1. The Sophists developed their movement at a time when moral standards were disintegrating and religion was decaying, and the morality they offered was a practical one in that it was based on precepts telling people how to get along with other people. Different Sophists taught somewhat different doctrines. Much of what we know about the Sophists has come down to us in the writings of Plato, though he was opposed to the Sophists and so should not be considered an uninterested observer. The Sophists considered the nature of law and whether law could be viewed as something objective, a scientific certainty to be applied to the world. Essentially, the Sophists found that there was no way to know whether there could be such a law or not and that therefore there was no reason to seek it. The Sophists saw themselves as enlightened when compared to the superstitious Greeks who had gone before, and they thus no longer believed in the gods as the source of a law for mankind. Morality could not be tested by recourse to the teachings of the gods, then, and indeed the enlightened individual knew that the law was a matter of human creation, a matter of accepted convention rather than objective certitude. Assuming that the law is only a convention, then, the issue is why we should obey it:
Protagoras argued in favor of obedience to the law not because obedience is "right" but simply because it is advantageous (Jones 69).
Later Sophists argued that there is no real "justice" or "right" and that these are only names applied to local and changing conventions. They further argued that the only real authority in the world is force. Thus the law is what can be imposed by force in a given society.
The Sophists saw nature as a continuous struggle for survival, and later Sophists also differentiated between themselves, the enlightened, and the mass of humanity. The enlightened do not need rules and do not need to heed rules, while the mas...