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’. Further, people agreed that the unjust must be punished. That was part of a process of turning them from wickedness to goodness, showing that virtue could, in principle, be inculcated.

Then, said Protagoras, consider what an astonishing thing it would be if good men did not think that teaching their children aretê was important: imagine the potential consequences! So they made certain that, from earliest childhood, their children were taught it by parents, nurses and tutors, telling them, ‘This is right, that is wrong’, ‘Do this, not that’, and later by schoolmasters who made them learn by heart poems, stories and eulogies of the great men of old. Then the state compelled them to learn the laws, indicating the penalties for breaking them, to correct and guide them. Finally, as some were more naturally talented than others when it came to e.g.