Can reading the Socratic dialogues help us navigate ethics in the age of virtue signalling?

Socrates’s ethical investigations are accepted as a corner stone of Western philosophy. So many profound and challenging philosophical ideas were first raised by Plato through the words of his mentor Socrates in the dialogues. But can reading the Socratic dialogues really help us survive the era of cancel culture and virtue signalling we are living through?

As Plato revealed in the dialogues, Socrates was constantly asking ‘How should we live a good life?’ and ‘What is it to be a good person?’ In part, it was Socrates’s rejection of the old ways – exemplified by Homer’s ‘eye for an eye’ morality in The Odyssey – that made him challenge the comfortable assertions of the great and good of Athenian society. Socrates was a scourge of those who professed to know the answers to the questions he asked. Socrates’s approach was to draw out the logical contradictions in the positions of those who professed to have clear ethical knowledge of the virtue he was investigating.

Today, many see parallels in Socrates’s lampooning of the supposed moral experts – who seem all too certain of moral truths and prepared to condemn and cancel those who do not follow their lead – and argue that the intellectual elite of today is ripe for exposing, and all-to-eager to ostracise their critics, just as happened to Socrates.

However, directly comparing today’s intellectuals to the society of Ancient Athens might seem a little far-fetched. After all, is being cancelled today for falling foul of woke sensibilities really the same as being condemned to death in Classical Greece? Perhaps a better line of inquiry is to return to the classic Socratic texts and ask how we could benefit today from serious and sustained moral inquiry. So, what can we learn from the life and record of Socrates?