The Sophists were the intellectual enemies of Plato. They were the first to say, in no uncertain terms, that virtue is not something we discover—it’s something we enforce. For them, virtue was not an eternal truth but a product of human society, shaped by persuasion, power, and custom. Plato, on the other hand, saw this as dangerous relativism. He believed that virtue, like justice and goodness, had a true nature, an objective reality waiting to be uncovered by reason.
But what if the Sophists were right? What if Plato’s entire quest for the ‘true being’ of virtue was just another way of rationalizing something much simpler—something that begins, not in philosophy, but in childhood?
Because, at its core, ‘what is virtue?’ is the same question as ‘what is Mother?’
Think about it: motherhood is not just a biological fact. It is a role, a set of expectations, an ideal that societies and families enforce in different ways. We do not simply describe a mother; we prescribe what a good mother should be. This is where Plato may have fallen into the very trap the Sophists warned about: when he searches for the true being of virtue, he assumes that virtue is something we can describe objectively, much like we assume that a mother is someone we can define.
But the term mother—just like virtue—is not merely descriptive. It is fundamentally prescriptive. To say that someone is a mother is to imply that they must act in certain ways. A mother nurtures, protects, sacrifices. She is not just being a mother; she is doing what a mother is supposed to do. Her being is tied to her behaviour. And because this behaviour is seen as natural, it is rarely questioned.
This is the conflation at the heart of philosophy and much of what we call ‘science’ today. Plato searches for the ‘being of virtue’ without realising that he is actually describing an ideal behaviour—one that must be prescribed through language and social norms. Before Plato was a philosopher, he was a child, and like all children, he learned early on that Mom and Dad are goodness incarnate. Their authority and intentions were not something to be debated—it was simply how things were. This is the same unquestioning assumption that later shaped his politics and metaphysics: namely, that goodness, justice, and virtue must have a true, unchanging nature, rather than being contingent on human behaviour.
The Sophists saw through this illusion. They were, in effect, the founders of social science. They understood that what we call virtue—like what we call motherhood—is a role defined by humans, not by some metaphysical reality—a childhood fantasy. This is what I have argued in The Nature of Kinship: From Dad and Mum to God and Society. If we want to understand why we think about morality the way we do, we have to look beyond philosophy and into the behaviour of language. We must ask: how do words like Mom and Dad shape our understanding of right and wrong? How does the way we address and refer to people create a world where moral norms feel like natural facts?
So, when we ask ourselves about virtue, we may be asking, What kind of behavior must be enforced? And when Plato asked, What is virtue?, he may have unknowingly done the same thing—only in grander philosophical terms. The Sophists understood this. And perhaps, after all, it is time to reconsider their wisdom.