The Challenge of Protagoras
Protagoras appears in the historical record, especially in Plato's Dialogues, as the most famous and successful of the Sophists. The Sophists were itinerant teachers who offered instruction to the adolescent male children of aristocratic families in exchange for a fee. In democratic Athens, with its citizen Assembly and People's Law Courts, the key to success for a young man on the make was the ability to sway public opinion. Thus the principal topic of Sophistic instruction was rhetoric, the art of persuasive speech. In order to speak persuasively in democratic arenas, it is necessary to appeal to the beliefs of ordinary people, especially their beliefs concerning right and wrong. Because of this, the Sophists became associated with moral relativism, the doctrine that right and wrong have no independent or objective foundation in the natural or divine order, and instead simply stem from the varying customs adopted by different societies. In Greek terms, morality is a matter of nomos (custom), not physis (nature). Socrates often appears in Plato's Dialogues as an opponent of the Sophists, arguing against them that right and wrong have an absolute character, independent of the customary norms of society. As such, moral truth must be grasped by philosophical knowledge rather than rhetorical appeal to mere opinion. It is not clear, however, that the Sophists deserve the bad reputation they acquired at the hands of Socrates, Plato, and their followers. Protagoras in particular was an advocate of the democratic political institutions that Socrates and Plato reject. In his Dialogue, the Protagoras, Plato even allows the historical Protagoras to develop a rather strong argument in favor of democracy, though he does leave the last word to Socrates, who continues to argue that the opinions of ordinary people are no adequate foundation for either political power or moral knowledge. We need to ask whether the claim that moral and legal values are objectively real and non-relative - in other words, the basic claim of natural law theory - necessarily implies the rejection of democracy.
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