Question

what is problematic about Gorgias' approach to ethics.  

Answer 1

Gorgia is about the Plato's "ethics" of argument in a literal sense of that term (which in Greek means both "habit" and " character" for the main issue to which it returns again and again is the kind of character a person defines for himself and offers to others - the kind of life and community he makes - when he chooses to think and talk in one way rather than in another.

The Gorgia is a dialogue, not a treatise and it is important to ask at the outset why Plato chooses to write this way, instead of simply telling us what he believes in some straight forward fashion.

The dialogue itself is meant to exemplify the kind of life Socrates called "dialectic". The form of this text is not a primitive or bizarre method of setting forth a doctrine that Plato is too Perverse or incompetent to say straight out; what it offers is an engagement in an activity, and this activity is its true subject. As we shall see, Socrates does occassionally say something to describe dialectic, but its clearest and truest definition is to be found not in what he says but in what he does.

The intellectual process by which this aspect of dialectic typically works is a movement from a point of disagreement btween Socrates and his interlocutor to a more general proposition that both accept; this point of agreement is then shown, by reasoning sometimes sound, sometimes fallacious, to lead to conclusions opposite to those previously asserted by the interlocuter. In the process the, the language of the interlocutor is remade, converted into what are called paradoxes, that is previously impossible or unimaginable propositions that he must now accept or that he is atleast incapable of rationally rejecting. The effect of this process is to disturb the relation between self and language, to breakdown the sense of natural connection and coherence between them. One comes suddenly to see both self and language as uncertain, as capable of being remade in relation to each other. The true aim of a dialogue that works this way, of the Gorgias among others, is nothing less than the shared reconstitution of self and language.