Amously, Plato held the thesis that a person could not knowingly choose to do that which is wrong.  Alas, contemporary society would suggest that, although Plato was no doubt an intellectual giant, he was sorely mistaken about this point; for if contemporary society bears witness to anything, it bears witness to the reality that people knowingly do what is wrong all the time.  Indeed, it happens with poignant frequency that people knowingly do what is harmful to their very own person. 

Now, if Plato’s claim is obviously false, what is equally problematic is the fact that people knowingly do what is wrong—even harmful to themselves.  I mean if people do not have the wherewithal to refrain from harming themselves, then it is all the more implausible to expect people to refrain from harming others.  And how on earth is it possible that people knowingly do what is harmful to themselves?

Significantly, and most importantly, the harm that people knowingly do to themselves is rarely a direct and immediate form of harm such as putting a gun to their head and killing themselves.  Out of the more than 6 billion people on the planet, comparatively few commit suicide.  So we mortals are comparatively good at avoiding direct and immediate harm to ourselves.  By contrast, we seem to be comparatively disastrous at avoiding embedded harms.  An embedded harm is a piece of harmful behavior that can be ostensibly characterized as pleasant behavior, but which in fact is known to be harmful. 

If listening to the Dr. Laura program is any indication, then romantic involvements are one of the paradigm examples of an embedded harm.  For instance, it is not uncommon for Dr. Laura to receive a call from a woman who dated, had sex with, and became pregnant by a man whom the woman knew from the outset to have serious anger management or drinking problems.  Dr. Laura invariably asks: How on earth did you let yourself become pregnant by a man whom you knew, from the start, to be so unsatisfactory as even a mate, let alone a father? 

The question is a very good one.  But if it is, then it would seem that there is something to Plato’s thesis after all.  A similar point can be made about any number of other activities such as people putting themselves into significant debt by gambling. 

The explanation for why numerous human beings subject themselves to embedded harms lies in one word: self-deception.  And it is the capacity for enormous self-deception that distinguishes human beings from all other animals on the face of the planet. 

One way of understanding Plato’s thesis, then, is as follows: (i) psychologically healthy individuals are not prone to self-deceptive behavior; accordingly, (ii) a psychologically health person will rarely if ever know the Good but go on to choose to do that which is bad for her or him. 

What is particularly of the moment here is that Plato held that only those who received the right kind of upbringing were apt to be psychologically healthy individuals and so not to be the kind of individuals prone to self-deception.  What on earth did Plato suppose was occasioned by the right sort of upbringing?  The answer, I suggest, is the ability to distinguish between (a) the intensity of desire for a given good and (b) the reality of that which has presented itself as satisfying that desire, but in fact does not—a reality impostor. 

In fact, one might argue that the move from infancy to childhood maturity is tied to making this distinction with sufficient finesse.  A properly developed adult is one who has the capacity to make this distinction to yet a much, much greater degree. 

We all have intense desires for all sorts of goods.  And if we are sufficiently fortunate the thing which presents itself as satisfying an intense desire for a given good does precisely that.  But is not uncommon for an intense desire that we have to go unsatisfied, and that all we encounter in terms of satisfying that desire is one reality impostor after another. 

If I understand Plato correctly: he held the quite simple, but yet ever so profound thesis, that with the right upbringing an adult would rarely if ever accept a reality impostor for the real thing, no matter how intense the individual’s desire for the thing in question might be.  And, of course, living well is inextricably tied to exercising precisely this sort of self-command in our lives.  This, in turn, tells us something that we all know, namely that the real problem is not so much in having desires but giving into them we should not.  And precisely what is thought to distinguish human beings from animals is that, even in the absence of any kind of threat, we can choose not to give into our desires. 

This is the freedom of the self of which Plato wrote.  It is the only freedom that he thought worth having given that one is a human being: the freedom, and so the wherewithal, to refuse to do that which one knows to be bad for one.  Plato held that we cannot take ourselves seriously as human beings without taking seriously this kind of freedom.  Contemporary society is too busy ignoring the reality of its human to take seriously this truth about its humanity.