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According to Socrates, when man commits "wrong actions," that individual has a wrong view, that is, a view clouded by desire. He thus acted (or acts) not knowing right from wrong and therefore acts without conscious knowledge or involuntarily.
Along comes Bernard Mandeville(1), a physician, who is not trained in the academics of logic. A reasonable man with a sense of humor so that he had according to Windelband (Dr. Wilhelm.) held a peculiar position on mankind's follies and the driving forces behind them.
Mandeville demonstrated that the whole life and charm of the social system is the result of self advancing individuals (later called self-love or narcissism) who place loose with the rules. Without this self agrandularization in the allegory, Fable of the Bees, the motive forces of society come to a halt and the organization which we call civilization collapses. Windelband wrote that every improvement in material conditions of man brought about by intellectual progress (why only intellectual progress?), results in new and stronger wants as the result of his being more discontented. Net-net, progress is at the expense of morality and happiness. One can question whether a person with a satiated appetite for meat and potatoes is less happy than when he and his ancestors lived on a thin porridge. Or, were his morals less.
The suspicion is that Mandeville didn't have the cloak of the University to provide respectability for his discourse and being only a physician was deemed not worthy of suggesting something that only the philosopher of the age of the enlightment (and extended to today).
Perhaps Mandeville saw behind the skirts shielding the Knowing Ones and tweaked them with his rationalization of what makes civilization work. Instead of picturing man as a uniform being, he saw that man existed as a beggar, thief, baker, banker, priest and doctor as well as a dilettante amusing himself by thinking deep thoughts. Accordingly, while some surely will be of noble thought and deed, they are a minority.
This is no defense of those whose practice of self-love at the expense of those who must bear the consequences, rather it is to acknowledge that those deeply flawed individuals exist and Socrates was right, they can't help themselves. How else do you explain the actions of some current day politicians?
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The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices made Public Benefits (1706) - Later additions/revisions (1;728), Inquiry; into the Origin of Moral Virtue (1732), Free Thoughts on Religion, Church, Government (1720).
A History of Philosophy (with special reference to the formation and development of its problems and conceptions) W. Windelband, translated by James H. Tufts, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1921 (reprint of second edition), copyright 1893, 1901.
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