Ancient Philosophy - Lectures 1 & 2 (Part Two)
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Lectures 1 and 2 (Part Two)
Plato’s Republic and Some Problems about Justice
What is Justice?
Book One of the Republic
In the course of this section of the Republic Socrates takes the opportunity of a seemingly inconsequential conversation about old age with Cephalus to press the question of how justice is to be defined.
Cephalus makes a remark that implies that he thinks that acting justly is simply a matter of paying one’s debts and refraining from deceiving people.
Socrates argues that this is an inadequate definition by putting forward the counter-example of a man who lends weapons to a friend but then asks for them back when he is temporarily insane.
The oddity of the question ‘What is F?’ when this is asked by Socrates.
Socrates doesn’t seem to be asking just for an accurate dictionary definition of a word ‘F’. He seems in fact to be looking for something more akin to a scientific analysis of a substance or a technological account of how a machine can be constructed to achieve a particular goal. Unfortunately it seems absurd to suppose that justice is a substance like water with a discoverable inner constitution or a device that produces certain repeatable effects because of the way it exploits natural regularities. So it’s not clear what would constitute an acceptable answer to Socrates’ question or even whether we can rely upon there being, even in principle, a meaningful and adequate answer.
We can perhaps lay down certain necessary conditions for an answer that would meet with Socrates’ approval. An adequate answer would provide us with a criterion that would allow us to determine of any particular action or person whether it or s/he is just, and it would also permit us to arrive at a definitive assessment of the value of justice. Moreover it seems that Socrates would insist that this answer should also be able to explain why it is not mere equivocation to call both actions and people just, and give us expert insight into how to both promote and subvert justice in people and institutions. Thus it might be appropriate to think of Socrates as seeking an explanatory account of justice rather than a definition.
There does, however, appear to be something intellectually cramping about the form of Socrates’ question. Asking ‘What is F?’ is not a good way of generating an explanatory account of the kind just described. It tends to attract as a response a verbally equivalent expression, an ostensive definition (a sample of the very thing in question is presented to the senses), or an account of some inner constitution (for example, water as a compound of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom). It also tends to beg the question against people who might wish to maintain that talk of F is not fully intelligible or that F does not really exist. It might be suggested therefore that Plato’s speculations about Forms existing apart from the spatio-temporal entities that would generally be thought of as being Fs or exemplifying F-ness are, in part, the result of his impulse to suppose that we can have direct intellectual access to a pure and unadulterated sample of such things as justice and beauty, which can then be used to guide our comparative judgements about the degree to which various spatio-temporal particulars possess those attributes.
After Socrates deploys his counter-example, Cephalus retires from the discussion and his son Polemarchus becomes the main interlocutor.
Polemarchus appeals to the definition of justice provided by the poet Simonides – it is just to give to each what is owed to him. However reflection on Socrates’ initial counter-example persuades Polemarchus to gloss this as treating friends well and enemies badly.
Socrates launches a number of objections against this view.
1) In most situations, the people most able to confer benefits on friends and harm on enemies seem to be practitioners of skills or arts other than justice. Thus the practice mastered by the just man, if it is a matter of conferring benefits on friends and harm on enemies, must apply to a counter-intuitively narrow range of circumstances.
2) All ordinary skills and arts are potentially morally ambiguous – the skilled doctor also has the skills to be an effective poisoner, the skilful navigator is also the person who can most easily take the ship off-course. Yet acting justly should always be a morally virtuous thing to do.
3) The people with whom one is friendly are sometimes morally bad people and one’s enemies are sometimes morally good people. Yet it cannot be right to do harm to morally good people.
4) Harming something involves making that thing worse in respect of the virtue or excellence that makes things of that kind good. Thus harming even an enemy involves making that person worse in respect of human excellence and the characteristic excellence of human beings is justice: in other words harming an enemy involves making that person less just. Yet no just person acting out of a regard for justice would wish to make another person less just.
