Skip to Main Content

Once the principal defence of justice has come to a close at the end of Book IX, Plato has Socrates return to the wages and reputations of virtue in Book X to show that, at least most of the time, the just individual appears just to the gods and other people whereas the unjust individual appears unjust to them. It follows from this that, at least most of the time, justice will be rewarded with wages and reputation whereas injustice will be punished. Socrates confidently assures Glaucon and Adeimantus that by the time just people come to the end of their lives they typically do have an excellent reputation as well as plenty of other good things that come about from such a reputation (613c5–7). Notably, the good things which they are said to receive in Book X are the exact same things Glaucon earlier claimed the unjust individual could win: the just person will get to rule in their city, marry their children to whomever they want and themselves marry whomever they want (613c9–d5). This is especially notable because these are all things associated with reputation and a high social standing. Socrates is in Book X wrenching the Refined External Goods out of the hands of the Dorian Rogue and returning them back to the just agent, where he thinks they truly belong. If what Socrates says about justice and the Refined External Goods here reflects Plato’s beliefs at the time of writing Republic—and I can see no good reason to doubt this—it shows that Plato has, in fact, been in substantial agreement with past Friends of Justice all along. He, too, believes the just individual will win the Refined External Goods and that these make a genuine contribution to their prospering. This is yet another reason to identify him as a Friend and to situate him in the long tradition of those defending the Traditional View of Justice.

Of course, what makes the central argument of Republic so significant is that it does not rely on the gods or appeal to the Refined External Goods to defend justice’s value. Plato was not content to rely on the considerations adduced by earlier moralists or to show that justice typically results in wages and rewards and that these typically contribute to the just individual’s prospering. Any argument of this sort would be of limited value for a number of reasons, not least of which is the one Plato himself highlights with the introduction of the Dorian Rogue. And so he endeavours to show that the just life would be better and more prosperous than the unjust life in all circumstances—even if an unjust individual were to win a reputation for justice or even in times and places where justice was not appropriately respected and, as a result, would not lead to social benefits. For this reason, he cannot appeal to the wages and rewards that depend upon the recognition and responses of other agents. Moreover, Plato was also not content to defend the value of justice by insisting on the existence of incorruptible and benevolent gods who recompense justice and punish injustice. Though it is easy to imagine how Socrates might have demonstrated that justice is valuable in all times and places by appealing to such gods, he stubbornly refuses to take this argumentative route in Books II–IX. This is almost certainly because his challengers Glaucon and Adeimantus—like the 5th-century Cynics they were channeling—denied that there were incorruptible and benevolent gods. Any argument that relied upon the existence of such gods would, then, have fallen on deaf ears and would have failed to truly persuade the brothers or their contemporaries. For this reason, Plato has Socrates turn inward to the soul to argue that justice all on its own is sufficient to make the just life better than the unjust life.

It is worth calling attention to just how modern this argumentative strategy feels, especially when compared with Plato’s other works that cover similar themes and topics. In most places where Plato endeavours to defend the value of conventional morality or discuss the role of justice in the well-lived human life, the gods occupy a much more prominent position than they do in Republic. In Gorgias, for example, Socrates memorably caps off his discussion with Callicles by claiming: ‘No one—at least no one who is not completely irrational and cowardly—fears dying itself. Rather they fear doing injustice. For a soul to arrive in Hades full of injustices is the extreme of all that is bad’ (522e1–4). He then goes on to offer a myth about the punishments and rewards meted out by the gods in the afterlife. The invocation of the gods becomes even more pronounced in the dialogues typically thought to have been written later in Plato’s life. When Socrates comes to discuss prospering and misery in the digression of Theaetetus, he explains—as David Sedley is well known to have argued—that god is the standard of goodness and prospering.1 ‘There are standards set up (παραδειγμάτων … ἑστώτων) in reality, my friend. One is divine and most prosperous, the other is godless and most miserable. But [unjust people] do not see that this is so and because of folly and the extreme of stupidity they don’t notice that because of their injustices they become like the latter standard and unlike the former’ (176e3–177a2). According to Socrates in this dialogue, one becomes prosperous by becoming as much like god as possible; to be unjust, meanwhile, is to stray away from god and to be miserable. And perhaps most notable of all for present purposes is Plato’s response to the problem of immoralism in Book X of his Laws, possibly his very last work.2 Early in this book the Athenian Stranger claims: ‘No one who believes in the gods as the laws direct has ever willingly committed an impious deed or uttered a lawless word’ (885b4–6). It follows that anyone who willingly speaks or acts badly must hold mistaken beliefs about the gods. Plato then spends the rest of the book putting forward complex arguments to the effect that the gods exist; that they care about human beings; and that they cannot be swayed by sacrifice or prayer. The hope is that such arguments will gently persuade unjust and ungodly citizens to ‘abandon their current ways in favour of pious’ and virtuous ways (907d5–6).

