Protagoras

Hippocrates, Socrates’s young friend, is overcome with the desire to gain a proper education in virtue from the traveling sophist Protagoras. Socrates is skeptical of this pursuit, and it soon becomes clear that one cause of his negative reaction is his skepticism that virtue can be taught at all. Socrates asks Protagoras how it can be that virtue is teachable. Protagoras indulges him, although he seems to think this is a silly question. He asks Socrates to compare a civilized person to one who lives outside civil society:

[T]hink of anyone who appears to you as the most unjust human being of those raised among laws and human society as himself being just, and a skilled practitioner in this matter, if one had to judge him against humans who have no education, no courts, no laws, and no necessity at all incessantly compelling them to care about virtues; they’d be some sort of savages (58).

The implication is that civil society teaches people how to be civil and, therefore, virtuous. Even those who may seem to have learned nothing are quite educated compared to their counterparts who live in a state of nature. This basic fact should be enough, Protagoras thinks, to prove that virtues are teachable.