (love of wisdom) but sophia (wisdom itself), the condition of the soul in contact with the Forms. Philosophy is instrumental; we do it for the sake of wisdom.
If technology could directly produce the virtues or the good condition of the soul without effort, both Plato and the Epicureans would presumably say the means no longer matter. But Plato values autonomy: there is something non-instrumentally good about reason being in control of oneself, as opposed to a drug like Ozempic controlling one’s appetites. Full virtue requires that one’s own reason, not an external intervention, governs the appetites.
For a disembodied soul, the good is simply knowledge of the Forms. For an embodied human being, the virtues transform the whole living animal, and the practical aspect of wisdom matters as part of our good.
The Unity of Virtue
Plato argues that the virtues are united in wisdom: having wisdom entails having all the other virtues.
People may have natural qualities (natural aggression, natural shyness) that make it easier to acquire certain virtues and harder to acquire others, and these natural qualities can come in pairings with natural vices. But natural virtues and vices are not yet genuine virtues.
When natural qualities are shaped by wisdom, they become genuine virtues, and at that level there are no pairings of virtue and vice. Aggression does not enable one to live well; courage does. Shyness does not enable one to live well; moderation does. In the realm of genuine virtue, the virtues are harmonized rather than in conflict.
Different Motivations for Virtue
Kamtekar’s essay “Imperfect Virtue” distinguishes several motivational bases for virtue: the philosopher’s virtue (based on understanding why virtues are good), the honor lover’s or citizen’s virtue (based on desire for self-esteem and social recognition), and the slave’s virtue (based purely on fear of consequences).
She wrote the essay to understand how Plato’s ideal city in the Republic could genuinely improve all classes, not just the philosophers. The auxiliaries (military class) and producers can have genuine if imperfect virtue based on motivations like shame, self-evaluation, and recognition of what others contribute to their well-being.
The honor lover’s virtue is genuine but not as counterfactually reliable as the philosopher’s. It depends on being sustained by a good society. Kamtekar initially argued that proper education and internalization could make honor lovers’ virtue robust enough to survive transplantation into a bad society, but she has since walked this back, coming to think that rational understanding is the real guarantor of reliability.
Even so, the honor lover’s virtue is not completely fickle; some degree of counterfactual reliability shows it is genuine virtue, but it need not be impermeable to change.
The difference between the democrat (honor lover in a bad society) and the auxiliary (honor lover in a good society) is not that one cares about appearance and the other about reality. Both are attracted to the real value that society recognizes. The democrat is confused, valuing multiple things (wealth, military honor) inconsistently, which is why he pursues wealth in secret. The auxiliary, guided by the philosophers, is not confused and consistently values virtue.
Stoicism: Contributions and Problems
The Stoics hold that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness and everything else is indifferent, though some indifferents are “preferred” (health, wealth) and others “dispreferred.” Virtue consists in selecting preferred indifferents as cosmic nature would have one select.
Kamtekar finds the Stoic account of right action interesting and their distinction between goods and indifferents important, but she does not believe virtue is sufficient for happiness and is alarmed by Stoicism’s popularity, since people are attracted to it because it makes happiness entirely up to us.
In Plato, the good is otherworldly (knowledge of the Forms), and technai like sailing are subordinate to kingly wisdom. In Stoicism, the good is knowledge of the natural world and one’s place in it, so virtue expands to encompass the correct use of all skills in selecting preferred indifferents. Sailing, for instance, becomes part of the art of living.
The Stoics need preferred indifferents to give content to virtue; without them, as Cicero argued, virtue would have no function. Kamtekar finds this implausible: if external goods do not contribute to happiness, it is incoherent to make the selection of them the essence of virtue. She finds the Aristotelian/Platonic picture more plausible.
The Stoic reply is that nature is providential (God/Zeus has organized everything for the best), and we share in divine reason, so willing what nature wills contributes to our happiness even though the external things themselves do not.
Kamtekar finds Stoic compatibilism least convincing: the claim that humans are blameworthy for their actions when they are the “principal causes” (established by contrast with what another person would do in the same situation), even though everything is providentially determined. She thinks this gives individuals too small a causal role to warrant blame.
The Stoic notion that assent is “up to us” does not mean it was in one’s power to do otherwise or that it is equally easy to go either way; it means one’s character is the cause of assent. Epictetus seems to describe the mind’s assent as like a balance scale determined by the weight of evidence. Kamtekar finds this unsatisfying because it changes the meaning of “up to us” and because blameworthiness depends on how one’s character came to be.
Character, Causation, and Contemporary Psychology
Kamtekar’s current research focuses on causation and moral responsibility in ancient philosophy, examining the variety of causal structures different ancient philosophers proposed, which she hopes will illuminate modern debates about determinism, compatibilism, and incompatibilism.
Ancient moral philosophy can offer contemporary psychology a clearer definition of character: character is a set of relations between reasoning and appetite or emotion, not just any trait like talkiveness or cheerfulness.
Contemporary social psychology is good at disentangling two questions: what causes an outcome, and what causes variation in behavior. These are often conflated because psychology focuses on measuring variance. The Stoic compatibilist argument (my character caused my action because someone else in the same situation acted differently) confuses variation with causation; in a deterministic world with a multitude of causes, isolating character as the cause from a single difference in outcome is insufficient.
Indian and Greek Philosophy
Kamtekar has taught comparative seminars on Greek and Indian philosophy, finding productive parallels in argumentative strategies between Nagarjuna and the Sextus Empiricists (skepticism) and in causal theories between Vasubandhu and Plato/Aristotle (plurality of causes playing different roles).
These similarities are striking because there is no clear evidence of transmission or influence, though trade routes and exchanges (e.g., Alexander the Great’s invasion of India) make contact possible.
Indian philosophical schools, particularly Buddhist ones, share structural similarities with Hellenistic schools: intellectual communities of monks pursuing intellectual and spiritual ideals. A key difference is that Buddhist schools treat the Buddha’s words as authoritative scripture that must be reconciled with, whereas Hellenistic schools are more willing to reject their predecessors.
Indian logic, particularly Buddhist logic, employs the tetralemma (four-cornered negation): not A, not not-A, not both A and not-A, not neither A nor not-A. This differs from Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle. The most useful interpretation, due to Bimal Matilal, understands it as illocutionary denial: the Buddha refuses to assert any of these positions because they do not conduce to edification or Nirvana. The Advaita tradition also uses negation to point toward non-duality, suggesting reality does not lend itself to assertions of A or not-A.
Virtue Ethics: Ancient and Modern
Modern virtue ethics, developed in the second half of the 20th century, holds that virtue or character is the fundamental moral notion, in contrast to consequentialism (good consequences are fundamental) and deontology (conformity to correct rules is fundamental).
Kamtekar does not consider herself a virtue ethicist, nor does she think any ancient philosopher was one. The ancients had theories of virtue and believed virtue was extremely important, but they did not claim that virtue is the single foundational concept from which all other moral notions must be derived.
For example, Rosalind Hursthouse defines right action as what the virtuous person would do, making virtue conceptually fundamental. Aristotle says a just action is what the just person would do, but this is not a definition reducing justice to virtue; he also defines justice as what is laid down by nature or by good law aiming at the common good.
The difference is theoretical, not about the importance of virtue. Modern virtue ethicists build all other ethical concepts out of virtue; ancients use other concepts (happiness, natural law, the good) to define and understand virtue.
