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Why did Socrates believe that people who act badly are mistaken about virtue?

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Ethics Detail of the stela inscribed with the Code of Hammurabi showing the king before the god Shamash, bas-relief from Susa, 18th century bce; in the Louvre, Paris.

Socrates believed that virtue is a form of knowledge and that anyone who truly understands what virtue is will necessarily act virtuously. Consequently, he argued that individuals who act badly do not do so out of a conscious choice to be evil, but rather because they are ignorant of, or mistaken about, the real nature of virtue.12

This position is rooted in the Socratic view that there is no such thing as "weakness of will"—the idea that one could knowingly act against what they believe to be right. For Socrates, if a person possesses the correct knowledge of good and evil, their desires and actions will naturally align with that knowledge. Therefore, moral failure is viewed as a cognitive failure; when someone behaves poorly, it is because they have incorrectly identified virtue with something it is not, such as material gain or pleasure, leading to a miscalculation of what is truly in their own interest.213

Would you like to explore how this Socratic view differs from later philosophical perspectives on moral motivation?