Virtue, Knowledge, and Wisdom: Bypassing Self-Control

TLDR: A famous passage of the Socratic model of virtue is "dragging knowledge around like a slave" as mentioned in this paper, in which the author argues that there is no such thing as lack of self-mastery; for no one understands himself to act against what is best, but they do so only through ignorance.

Abstract: I Socrates' claim that virtue is knowledge implies that if we behave in an unvirtuous way we must be ignorant of what goodness really is. No allowance is made for the possibility that we may know what is good but act otherwise because we are too weak to resist temptation or fear--in other words that we may lack self-mastery. In a famous passage Aristotle rejects the Socratic model: It is problematic how someone with correct understanding can lack self-mastery [GREEK TEXT EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Some say this is not possible for someone who has knowledge; for it would be strange, as Socrates thought, if when someone possessed knowledge something else should master it and "drag it around like a slave." Socrates in fact used to attack the account altogether, on the grounds that there is no such thing as lack of self-mastery; for no one understands himself to act against what is best, but they do so only through ignorance. Now this account clearly goes against the evidence.(1) The evidence that Aristotle has in mind is the experience we have all had of sometimes going against our better judgment because of the pressures of the moment Most people agree with Aristotle and it is hard to see how Socrates could have believed that we never go against our better judgment.(2) The view that emerges from Plato's treatment of the subject is ambiguous, and disentangling that ambiguity will help us to understand why Socrates may have described virtue as he did. Aristotle's reference to "dragging knowledge around like a slave" is from the Protagoras,(3) and in other early dialogues as well Plato seems committed to moral intellectualism, the view that whether we are virtuous depends solely on our intellect and has nothing to do with the strength or weakness of a will that is distinct from the intellect. However, Plato's subsequent formulation of the concept of a tripartite soul seems to be an accommodation to precisely the kind of criticism that Aristotle later made. In the Republic Socrates says: Self-control(4) is surely some kind of order, the self-mastery [GREEK TEXT EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of certain pleasures and appetites, as they say, using the phrase "master of oneself" ([GREEK TEXT EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])--I don't know how--and other such phrases that are like traces that it has left behind. . . . Yet isn't the expression "master of oneself" ridiculous? He who is master of himself would also be subject to himself, and he who is subject master. The same person is referred to in all these statements.... But the saying seems to me to want to say that in the same person there is something in the soul that is better and something that is worse, and when the part that is better by nature is master of the worse, this is what is meant by speaking of being master of oneself... But when, on the other hand, because of bad upbringing or bad company the better part which is smaller is mastered by the multitude of the larger, we blame this as something shameful, and call it being subject to oneself and licentious.(5) Here it sounds as though there really is something that can overpower knowledge and "drag it around like a slave," and that not only knowledge is responsible for virtue, but also our upbringing and the company we keep. Later in the discussion internal obstacles are added to the external examples of bad upbringing and bad company, and we learn that vice occurs when either the spirited part of us, or the part of us that seeks pleasure and avoids pain and fear, dominates the knowledge-loving part. …