Should the Tories follow Frank Field’s lead and, in the light of their ‘broken society’ campaign, make it their policy to produce ‘the good citizen’?
Should the Tories follow Frank Field’s lead and, in the light of their ‘broken society’ campaign, make it their policy to produce ‘the good citizen’?
In Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, this famous intellectual is said to produce the ‘good citizen’ by teaching him ‘proper management of his own business and of the city’s too, so that he can make the most effective contribution to its affairs both as a speaker and man of action’. But Socrates rejects this claim, arguing that ‘goodness’ (Greek aretê) is not a teachable management skill, but something more akin to our ‘virtue’, with strong moral overtones to it — a difference not of degree but of kind. They found no meeting of minds.
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