Hunter Biden and the teaching of virtue

Joe Biden, President of the United States, may not have any criminal charges on his record, but his son Hunter does. When ancient Greeks discussed whether aretê (‘virtue, moral excellence, goodness, bravery’) could be taught, or not, such examples came into play.

Plato discussed the problem in a dialogue in which Socrates raised the question with the famous sophist Protagoras who claimed to be able to teach anything to make people better. Socrates’s example was Pericles: here was a man of supreme aretê, but his two useless sons simply ‘browsed randomly about like cattle, hoping to bump into it’. Protagoras answered as follows.

When men, he said, first learned to live in cities, life was fairly chaotic until Zeus decided that every man should be endowed with a range of useful skills, most of all respect for others and a sense of justice. And so they were, the sophist said, because ‘everyone wants to be thought just, even if they are not’.