I mention these other works to highlight that more often than not in Plato’s career our philosopher was quick to bring in the gods while thinking about justice’s relationship to prospering and while tackling the problem of injustice. This is true of the dialogues that are conventionally held to have been written before Republic, but the trend is especially pronounced in the dialogues that were almost certainly written after it. Which of these discussions represents Plato’s ‘official’ answer about the value of justice or his ‘preferred’ solution to the problem of injustice is a question that cannot be answered here. I am not myself convinced that the underlying assumption of this question—namely, that one discussion occupies a more authoritative place in understanding Plato’s doctrine—is entirely defensible. All the discussions mentioned in the previous paragraph occur in particular dialogical contexts between unique sets of interlocutors, and it seems very unlikely to me that Plato the literary genius was insensitive to these facts. It is certainly possible that Gorgias, Republic, Theaetetus and Laws all include attempts to convince different audiences that justice is something to be cultivated and cherished, whereas injustice is something to flee and to be avoided. If this were the case, then the best one could do to identify Platonic doctrine would be to holistically reconstruct his considered view by drawing on all these dialogues and piecing together some overarching commitments. Such a project would certainly be worthwhile and profitable, though, once again, it goes far beyond the scope of this work. Of course, it might also be the case that Plato changes his mind over the course of his life and comes to accept different solutions to the problem of injustice. Either way, it remains striking that in so many of Plato’s other works—including the dialogue most likely written at the end of his career—he leans so heavily on the gods when he discusses the issues we have been addressing in this book. Anyone who insisted upon identifying Plato’s ‘mature’ response to the value of justice and the problem of injustice would be excused if they concluded that interventionist gods were central to the answer.

Though the later dialogues and their responses to the problem of vice and immoralism have had their defenders in modernity,3 they are far less popular now than Republic. And they feel more alien to our sensibilities. What is it about this particular dialogue that calls out to us so much today? There are, of course, very many answers one could give to this question. Republic deftly incorporates moral, metaphysical and epistemological themes into a single, unified philosophical work of the highest calibre. It is arguably the first watershed work of political philosophy in the Western tradition. And in addition to all its analytical merits, it is a masterpiece of literature and drama. This is in marked contrast to Laws, which, whatever else one wants to say about the dialogue, is long, turgid and at times very boring. Nevertheless, I would hazard a guess that three features of Republic’s argument make the dialogue’s philosophical project appealing to us today.

The first is that it aims to prove that the just and moral life is better for human beings to live than the unjust and immoral life. It aims to justify the practice of morality itself. This is a topic that has remained (almost) as important for us today as it was for the Greeks of the 5th century. Of course, Republic shares this ambition with the other dialogues discussed above. But unlike those other dialogues, in our work Plato resists appealing to the gods or the supernatural in his central argument defending the just life. Like Prodicus and the author of AI before him, Socrates is forced to develop new, mostly natural and yet still persuasive considerations to defend the value of justice and morality. And finally, Plato resists appealing to considerations of reputation, wages and esteem, which are all potentially time- and location-dependent. Learning from the failure of past moralists, he dismisses the things that come to be from justice because they can be won by someone who merely seemed to be just and, as Book X hints, because there have been and may yet be societies in different times and places that do not appropriately honour justice and virtue.

The central argument of Republic, then, aims to defend the practice of justice and attempts to do so in a way that is both largely naturalistic and universally applicable. This, I suspect, helps to give it its enduring appeal to philosophically inclined readers. But the naturalistic and secular bent of the argument also marks it as something of an outlier within Plato’s corpus as a whole. By way of conclusion I would like to suggest that the best explanation for why the argument in this particular dialogue is so secular is because it was consciously offered as a contribution to an existing debate about the value of justice in which appeals to the gods would not have been persuasive. Rather than breaking the rules of that debate and trying to convince the immoralists that the gods exist, as Plato attempts to do in Laws, he tries in Republic to win the 5th-century sophistic debate about justice once and for all for the Friends of Justice. And that means showing that it is, all things considered, profitable and prudent for the individual to be just by appealing only to facts about human nature and the natural world. Thus it may be that the 5th-century debate about justice is largely responsible for many of the features of Republic’s argument that we value so much today.

Notes
1

Sedley (1999, 309–16).

2

Laks (2000, 291–2) has highlighted how significant god is in Laws and how that marks a departure from Plato’s earlier work.

3

In the introduction to his commentary on Laws X, Lewis recommends the study of this text in part because it might help people realise the falsity of atheism (Plato, 1845 edn, xiii): ‘Our main object, then, is to recommend this noble philosopher to the present generation of educated young men, especially theologians. The present work by no means professes to set forth his system as a whole, but merely to present some of its attractive points, to allure other minds among us to a more thorough examination … We conclude with the remark that, in a moral and practical, as well as speculative point of view, the particular subject of the dialogue selected has some claim to attention. He who thinks most deeply, and has the most intimate acquaintance with human nature, as exhibited in his own heart, will be the most apt to response all unbelief into Atheism.’ A far more common reaction to Laws can, I think, be found in Pangle (1976, 1059): ‘I believe the chief reason why the Laws is so rarely studied by political scientists, and that when studied it seems so alien, is the emphasis on the gods and “religion” which pervades the work.’

Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close