Plato's shorter ethical works show Socrates at work on topics related to virtue, which he believes we should seek for the sake of the soul as we should seek health for the body.ocrates seems to assume in these works that knowledge of definitions has priority in two ways: (1) One must know what reverence is before one could know of any particular action that it is reverent (whether, for example, it is reverent to prosecute one's father), and so for the other virtues and other cases.