These arguments seem distinctly problematic. The view that the just person is someone who possesses a distinctive skill is one that does not seem to be implied by Polemarchus’ revised definition of justice. It seems more natural in fact to interpret Polemarchus as wishing to present the just person as having a particular disposition rather than an ability lacked by the person who isn’t just. The notion that justice, like medicine or seamanship, is a matter of knowing how to achieve certain ends is actually a characteristically Socratic view. So Plato could be construed as constructing this section of the Republic so that his Socrates is engaged in refuting the views held by the historical Socrates. Is there any independent reason why someone like Polemarchus should have been tempted by the view that the just person possesses a skill? If one holds that the just person is more knowledgeable or more rational in his beliefs than the unjust person, it would be natural in the intellectual context of Plato’s time to assimilate this to possession of a skill or art for these were paradigms in that era of intellectually defensible sets of beliefs that could be taught and conferred an ability to act correctly in particular situations. However if one rejects the supposition that one of the essential differences between a just person and an unjust person is that the former possesses some knowledge lacked by the latter, then the analogy between justice and a skill looks less attractive.
Socrates’ third objection can apparently be met by simply making it clear that a friend in the context of Polemarchus’ definition is to construed as someone who appears good while an enemy is someone who appears bad and is so in reality. And the fourth argument appears to rely on the suppressed premiss that human excellence or flourishing is exclusively a matter of being just. Without that premiss it would be open to us to say that harming someone does involve taking action to move them from a more flourishing state to a less flourishing state while simultaneously maintaining that this can be done without making them less just. Again, this premiss has little initial plausibility without the assistance of reinforcing argument, and it seems to represent the intrusion of a characteristic Socratic belief rather than a view that would appeal to someone like Polemarchus.
At this point Thrasymachus intervenes in the discussion, and he seems at first sight to be objecting to the whole enterprise of trying to define justice. Instead of concentrating on the nature and qualities of some supposed thing called ‘justice’, we need instead to examine the function and rationale of discourse using that term and terms that have the same sense. And Thrasymachus appears to be on the verge of saying that when we do this in a dispassionate and unprejudiced fashion, we see that the distinctive feature of such discourse is that people and actions are called just when they serve to promote the interests of those who are strong enough to make the laws and influence social conventions. Unfortunately Plato then shapes the dialogue so that Thrasymachus is manoeuvred into expressing his position in the inappropriate form of yet another definition of justice, albeit one that defines justice in robustly non-moral terms as ‘nothing other than the advantage of the stronger’.
Given this definition Thrasymachus seems to be committed to the view that if the rulers/the strong make a mistake about where their advantage lies and lay down laws and social codes that actually harm their selfish interests, justice requires that everyone else should break those rules in an effort to promote those interests. This undercuts the whole thrust of Thrasymachus’ attempt to present himself as a hard-headed realist and cynic concerning talk about justice; so he revises his definition to say that justice is that which serves the advantage of the expert or ideal ruler, the ruler who makes no mistakes about his own interests and possesses all the skills necessary to rule effectively and competently.
Socrates then pounces on this revised definition by arguing that true experts in any art serve, insofar as they are acting as experts in that art, the interests not of themselves but of the objects ruled over by that art. Thus expert doctors exercising their expertise as doctors benefit their patients and expert horse trainers work for the good of the horses over which they have control. By analogy, therefore, an expert in the art of ruling will benefit his subjects rather than himself. Thrasymachus defends himself with the analogy of the shepherd: in one sense the expert shepherd does look after this flock of sheep but the end result for the sheep is not necessarily a good one or even a better one than would have occurred without the intervention of the shepherd. Socrates maintains in turn, however, that it is the application of the ancillary craft or skill of making money, rather than anything intrinsic to the skill of shepherding, that leads to any unfortunate consequences for the sheep.
 Back to Home Page |
Send E-Mail to: alan.bailey4@yahoo.co.uk
Copyright © 2007 Alan Bailey. All Rights Reserved