Relevance of Virtue Among Other Goods in Life

"Wealth does not bring about excellence (virtue), but excellence (virtue) makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively." (30b2-4).

The virtue can be both a source of money and also something that leads people sometimes (or even often) to forgo making money. Socrates never claims that others ought to neglect their own affairs as he has done; quite the contrary, he describes himself as on a special mission from Apollo.

If we grant that Socrates regards money as a good, it is not difficult to see why he would think that it is caused by virtue. Virtue for Socrates is or is closely connected with wisdom, and non-virtuous agents, far from being shrewd operators adept at attaining the ends they seek, are "like runners who […] who leap away sharply at first, but become ridiculous by the end and go off uncrowned, with their ears drooping on their shoulders like those of exhausted dogs."40 The vicious cannot reliably achieve even their stated goals (money, reputation, etc.). It is only by luck that they manage to secure the things they seek and to hold on to them for as long as they do. By contrast, Socrates says in the Euthydemus, "wisdom makes man fortunate in every case." 41 The implication is that there is no goal that can be reliably attained in any way other than by wisdom. Thus if one is to reliably attain money (or anything else)—to attain it in some way other than by accident—it could only be through wisdom. In this sense, virtue is a money-maker. Socrates’ poverty, he tells us, is a result of his service to the god. Apollo has put him on a special mission, which has left him no leisure to attend either to the city’s affairs or to his own (24b). Socrates is poor because he dedicated himself so completely to this divine mission as to neglect his own affairs (31b). This is consistent with his being virtuous and with his virtue giving him the power to earn a fortune.

He may simply have chosen to devote all his time to philosophy instead. (And it may even be that this devotion is in fact producing wealth, which is not accruing to Socrates himself.) Of course, Socrates thinks abdicating the post in which the god put him would be unjust, so there is a respect in which his virtue can be said to prevent him from making money, but this respect isn’t necessarily inconsistent with the claim that his virtue enables him to make money. Socrates may be like a builder whose expertise would enable him to build a house on a certain site, but also enables him to recognize that the site would be a poor location, and so decides not to build. Surely the fact that this expertise prevents him from building the house does not show that the expertise is not a source of houses. So much then for the objection that Socrates’ poverty is inconsistent with his saying that money comes from virtue.

If it is, then he would be saying that what is good about virtue is that it is a means to money, and this would imply that the money is better than virtue, since it is that for the sake of which virtue is valued. To see whether the clause (as standardly construed) has this implication, let’s consider a parallel case—a variant on a familiar fairy tale. A foolish young man whose only possession is a goose that lays golden eggs exchanges it for a handful of jelly beans. In the course of excoriating him, his irate (and now penniless) mother tells him that with the gold from the goose he could have purchased bushels of jelly beans as well as anything else that he might want to buy. Is the mother praising goose as a candy-provider? No: her statement does not imply that the goose’s value stems from its ability to buy jelly beans or that its goodness is in anyway dependent on the goodness of the candy. Her statement is merely a way of making more dramatic the folly of the boy’s exchange.

Even if one were (foolishly) to take jelly beans as one’s standard of value, the mother effectively says, the goose would supply all the jelly beans one could want, and, in addition to this, it would supply many other things worth having. That there are other things worth having shows that it is a mistake to take the beans as one’s standard of value in the first 9 place. she appreciates the financial rewards that stem from the goose, but she may also value it in other ways that are more important to her—for example, she may have affection for it as a pet, or worship it as divine. The point of her argument is that, even from a candy-centric perspective the goose is more worth having than the handful of jelly beans, because the goose not only provides the jelly beans but is valuable in other ways as well. Similarly, in saying that "virtue does not come from money, but money, from virtue," Socrates would be taking virtue’s status as a money-maker as evidence of its value and perhaps as one good thing about it, but he needn’t be making its goodness subordinate to that of money in any way.

Likely he would regard it as belonging to the class of goods that are good both in themselves and for their consequences. In Republic II, Socrates classes justice among such goods, describing them as "the finest." If he takes this same view of justice and the other virtues in the Apology then it would be quite natural for him to say what the traditional construal of 30b2-4 has him saying. Socrates is not arguing that virtue is good because it makes money; he is not even addressing himself to the question of whether it is good; he takes it for granted that it is. The question at hand is which of two things generally acknowledged to be good—money and virtue—is better and should be one’s priority.

The majority opinion (as demonstrated by the way most people live) is that money is better, whereas Socrates contends that virtue is. Of the two goods, virtue is the better, says Socrates, because it is a source of money, whereas the reverse is not the case. Notice that the contrary view that money is a source of virtue had great currency. In the Apology itself we are told of Evenus from Paros, who is supposed to be able to teach virtue for five minas, and in other dialogs we meet others who claim or are claimed to be able to make young men virtuous for a fee. If virtue could be acquired from a paid teacher, then money would be a source of it. And, if money did bring about virtue (whether through hired teachers or in some other way) and everything else that is good for men (e.g., perhaps, health, honor, and political power), then someone who acknowledged that both wealth and virtue were good would reasonably prioritize moneymaking; for he would think that, by becoming rich, he would also be enabling himself (and his sons) to attain virtue and the other human goods. If, by contrast, as Socrates maintains, virtue is the source of whatever other goods there may be, then it is virtue that should be one’s priority in life. Notice that the point of this passage is not merely that the relevant items are good or bad, depending whether they are controlled by virtue or vice; rather the point is that each of the relevant items is better or worse than its opposite, depending on whether it is controlled by virtue or vice. Wealth, then, is not just good for a virtuous person, but it is better than poverty.

This is a more robust endorsement of money than the minimal one considered earlier. Virtue is not only among the things that (unlike vice) can be good for people, it is better for the relevant people than other things (in particular its opposite), which may also be good. Moreover, it is not merely the case that money is good for certain people and not for others. The people for whom it is good are the only people for whom anything at all is good, other than virtue (or wisdom), which is the precondition of anything else’s being good for one. To the extent that one is virtuous and therefore capable of having things be good for one, money health, strength and the like are good for one and better than their opposites.

The passage also indicates what it is about these qualified goods that makes them better than their opposites for virtuous people and worse than the opposites for the vicious. Money, strength, health and the rest increase the scale on which one can act; this makes them good for those who act well, and bad for vicious agents who act badly, and whether one acts well or badly depends on whether one is virtuous or vicious.38 Thus Socrates’ view in the Meno and Euthydemus at least (and the stranger’s view in Laws II) is that money, as a facilitator of action, is good for any person insofar as that person is virtuous and thereby capable of having things (other than virtue itself) be good for him.Though money is not good without qualification, and though it is overvalued by most people, there remains a robust sense in which it qualifies as good—the only sense in which anything other than virtue itself qualifies as good. If the Socrates of the Apology shares this position, then I see no reason why he should have hesitated to refer to money as "a good" at 30b4. Any scruple that might have prevented him from calling it good without qualifying the remark would prevent him from ever using the word "good" for anything other than virtue without launching into a digression on the factors conditioning its goodness.